Muntjac Magazine #2 Insurgency & Counter-Insurgency

Mutt. — Editorial

What motivated us to theme this second issue of the magazine around Insurgency & Counterinsurgency is our desire to crystialize our dispersed experiences of betrayal, repression and defeat into not only a critique of the left and some sections of the anarchist scene but to present an alternative with teeth.

We also want to draw more attention to the lessons we could be learning from the moments of refusal that do happen here and of course lessons from movements in Palestine, Kanaky, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Kenya, Greece, Indonesia, West Papua, Mexico, Argentina, Chile or elsewhere.

Before we go any further, it’s important to define terms;

Insurgency — an insurgency is a formation of lightly armed people waging asymmetrical warfare against a larger, centralized enemy. Typically, this enemy (to the insurgents) is the state which dominates the given territory or an occupying force that has moved into an area.

The police here and elsewhere frame their study of the anarchist movement that separates itself from the theatre that is the left wing of capital through this lens, no matter what they call us, the state is the only terrorist. Further to this, we should point out that we’re not insurgency fetishists as we’re not inspired by the insurgencies of fascists but instead insurgencies against colonialism, capital and the state.

Counterinsurgency — counterinsurgency is a term to define a range of tactics utilized by an occupying force to repress insurgences that have formed against them.

There are a myriad of tactics used by occupiers to maintain their control, most of which are “direct” in nature: Blockades or Checkpoints to funnel insurgent traffic through regions the occupation has better control of. Surveillance Infrastructure, Patrols, or Quick Reaction Forces (highly mobile units equipped with “force multiplier” equipment, trained to respond to any attack on the occupations infrastructure)

These are always complemented by tactics of a more “indirect” nature. The use of torture or bribes to gain information, the spreading of disease, the use of chemical weapons, psychological warfare, propaganda, byzantine regulation to mentally exhaust the people trying to etch out a way of life under occupation, the use of paramilitaries for plausible denability is often complemented with the creation of counter-gangs [1] (lightly armed groups trained by the occupation to both delegitimize the initial insurgency and to actively hunt them down and kill them)

In the past few years, we’ve been witnesses to insurgent elements in uprisings against the state in Belarus, Hong Kong, the Black anti-police uprising across the so-called US in 2020, Indonesia, Kanaky, Martinique, Guadeloupe and elsewhere. A new stage of anti-colonial struggle in Palestine began with the Al-Aqsa Flood and despite heightened genocidal tactics by the occupation and its allies, the resistance has continued. In Myanmar, anti-junta insurgent groups still fight the Tatmadaw. In West Papua, Insurgent groups persist against the Indonesian armed forces. There are others, but I only have so many pages to spare.

At the same time, we’ve seen a burgeoning arms race in counter-insurgent tactics to crush uprisings in their infancy or to wear them out at their heights. Here, the horizon looks bleak for those of us who rise in anger at the British state:

In the prisons, more weapons are being introduced after an attack on prison guards, the punitive raid at HMP Garth still rings in the ears of prisoners once under the illusion that the wave of early releases has signaled a coming ease in the quality of life on the inside [2].

Stepping outside, you’ll likely come face to lens with the British pathological urge to film fucking everything, this will deepen as the police introduce permanent facial recognition technology installations to complement the preexisting checkpoint-style facial recognition vans. This combined with the prevalence of apps like PimEyes [3] is enough to make anyone anxious.

It’s (still) a police carnival, if you’ve had the displeasure of participating in Babylon’s various protest movements, you’ve seen it. The counterinsurgency has many faces but what it tends to look like is the perpetual appeal for calm, for peace, the prevention of de-arrests,calls for “non-violence”. Specifically,

It looks like the PSC’s (Palestine Solidarity Campaign) leadership taking down an article by Scotland PSC talking about how the police sent armed response and made several arrests during a static demo outside of a fucking Home Bargains supermarket. It looks like Representasians pushing for Hate Crime legislation deceptively wrapped in the language of anti-racism [4]. It looks like Black ‘Security’ organisations like Forever Family serving as a de facto police force at demonstrations in Black neighbourhoods.

Fuck them, they know what side they’re on.

Austerity for everyone but the police, 13,000 new cops, new drone tech, a glimpse of which was seen last summer a drone hovered above a prearranged antifascist counter-demonstration meeting point with its speaker blaring “REMOVE YOUR MASKS OR YOU WILL BE ARRESTED”. In a video posted to TikTok the Metropolitan Police illustrated their ongoing campaign of installing plainclothes police officers inside shops frequently targeted by shoplifters.

New power granted to the police has criminalized masks, tactics that work and spoof their tech are threats to the techno dystopian hellscape we live in. The police are already using predictive policing algorithmic software to aid in their campaigns of predation, speaking of which, the British Transport Police jumped with joy as a new transphobic supreme court decision has given them the chance to further their frequent abuses against women and children. On top of all of this, a new FBI style police agency is on the cards and ongoing repressive projects like Operation Adream are on our minds once again [5].

Elsewhere, the feeling seems mutual:

In Indonesia, anarchists and students who rose against new laws that would return the country to military rule have faced off against counter-gangs of plainclothes cops dressed like demonstrators, the police have re-routed ambulances full of wounded protestors to police stations, police have destroyed supplies of water and food prepared to sustain the fight and have utilized hardware that intercepts mobile phone data, notably, using it to try to access people’s Whatsapp accounts (these protests have largely been organised via social media). The police use powdered dye to mark the clothes of people gathering at pre-arranged protest sites, this is paired with the installation of new cameras [6].

In Greece, the New Democracy government has tried and failed to distract people from its shortcomings through repression [7]. On top of this the communist KKE again join the forces of the counter-insurgency calling the Koukoulofori (“hooded ones” in Greek) cops as they pack their banners into their bags and head home the second the molotov cocktails and tear gas start flying. This again reminds us of their collaboration with the police in defense of the parliament and the Golden Dawn fascist organisation in the past [8].

In Nigeria, politicians can easily dip into the large numbers of unemployed young people to form counter-gangs to repress protests on their behalf.

In Turkey, police use irritant chemical sprays to force protestors to remove their masks so they can be photographed for follow-up arrest.

In Turtle Island, during a daytime direct action against parked police vehicles in “NYC”, police use drones to track the anarchists as they disperse. Automatic license plate readers, Instagram captions, and fingerprints were used to aid in the prosecution of 3 alleged Arsonists at Tesla car dealerships [9]. The RICO charges levelled against the Stop Cop City movement show a clear attempt at the criminalization of solidarity itself [10].

Are we fucked then?

On the contrary, despite the billions of pounds poured into the apparatus of the counter-insurgency, opportunities for disruption, refusal and freedom through negation exist everywhere. If you’ve been paying attention, people are taking these opportunities, the misery of everyday life is vulnerable, you just need to be determined.

More sophisticated knowledge of the technological tools of repression can help us stay on the outside, anarchists recognizing the fact that anti-repression is everyone’s responsibility could help those on the inside survive the regime of isolation and deprivation too.

I’m drawn back to the Creole proverb Sé ti bwa ka fè gwo difé

Smouldering little branches, when grouped together, can fuel a great fire.

Mutt.

01/05/2025

Recommended Further Reading

An Open Letter To The International Anti-Prison / Anti-Repression Gathering (2024)

returnfire.noblogs.org/post/2024/03/25

To the International Anarchist Movement: Three Security Proposals

notrace.how/blog/three-proposals/three-proposals

Encrypted Messaging for Anarchists

anarsec.guide/posts/e2ee

We (MUST) Keep Us Safe: An interview with a Long-Term, Anonymous Anarchist Comrade on Repression, Trauma, Security Culture, and Revolutionary Solidarity

thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/post/2025/01/12

Bristol Anarchist Black Cross

bristolabc.org

In The Belly: a journal by and for people who are held captive by the Prison-Industrial Complex.

bellyzine.net

Mongoose Distro: material solely for the purpose of achieving breakdown of prison through disruption.

mongoosedistro.com

International Day of Solidarity with Marius Mason & All Long-Term Anarchist Prisoners

june11.noblogs.org

International Week of Solidarity with Anarchist Prisoners (23 – 30 August)

https://solidarity.international

NOTES

Zhachev — They Who Returned to the Rock

In approximately 312 BCE, a former general of the late Alexander the Great, King Antigonus I Monophthalmos launched an effort to conquer the Nabataean people. The Nabataeans were a proto-Arab group, in many ways the proto-Arab group, who had for centuries inhabited the deserts of Syria and the Levant, particularly what is today southern Jordan. Known for their nomadic lifestyle, control of important trade routes, and illusive nature, they were a very significant cultural, economic, and political force in the region during the era.

The Nabataeans were not a people who hastily conducted warfare. While it is true that they generally avoided direct confrontation, they did excel at a lethal kind of proto-guerrilla warfare with cunning strategies, leveraging their knowledge of the desert terrain and the resources of their extensive trade networks to outclass and outmaneuver their opponents. Their military engagements were often characterized as defensive in nature, reflecting a preference for avoiding open battles and instead exploiting the strategic advantages offered by their environment to gain tactical victories.

During the classical campaign of King Antigonus I against these desert free men, the Nabataeans, who controlled the vast flow of spice and incense throughout the whole of the ancient and classical world, noteworthy historical figures were involved. There was Demetrius, son of Antigonus I, the failure and war criminal Athenaeus, a general of Antigonus I, and Hieronymus of Cardia, a famous Hellenic historian. The chronicle of Hieronymus regarding these events was later incorporated through its surviving fragments into the writings of the Hellenic historian Diodorus of Sicily. Specifically, a work by Diodorus entitled Library of World History, sec. 19.94.2–95.2, which provides a fascinating account of Nabataean customs. Here’s a

translation by C.H. Oldfather:

“For the sake of those who do not know, it will be useful to state in some detail the customs of these Arabs (Ἀράβιοι), by following which, it is believed, they preserve their liberty.

They live in the open air, claiming as native land a wilderness that has neither rivers nor abundant springs from which it is possible for a hostile army to obtain water. It is their custom neither to plant grain, set out any fruit-bearing tree, use wine, nor construct any house; and if anyone is found acting contrary to this, death is his penalty [author emphasis]. They follow this custom because they believe that those who possess these things are, in order to retain the use of them, easily compelled by the powerful to do their

Bidding.

Some of them raise dromedaries, others sheep, pasturing them in the desert. While there are many Arab tribes who use the desert as pasture, the Nabataeans far surpass the others in wealth although they are not much more than ten thousand in number; for not a few of them are accustomed to bring down to the sea frankincense and myrrh and the most valuable kinds of spices, which they procure from those who convey them from what is called Arabia Eudaemon.

They are exceptionally fond of freedom [author emphasis]; and, whenever a strong force of enemies comes near, they take refuge in the desert, using this as a fortress; for it lacks water and cannot be crossed by others, but to them alone, since they have prepared subterranean reservoirs lined with stucco, it furnishes safety. As the earth in some places is clayey and in others is of soft stone, they make great excavations in it, the mouths of which they make very small, but by constantly increasing the width as they dig deeper, they finally make them of such size that each side has a length of one plethrum (30–33 meters). After filling these reservoirs with rain water, they close the openings, making them even with the rest of the ground, and they leave signs that are known to them-selves but are unrecognizable by others. They water their cattle every other day, so that, if they flee through waterless places, they may not need a continuous supply of water.

They themselves use as food flesh and milk and those of the plants that grow from the ground which are suitable for this purpose; for among them there grow the pepper and plenty of the so-called wild honey from trees, which they drink mixed with water. There are also other tribes of Arabs, some of whom even till the soil, mingling with the tribute-paying peoples, and have the same customs as the Syrians, except that they do not dwell in houses.

It appears that such are the customs of the Arabs. But when the time draws near for the national gathering at which those who dwell round about are accustomed to meet, some to sell goods and others to purchase things that are needful to them, they travel to this meeting, leaving on a certain rock their possessions and their old men, also their women and their children. This place is exceedingly strong but unwalled, and it is distant two days’ journey from the settled country.”

We cannot be sure if this Hellenic account and perspective is wholly accurate; whether or not they put to death fellow tribespeople who dared break their sacred codes. But the assertion that the Nabataeans were “exceptionally fond of freedom” as Hieronymus of Cardia claims is fully backed up in the different historical records of many different cultures and peoples who interacted with them across the ages.

A people of the desert, these earlier Arab nomads epitomized a pattern of resistance to the encroaching influence of civilization, a pattern that recurs throughout history. Their story, like that of so many others, reveals a fundamental conflict between those who embrace a life of independence, autonomous sovereignty, and those who seek control and the imposition of their ways upon others. These contra-historical peoples, as we have termed them, are those who resist the homogenizing force of civilization, fiercely defending and asserting their autonomy and cultural distinctiveness. The Nabataeans, through their clever use of the desert as a natural defense, their control of trade routes, and their nomadic lifestyle, demonstrate this pattern. They were not simply stupid barbarians; they were a complex society with an economy, a culture, and a system of sociality. Their choice to remain in the desert, to largely avoid agriculture, wine, and settled living, especially in their earliest days, was a conscious one, a strategic decision to maintain both their individual and cultural autonomy.

The account mentioned earlier by Hieronymus of Cardia, preserved in Diodorus of Sicily’s writings, provides a glimpse into their customs and beliefs. The Nabataeans’ rejection of the conventional trappings of civilization—the cultivation of crops, the production of wine, the building of houses—was a deliberate act of defiance. They recognized that these civilized practices made them vulnerable to external control. Their choice of a nomadic lifestyle, their ability to move and disappear into the desert, was a means of self-preservation. They understood that the key to their freedom was to remain elusive, ungraspable, and to leverage their knowledge of the environment against their enemies.

Their construction of hidden water cisterns, their intimate knowledge of the desert’s resources, and their careful control of their trade routes, all exemplify their commitment to maintaining their independence. These were not passive acts of survival; they were active strategies of resistance. The Nabataeans were not simply defending their territory; they were defending their way of life, their culture, and their freedom from external control. Their interactions with King Antigonus I Monophthalmos and his generals, and the

Hellenistic world in general, represent a clash of civilizations, a struggle between a settled, expansionist power and a people determined to preserve their autonomy. The Nabataeans were not interested in conquest; they were interested in maintaining their way of life, their autonomy, and their freedom to trade and live as they saw fit. As stated, they were not necessarily warlike, but they were willing to defend their way of life, even through warfare if necessary.

The ability of the Nabataeans to maintain their lifestyle, their ability to resist the incursions of their neighbors throughout the many centuries, demonstrates the effectiveness of their strategy. Their success, however, should not be understood as merely a matter of military prowess. It was the result of a holistic approach, encompassing economic, cultural, and social dimensions. They were not just fighters; they were artists, traders, negotiators, and, above all, masters of their environment.

This pattern of resistance is echoed throughout history. Consider the Chickamauga Cherokee, a group of Cherokee who, following the American Revolution, chose to continue resisting the encroachment of the United States government on their lands and way of life. They refused to sign treaties, continued to raid American settlements, and fought a protracted guerrilla war to protect their independence and traditions. Like the Nabataeans, the Chickamauga Cherokee understood the threat posed by the expansion of European civilization. They saw peace treaties, jurisprudence, and legalism as a means to dispossess them of their land and culture, to force them to abandon their traditional ways of life. The Chickamauga Cherokee, like the Nabataeans, adopted strategies of resistance tailored to their environment. They used the forests and mountains of their homeland as a refuge, launching surprise attacks and retreating into the

wilderness, just as the Nabataeans used the desert. The Apache, a collection of related tribes in the American Southwest, provide another powerful example of this pattern. Their resistance to Spanish and, later, American colonization was legendary. They, like the Nabataeans and Chickamauga Cherokee, used their knowledge of the terrain, their nomadic lifestyle, and their cunning to outmaneuver their enemies. They understood that civilization meant the loss of their freedom, the destruction of their culture, and the dispossession of their land. Their history is replete with acts of defiance, guerrilla warfare, and determined efforts to preserve their independence.

The uncontacted tribes of the Amazon rainforest, still living today, represent a contemporary example of this historical pattern. These isolated communities, often numbering only a few hundred or even dozens of individuals, have actively resisted contact with the outside world. Their reasons are the same as those of the Nabataeans, the Chickamauga Cherokee, and the Apache: they understand that contact with the outside world poses a threat to their way of life, their culture, and their freedom. They have witnessed the destruction of other indigenous communities, the loss of their land, and the forced assimilation into a hostile imperialist culture. Their avoidance of contact is not merely a matter of isolation; it is an act of resistance, a conscious choice to defend their way of life. Pacific people like the Maori of New Zealand, who have continued resisting European colonization for many years, also illustrate this recurring theme. They, too, once fought against British and European rule and the loss of their lands, using their knowledge of the terrain and their fighting skills to resist. They, too, understand that contact with civilization threatened their traditional ways of life, their culture, their autonomy, and mother nature itself.

Even in the modern world, this pattern of resistance persists. The Palestinian people, some of them perhaps direct genetic descendants of the Nabataean tribespeople, who have lived under occupation for decades, almost a century, provide a contemporary example. Our resistance, whether through political activism, cultural expression, or, in some cases, armed conflict, is a struggle to preserve our identity, ourr culture, and our right to self-determination. My steadfast Palestinian people understand that civilization, in the form of Israeli occupation, threatens our freedom, our culture, our spiritualism, and our very existence.

Our struggle, like that of the Nabataeans, the Chickamauga Cherokee, the Apache, the Maori, the uncontacted Amazonian tribes, and so many others is a fight against the homogenizing force of civilization, a struggle to preserve their ways of life. A fight against the silencing of the differend. These contra-historical peoples all share a common thread: a deep-seated commitment to their way of life and a willingness to defend it against every external opponent. They recognize that civilization, with its emphasis on control, standardization, and expansion, often comes at the expense of freedom, cultural diversity, and the autonomy of those who resist it. They choose to live on their own terms, even if it means facing hardship, conflict, and the constant threat of invasion. They understand that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

The Nabataeans, with their ingenious adaptations to the harsh desert environment, their skill in trade and negotiation, and their unwavering determination to remain independent, serve as a brilliant example of this enduring pattern. Their story reminds us that the clash between civilization and those who resist its encroachment is a recurring theme in human history, and that the struggle to preserve cultural distinctiveness and autonomy remains relevant to this day. They, and all those who have followed their example, are a testament to the enduring power of the human spirit to resist homogenization and to choose freedom over control.

The Nabataeans, with their mastery of resource management, and their resistance to outside forces, serve as a striking precursor to Frank Herbert’s Fremen of Arrakis. The parallels are numerous and profound, highlighting the recurring motifs of survival, cultural adaptation, and the struggle for self-determination that resonate across both history and science fiction. The Fremen, just like the contra-historical peoples we have discussed, exemplify the human capacity for resilience and the inherent value of preserving a distinct way of life in the face of external pressures.

Arrakis, or Dune, is a harsh and unforgiving desert planet, much like the environments inhabited by the Nabataeans, the Apache, and other contra-historical groups. This environment shapes the Fremen, forcing them to adapt and evolve in ways that define their culture and survival. Their mastery of water conservation, their development of the stillsuit, and their knowledge of the sandworms are all testaments to their ability to thrive in a seemingly inhospitable world. Similarly, the Nabataeans, through their ingenious reservoirs and their nomadic practices, demonstrated an exceptional understanding of their desert environment. The Apache, too, possessed an intimate knowledge of their arid homeland, using this knowledge to evade their pursuers and sustain themselves.

Both the Fremen and the Nabataeans value their freedom above all else. They resist external control, whether it comes from the Imperium in the case of the Fremen or from the Hellenistic powers in the case of the Nabataeans. This resistance is not merely a matter of military strength; it is a cultural imperative, a deeply ingrained belief in the right to self-determination. The Fremen’s jihad, a religious war for control of Arrakis, is the ultimate expression of this desire for freedom. The Nabataeans, as we have seen, skillfully avoided direct confrontation, but were ready to fight to preserve their liberty.

The cultural practices of the Fremen and the Nabataeans are also remarkably similar. Both groups value communal living, strong social bonds, and a reverence for their ancestors and traditions. The Fremen’s rituals and religious beliefs, centered on the importance of water and the sandworms, are deeply rooted in their environment and history. The Nabataeans, too, appear to have had a strong sense of community and a distinct set of customs that set them apart from their neighbors. Both cultures prioritize survival, placing a high value on resourcefulness, resilience, and a willingness to adapt.

Perhaps the most striking parallel is the Fremen’s role as a provider of a vital resource, melange (spice), much like the Nabataeans controlled key trade routes. The Nabataeans, by controlling the flow of incense and spices, held a position of economic power in the ancient world. They were not merely traders; they were the gatekeepers of a valuable commodity, and thus, of a crucial element in the global economy of their time. Similarly, the Fremen control the production of melange, a substance that is essential for interstellar travel and the prolongation of life. This control gives them immense political and economic leverage, allowing them to challenge the power of the Imperium and ultimately reshape the galaxy.

Both the Nabataeans and the Fremen are seen as “other” by those outside their cultures.They are often misunderstood, feared, and viewed with suspicion. Their customs and ways of life are often seen as strange or primitive, and their resistance to external control is viewed as a threat. This othering is a common theme in the history of contra-historical peoples, who are often marginalized and demonized by those in power. The modern science fiction fan, however, often embraces these figures for the very reasons they are othered. The Fremen, in their alienness, embody ideals of freedom, resistance, and environmental consciousness that many find absent in the civilized world.

There is a latent irony here, however. While science fiction offers an escape into worlds where resistance and survival are glorified, where the marginalized are often the heroes, the real-life counterparts of these fictional characters are often denied the same support. The Nabataeans are gone. Many of the contra-historical groups we’ve discussed face an ongoing struggle, often against overwhelming odds. The uncontacted Amazonian tribes, for example, are threatened by deforestation, mining, and encroachment on their lands. The Palestinians face displacement, occupation, a lack of recognition of their rights, and most recently, unrestrained genocidal assault.

Modern science fiction fandom, often composed of young people, find themselves captivated by these figures. Their escapism allows them to live, vicariously, through the stories of the Fremen. They might wear Fremen cosplay, they might engage in online discussions about the political dimensions of the novel, and even go so far as to fetishize the “otherness” the Fremen embody. But too rarely does this translate into real-world support for those engaged in similar struggles. How often do these fans, caught up in the drama of fictional battles, take concrete actions to support the real-world indigenous communities or Palestinians fighting for their survival? How often do they direct their passion toward real-world combativeness? The detachment is often lamentable. The “cool” warrior in a book or movie, the one who

can survive where others cannot, takes on a heroic cast in the imagination, but the realities of the modern world often mean the destruction of those ideals. The passion for the fictional quickly, it seems, burns itself out without a single match being lit for their real-life counterparts. The science fiction fan, lost in their own world of imaginary threats, often fails to see the real threats facing those who resemble their heroes in the modern day.

This disconnect is not simply a matter of apathy. It is often a complex interplay of factors, including a lack of awareness, a sense of powerlessness, and a tendency to prioritize personal enjoyment over communal action. The Internet and social media offer a platform for surrogate engagements, echo chambers, reinforcing existing biases and most often preventing meaningful dialogue. The distractions of modern life, from the demands of work and school to the constant bombardment of entertainment and vice, can also make it difficult to focus on the struggles of others.

This, however, is not to say that science fiction fandom is entirely divorced from social and political concerns. Many fans are deeply engaged in things like ecology, indigenous struggles, and animal rights. But the focus on fictional worlds often overshadows the struggles of those who embody similar values in reality. The Fremen’s fight for Arrakis, in the minds of some, becomes more important than the Palestinians’ fight for their homeland. The Apaches’ fight for their land becomes a distant memory, buried beneath the imagery of a galactic war. The Fremen, and the Nabataeans, offer lessons that we often fail to take to heart. They remind us of the importance of cultural preservation, the value of self-determination, and the need to respect the environment. They also highlight the dangers of complacency, the risks of

ignoring the struggles of others, and the tragic consequences of romanticizing resistance without providing real-world support.

The parallels between the Fremen and the Nabataeans are undeniable, revealing the power of the themes of survival, cultural adaptation, and resistance. The Fremen, like the Nabataeans, embody the ideals of freedom, resilience, and environmental consciousness. As science fiction fans become lost in the escapism that these characters provide, they must also be reminded of those struggling in the modern world, who mirror these figures in so many ways.

Zhachev is a 35 year-old Palestinian born in exile in the southeastern United States. He currently lives and writes from the southern Blue Ridge Mountains. substack.com/@zhachev

Sidiq — Pengar / Hangover

Pengar

Selama kekuasaan berdiri tegak menghadap

Dan menjadi ancaman bagi kebebasan hidup.

Takkan berhenti ku persembahkan Pemberontakan bak perampok pembuat kekacauan

Menjelma perompak menyusur lautan.

Hingga koleris busuk peradaban takkan menemukan lagi celah

Hingga semua rata dengan tanah.

Hangover

As long as power stands tall

and threatens the freedom of life.

I will not stop presenting

Rebellion like a robber making chaos

Incarnate pirates along the sea.

Until the rotten colonialists of civilization

will find no more loopholes

Until all is razed to the ground!

From Palang Hitam Anarkis:

Sidiq is an anarchist, illegalist and an individualist.

On the 12^th of July 2024, state authorities had arrested him for cannabis use and possession. He often contributes to anarchist publishing and street libraries, involvement in soccer hooligan club, clashes in protests and a passion for writing poetry. Sidiq is looking at a possible 10 year prison term.

His support group are taking donations via paypal at; einzine16@gmail.com

You can write to Sidiq;

Muhammad Ilyas Sidiq

Lapas (prison) Kebonwaru, Kec.

Batununggal, Kota Bandung, Jawa Barat

40272

Indonesia

Sidiq is part of two publishing collectives; Contemplative Editions and Talas Press who publish anarchist books.

Contemplative Editions

contemplative@riseup.net

@___contemplative [Instagram]

contemplativepublishing.noblogs.org

Talas Press

@talaspress [Instagram]

https://linktr.ee/talaspress

For more information on anarchist anti-prison struggle in so-called Indonesia, find Palang Hitam Anarkis [Anarchist Black Cross] online at palanghitamanarkis.noblogs.org or on Instagram @ palang__hitam

Mar — this poem is dedicated to uncle

no to the uncle who told us his hijabi cousins feel safer calling the police so we should all comply while the st georges set fire to the hotel exits

no to the aunties in glittering geles shaking coloniser hands in blood stained palace galas

no to the OBE MBE EDI workshops that report me to HR because my tone makes them feel uncomfortable

no to zionism, nazism, hindutva fascism, beckies who think their good hair buys them access to white-ism

no to the charity philanthropy bursary purchasing black and brown boys for the prevent to prison pipeline

no to assimilation respectability politicking boot-licking do you season the leather or have you sold off your taste for spice too

no to the head down keep quiet change your name to something more comfortable to unmelanised tongues if they can pronounce guattari they will honour my grandmother’s legacy

so no

no to uncle

no to uncle pouring limp water on the fire of my rage

Margeret Kimblerly & Roddy Rod — Martinique’s History of Resistance

Margaret Kimberly The Caribbean island Martinique, is an overseas department of France, but its people are in protest against the government in Paris. The most recent protest occurred because of the high cost of food due to the presence of food distribution monopolies. Roddy Rod is an anti-kepone activist, a pan-African, anti-imperialist resident of Martinique. He is also a resident of the African nation the Ivory Coast. He speaks on behalf of other anarchists in Martinique who are engaged in disruptions on behalf of the people there. He joins us from Martinique.

Roddy Rod Thank you margret, it’s an honor to be here.

MK I don’t think Americans know much about Martinique, people think of it as a colony when in fact it is France, just as Hawaii is the US even though it’s far from the mainland. Despite being a part of France, people there do not have the same material conditions that other citizens of France have. There have been protests, intermittent protests and there were some recently about the high costs of food. What is it that causes these differences in treatment and the difference in food prices?

RR The obvious response is that it’s 7,000 Kilometers from France, Martinique has a colonial history. You see, Margret, colonisation has multiple faces it can be destroying Haiti, as France has done, it can be through false decolonisation within West Africa and keep the money and it can also be through departmentalisation where its a still a french department but you always have to fight and to scream to have the same treatment. Some people still choose to fight for equality, I don’t have the pretension to speak for those people, I respect them, but I’m not part of them.

As far as the situation here, there is an association that started with claims, the strict claim was in response to a commission against the monopolies in Martinique, in 2023. Monopolies within the food distribution industry have been made to answer as to why the cost of food distribution is so high. In regards to that there is an association who started claims saying “you say that Martinique is france, then the prices then the food has to be at the same price as in france” that is when everything really started. Its nothing new, that fight against the monopolies has been going on for centuries, mainly within our modern history in Martinique, it has erupted and never really stopped, its calmed down but its not gonna calm down anymore, in 2009 and then for other reasons in 2019, 2020 and now in 2024.

So, that association, their strict claim is “nothing more” they don’t talk about colonisation, they don’t talk about imperialism, their claim is France has to manage something in order for the food to be at the same price as in france. That is the starting point in September, 2024.

MK It’s interesting, I use the example of Hawaii, being a US state, even though it’s far away. They also have very high food prices. It seems, there is a connection between these places that are allegedly part of another country which prevents them from doing what’s right by their people. It seems that Martiqnue should secure food from the rest of the region, the Caribbean and other nations. Is that not possible?

RR That’s when the historical context comes in, thank you for that and yes I believe it would be a very rich conversation with people from Hawaii and from Puerto Rico as well. The historical context within Martinqiue is that there is a colonial pact that doesn’t say its name anymore, that is still in place with its economic function Martique, as with many countries in the Caribbean, has gone through the genocide of Natives and then the deportation of Africans forced through slavery to work. Then thanks to the brave people of Haiti, we have gone through a process of abolition of slavery.

Slavery in Martinqiue was abolished in 1848. What happened at that time? Descendants of enslavers, who were enslavers the day before. They were compensated for the loss of the forced labor, they kept much of their land and they kept their connections with the French elites. They kept the same economic model we have today in Martinique in which we plant an aggressive monoculture. We plant bananas and sugar canes, some of these are for rum. These are exported on boats as raw products. These same boats come back with products from france. 80% of what we consume in Martinique comes from the imports from France.

The individuals who are within the export and import industry are in a community, that we call the Bekes and there are big names within the Bekes, they are a caste, they have a racial way of functioning which is white supremacism. They are descendants of enslavers, that’s the issue we still have in Martinique.

MK So, the people who control Martinqiues economy are white people, descended from the slaveholding class?

RR It’s not just white people, because even white people in France are against this, there are a lot of French people who are against this way of functioning, it’s caste, it’s white supremacy, it’s not white privilege. Which is a different problem, it’s white supremacy at its purest. We have people whose ancestors have been compensated for the loss of their workforce when slavery in Martinqiue was abolished. They kept lands, they kept economic power. They kept growing through the centuries, through the next generations. So I’m oppressed by the same last names that my grandmother, my great grandmother, my great great grandmother were oppressed under. Those are the same last names, its caste.

MK So, it is a class issue?

RR Yes, it’s a capitalism issue. We have white people as allies, it is just capitalism at its purest. The consequence is not just the food price, everything is more expensive here. Another consequence is Kepone, Chlordecone and in the US Kepone was manufactured by in the US by Allied Chemicals.

MK So, Kepone is an insecticide, correct?

RR Initially, it was not authorised on US soil for us, it was authorised for Export. In 1974, at the warehouse of Allied Chemicals, there was an issue with AlliedChemicals. The workers were infected, the river was infected as well, it is a highly toxic pesticide. In the US, this issue was handled quickly, banana producers that were importing this pesticide in Martinique went and bought the authorization for them to bring production somewhere else. They knew of its toxicity since 1975. As of today, the use of this pesticide was stopped in France in 1990, in Martinique it was used until 1993. That lobby bought a lot of the pesticide before the ending date came in.

MK So this pesticide was banned in the US for 50 years but it was allowed to be used in Martinique. Is it still being used in Martinique?

RR Not officially, since 1993. The reason why I’m very meticulous in what I say is because of the arguments in courts. The consequence is, a lot of our soil, our rivers and some of our seas have been poisoned for more than 500 years. It can poison the Chickens, the Fish, it is an environmental catastrophe. There is a UN report that classifies Martinqiue and Guadeloupe as two of the fifty most countries polluted on earth.

Why I talk about Kepone is the same people, the same companies that plant bananas are the same ones importing food.

[...]

MK The protest over these conditions, in this case, high prices. What is it that people want? Do they want to be treated more equitably, do they want to be independent of France? What is the demand of the protest?

RR Martinique, in my opinion, is at a crossroads. There is a consensus, things need to change. Everybody agrees, even in France. There are three camps;

— The majority of people want to fight for quality.

— There are people who want to start the process of autonomy

— There are more radicals, like myself, who want to go through the fight for independence.

The people who want to fight for autonomy and those who want independence are allies. We don’t agree on everything but we want to push the line forward for emancipation, whether it has to go progressively or it has to be more radically more drastic.

MK What is the outlook for any of those things happening? For autonomy or independence?

RR I’ll take some time to explain to you, what has happened in terms of protest in the last 15 years. Before I say this, Martinique has a rich history of fighting against colonialism and for independence, even through minority camps.

We have the insurrection that took place in 1870 led by Lumina Sophie. We have many radicals throughout our history, we have Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire the L’OJAM (Organisation de la Jeunesse Anticolonialiste de la Martinique / Anticolonialist Youth Organisation of Martinique) who faced répression. We had Martiniquans joining the ARC (Alliance révolutionnaire caraïbe / Caribbean Revolutionary Alliance) after the ARC was banned and brought down, some people in Martinqiue kept going like the Sons of Telga. Telga was one of the major figures of the 1870 insurrection in Martinique.

What I’m trying to say is, even if it’s a minority, we still have members of the independence camp who keep fighting for independence and we have a rich history of fighting. Even if the people of Martinique continue fighting for equality.

The French didn’t push forward equality in our history through kindness. People fought, people died, for equality.

The consequences of what happened in Martinique in the past few weeks. You have 134 small and big businesses that have either been vandalized, looted or burned down. You have more than 560 people that have lost their jobs, you have losses between around $70 million dollars this is all spread between 19 towns. Coming down to this, it’s very sad. Martinique is 1,128 square meters. It’s 360,000 people. 200 people were arrested as France sent elite troops.

In Guadeloupe in 2009, the fight against the high cost of food distribution began. It began there and had a domino effect in Martinique, 15 years later, nothing has changed. Under the camp for independence you had youth that I was a part of that had a different approach in 2019, throughout the Kepone commission. When the state starts a commission, sometimes it is to protect some people, it is not to bring people to justice. We knew where it was going. We, a small group of radicals started disruptions against stores, against colonial statues, against plantations. We had a different approach saying; the problem is colonial, people have to realise it. Through reforms you reinforce the colonial power.

We have to face that colonial power, our approach was to make disruptions so people can see that we’re not scared of the police and the repression. I was highly injured myself, I was shot in the face by the police during protests in 2020. Not just me, Kéziah Nuissier who was almost lynched by French white police. We were prosecuted, many others went to jail. Some for two years.

The response, then and now from the French state is to send in the French elite police troops called the CRS. In 1959, following a fight between a white and black person in Martinique, following that there were protests that were repressed by the CRS. There are three people who have been assassinated by them, the response from the Martinquian deputies was “the CRS needs to go”

There is an association, who wanted to start negotiations with the food distribution enterprise companies, the response from the government was to send the CRS. That is what sparked violence, looting and insurrection in Martinique.

The interview has been abridged and edited for ease of reading. For the full conversation, listen to the original audio. soundcloud.com/user-92939733/martiniques-history-of-resistance

Simoun Magsalin — The Anarchy of the Peripheries: Preliminary Notes to a Study of Rebel Peripheries

In the internal peripheries of various States in the former Third World, State power cannot fully cohere and territorialize. Usually situated among mountainous formations, these internal peripheries have long defied civilizational imposition. James C. Scott described it in the Zomian highlands of mainland Southeast Asia. In the Philippines, peoples would routinely escape the Spanish colony by practicing remontar or escaping to the mountains. Their Indigenous descendants are known as remontados today. Across the Americas, enslaved peoples would also flee to safety of the jungles and mountains to form maroon communities, some of which reconstituted African polities and and some were the size of some small European countries. Across time and space, internal peripheries acted as refugia by which peoples could escape and defy State power and all the civilization that it entailed—corvée, taxes, slavery, colonialism, proletarianization, etc. This is the “anarchy of the peripheries.”

The anarchy of the peripheries has also historically been the refuge, bulwarks, and strongholds of guerrilla movements, some of which were Marxist and communist. These peripheries that are the refuge of guerrilla movements is what I would term as “rebel peripheries.” The relationship of the rebel peripheries and the anarchy of the peripheries is marked by what I call as a “heretical” thesis, of which has two components. The first is that many of these authoritarian guerrilla movements survive and even thrive as a result of the condition of the anarchy of the peripheries, of the failure of State power to fully cohere and territorialize in the internal peripheries. This is irony: that authoritarian guerrilla persist because of a relative condition of anarchy. The second component is that it is Marxists and other authoritarians, and not libertarians, that have been able to fully take advantage of the anarchy of the peripheries and develop rebel peripheries. This too is irony: the very peripheries where anarchy thrives, where State power is weakest, it is the authoritarians, and not the anarchists that are to be found. Why is this so?

From Infrapolitics to Rebel Peripheries

The anarchy of the peripheries is largely constituted on two components: geography and political power. These are highly interrelated. State power is normally best constituted under specific geographical features like plains, rivers, and valleys—places that are also easier for populations to settle. This is no coincidence. For whatever reason, State power has difficulty imposing its rule of law beyond easily-traversal geographies. A notable exception is the northern Andes mountains in Columbia and Ecuador where State power coheres stronger in the mountains where most of the population lives, but this is due to the fact that the more favorable climate of the Andes allows more people to settle there than in the coasts of those countries. This clear exception also reveals that State power better coheres and territorializes in areas of higher population density, which itself is also conditioned by geographies that are easier to settle.

State power also seems to better cohere in some countries more than others. In the former First World and Second World like in the historical revolutionary situations in Spain and Ukraine, State power was able to cohere and territorialize and supersede whatever anarchy could have existed due to the revolutionary situation. But it is in the former Third World where the anarchy of the peripheries were able to shield and allow the flourishing of Marxist guerrilla movements and other rebel peripheries.

Archaeologists have a formal term for the anarchy of the peripheries during the age of colonization: pericolonialism. Pericolonialism is the condition of peoples and territories in the peripheries of colonial projects. In the Philippines, pericolonial archaeology (through the work of Stephen Acabado) is revealing that the Ifugao and other Igorot peoples of the Cordilleras were not unaffected by colonialism but rather reacted to it and even restructured their societies to defend against colonialism.

During the colonial period of the Philippines, people would practice remontar, or returning to the mountain, to escape the colonizers. It is said by Frederic Henry Sawyer (an American colonial anthropologist) that the Pangasinense had a tendency to flee to the mountains to escape the colony, given the proximity of Pangasinan to the mountains of Benguet. James C. Scott described “infrapolitics” or invisible politics much like how infrared is invisible to the naked eye. For Scott, desertion was infrapolitical compared to a mutiny, which is obviously political. In this sense, remontar, and related concepts like marronage, was the infrapolitical equivalent to anti-colonial rebellions. Fleeing the colony was less risky that challenging colonial State power. Remontados and maroons alike would flee to the anarchy of the peripheries where they can live without the diktats of State power and the slavery that it entailed.

In the period of creole postcoloniality, or the transferring of control of State power from colonial suzerains to creole bourgeoisies, I argue that pericolonialism transforms into “peristatism,” or the condition of peoples and spaces in the peripheries of State power and territoriality. The anarchy of the peripheries in the contemporary age is marked by the inability of State power to cohere and territorialize in these peripheries. As we have seen throughout history, these anarchic peripheries become havens for rebel peripheries by which guerrilla movements set up shop. In this sense, these rebel peripheries are the visibly political form to the infrapolitical practice of remontar and marronage.

In the Philippines, there is a colloquial term for joining the communist insurgency led by the New People’s Army, the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). The term is “mamundok” and it is a literal translation of the Spanish “remontar,” both meaning to go up the mountain. This mamundok, however, is an explicit politicization of remontar. While Remontados wish to merely desert State power, those who mamundok explicitly seek to challenge State power. Under the theory of Maoism, the protracted people’s war aims to militarize the whole countryside and “surround the cities” and finally contest and conquer State power.

As mentioned previously, this contention for political power is heretical in the sense that it aims to build revolutionary State power precisely in the anarchy of the peripheries where State power is weakest. Rebel peripheries build power precisely in the long tradition of infrapolitical anarchy of the peripheries. It is in the peripheries where Marxist guerrilla forces converge and wage people’s wars, from the CPP, the Communist Party of Malaya, the Communist Party of Thailand, the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), the Naxalites in India, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and many others. Of these, it is only the PKK and the Zapatistas (EZLN) that are libertarian in content. Crucially, the libertarianism of the PKK is still in doubt by many, and the Zapatistas originally started out as Maoist before embracing a unique Indigenous libertarianism after dialogue and collaboration with the Maya of Chiapas.

So we are faced with the obvious fact that most rebel peripheries are led by authoritarians who invariably use assassinations, kangaroo courts, and violent purges to keep power in their rebel peripheries (much has been written on the matter, by myself and others). Anarchist armed struggle has tended to instead be conducted in revolutionary situations or in urban areas. A comparative analysis is necessary.

Historical and Contemporary Anarchist Armed Struggle

In concerted and generalized periods of anarchist armed struggle, the heretical thesis has generally held true. We can consider two cases in the Ukrainian and Spanish revolutions. (While we would like to consider a third in the Korean Shinmin prefecture, the structure of their armed struggle is not well documented.)

Neither Ukraine nor Spain had significant internal peripheries where State power was unable to cohere fully and territorialize. Ukraine is largely a vast open plain, quite ideal for the rapid mobilization of an armed central authority across it. Once, however, Ukraine was part of a vast periphery of empires where Cossack peoples largely retained their autonomy from empires and States through mobility, raids, and mercenary service. As the technologies of the State improved, State power cohered and territorialized in Ukraine, integrating the formerly autonomous cossacks into the Russian imperial system. By the time of the Ukrainian revolution, State power lost its coherence and deterritorialized in the country, allowing for a kind of anarchy. The Makhnovshchina was a “Republic on Tachanka”—always on the move. Like the cossacks before them, the Makhnovshchina used their mobility to their advantage to evade and assault State power. But the specific anarchy of the Ukrainian revolution was conditioned by the chaos of the revolutionary situation and the invasion of foreign powers, not by the inherent anarchy of the peripheries. The anarchy of the Makhnovshchina was not necessarily rooted in the specific geographic structure of Ukraine, but by the political situation and the creative mobilization by Nestor Makhno and his Black Army. Indeed, the “Republic on Tachanka” had no recognizable territorial bulwark—it was rather first and foremost a social movement backed by a guerrilla army. The Makhnovshchina did not present itself as what we now recognize as rebel peripheries today. Eventually, however, the Makhnovshchina was crushed and Bolshevik State power did cohere and territorialize in Ukraine.

In Spain, the situation was similar. State power had cohered and territorialized across the Iberian peninsula for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. The collapse and deterritorialization of State power was, again, conditioned by revolution, not by geography. Where anarchists were able to carve out spaces of autonomy or wage armed struggle, it was because they have allied with the Republican State. However, when the political settlement between the Republicans and the anarchists no longer became tenable, the full force of State power was borne on the anarchists. Iberia did have internal peripheries throughout the mountainous and forested regions, the most major of which are the Pyrenees. There the Spanish maquis continued the fight against Fransisco Franco and fascism. Some of the maquis were anarchist like the Sabaté brothers Quico, Pepe and Manolo. But Francoist State power did eventually cohere completely within the Spanish internal peripheries, forcing maquis both anarchist and Stalinist to evacuate, desist, or die in the resistance. Indeed, the three Sabaté brothers all died by the hands of the fascists. Furthermore, the maquis guerrilla war in post-war Spain did not have recognizable liberated zones like with rebel peripheries.

In both Ukraine and Spain, as the State power of authoritarians matured, the anarchy of the revolutionary situation was superseded by to cohering and territorialization of State power. In Spain, which did briefly have some anarchic peripheries, the maturation of the Francoist dictatorship eventually superseded whatever anarchy the forests and the mountains provided. This is not the condition of how the anarchy of the peripheries presents itself today, which presents itself as a persistent peristatism where State power cannot cohere or territorialize completely.

However, similar to the rebel peripheries of today, anarchists in both the Spanish and Ukrainian revolutions had the peasantry as a major mass base. Beyond Iberia and Ukraine, classical anarchism in Italy also won the support of the peasantry. Much like the peasantry of the peripheries today, the desire for some level of independence from the market and State system through small-scale land ownership and tilling dovetails with anarchist politics. This is why, for example, that Marxists are wont to slander anarchism as “petty bourgeois” as in a sense anarchism did win mass bases among independent peasants (who could be classified as petty bourgeois).

After the period of classical anarchism, the sunset of which is marked by a world-historical demobilization of anarchism, there were (and are) still periods of post-classical anarchist armed struggle. We can consider three forms, the pro-organizational type of the Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU), insurrectionary anarchism, and united front in Rojava.

The FAU’s armed wing of OPR-33 largely operated in the cities and mostly conducted targeted armed offensive meant to support direct action and political efforts. The FAU made a conscious decision to put political forces at the forefront to prevent the militarization of the political arm. Uniquely proletarian in character, the FAU was based on the urban working class of Uruguay. The FAU did not conduct a people’s war in the countryside or make use of peristatism or the anarchy of the peripheries. Rather, they remained proletarian and urban in character.

Attacks by insurrectionary anarchists are usually urban in character and do not seem to generalize armed struggle (not for lack of trying, however). These attacks are conducted across the contemporary world and rarely have some coherent identity like that of a guerrilla communist party. Some names can be described, such as the Mediterranean-based Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI) or the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire (SPF). Some theorists such as the late Alfredo Maria Bonanno have been identified with insurrectionary anarchism. Insurrectionary anarchism seems to keep a consistent urban character with their attacks. Similar to the FAU, we do not see insurrectionary anarchists make use of peristatism or the anarchy of the peripheries to their advantage. If they build mass bases among people in the periphery, it is not well known.

In the last case, we have seen is anarchists joining International Freedom Battalion in Rojava—the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES). Three groups are notable here, the Revolutionary Union for Internationalist Solidarity (RUIS), the International Revolutionary People’s Guerrilla Forces (IRPGF), and the Tekoşîna Anarşîst (Anarchist Struggle, TA). This kind of armed struggle was meant to support the existing military campaign in Syria against Daesh and later Türkiye and their Syrian proxies. The war in Syria is largely conventional in character rather than guerrilla. Rojava is not exactly a rebel periphery with the territory having relatively significant urban areas and having (for all intents and purposes) a conventional de facto government. While many an anarchist has celebrated the higher levels of autonomy and democracy in DAANES, it is still a relatively conventional rebel State apparatus, if a revolutionary one. This is not to dissuade support of Rojava, but just to show that it is not conventionally a rebel periphery. Nor is it clear if anarchists in North and East Syria build mass bases among peripheral peoples.

As we can see, post-classical anarchist armed struggle had not historically made use of the anarchy of the peripheries or made mass bases among peripheral peoples. Why is this so?

The Defeat of Anarchism

Largely, the reason why anarchists have not been able to make use of peristatism to develop anarchist rebel peripheries is because of the world-historical defeat of classical anarchism which saw the demobilization of anarchism worldwide and the conversion of many anarchist and proto-anarchist milieus to Marxism-Leninism, and later Maoism. Similarly, it was only with the collapse of the Soviet Union and capitalist restoration in most of the former Second World where we see libertarian alternatives like Abdullah Öcalan and the Zapatistas arise.

Where anarchism could have taken root among peripheral peoples, the galvanization of world Leninism and generous funding of communist parties in the wake of the victory of the Bolsheviks crowded out alternative revolutionary formations. The Soviet Union and other Second World states could invite revolutionaries to learn Marxism-Leninism and train for guerrilla war. Anarchist revolutionaries simply could not compete with such resources. Many converted to Marxism.

In the Philippines and China, this was indeed the case. The Soviet Union could provide tutelage and resources, so revolutionaries tended to adopt Marxism-Leninism as a guide for their own revolutionary praxis. Later on, it was Maoist China who supported the export of Mao Zedong Thought to Third World countries.

Where Soviet Marxism-Leninism was increasingly seen as decrepit and stagnant, a revitalization of revolutionary Marxism was done under the banner of Mao Zedong Thought. Revolutionaries across the Third World would challenge “official” communist parties for the development of new people’s wars and rebel peripheries. This was indeed the case in the Philippines where the Communist Party of the Philippines displaced the old party, the PKP-1930.

Anarchism’s place in all this was in the sidelines. Sure, there were localized revitalization in some places, most notably in the May–June 1968 events in France, but anarchism remained to be largely marginal movement internationally. It is only recently after world-historical decommunization in the collapse of the Soviet Union that anarchism returned with a vengeance. This inversely proportional relation between Marxism and anarchism is well known in anarchist emergence literature.

It is Right to Rebel

In terms of the anarchy of the periphery, Marxist-Leninist revolutionary movements built their party power on peripheral peoples, mostly peasants of varying kinds and/or Indigenous peoples. Peristatism here is not just a condition where State power is weak, but is also one of poverty. Peripheries are not as well integrated into the world-capitalist system as urban, suburban, and near-urban rural areas are. The condition of periphery also means that the welfare state is not as strong there as in more integrated territories. This localized lack of State power and poverty appeals to Marxist-Leninist revolutionary movements.

In the peripheries, the people there lack access to medicine, education, and law. Communist parties, such as that in the Philippines, have proven their capacity to provide where the State fails. The New People’s Army is not just a fighting force, but a mobile clinic, school, and court rolled up into one. Anarchists do not oppose communist parties because they do these things, however (although we may oppose the law part). After all, in both the classical and post-classical period, much of the social life of anarchists that did provide mutual aid and ateneos in health care and education were notably urban in character.

Indeed, the underground governments of Marxist-Leninist parties can and have been quite brutal at times, which is one of the reasons anarchist oppose them. In the Philippines, Peru, Nepal, and India, Maoists committed all kinds of atrocities on their own mass bases from brutal purges, retaliatory attacks, kangaroo courts, and even massacres. (An accounting of which group did what cannot be recounted here.) This is, of course, is not limited to Maoists. The Makhnovshchina conducted a pogrom against the Mennonites and the Spanish anarchists could have been overzealous in the murder of clergy and lay Catholics. The point, however, is not to declaim violence, but rather that violence ought have a specific character, that being against the State, proletarianization, work, and all. (An abolitionist argument on the character of violence can be read elsewhere like in my “Why Socialists Must be Abolitionists.”)

Much of the model of Marxist-Leninist rebel peripheries is due to Yan’an model of the Communist Party of China, that being to create a communist bulwark in a periphery far from enemy State power to construct an underground revolutionary government. From Yan’an, the Chinese communists were able to take the whole of China. This bulwark would then be the temporary capital of the communist insurgency until the Party can take State power in full.

However, anarchists declaim the building of such a government, whether in the peripheries or in a revolutionary situation. Rather, anarchists might take point from the Ukrainian revolution where the Makhnovshchina was able to temporarily eradicate State power and other rivals (nationalists, imperialists, Bolsheviks) to allow the proletariat and peasantry to build what they please. In this way, the Makhnovshchina allowed the flourishing, even for a brief time, of various soviets and communes where workers and peasants experimented in revolution. Similar happened in the Spanish revolution, albeit the anarchist additionally had a disastrous alliance with the Republicans.

Perhaps in the contemporary world, anarchists would point to the Zapatistas, who, starting from a Maoist position, actually did try to serve the people and learn from them and then found that the masses really did want to build something libertarian rather than yet another State—underground or otherwise. So that it is in Zapatista Chiapas that the political form favors bottom-up structures and probably the truest political democracy in the world. Basing themselves in a rebel periphery, the Zapatistas defend their autonomy from States with a combination of creative politics and armed force.

But despite the endurance of the Zapatista model, the general endurance of the rebel peripheries, and the resurgence of anarchism in the past decades, why is it that we have not yet seen an anarchist rebel periphery?

Towards an Anarchist Rebel Periphery?

For quite a number of reasons, contemporary anarchism is still very much urban-based with mass bases among workers, students, and other urbanites. But this is not destiny. Quite a number of communist parties, like that in the Philippines, started out as urban and even student movements that eventually established mass bases in the peripheries and started people’s wars. Furthermore, history is not destiny either. Just because anarchists have not made use of the anarchy of the peripheries does not mean that anarchist rebel peripheries cannot exist. But there are still quite a number of reasons why anarchists today are not founding rebel peripheries.

Most of the world is increasingly urban. This is a recurring trend in all countries and may be part of capitalist development. If more of the world’s population is in the urban, then so is the class struggle. A lot of what rebel peripheries actually do is to funnel militancy from the urban to the rural, as is the case in the Philippines. With the brain drain of radicals and militants, those in the urban class struggle are left with less boots on the ground.

In some countries like the Philippines, building rival projects in rebel peripheries will get us killed by guerrillas. It is not as if the communist party will allow some anarchists to go around establishing councils and communes that could potentially threaten their hegemony.

Despite the authoritarianism and the far-right on the rise, conditions are not yet forcing us to do purely underground work. We still have leeway to operate in cities and mostly legally. Unlike the brutal past dictatorships in Nepal, the Philippines, and Peru, we can still still operate mostly openly. While there is State repression, the character is as severe as it could be.

If conditions do worsen that forces our movements underground, then perhaps having an underground railroad towards a rebel periphery might be useful for us. Perhaps then, an insurrectionary strategy grounded in the anarchy of the peripheries would be viable.

Crucially, however, our current world is also one where State power continues to grow stronger. State power is increasingly interfering in many spheres of life. It is cohering and territorializing in the far corners of the world. This has been going on since antiquity as more and more of the world is being territorialized by States. It is increasingly easier to travel to peripheries, making them less peripheral. Perhaps the anarchy of the periphery is a dying breed.

In Myanmar, where liberal-democratic and socialist movements were driven underground and to rebel peripheries in open rebellion, anarchists are rather few and out organized by other groups like the armed liberal-democratic opposition, ethnic armies, and even a reforged Communist Party of Burma. Efforts to found a Black Army there have been smothered in the crib.

Most importantly perhaps, we can and should ask: What are we even building if we build guerrilla fronts and establish rebel peripheries? Ursula Le Guin wrote, “The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.” If all we have are means, is building a rebel periphery something that, as Errico Malatesta urges, allows us to walk towards anarchy always? And even if contemporary anarchism is largely urban in character, do not the people in the peripheries also deserve autonomy and armed self-defense? Would not moving to and organizing in the peristatal peripheries be great acts of anarchist solidarity? After all, there are still many places in the world where State power is weak and where the governments are brutal.

Ultimately, this essay is but preliminary work to understanding the question of the anarchy of the peripheries and what rebellions could lurk there. I do not have answers to the questions I ask. We cannot discount the possibility that anarchists can and will build an anarchist rebel periphery.

Simoun Magsalin is a reader of books about social ecology, abolition, socialism, anarchism and communism. He is a dreamer for a better world, a digital librarian, and archivist for radical sites.

Leonardo Torres Llerena — Toward an Indo-American Revolution: José Carlos Mariátegui’s Relevance for Decolonial Insurgencies

Introduction

José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) was a Peruvian Marxist thinker, journalist, and political activist whose ideas reverberate throughout Latin America’s leftist movements even today. Despite his relatively brief life, Mariátegui profoundly influenced how we understand class struggle, anti-colonialism, and especially the role of Indigenous communities in shaping revolutionary politics. His seminal work, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (1928), stands as a watershed text in Latin American Marxist and decolonial thought, bridging Western socialist theory with the specificities of the Andean and broader Latin American context.

Through this essay, I (a Peruvian migrant living in the UK) will examine how his emphasis on the Indigenous Question, communal forms of organisation, and the lived realities of colonised populations provides a framework for analysing and critiquing both revolutionary movements and state repression. Weaving in a decolonial lens, we will situate Mariátegui within the broader trajectory of Latin American anti-colonial struggles, from Indigenous resistance to later guerrilla movements, showing why his thought remains pivotal for non-white and anti-colonial activists, particularly within anarchist and other radical circles.

If insurgency is understood as a challenge to entrenched structures of domination and counterinsurgency as the array of techniques used by states and elites to maintain the status quo, Mariátegui’s call for an “Indo-American socialism” offers both a conceptual and strategic blueprint. By placing Indigenous communal forms at the centre, Mariátegui effectively reorients socialism—traditionally perceived as a European product—to the historically colonised geographies of Latin America.

Part I: Historical Context and Intellectual Trajectory

Mariátegui’s Early Life and Influences

José Carlos Mariátegui was born in Moquegua, Peru, in 1894. Raised in relative poverty and suffering health issues that plagued him throughout his life, Mariátegui’s early experiences gave him direct insight into the harsh realities faced by Peru’s marginalized communities. At a young age, he became a journalist, quickly turning his vocation into a platform for radical critique.

Peru was grappling with the social and political aftershocks of the War of the Pacific (1879–1884), which had left the country economically and morally destitute. The oligarchic republic that emerged in the early 20^th century was dominated by landed elites benefiting from resource extraction and the exploitation of Indigenous labour. The Indigenous population (the majority of the country) was relegated to near-feudal conditions in haciendas, deprived of fundamental rights, and disparaged by official national narratives. This deeply stratified society became Mariátegui’s chief area of investigation.

Mariátegui left Peru in 1919, journeying to Europe (particularly France and Italy) where the Western avant-garde, Italian Futurism, and nascent communist movements influenced him. Significantly, he was exposed to Gramscian ideas in Italy, learning about the importance of cultural hegemony and the necessity of engaging popular culture in revolutionary struggle. However, Mariátegui was no mere importer of European thought: upon returning to Peru, he critically adapted Marxism to the specific realities of Andean society, including its Indigenous communal traditions.

Encounters with Marxism and Latin American Realities

Mariátegui rejected a Eurocentric application of Marxism that failed to account for the material and cultural specificities of Peruvian and Latin American contexts. Far from advocating a sterile, dogmatic version of historical materialism, he saw Marxism as a living method capable of renewing itself when confronted with different social formations. He insisted that socialism in Peru could not merely copy European or Soviet models but had to engage intimately with Indigenous peasant realities and the legacy of colonisation.

Simultaneously, Mariátegui drew on the intellectual ferment spurred by the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), our region’s first major socialist-inspired revolution of the 20^th century, and the Bolshevik Revolution (1917) in Russia. Although his exposure to the Mexican Revolution was indirect, its impact on Latin American socialists at the time—through the idea of agrarian reform and peasant-led insurgencies—deeply influenced how revolutionaries throughout the region approached class struggle. Mariátegui’s critical contribution was to bridge these developments with a renewed focus on Indigenous communal forms, or what he called the ayllu—the basic unit of traditional Andean society.

Decolonial Praxis in the Early 20^th Century

Decolonial thought in Latin America can trace an important lineage to thinkers like Mariátegui, who recognised that colonisation was not a mere historical event but a structure that continued to shape race, class, and power relations. His perspective diverged from many Eurocentric Marxists by emphasising that the capitalist exploitation of Peru’s Indigenous population was intertwined with centuries of colonial subjugation. Hence, the material struggle against capitalism and the cultural-epistemic struggle against colonial oppression could not be separated.

These insights are crucial to understanding how Mariátegui’s writings speak to insurgencies—uprisings aimed at overturning systemic injustice—and the counterinsurgencies that state deploy to defend their power. Where state-centric narratives in Latin America often framed Indigenous mobilisations as backward or dangerous, Mariátegui saw these communal struggles as seeds for a new socialist society anchored in local forms of reciprocity and mutual aid.

Part II: Mariátegui’s Core Contributions to Revolutionary Theory

1. The Indigenous Question and Decolonial Socialism

Mariátegui’s most celebrated contribution is arguably his articulation of the “Indigenous question” as central to revolutionary politics in the Andes. In Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, he devoted extensive analysis to how race, land dispossession, and colonial continuities shaped Peru’s socio-economic landscape. He called for a “socialist solution to the Indigenous question,” meaning a transformation that recuperated communal landholding traditions (the ayllu) as part of a broader socialist project.

* Reclaiming Communal Traditions: Rather than treating Indigenous communalism as a relic of a premodern past, Mariátegui saw it as a vibrant tradition that could inform specifically Peruvian socialism. He rejected paternalistic and assimilationist approaches that aimed to “civilise” Indigenous peoples through Western capitalist paradigms. Instead, he posited that these communities already embodied forms of collective labour that were ethically and structurally akin to socialist principles.

* Indigenismo vs. Revolutionary Praxis: While the prevailing intellectual trend of his time, indigenismo, sought to recognise Indigenous peoples within the national narrative, Mariátegui critiqued it for seldom moving beyond reformist advocacy or folkloric celebration. For him, the Indigenous question was not only a cultural or racial issue but a revolutionary one, inseparable from economic emancipation and a break with neo-colonial power structures.

* Decolonial Marxism: Mariátegui anticipated many subsequent critiques of Marxism’s Eurocentric blind spots. By situating the Indigenous peasantry at the heart of a revolutionary alliance, he called for an approach that overcame the typical urban bias of Marxist movements. While he acknowledged the importance of proletarian organising in factories and mines, Mariátegui never lost sight of the rural, communal bedrock upon which Peru’s social fabric was built.

2. Critique of Oligarchy and Colonial Legacies

Mariátegui’s analysis of Peru’s oligarchy underscores a pattern of racial capitalism rooted in the colonial era. He illustrated how the white or mestizo ruling class enriched itself by exploiting Indigenous labour, perpetuating racial hierarchies established by Spanish colonial administrators. This system was maintained through violence—both the structural violence embedded in unjust land tenure and the more explicit violence of state-led repression.

* Collusion Between the State and Landed Elites: Mariátegui examined the Peruvian state’s complicity in protecting the privileges of landowners. Indigenous uprisings and peasant movements were invariably crushed under the argument of “maintaining order.” Here, we find the seeds of Latin America’s counterinsurgency doctrines, as the state historically de-legitimized Indigenous revolts by branding them criminal or subversive.

* A Call for Land Reform and Peasant Power: Land reform, for Mariátegui, was not merely about redistributing territory but about decolonising social relations. He envisaged a scenario where the Indigenous majority, organised collectively, would reclaim the land not as individual property but as communal spaces for production and social life. This stance challenged the individualist model of liberal land distribution, aligning more closely with anarchist and decolonial philosophies that emphasise collective stewardship.

3. The Role of Culture and Myth in Revolution

A less heralded but equally important component of Mariátegui’s thought is his discussion of myth. He posited that revolutions are driven not just by cold economic calculations but by mythic, imaginative forces—hope, solidarity, sacrifice, and communal identity. By revitalising Indigenous and popular cultural traditions, revolutionaries in Latin America could tap into a deep reservoir of collective energies.

This cultural dimension resonates with anarchist traditions that value decentralised networks, communal ethics, and direct action anchored in local cultural contexts. Mariátegui diverged from orthodox Marxists who prioritised the industrial proletariat and rationalist lines of class analysis, stressing instead that forging a new world required creativity, spirituality, and the forging of a new “historical bloc” that included peasants, workers, and the broader masses.

Part III: Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Latin America

1. Defining Insurgency & Counterinsurgency

Insurgency, in the Latin American context, typically entails armed or militant opposition against established political and economic structures. From the independence struggles of the 19^th century to the rural-based guerrilla movements of the 20^th century—such as Cuba’s 26^th of July Movement, the FARC in Colombia, or the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) in Peru—insurgency has often been a response to intense marginalisation, poverty, and landlessness.

Counterinsurgency, conversely, includes the tactics, strategies, and ideologies states employ to destroy or neutralise insurgent movements. In Latin America, counterinsurgency often relies on a blend of military repression, propaganda, and sometimes social reform measures meant to reduce the insurgents’ support base. Historically, these approaches have been heavily influenced by U.S. military doctrines (e.g., the School of the Americas) and are designed to preserve the status quo of racial capitalism and neo-colonial control.

2. The Peruvian Experience: Shining Path and Beyond

Though Mariátegui did not live to see the rise of Peru’s Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) in the late 20^th century, his ideas nonetheless cast a long shadow. The Shining Path emerged in the 1970s under the leadership of Abimael Guzmán, blending a Maoist interpretation of Marxism with a violent, doctrinaire strategy aimed at “protracted people’s war.” While the Shining Path did invoke the Indigenous question in rhetorical terms, it largely centralised authority and carried out brutal campaigns that often victimised the very communities it claimed to liberate.

From a Mariáteguian perspective, one might argue that the Shining Path represented a deviation from the decolonial and communal aspects of Indigenous struggle. Although Shining Path emphasised peasant mobilisation, its rigid vanguardism and violent tactics alienated large portions of the rural Indigenous population. The Peruvian state’s counterinsurgency response was equally brutal, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths, widespread human rights violations, and atrocities primarily inflicted upon Indigenous communities in the highlands and the Amazon.

Mariátegui’s insistence on a socialism that grew out of Indigenous communal practices—rather than being imposed from above—stands in sharp contrast to the Maoist-inspired centralism of the Shining Path. Similarly, an anarchist perspective critical of hierarchical party structures and authoritarian ideologies might find Mariátegui’s communal emphasis more resonant than the top-down militarism that characterised much of the Shining Path’s insurgency.

3. Counterinsurgency as Neo-colonial Continuity

Counterinsurgency in Peru (and elsewhere in Latin America) often replicated the racial logic of colonial and neo-colonial regimes. In Peru, the worst atrocities against suspected insurgents and entire communities—especially in the Andean regions—mirrored centuries of colonial violence against Indigenous peoples. Under the guise of defeating “terrorism,” the Peruvian military and associated paramilitaries committed acts that reaffirmed the low value assigned to Indigenous lives in a society still marked by colonial hierarchies.

From Mariátegui’s vantage point, such state violence defends the oligarchic and neocolonial order. The cyclical nature of insurgency and counterinsurgency in Latin America is inextricably linked to incomplete decolonisation; so long as the agrarian question, racial hierarchies, and economic exploitation remain unaddressed, militant rebellions will continue to spring forth from subaltern communities.

Part IV: Decolonization and the Legacy of Mariátegui

1. Connecting Mariátegui to Decolonial Theory

Mariátegui’s thought prefigures many arguments of contemporary decolonial theorists such as Aníbal Quijano, María Lugones, and Walter Mignolo, who emphasise how the coloniality of power structures race, gender, labour, and knowledge. While Mariátegui wrote decades before “coloniality” became an academic term, his insistence that capitalism in Latin America cannot be properly understood without its colonial heritage places him firmly in this tradition.

* Coloniality and Racial Capitalism: For Mariátegui, and later decolonial thinkers, capitalism’s global expansion was made possible through the racial hierarchies forged under colonialism. In Peru, this manifested in the oppression of Indigenous peoples and the monopolisation of land by white and mestizo elites. Only by dismantling these racialised class structures can true emancipation emerge.

* Epistemic Decolonization: Mariátegui was keenly aware that colonisation extended beyond physical domination into the realm of culture and knowledge. This awareness undergirds his project of fusing Marxism with Andean communal logic, representing a deliberate effort to create a distinctly “Peruvian socialism.” He thus challenges the standard linear narratives of modernity by placing Indigenous epistemologies at the centre of societal transformation.

* Beyond Extractivism: Although he lived in an era before the environmental crisis reached its current, catastrophic proportions, Mariátegui’s respect for communal land practices implied a more sustainable and collective relationship with nature. In contrast to the extractivist paradigms fuelling capital accumulation across the Global South, Mariátegui’s approach reclaims local stewardship. This dimension has become increasingly urgent in contemporary decolonial critiques that link environmental devastation to ongoing colonial plunder.

2. The Relevance for Contemporary Movements

Contemporary Latin American movements—ranging from Indigenous-led uprisings in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Chile, to Afro-descendant communities resisting land dispossession in Colombia, Brazil, and beyond—invoke principles that Mariátegui championed nearly a century ago. These include communal organisation, reclamation of land and resources, and the integration of cultural revitalisation with socio-economic demands.

* Anarchist Resonances: While Mariátegui was explicitly Marxist, his valorisation of communal forms and direct action resonates with anti-authoritarian principles found in anarchist traditions. He opposed both top-down state socialism and liberal market-centric approaches, emphasising the autonomy and leadership of Indigenous communities in shaping their own destiny.

* Insurgency in a Post-9/11 World: In the post-9/11 era, states worldwide have expanded the rhetoric and apparatuses of counterterrorism, which often conflate insurgent movements with terrorism. This dynamic continues to criminalise Indigenous and peasant mobilisations, labelling them as security threats rather than legitimate social struggles. Mariátegui’s perspective would assert that these movements are not mere criminal phenomena but expressions of long-simmering discontent with colonial and capitalist oppression.

* Gender and Intersectionality: Although Mariátegui did not extensively analyse gender as a distinct axis of oppression, his decolonial stance implicitly challenges patriarchal structures embedded within colonial societies. Modern-day decolonial feminists, who highlight the intersection of race, gender, and colonial oppression, can find a starting point in Mariátegui’s insistence on combining Marxist analysis with local cultural realities. In particular, Indigenous women often spearhead community-based insurgencies, linking land defence, cultural revival, and gender equality in ways that extend Mariátegui’s foundational insights.

Part V: Decolonial Reflections on Insurgency & Counterinsurgency

1. The Moral and Ethical Dimensions of Resistance

Mariátegui understood that any insurgency—even if militarised—must rest on moral legitimacy derived from the communities it claims to represent. Insurgencies rooted in popular aspirations for land, dignity, and cultural renewal can effectively mobilise collective myths and identities, becoming powerful vehicles for socio-political transformation. However, if an insurgency loses this moral core—by adopting overly authoritarian or violent tactics—it risks alienating the same communities whose support it relies upon.

From a decolonial anarchist perspective, the reliance on hierarchical command structures or cults of personality can distort an insurgent movement’s original emancipatory aims. Mariátegui’s approach implies that “people’s war” should be led by the people themselves, anchored in communal assemblies and direct democratic practices. If the struggle ceases to be communal, it risks reproducing the same forms of domination it ostensibly opposes.

2. Counterinsurgency as Epistemic Violence

States do not merely deploy military might to crush insurgencies; they also wield epistemic violence, controlling the narratives that define who a terrorist, who is a criminal, and who is a legitimate political actor. Latin American ruling classes often frame Indigenous demands as archaic, irrational, or subversive to national “unity,” thereby delegitimising communal autonomy. Decolonial critiques highlight that such epistemic violence is a continuation of colonial attempts to delegitimise Indigenous worldviews.

Mariátegui’s insistence on the legitimacy of Indigenous communal knowledge counters this hegemonic narrative. By positing that Indigenous traditions are not obstacles to modernity but viable alternatives to capitalist exploitation, Mariátegui challenges the standard justifications for counterinsurgency. His stance forces us to question how official discourses brand movements as “violent” or “illegitimate,” often ignoring the structural violence that prompted resistance in the first place.

3. Lessons for Present and Future Movements

* Building Alliances: One of Mariátegui’s core insights—building alliances between urban workers and rural Indigenous communities—remains crucial. While class struggle remains at the heart of Latin American insurgencies, an awareness of racial and colonial oppressions is vital to forging unity. Modern movements could expand on Mariátegui’s blueprint by including Afro-descendant, LGBTQ+, and women’s collectives, recognising that multiple forms of oppression intersect and fuel insurgent discontent.

* Centring Indigenous Authority: Any revolutionary strategy in the Andes (or other Indigenous-majority regions of Latin America) that fails to recognise the autonomy and leadership of Indigenous communities is doomed to replicate colonial patterns. Mariátegui’s emphasis on communal democracy offers a guiding principle for anarchists and other anti-authoritarians seeking to support local struggles without imposing external agendas.

* Resisting Militarisation: While armed struggle has been a historical recourse against extreme exploitation, Mariátegui’s perspective encourages caution against militarisation’s pitfalls. Movements that embrace rigid hierarchies or vanguardist doctrines may replicate forms of patriarchy and authoritarianism, undermining the broader goal of decolonial liberation. Anarchists and non-white communities often experience the brunt of state repression; hence, a careful strategic calculus is needed when deciding whether to adopt armed methods or focus on grassroots organising, dual power structures, and other forms of direct action.

* Revolutionary Culture and Education: Mariátegui gave considerable weight to culture, art, and myth. These elements cannot be dismissed as superfluous; instead, they are part of building a collective identity that can sustain resistance over the long term. Education—especially popular education—becomes a site of struggle, challenging colonial narratives and fostering a new generation committed to communal, anti-capitalist ethics.

Part VI: Critical Engagements and Contemporary Resonances

1. Anarchist Critiques of Mariátegui

From an anarchist point of view, Mariátegui can be critiqued on two main grounds:

1. His Commitment to the Party Form: Mariátegui did attempt to form a socialist party in Peru, the Peruvian Socialist Party (which later became the Peruvian Communist Party). This orientation implies a degree of centralisation that may clash with anarchist opposition to political parties. However, Mariátegui’s support for a party did not necessarily translate into authoritarian or rigid Leninism. His writings suggest a more flexible, localised approach to political organisation.

2. Underdeveloped Analysis of Patriarchy: Like many male revolutionaries of his time, Mariátegui did not fully articulate how patriarchal oppression is intertwined with class and colonial domination. Anarchist feminists, particularly women of colour, might argue that his vision remains incomplete without a robust gender analysis. Nevertheless, his emphasis on the communal and the critique of colonial patriarchy provides an entry point for expanding his ideas in more explicitly feminist directions.

2. Beyond the Peruvian Context: Latin American Solidarity

Mariátegui’s critiques of land concentration, oligarchic power, and neo-colonial intervention echo throughout Latin America, where Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities continue to face violent dispossession. From the Mapuche struggle in southern Chile to the Garifuna communities in Honduras defending their ancestral territories, the same logic of colonial capitalist expansion remains entrenched.

In a region marked by repeated coups, dictatorships, and waves of neoliberal restructuring, Mariátegui’s clarion call for a socialism that arises from local realities remains a touchstone. The Bolivian experience under Evo Morales, for instance, attempted to integrate Indigenous leadership into state structures, revealing both the potential and the contradictions of institutionalising Indigenous-led governance within a capitalist framework. While the Morales government advanced certain decolonial policies, it also succumbed to extractivist pressures that alienated Indigenous and environmental movements.

3. Paths Toward Decolonial Futures

If we read Mariátegui not as a rigid dogma but as a living methodology open to adaptation, his work provides valuable insights into how communities might navigate the complexities of 21^st-century struggles. Global crises—climate change, pandemics, entrenched inequality—underscore the urgency of articulating alternatives to capitalist modernity.

* Horizontalism and Communal Economies: In times of crisis, local assemblies and mutual-aid networks often spring up to fill the gaps left by neoliberal states. Mariátegui’s championing of communal labour resonates with these efforts, suggesting that cooperative and horizontal economic structures have deep historical roots in Latin America’s Indigenous communities. This can bolster anarchist arguments for self-management and localised autonomy.

* Spiritual and Cultural Revivals: The revival of ancestral ceremonies, languages, and spiritual practices continues to fortify communal identities in regions such as the Andes, Mesoamerica, and the Amazon. Mariátegui would likely see these cultural revivals as vital components of a broader insurgent identity, one that counters the assimilationist imperatives of both colonial and capitalist modernity.

* Transnational Solidarity: Given that colonialism was always a global phenomenon, decolonial insurgencies must likewise be international in scope. Migrant communities, diaspora networks, and global Indigenous alliances have begun to connect struggles across continents. Mariátegui’s emphasis on forging new myths of solidarity could be extended to create transnational bonds that defy the borders erected by colonial and neo-colonial regimes.

Conclusion

José Carlos Mariátegui’s legacy stands as a crucial bridge between Latin America’s Indigenous and peasant histories of resistance and the broader socialist and anarchist imaginaries that seek to overturn capitalist modernity. In addressing insurgency and counterinsurgency from a decolonial standpoint, Mariátegui offers nuanced insights rather than a universalising Marxism imported wholesale from Europe. He champions a localised, culturally embedded approach that places Indigenous community forms at its core.

He reminds us that insurgencies must be both materially grounded and spiritually fuelled—myth and culture are as potent as class analysis in mobilising a people for radical change. Counterinsurgency, conversely, is not just the physical repression of rebellion but also the epistemic violence that delegitimises subaltern worldviews and fortifies a colonial-liberal consensus. This understanding remains painfully relevant in contemporary Latin America, where Indigenous and Afro-descendant movements continue to confront the militarised might of neo-colonial states and global capital.

For today’s global majority anarchists, Mariátegui’s writings resonate with a shared recognition that domination operates on multiple axes. The struggle is not confined to class exploitation alone but extends to cultural, racial, and gendered forms of oppression that originate in colonialism. His radical call to centre Indigenous communal structures challenges the “one-size-fits-all” models of revolution that have so often failed to emancipate the most exploited and marginalised.

Yet Mariátegui’s legacy is no panacea. His own Marxist commitments, potential blind spots regarding gender, and the historical distance between his era and our own require critical engagement. Still, his central questions remain urgent: How can colonised people reimagine socialism so that it reflects their histories, cosmovisions, and communal practices? How might insurgent movements avoid reproducing the same logic of domination that they initially set out to destroy?

In grappling with these questions, Mariátegui’s work encourages us to seek alliances beyond the confines of classical Marxism, incorporating feminist, anti-racist, and anarchist critiques that further decolonise our political frameworks. In the face of ever-evolving counterinsurgency tactics, from media disinformation to militarised police, the lesson is clear: true liberation requires more than just replacing who sits in the halls of power. It demands a radical redefinition of social relations, an unearthing of colonised knowledge, and a re-centring of communal bonds that have sustained subaltern communities through centuries of exploitation and oppression.

By embracing Mariátegui’s “Indo-American socialism” as a living tradition to be reworked and expanded, contemporary movements can draw on his hope, creativity, and respect for the Indigenous communal spirit. In so doing, they carry forward a vision of insurgency that is rooted in solidarity rather than coercion and a practice of counter-hegemony that reclaims epistemic and cultural spaces from centuries of colonial assault. The path to decolonial futures, as Mariátegui noted, is not given—it must be made in the crucible of struggle, collectively shaped by the people who live its realities day after day.

In sum, José Carlos Mariátegui’s relevance for discussing insurgency and counterinsurgency in Latin America lies in the clarity with which he anticipated the intersection of colonialism, capitalism, and racial oppression. His thought enriches anarchist critiques of state power by reminding us that the root causes of rebellion are deeply historic, anchored in centuries of communal forms that refuse to vanish. Whether on the frontlines of a land defence struggle in Latin America or in the diaspora (over 43 million living out of our region), the Mariáteguian tradition endures as a testament to the power of local knowledge, cultural reclamation, and revolutionary myth. It remains the task of those who believe in a decolonised world to keep this tradition alive, shaping insurgencies that can genuinely dismantle colonial and capitalist power—and to resist the counterinsurgencies that would contain or obliterate them.

Leonardo Torres Llerena is a Quechua Peruvian migrant living in the UK.

CharlieBanga & Semiyah — Autonomous Submersion: Notes on slavery and stripping black agency

“On slave ships, hurling

ourselves into oceans.

Slitting the throats of our captors.

We took their whips and their ships.

Blood flowed in the Atlantic

and it wasn’t all ours.

We carried it on.”

— Assata Shakur

“Autonomous Submersion” a term coined by BARS members (Charlie and Semiyah) is described as a courageous act of resistance by enslaved Afrikans that chose death by sea or ocean, rather than enduring white involuntary captivity on slave voyages to the Americas. It is viewed as the ultimate act of disobedience and defiance. This term is used in reference to the mutinies, uprisings, and self-sacrifices that took place on ocean vessels throughout the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Autonomous because to be defiant and disruptive gave them back their autonomy, their choice. To rebel and go against the grain knowing they were surrounded by nothing but whites and water was an act of the ultimate refusal. An ancestral form of direct action. A refusal to be docile, civil, or passive in the face of insurmountable violence. The privilege of imagining new beginnings was no more. There was now only time to take back what little autonomy they had left and choose their endings. Submersion because the water would put an end to the endless horrors of being subdued to someone else’s sinister whims. For our ancestors, perhaps the ocean invoked a plethora of emotions like fear, comfort, or relief. Fear because if one chose to engage in autonomous submersion, the ocean would either sink them under its dark depths or guide them to shore somewhere. Comfort because some believed water spirits would take them back home. Relief because when they jumped or fought it would cause a disruption and sabotage their enslaver’s scheme to profit off their bodies.

To be black, to be enslaved, was to be stripped of your agency in a way that no human being should ever be. The oppressor did not believe the enslaved was capable of choosing how they lived, when they ate, let alone who to mate. And yet, after all possible forms of autonomy had been stripped, our ancestors found a loophole in this sinister clause. They knew they were more valuable to their captors able-bodied and alive. They also knew that death may be inevitable, not even a choice at all, considering their inhumane conditions. Therefore, if your oppressor is hellbent on choosing how the rest of your live will be lived, then the only option left could be to choose how you die—autonomous submersion.

In an article titled “The Spanish Slave Ship Carlotta ‘Denounced’ by a Shark,” Afro-Brazilian historian Aderivaldo Ramos de Santana discusses how it is estimated that about 1.8 million bodies were consumed by sharks over three centuries of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. This transpired due to enslaved Afrikans who became ill from the inhumane conditions and were thrown overboard, jumped after deciding that a watery grave was better than bondage, and many who chose insurrection. Slave ships left behind copious amounts of blood to the point it altered the shark’s migration patterns.

Whether through autonomous submersion or the stripping of black agency, our ancestors throughout the Afrikan diaspora endured some of the most horrific crimes against humanity, both on land and at sea. Enslaved afrikans did not have many choices once they were kidnapped, shackled, and stacked upon one another. Their options, outside of sitting in fear and wading in the grief of what was stolen from them, were few. Many came to the dark realization that they do have a choice: they can choose to perish. They need not wait for approval or confirmation from their oppressor on how or when they died, how high they jumped from the ship’s deck, if they fought back in groups or resisted alone. This was them reckoning with death and coming to terms with their current situation. An untimely and unfair ultimatum.

Self-immolation (sacrificing oneself by fire as protest) obviously differs from Autonomous Submersion as it is a method more commonly practiced by modern social justice activists to raise awareness about global injustices. Additionally, it involves death by fire rather than by water. However, the key difference is that unlike those bound and subjected to slavery, self-immolators are not physically restrained or viewed as property. While modern protesters have multiple resistance options, enslaved people on ships, had very few due to constant surveillance and physical constraints.

Autonomous Submersion doesn’t seek to embellish, but rather emphasize that in a world drenched in anti-blackness, Afrikan freedom has always come with a price and a sacrifice. The ultimate cost being one’s life as a means of freeing themselves from the oppression they face. Our ship bound ancestors exemplified some of the first visions of black autonomy. Their ability to reconcile with death and resist in the midst of struggle is beyond worthy of recognition. May we all be as brave and resilient as the original black autonomists.

Notes On Slavery and The Stripping Of Black Agency

Stealing away one’s right to decide for themselves how they will live, use their labor, use their body is the act of stripping their agency. The enslaved experienced what it means to no longer have ownership of themselves. The moment they were kidnapped, chained, and confined all autonomy ceased to exist. The black body was now a spectacle; a thing to be broken, worked, raped, paraded, and subdued. The black womb was no longer the enslaved’s own, it was now her master’s meant to be used for producing more “property.” The broad black body was only meant for lynching, lifting, and lashes when it stepped out of line.

Black enslaved children had their purpose pre-determined before even coming out of the womb. They did not need to wonder about what they would do because their labor and body had already been accounted for. There is no childhood for the slave since that would insinuate an environment where a child is free to do childlike things. For example, girls as young as twelve and thirteen (and even younger) were subjected to sexual exploitation. Forced reproduction was a dehumanizing act that many young women endured. This despicable and unforgiving practice was created to increase the plantation owner’s power and pockets. In this mass raping event, motherhood was not a choice—it was a literal demand.

Enslaved disabled Afrikans (those who were physically disabled, blind, or deaf) faced severe oppression because they couldn’t work in the same way as able-bodied Afrikans. After the American Civil War and the alleged “abolition of slavery” during the Reconstruction period, state governments abandoned and ignored them simply because they deemed them useless and unprofitable. Many former slaves who were unable to work were left vulnerable and remained under the control of former slaveholders who still held power over them. Ableism and eugenics still persist today so imagine what it must have looked like during slavery. Some of our ancestors were unable to participate in a rebellion, an uprising, unable to even attempt to escape the hell they endured on stolen land. Many had no choice but to stay with the immoral slave master who would continue to find ways to utilize their existence. A foolish and abhorrent enslaver who would somehow consider themself “charitable” for allowing a disabled negro to stay with them. Meanwhile the able-bodied free slave would struggle to find their way in a world intent on making sure that subjugation would follow them, even after the law claimed they were allowed to live life on their own accord.

In Saidiya Hartman’s book “Lose Your Mother” she writes: “In every slave society, slave owners attempted to eradicate the slave’s memory, that is, to erase all the evidence of an existence before slavery. This was as true in Africa as in the Americas. A slave without a past had no life to avenge. No time was wasted yearning for home, no recollections of a distant country slowed her down as she tilled the soil, no image of her mother came to mind when she looked into the face of her child.”

This highlights how during slavery the stripping of Black agency wasn’t solely about physical domination, it was also an attack on the human psyche as well. Clearly, this was a form of psychological warfare. Memories were reserved for the whites, the well-born, and the well-to-do, not for Black folks. After all, what good is a book to a negro who isn’t legally allowed to read and write? The evil brilliance of white supremacy has always been this method of mental manipulation. The palm coloreds knew it would be a dangerous thing if the enslaved ever realized they were the product of centuries of genocide, rape, exploitation, forced subjugation, Westernized religious indoctrination, and pseudo-scientific racism used to justify anti-Blackness.

Slavery has left an immovable stain on this country. Any attempts to wash it are futile as blood will forever be imbedded in this land. No amount of atonement could ever heal the wounds colonization has left on enslaved black folks and their descendants. For some, the ultimate sacrifice was made with their lives and for others, freedom was deferred by disability. The history of the enslaved begs the question: what are we willing to relinquish? And if not that, are we prepared for what we will have to endure? The answers to these are not easy, but thankfully our ancestors allow us the privilege of using our history as a light. A light to guide us towards liberation from the dark plantation we currently inhibit.

Semiyah’s writings, videos and music can be found on semi-yah.com. CarlieBanga is a co-founder of BARS, you can read more of their writings on substack.com/@charliebanga.Follow BARS on instagram @barsnola and @blackanarchistradicals

Anon — Our Burning Memory: Social War & The Combatants for Black Liberation

“I had rationalized the world and the world had rejected me on the basis of color prejudice. Since no agreement was possible on the level of reason, I threw myself back toward unreason.” – Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks

Our history is a history of names of the dead.

Oscar Grant, Kimani Gray, Alton Sterling, Freddy Gray, Brionna Taylor, Mike Brown, Timothy Green, Kajeme Powell, Vonderitt Myers, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sean Bell, Rekia Boyd, Sonya Massey, Ta’Kiya Young, and on, and on, and on….

Since about 2015, when I first found people who were keeping track, the average number of people killed by police every year is about 1,500 people. 1,500 unique individuals who’s lived snuffed out, who’s absence ripples across a whole constellation of relations – relatives, friends, loved ones, communities, etc. That, of course, is only explicit murders, not a variety of different forms of death in custody that are also murders, not harassment, not brutality, not sexual assault and rape.

So great are our dead, and at every turn they should be honored and remembered. Who remembers them and honors them better than our fighters? But…who are out fighters? Who makes note of and remembers them?

Our history is a history of defeat, and that defeat has us adopting the worldview of the enemy, has us accepting the limits of our chains. The left wing of capital, the self professed revolutionaries and yes even many anarchists, have adopted a stance of self victimization. In shock from the violence of oppression, the daily blood quota to keep a system of racial caste domination functioning, many will flee from what is asked of us, talking about /safety/ before talking of fire and gunpowder – if they ever do. They will say “White Bodies To The Front!”, “Dismantling White Supremacy is White People’s Work!” as if someone could ever fight in place of us. They will tell people to stay out of the streets, to stay in line, to not come out before ever thinking of picking up a rock and a stick. They will talk infinitely about the strength of the police, but will never talk of their weaknesses.

When those few brave individuals, no longer accepting the daily misery and humiliation, no longer accepting the limitations thrust upon us by the color of our skin, strike out in displays of ferocity and courage, the activists and revolutionaries rush in to spit upon their memory. They’re adventurists. Individual action doesn’t do anything. Your actions are going to bring repression upon us. Your making us look bad. You’re a fed. That was a false flag. They’re not affiliated with us, we’re the good ones. We’re the docile ones. We’re the cowardly ones who never dare to strike against our chains.

This tension is notable in looking at /who is worth remembering/. We talk of the innocent, the unarmed killed by the police and vigilante. If the innocent deserve our support, the guilty do doubly so. So much breath is wasted in trying to justify why so and so isn’t a criminal, was innocent, didn’t deserve to die. As though all our other kin deserve death. All the while the dominate order continues to stack our bodies because they see crime not in the action but in the origin – the birth in black skin.

I do not identify with this mythical figure of innocence – a white figure, an appeal to white morality. In the figure of the shoplifter, the drug dealer, the prostitute, the carjacker, the shooter I will always see more of myself. I know /what is done/ is incidental, irrelevant, an excuse to play out fantasies of violence against black people, a desire to punish the Black Other to affirm the Goodness of White.

In an act of reclaiming the memory of the guilty, of uplifting our fighters I wish to talk about two particular individuals – Christopher Monfort and Korryn Gaines.

Our Memory Is A Burning Fuse

“My intentions are the best for the city and the country. The things I’m accused of are selfless acts. I didn’t get anything out of them.” – Christopher Monfort, Seattle Times Interview (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/accused-seattle-cop-killer-christopher-monfort-loner-obsessed-by-ideology/)

October 22^nd. Smoke rises from the Seattle City Maintenance Facility – multiple cop cars have burst into flames. A note is left at the scene referencing the video of King County Sheriff Paul Schene repeatedly punching 15 year old Malika Calhoun who is held in custody.

The perpetrator gets away, the attack remains unsolved.

10PM on the 31^st, a cold Halloween night, and a vehicle drives through the streets of Seattle’s central district. It pulls up next to an SPD patrol car and the window rolls down. The officers turn their heads to look over and from the darkness of the vehicle they are greeted not with a face, but with a barrel of a rifle. It opens it’s mouth to speak.

KRAK KRAK KRAK.

This exchange of speech in a language the police know so well lasts less than a minute before the rifle disappears into the darkness of the car. The vehicle quickly turns around and speeds off from the direction it came.

A look back over the scene: An SPD patrol car riddled with bullets, one pig slumped in his seat dead, the other injured.

“And when we die there ain’t no fireworks or fuckin parades” – Bambu, Since I Was A Youth

November 6^th, the armed death cult of SPD hold a public memorial – a procession through the city they occupy, a show of force. Around the same time out in Tukwila a snitch, a cop without a uniform, calls in a suspicious vehicle that matches the description of the vehicle that opened fire on the occupying army. The enemy encroaches on an apartment complex, a man brandishes a 9MM Glock and flees up the stairwell. The enemy approaches, the man pops out from the corner putting the gun into the cops face and pulls the trigger – click – he forgot to chamber a round. He goes down in a hail of gunfire into his head and stomach.

The enemy enters the man’s apartment. They find a small armory – A bolt action rifles and 2 semi-auto rifles, a shotgun, another .45 handgun, homemade explosives and firebombs and booby traps.

Ballistic and DNA forensics identify this man – Christopher Monfort – as the arsonists and gunman. Despite all odds he survives, now paralyzed from the waist down with a bullet lodged in his spine and with brain damage.

“So when the system seems to break down what do we do? We march, we protest, we form groups and the police scowl at us on the sides of the road and talk about the overtime they’re getting. If you stand close enough you can hear them. They have no intent on listening to a thousand or ten thousand people marching for police to stop their brutality. When you see a couple police officers brutalizing or murdering someone there’s always a few, maybe half a dozen, of their friends around them. They’re not gonna tell on their buddies. They’re not crossing the blue line.” -Christopher Monfort, Final Statement to the Court (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YDP9buYVHg)

Despite everything, Chris was able to speak for himself. He was sentenced to life in prison. He died in 2017 in his cell at Walla Walla State prison, allegedly from overdose. Anarchists continued to support him until his death.

“’She always was a little radical, and she was hardcore about certain stuff. She did a lot of research … laws of the land,’ Rhanda [Korryn’s Mother] said. ‘And right after Freddie Gray got killed, it amplified because he was a neighbor to us. We used to see him.’” – Interview with the Mother of Korryn Gaines (https://truthout.org/articles/twenty-three-years-of-resisting-police-brutality-the-life-and-death-of-korryn-gaines/)

March 10^th, 2016. A woman is pulled over for driving a vehicle with a piece of cardboard where a license plate should be. She is ordered out of her vehicle as a cop threatens to taze her. “You are not going to kidnap me, you are going to have to kill me.”

She is arrested for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. She is held for two days in isolation with neither food nor water.

August 1^st, police come to her door to serve a warrant for missed court dates. The door is opened, the the cops are greeted with a shotgun to their face. They retreat and call for back up and a 6 hour standoff ensues.

Initially they try to frame the situation as a kidnapping but have to roll it back as a Facebook live stream of the stand off goes viral, with her calmly in her home and the occasional shot of her children in the background eating and playing. She talks about the situation while friends and followers cheer her on and tell her to hold strong.

In part of the video, Gaines asks her 5 year old son “Who is outside?” He answers “The police.” She asks why; “To kill us.” He responds.

Toward the end of the standoff, the Baltimore Police – with compliance from Facebook – gain access to her account, shut off the live stream and deactivate the account. Within moments of the live stream going down, the cops shoot through the wall, killing Korryn and wounding her child.

“’Officer shot through a wall and couldn’t even see nothing,’ Rhanda said. She describes the sentiment of the officer as, ‘Nerve of this little Black girl to stay in this house when we said to come out!’” – Interview with the Mother of Korryn Gaines (https://truthout.org/articles/twenty-three-years-of-resisting-police-brutality-the-life-and-death-of-korryn-gaines/)

The Black Liberation Army Is A Living Tension

“…our final consideration is whether or not these masses must centralize their organizing (not to be confused with the obvious need to coordinate their efforts!). To that I answer with an emphatic, ‘no!’ and further, I contend that such centralization will only make it easier for our oppressors to identify and level repression upon us – prolonging the crisis our generation must deal with.” – Russell Maroon Shoatz, The Dragon and the Hydra

These two stories are a drop in the ocean – there’s a thousand stories like these. Hidden, buried, choked out by our enemies and the cowards who enable them. Names and acts we will never know. The point in recounting and connecting these stories, beyond the inspiration of individual action, is to describe a living tension.

Once is an act of insanity. Twice is a lone wolf. A thousand times begins to look like an army.

While revolutionaries waste their ink and breath talking of conditions, of “the people” not being ready, the past two decades has been the informal spread of practices and the development of ad hoc fighting formations. The shooters, the rock throwers, the looters, the arsonists, the get away drivers. A black liberation army – a de facto informal network of fighters across the territories dominated by the american state – has been building and fighting right before our very eyes.

Many look at this and see disorganization, a child needing the strong hand of the Patriarch to guide them, whether in the form of the vanguard party or the leader, to the /real/ means of freedom that these chaotic and ungrateful negros will never grasp on their own. But any closer look shows that we are very obviously organized and coordinated – perhaps /the/ most organized forces in these territories and perhaps it’s the revolutionaries who need a lesson in organization.

Or better yet, the revolutionaries need to be pushed out of our way.

Yes, the organization, the coordination, the fighting spirit is all there. What is needed is for us to consciously recognize this – that we aren’t fighting alone, that to some degree or another we have built upon the ideas, strategies and practices of others, refined in the forge of street combat. This consciousness has been developing over the past 20 years and through bitter and bloody experience will continue to develop is greater and lesser degree, in different ways, in different territories.

I don’t have a plan or a great analysis to give you to beautifully close this out. All I can offer is this; I see tensions that need to be pushed, memories that need to be reclaimed, and developing practices that need to be analyzed. Through writing, through video, through music, performance, crime, and practice in the instances of street combat to come I seek to spread and clarify these and be in dialogue with the development of the black liberation army, walking along side it as an anarchist and developing it as a participant.

If nothing else has been made more clear to me, I can clearly see that many individuals in many different territories see a similar trajectory and, like me, awkwardly stumble towards it. Just as I develop and dialogue with local and regional tensions, I hope to dialogue with you all, sharing our ideas, sharpening our practices.

I cannot say what the future holds, victory or defeat. All I can say for certain is that no savior from on high will deliver us from the position we find ourselves in; that our destiny is in our hands alone, so let’s make sure our hands are armed.

In Memory Of Our Fallen; Let us their cities into funeral pyres. In Memory Of Our Fighters; Let us honor your names with fire and gunpowder. Peace By Piece Ⓐ

submitted anonymously to pugetsoundanarchists.org

Patrick Jonathan Derilus — The Immovable Black Lumpenproletariat: The Futility of White Supremacist State-Sanctioned Indictments of Black Factions and Gangs

Though I cannot condone it, much of the violence inflicted on my gang rivals and other blacks was an unconscious display of my frustration with poverty, racism, police brutality and other systemic injustices routinely visited upon residents of urban black colonies such as south central Los Angeles. I was frustrated because I felt trapped. I internalized the defeatist rhetoric propagated as street wisdom in my hood that there were only 3 ways out of south central, migration death or incarceration. I located a fourth option: incarcerated death. — Stanley Tookie Williams, Blue Rage, Black Redemption: A Memoir

It should be made clear, if in any case there was no critical observation of the phenomena, that in our, to use bell hooks’ phrase, ‘imperialist, colonial settler, white supremacist, capitalist, cisheteropatriarchal society,’ Black people (of all ages and gender identities) are under ceaseless exploitation and violence via surveillance, harassment, instigations and so on. With attention to Black-led organizations, factions, collectives, and in this case particularly, Black gangs, there is unquestionably a white supremacist outroar from racists (media or otherwise), who deem these communities a threat to the status quo.

Fuck respectability politics and fuck civility; and this is to say that regardless of the objective of a Black collective, be it as politically far-left as the Black Guerilla Family (BGF), a Black Power group that originated in San Quentin State Prison and was founded by George Jackson in 1966 or politically center-right as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) founded by Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois and several other members in 1909, we’re niggas at the end of the day.

While we can present arguments for what this statement means is not the point, but rather, the sociohistorical result of change that is assuredly established when Black people have long struggled for: Black Liberation. Black history is every day. Black history in itself chronicles resistance, togetherness, unfettered joy, solidarity, commonality, righteous insurgence, mutuality, love — notably the urgency for Black self-defense against the white supremacist police state.

Let us also highlight that in spite of these elements, we recognize the settler-fascistic entities that have been responsible for the many deaths, infightings, conspiracies, and consistent destabilizations of Black-led movements, organizations, and to this day, Black gangs. Prior to the Black Panthers — and what many of us know in modern day as Crips, and Bloods, were some of their historical predecessors, The Slausons, The Businessmen, and The Gladiators, Black-led gangs that originated in Los Angeles during the 1940s. In the documentary, Bastards Of The Party, former Blood and historian Cle Sloan outlines the history of the formation of Black factions in California throughout the 1950s to the 1990s. The sociopolitical function of these gangs were a direct response against white supremacist gangs like the Spook Hunters who regularly terrorized Black people because of the growing Black population at the time—white flight. Indeed, a significant number of Black factions were created out of a response to white settler violence in the late 1940s — although the formation of Black gangs in the United States can be traced back to the 1920s. In the article, “Black Street Gangs in Los Angeles: A History (excerpts from Territoriality Among African American Street Gangs in Los Angeles),” writer Alex A. Alonso states:

The first major period of black gangs in Los Angeles began in the late 1940s and ended in 1965. There were black gangs in Los Angeles prior to this period, but they were small in numbers; little is known about the activity of these groups. Some of the black groups that existed in Los Angeles in the late 1920s and 1930s were the Boozies, Goodlows, Blogettes, Kelleys, and the Driver Brothers. Most of these groups were family oriented, and they referred to themselves as clubs.

In the 1960s and 70s, an example of this is Kwanzaa’s founder, Ron Karenga, who was not only a violent, self-hating, misogynist responsible for kidnapping and torturing Black women, but also, an agent of fascist J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO, who exacerbated the infighting between the Black Panthers and the US Organization. Subsequently, this led to the murders of four members of the Black Panthers, whose names went by John Huggins, Sylvester Bell, Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Savage:

According to Louis Tackwood, a former informant with the Los Angeles Police Department’s Criminal Conspiracies Section and author of The Glass House Tapes, Ronald Karenga was knowingly provided financial and material support by LAPD Tackwood as a liaison for U.S. operations against the Black Panthers. On January 17, 1969, a gun battle between the groups on the UCLA campus ended in the murder of two Black Panthers: John Huggins and Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter.

This incident led to a series of retaliatory shootings that lasted for months. Later, in 1969, two other Black Panther members were killed, and one other was wounded by ‘US’ members. The Panthers referred to the ‘US.’ organization as the ‘United Slaves.’”.

Around the same time the Black Power movement was building momentum, the Gangster Disciples, founded by Larry Hoover, were a Black-led faction based in Chicago in the late 1960s and 70s. In the same way, the Black Disciples, founded by David Barksdale, were another Black faction based in Chicago that was created at the grassroots, organizing projects such as the free breakfast program for the community and marching together with Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1966. At a time before the Black Disciples (BDs) and Gangster Disciples (GDs) were separate factions, they were an alliance that went by the Black Gangster Disciple Nation (BGDN)..

Though the BGDN has been disbanded since the late 1980s, we can contextualize this into broader discourse on how the Black lumpenproletariat has demonstrated instances of solidarity amongst one another — although, there are clear political and ideological inconsistencies that have been shown in the Black lumpenproletariat that cannot go unaccounted for such as: transphobia/misia, colorism, infighting, ableism, sanism, queerphobia/misia — lack of thorough constructive criticism amongst themselves, and the betrayal of the Black masses due to capitalistic interests.

As an example, Brooklyn Drill pioneers, Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow, who whose music and lyrics reflected warring against neighboring factions across the borough, exhibiting hyperbolic bravado — misogynoir — broadly expressing the racial, economic plight of coming up as a Black youth in the now-ever-increasing gentrified streets of Brooklyn — have aligned themselves with Zionist billionaire, white supremacist and genocidaire, Donald Trump — to whom they have exalted — and to whom Sleepy Hallow replied subsequently after Sheff G’s cosigning of Trump using his fascistic slogan, ”Make America Great Again.”

Due to intraracial conflicts between Hoover, Barksdale, and other neighboring factions who fought and killed one another over territory and notoriety, the two leaders met with each other to have a conference that soon led up to the unity of the BDs and the GDs:

In June of 1969, Larry Hoover had enough of the Stones and conferenced with David Barksdale instead. Larry Hoover’s alliance with Jeff Fort as allies for a few months had gone sour and now Hoover met with David Barksdale. The two groups established an alliance that had a title known as the Black Gangster Disciple nation. The Black Gangster Disciple nation consisted of the Gangster nation, which was the Supreme Gangsters and their Gangster allies, these Gangsters were to be led by Larry Hoover. The Disciples were now known as “Black Disciples” and this was the alliance of all the Disciple gangs led by David Barksdale.

Stanley Tookie Williams, who co-founded the Crips alongside Raymond Washington in 1971, established a groundwork in which Black folk would defend themselves and their communities from neighboring adversaries in Los Angeles. Similarly, the Bloods, created by Sylvester Scott, were later created as a direct response in opposition to the Crips. Contrary to this occurrence, the remarkable moments in Black history where Bloods and Crips, despite their incendiary rivalries against each other, have come together in solidarity to protest state-sanctioned police violence against Black people. To echo the sentiment of George Jackson in his book, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson:

Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.

We highlight instances of collective protest in Atlanta, the unity of rival Bloods and Crips gangs taking place after the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1992, unity between Bloods, Crips, and the Nation of Islam in Baltimore, who banned together in honor and righteous vengeance against the state-sanctioned murder of Freddie Gray, Newark, New Jersey and a March For Peace in The Bronx that was led by rival gangs inspired by the wrongful murder of Nipsey Hussle.

Bringing further attention to the history of white supremacist, State-sanctioned violence toward Black people in the US and across the world, we understand that surveillance and more specifically, indictment, an arbitrary charge or accusation of a crime, is no new concept to us. To be Black itself is a crime in the world. In the article, Black is Crime: Notes on Blaqillegalism, writer Dubian Ade states,

What a crime it is to be Black. To have the police be called on you for sitting in a restaurant, for grilling at a cookout, selling water, going to the pool, taking a nap, standing on the corner; to be Black and to have the presence of one’s very own body break the law and to know at any given moment a police officer can slam you to the ground and cuff you for resisting arrest, which is to say, arrest you for absolutely no reason at all. Blackness carries this implication that a law is or has been broken and is about to be broken in the future. It is the color and sign of criminal activity under white supremacist capitalism used to justify the mass incarceration and extra-judicial murder of Black people by and large.

But what are the origins of this strenuous relationship between Blackness and the law? In what ways is Black criminalization constituted under the state? And if Blackness is already criminalized in the eyes of the law, what are the features of already existing Black illegal forms and what might the theoretical contours of Black illegalism (Blaqillegalism) that is principled and above all revolutionary look like?

With attention to this concept of Blaqillegism and Black criminality, Huey P. Newton articulates that the question of freedom in the context of Blackness, in its totality, is an ontological one:

…existence is violent; I exist, therefore I am violent in that way.

— Huey P. Newton, On Revolution

The State does not spare racialized captives. To name a few, learn about Mutulu Shakur, stepfather of Tupac Amaru Shakur and a member of the Black Liberation Army, who was just released from prison in December of last year after serving 60 years in prison; he was informed he only has a few months to live due to terminal cancer in April. Another is Marshall “Eddie” Conway, an elder of the Black Panther Party, who was sentenced to serving 43 years to life in prison for self-defense.

Look to the instance of Tay-K, who was 19 at the time he was indicted and sentenced to 55 years in prison. 23-year old YNW Melly, who was indicted and is facing the death penalty. Look at the wrongful indictments of YSL and Young Thug and Gunna—Sheff G, Sleepy Hallow — Woos and the Choos, the YGz and Drilly indictment and now 19-year old Kay Flock, who was just indicted with the death penalty being listed as a possible charge.

I repeat, the death penalty.

Where else have we heard the inhumane sentencing of young Black and Brown children and teenagers across AmeriKKKa?

Recall the wrongful conviction of 14-year old George Stinney in 1944, who the State put to death by electric chair for allegedly murdering two white girls. The State — white civil society — junior partners liken themselves to heroism subsequently initiating rituals via jingoistic propaganda by which they have indicted us — whether we be part of a faction, gang or what have you — by regurgitating white supremacist, fascist talking points spread by Western media. Consequently, this pattern people develop and take on cannot be reductively described as a form of so-called “racist hatred,” but as Frank B. Wilderson III articulates in his memoir, Afropessimism, these indictments on us — are gratuitous and thus whites and their junior partners — nonBlacks — find nourishment in the consumption and annihilation of our Black flesh. Wilderson states:

Why is anti- Black violence not a form of racist hatred but the genome of Human renewal; a therapeutic balm that the Human race needs to know and heal itself? Why must the world reproduce this violence, this social death, so that social life can regenerate Humans and prevent them from suffering the catastrophe of psychic incoherence — absence? Why must the world find its nourishment in Black flesh?

As long as antiBlack suffering exists, which is what sutures the unethical formation of The World, there will never be any transformative recourse for Black people until we put an end to said apparatus.

By the same token, it is far too reductive (and victim-blaming) to present cases that serve as counterarguments to the material reality in which Black children and adults are continuously subjected to. With Malcolm X’s truism, by any means necessary in mind, often many Black folk are left with no choice to navigate this colonial settler, white supremacist world in the best ways we can as a means of not only defending ourselves and our communities against the white supremacist power structure, but also surviving under it. Black feminist and scholar, bell hooks, highlights the two-sidededness of this racial, socio-existential dilemma in her text, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity:

In today’s world, most upwardly mobile educated black males from privileged class backgrounds share with their poor and underclass counterparts an obsession with money as the marker of successful manhood. They are as easily corrupted as their disenfranchised brothers, if not more so because the monetary stakes, as well as the rewards in their mainstream work world, are higher…assimilated black males who are “white identified” find it easier to submit to fickle arrogant white males (and white female bosses) in the workplace. However, most black males suffer psychologically in the world of work whether they make loads of money or low wages from overt and covert racially based psychological terrorism.

hooks continues:

Young beautiful brilliant black power male militants were the first black leftists to loudly call out the evils of capitalism. And during that call they unmasked wage slavery, naming it for what it was. Yet at the end of the day a black man needed money to live. If he was not going to get it working for the man, it could come from hustling his own people. Black power militants, having learned from Dr. King and Malcolm X how to call out the truth of capitalist-based materialism, identified it as gangsta culture. Patriarchal manhood was the theory and gangsta culture was its ultimate practice. No wonder then that black males of all ages living the protestant work ethic, submitting in the racist white world, envy the lowdown hustlers in the black communities who are not slaves to white power.

The inherent uselessness of incarceration—of imprisoning Black children—Black people, is divesting money from state to state and putting the funds toward building transformative rehabilitation centers across the country similarly to the Success Stories Program. As stated in their mission and values statement, the primary focus of the Success Stories program is this:

Our mission is to provide an alternative to prisons that builds safer communities by delivering feminist programming to people who have caused harm.​ We envision a world free of prisons and patriarchy as the dominant culture. We build a world where harmful behavior is seen as a symptom of patriarchy to be transformed, in the community, by our program and others like it.

What happens when the State persistently (and wrongfully) indicts Black women, men, queer folk, and children for so-called “crimes” will never resolve anything — it will never curtail anything. We are looking at a generational passing down of Black factions (of the newer generation) that will continue to repeat itself. These factions, which are defined as a group or clique within a larger group, party, government, organization, or the like, typically having different opinions and interests than the larger group, are often born out of an aversion to episodic, economic violence, impoverishment, governmental negligence, fascist police violence, —the white establishment and a yearning—a desperation to belong (commonly by homosocial bonding) to establish camaraderie between one another. In other words, regardless of how many indictments the State puts on Black people, the lumpenproletariat collectives that the State has destabilized will naturally be reborn out of generational factions in our continued struggle against the deathly whims of the US Empire.

Patrick Jonathan Derilus is an American-born Haitian independent writer and Goodreads author who resides in Brooklyn, New York. Their pronouns are he, him, his, or they, them, theirs. They write poetry, short stories, and essays. They are published in RaceBaitR, Rabble Literature Magazine, Cutlines Press Magazine, Linden Avenue Literature Magazine, and elsewhere. They are the author of their 2016 anthological work, Thriving Fire: Musings of A Poet’s Odyssey and newest ebook, Perennial: a collection of letters.

Fawaz Murtada – Why Would You Become an Anarchist in Sudan?

Why Would You Become an Anarchist in Sudan?

This question has always haunted me at many moments in a country of ideological, cultural, ethnic, tribal, and political diversity—where countless choices exist, yet none can be freely made. The moment you are born, your identity in Sudan is determined by religion, while your tribe plays a crucial role in shaping your culture and even your fate.

To become an anarchist in Sudan, you must have already escaped all these imposed identities and the suffocating constraints that push us into the furnace of the state. Sudan is a country where war, crises, and disease have never ceased. Its people, saturated with military, religious, and tribal ideologies, serve as perfect fuel to ignite conflicts. In such a country, I have always looked at my life with amazement. Our struggles often resemble action films—perhaps bizarre or unbelievable to outsiders—where survival means constantly fleeing from warring factions, dodging a hail of bullets fired directly at you. Bullets of the state, religion, tribe, sect, and armed factions.

Choosing to be an anarchist is an expression of true awareness of the failures of these systems. It is a consciousness that pushes you to the limits of both practical struggle and the deeply complex human experience. And this path leads to only two possible outcomes: you either survive as a true revolutionary resister, or you are consumed by the spiral of power. Just as authority in Sudan takes many forms, so does opposition. There are political resistance movements, parties, mercenary armed groups, so-called revolutionary and liberal militias built on tribal structures, and cultural factions engaged in deep propaganda-driven Authoritarianism.

These intertwined hierarchies form the crises of Sudanese peoples. Sudan is, in reality, a collection of small peoples trapped within a state that wields brutal power, recognizing no human rights beyond its own interests.

Furthermore, the ideology of extremist Islamists has been another tool for deepening ignorance and backwardness in Sudan.

Striving to confront all of this as a lone anarchist is like fighting as a wolf among packs of hyenas. If they find a single weakness in you, it will mean your inevitable destruction. The path forward begins with seeking out those who share your ideas, developing them, and offering them knowledge and education. As an anarchist, you carry the feeling that wherever you are, and whatever your capacity, your mission is to spread freedom. The price of that freedom may be high—it may even cost you your life. Yet, all of this is just a small contribution to the scale of liberation that people need to live a dignified human life. Freedom is the highest state of being, and anarchism shows us how to achieve and practice it. Freedom is not just a poetic word to express aspirations—it is an effort, a commitment to being free with yourself and others, and a struggle to make freedom a reality.

To be an anarchist is a blessing that cannot be monopolized or hidden.

To be free is to be an anarchist, and to be an anarchist is to be free.

Why Should Anarchists in Sudan Be Supported?

Every day, we witness global conflicts over resources, power, and ideology, with peoples divided into camps—either supporting the existing authority in their countries or seeking to seize control of the state. In Sudan, the struggle for resources and power has long been the driving force behind conflicts, culminating in the catastrophe that befell the country on April 15, 2023. These events starkly revealed the truth behind the slogans of the December Revolution, which anarchists actively worked to clarify.

When the Janjaweed were an integral part of the military state and participated in the violent dispersal of sit-ins, comrades bravely opposed them, demanding their popular dismantling, recognizing them as a threat to the revolution and society. Later, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) emerged as an independent power based on tribal foundations, wielding their authority and weapons to impose dominance through explicit racial supremacy. In Sudan, organized tribal conflict is visibly fueled by the state, with ignorance serving as the primary tool for igniting division among communities for the benefit of the ruling powers.

Anarchists have rejected tribal authority, which remains the primary driver of conflict in Sudan, and are fighting to spread awareness of freedom, independent thought, and liberation from state and tribal propaganda to prevent people from becoming pawns in the power struggle. In a country exhausted by poverty, underdevelopment, and wars—where resistance has become increasingly difficult, and comrades face unimaginable repression—Sudanese anarchists have insisted on their presence and continued struggle. Their role extends beyond resistance; they have become a mirror reflecting the true reality of the situation, beyond the distortions of mainstream media, sharing their daily experiences and struggles with anarchists worldwide.

In Africa, where anarchist ideas remain relatively scarce, Sudanese anarchists serve as a beacon of hope for spreading emancipatory consciousness. The rise of African peoples against the plundering of their resources and their treatment as a dumping ground for waste and a treasure trove for global exploitation is no longer a choice—it is a necessity. The war in Sudan is not merely an internal conflict; it is an open battleground for arms testing, as many nations sell their weapons to be used against innocent civilians.

Today, Sudanese people are not fighting over religion or ideology but are engaged in a fundamentally authoritarian struggle. With social movements against ideology losing momentum, anarchists remain the only ones capable of offering a correct analysis and critique of authoritarian policies. As we give our utmost efforts—and possibly even our lives—to maintain our existence and spread awareness, the support of comrades worldwide is crucial.

We cannot fight this struggle alone. Just as we recognize that we are not alone in this world, international solidarity strengthens us. That is why we call on all comrades to support anarchists in Sudan—because supporting them is supporting freedom and justice against tyranny in all its forms.

Support the anarchists in Sudan… Support freedom in Sudan!

Anarchists Contributions During the War

Certainly, the war had a devastating impact on the formation of our group, as displacement and dispersion were inevitable consequences of the violent conflict in the country. However, thanks to international solidarity, we were able to rescue comrades trapped in conflict zones, bring them to safety, and assist them in adjusting to their new housing situations. We also helped others find shelter. Personally, during the war, I hosted more than three families of comrades, reinforcing the principle of solidarity until they were able to stabilize their situations.

Despite our limited resources, we exceeded our capacities significantly. Most of our comrades volunteered to serve the affected community and vulnerable groups such as children, women, and the elderly. With humanitarian aid being scarce and the crisis worsening, we had no other choice but to step up.

Additionally, it was essential to reflect the true causes, trajectory, and developments of the war from our anarchist perspective to the world. We also sought to defuse the tensions that warring factions aimed to escalate in order to fuel the conflict, by raising awareness about the nature of the war.

Another crucial aspect of our efforts was educating people about the dangers of war remnants and how to handle situations involving captivity, detention, starvation, injuries, and war-related waste.

Despite our lack of resources, we remain committed to our liberatory duty—spreading awareness in such complex circumstances. We hope to expand participation and broaden the scope of the struggle.

Friends in the Kurdish-speaking Anarchist Forum (KAF) have recently received this communication from an anarchist comrade in Sudan. We wanted to share here, so people can know the situation for anarchists in Sudan.

Daniel Adediran — Where is Black Anarchism in the UK?

“The discourses of nation and people are saturated with racial connotations. Attempts to constitute the poor or working class as a class across racial lines are thus disrupted. This problem will have to be acknowledged directly if socialists are to move beyond puzzling over why black Britons (who as a disproportionately underprivileged group, ought to be their stalwart supporters) remain suspicious and distant from the political institutions of the working-class movement. — Gilroy.”

I’d like to start off with a little bit about what Anarchism means. This might be preaching to the choir a little, but bear with me as this was essential in getting my thoughts down on paper and dealing with the subject matter at hand.

Anarchism is a strand of philosophy and method of social organisation that eschews all methods of domination and exploitation in its implementation and in its results. Means AND ends, baby. Now this definition might seem a bit unwieldy, but that shouldn’t be a problem, there are anarchists from the past who were much better at defining it than myself. For example, everyone’s favourite Italian stallion, Errico Malatesta defined anarchism in his 1899 article Toward Anarchism, thus: “Anarchism is the abolition of exploitation and oppression of man by man, that is, the abolition of private property and government; Anarchism is the destruction of misery, of superstitions, of hatred.

Therefore, every blow given to the institutions of private property and to the government, every exaltation of the conscience of man, every disruption of the present conditions, every lie unmasked, every part of human activity taken away from the control of the authorities, every augmentation of the spirit of solidarity and initiative, is a step towards Anarchism.” Satisfied? If not, here’s a take from the Lithuanian-born bad gyal, Emma Goldman from her 1910 book, Anarchism: What It Really Stands For: “ANARCHISM:--The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary. The new social order rests, of course, on the materialistic basis of life; but while all Anarchists agree that the main evil today is an economic one, they maintain that the solution of that evil can be brought about only through the consideration of every phase of life,-- individual, as well as the collective; the internal, as well as the external phases.”

As we can see from the definitions listed above, those from an Italian, a Lithuanian and a Brit, the ideology is distinctly European, but the modes of living and the tactics employed to implement this philosophy is not completely alien to Africa or the diaspora. Before the advent of the Capitalist mode of exploitation in the global South, many African Societies practiced a form of egalitarian communalism, which though not anarcho-communist outright, was distrustful of power and vested leadership in a few, which shared resources each according to his need from each according to his ability and which protected the minorities without deferring to them as a coercive influence. These societies were not perfect by any means, including some with the treatment of women, but they were much freer if less economically productive than the Capitalist mode of production, which force Africa and the Global South into the role of resource mule, consistently exploited, with the accompanying misery of millions.

One of the models of egalitarian society were the Igbo people of what is now South Eastern Nigeria. Igbo social and political structure, except in the rarest of exceptions, was mostly semi-autonomous, with no King or Priest using violence to exert hierarchical control over the rest of the polity. Villages and towns were ruled completely by the people who lived in them and no one else. Expertise was prized, and this made many men famous in their village or town, but they did not become princes in the Feudal sense and often carried out special duties bestowed on them by all the members of the community. There were women’s councils that ruled specifically on women’s issues and, in a manner common of Africans, Feudal or Egalitarian, the land did not belong to any one person, but was held in common and used by all according to need.

It was not only the Igbo in West Africa that practiced communalism. Sam Mbah and I.E. Igariwey in their necessary book African Anarchism list no less than twenty-eight different ethnic groups across the length and breadth of the continent that were or are stateless societies, their population a whopping 200 million and growing today.

There are also instances of open defiance to the global hegemonic capitalist order in the histories of the African diaspora. From the Maroon societies all across the Caribbean from Jamaica to Martinique, to the Mocambos in Brazil and the Palenques all over the Spanish-speaking Americas, even to the Dismal Swamp of the southern United States, whether short-lived or centuries-old, existing even into the modern day.

The modern era of black radicals, especially in the United States post 1960, also took anarchist theory in new directions and developed a potent strand of anarchism largely away from their white anarchist counterparts.

A man who gets little mention amongst anarchists of all ethnic backgrounds is Martin Sostre. A towering figure in the prisoner rights movement and an ardent anarchist, his ire for exploitation crystallising after a stint in prison in the early 1960s and after taking up and then discarding because of their ineffectiveness, ideologies as varied as Black Islam and Internationalism. After opening up and Afro-Asian bookstore, it saw brief success in Buffalo, New York. Sostre was known to give out anarchist pamphlets to those who could not afford books and made the place a hotbed of radical ideas. He was falsely imprisoned in a COINTELPRO sting, a frequently used tactic by the State to crush any semblance of a black radical upsurge. He did not let himself succumb to despair. Sostre became a jailhouse lawyer, acting as legal counsel to the worst off in our society, those damned poor folk who have been caught up in the jaws of the law. And he was damn good, winning not one, but two landmark legal cases involving prisoners rights. Inverting the ancestor Audre Lorde’s famous maxim, Sostre had dismantled the master house, with its tools. Withstanding the horrors of solitary confinement, he managed to continue to secure wins for the underclass against the state, granting them some measure of dignity in an otherwise inhuman system. He introduced Lorenzo Kom’Boa Ervin to anarchism, and after becoming the most famous political prisoner in the world, was released in 1976.

Lorenzo Kom’Boa Ervin, while learning about anarchism from Sostre, was not overlooked like his predecessor was. Author of the seminal text Anarchism and The Black Revolution, one of the best and most widely read Anarchist works. Ervin was a Black Panther and his insane story, of hijacking a plane to Cuba to avoid jail for the attempted killing of a Ku Klux Klan member, and his mistreatment in Cuba, deportation to Czechoslovakia, escape from a Czechoslovakian jail, only to be captured in East Germany, tortured in Berlin and returned to the USA to spend the rest of his life in jail, has become stuff of legend. Spoilers: he doesn’t die in prison. As Saint Andrew says in his essay What Is Black Anarchism “While in those so-called socialist countries, he became disillusioned with what was clearly a dictatorship, not some “dictatorship of the proletariat.”” Saint Andrew continues “His case was adopted by the Anarchist Black Cross and a Dutch Anarchist group called Help A Prisoner Oppose Torture Organizing Committee. They coordinated an international campaign petitioning for his release. Of course, he took issue with middle class hyperindividualism of many white American anarchists at the time, but he still worked with anarchists around the world who continued to support him and write to him while in prison. He began writing Anarchism and the Black Revolution and published it in 1979. It remains one of the best and most widely read works on anarchism today.

Linked below. His prison writings garnered him a following in Europe, Africa, and among Australian Aboriginals. He was finally released nearly 15 years after his sentence, in 1983.” If you haven’t got a copy of Anarchism and The Black Revolution, get one this year at the bookfair, or steal one from your local bookshop/borrow from your local library. It is a treasure trove of insights.

Ervin was not the only Black Panther to have turned away from their political program and embraced Anarchism. Kuwasi Balagoon, an openly bisexual man (both hard and easy to be in the Black Radical Tradition, ask James Baldwin) joined the Panthers in 1967, having been radicalised in London. In 1969 he was arrested and indicted for a piece of propaganda by the deed. The trial was known as that of the Panther 21 and was at the time, the most expensive trial in New York State history. Though the trial collapsed, the state was determined to do whatever it could to crush this black rebel and had him sent to jail for 23 years of a bank robbery in New Jersey. It was in prison that Balagoon, disillusioned by the in-fighting of the Panthers and their pivot away from the people embraced anarchism and joined the broadly anarchist Black Liberation Army.

Balagoon would escape prison twice and on the second attempt aid Assata Shakur in her famed escape, but would ultimately die in prison from AIDS-related pneumonia, a warrior and a revolutionary. Rest in Power. As I hope I’ve shown above, both Ervin, Sostre and Baloogun developed their blend of anarchism, not with input from white anarchists who would have and should have been in their milieu, but both from space and time away from the struggle for an egalitarian society, in prison. All were steeped in the famed black radical tradition, Ervin and Baloogun with the Panthers and Sostre with the Afro-Asian Bookstore, but both found flaws in ideology that the Black Radical Tradition normally espoused, like Islam, The Black Panthers, Marxist-Leninists, Maoists, The Democratic Party. Both discarded those tired old ideas and grappled with a philosophy that until the mid-20^th century had been an overwhelmingly European one. Not only did they grapple, they made it their own. I, for one, don’t think I’m nearly as courageous as these men. I really don’t think it is necessary for black men and women to go to jail (or die there) to realise that anarchism is the only viable solution to our Problems.

So, what is to be done about Black Anarchists in the UK context? As we have shown earlier on, though the ideology may not have taken root among the diaspora in concrete terms until the 60s in the US, the lived practice has long been a part of African and Diaspora communities. Anti colonialism and anti-racism need anti statism, which makes anarchists and black radicals natural bedfellows. So why are there so few of us? Why as my quote from earlier describes are we “puzzling over why Black Britons….remain distant”?

One part of it, I assume, is ignorance of the true aims of the philosophy, that it espouses chaos, or more likely, it’s plain dismissal as ‘cool, but idealistic/unrealistic/never gonna happen’. Another reason is that our intellectuals and culture heroes on the black left only talk of some sort of Scandinavian Social Democracy or a creeping, still undercover authoritarian leftism. This is a hangup of global extraction. From the revolutionary Richard Wright and W.E.B. DuBois to the Panther leadership, Marxist Leninists and Maoists made great overtures to the plight of black people in the United States for most of the 20^th Century. A lot of the independence movements in Africa during the 1950s and 60s and their support from the USSR, was responsible for cementing the image of socialism in the minds of Africans on the continent (and possibly destroying it, but that’s a topic for another time).

But we as anarchists and you as white anarchists need to ask, still more questions. There’s nothing to be said, for what we could have done in the past, what are we doing now? Where is the black block, the sight of the black flag at The Sudanese and Congo protests? Where are the stickers and the posters and the Zines, highlighting the plight of Haitians dying right now? Why is the most famous political prisoner in the UK not a young (or old) black man or woman? Especially, as I’ll show later, with our over representation in the carceral system. And what can be done by comrades, white and black alike to increase our presence in black radical movements and the black radical tradition in the country? I believe, the answer lies in Especifismo and its particular brand of anarchist praxis, including social insertion.

Especifismo grew out of the 1920s Platformist movement, who stressed organisation to combat the creep of bolshevism on social movements (sound familiar?). It was created by the Federacion Anarquista Uruguay in the 1950s and was instrumental in surviving the US-backed right-wing despotism that strangled the country from the 1970s to the 1980s. It was further developed by Brazil’s Federacao Anarquista Gaucho and Rio De Janeiro during their countries right-wing junta in the 1980s. It should be noted here that, Brazil has the largest African Diaspora in the world. Forged in the crucible of right-wing reaction, Especifismo has gone on to find roots all over Latin America, in Africa and in the United States

.

Especifismo emphasizes

1. The need for a specific anarchist organisation built around a unity of ideas and praxis

2. The use of said organisation, to theorize and develop political and organising work

3. An active involvement in and building of autonomous and popular social movements.

Especifist anarchists understand that they cannot just work with everyone. Almost every political movement has its own end goals and means to getting there. As means and ends are of paramount importance to anarchists, Especifists believe that a specific anarchist organisation is needed to begin using especifist strategy, one where there is a unity on interpretation of theory, the generation and consensus-making of ideas, as well as the implementation of praxis.

These organisations, will most likely have a unique outlook on the situations that beleaguer their communities. They can be all-black, all-white, or a mixture of both, the racial makeup of the espicifist organisation is not the point, it is a unity of ideas. With this unity in place, the organisation must work to build their own theories around politics and organisation in their unique context, and develop this into practical action. All this might sound familiar to you if you’re organising already. If you are and implement the third point, you may well be an Especifist without knowing it.

The third point is called social insertion and its one I’d like to stress. Social insertion is NOT, some kind of watered-down Left Unity, it is also NOT a one-time single-issue anarchist tack on, to use your position as an anarchist to give liberal or authoritarian leftists a moral rubber stamp. It is an active, continual involvement in movement, particularly mass movements, where different groups come together based on shared exploitation. Shared ideology comes from the especifist group you already represent. A great example of these mass-movements that have large groups of black people, are local assemblies, tenant unions, prison unions and housing co-operatives. Inside these movements especifists are able to promote, advocate for and put into practice the anarchist principles they have taken from their original groups and to do so honestly, to show that anarchist methods of organising are effective.

Small and larger anarchist organisations will always make up a minority in the populace, so to fight off the spectre of vanguardism, we must bring the staples of Especifismo into the 21^st Century, including social insertion. As long as we’re not working with people at cross purposes to us such as Marxist Leninists and other Authoritarian Leftists, we should take it upon ourselves not to self-isolate and to hold our noses, so to speak, when coming into contact with other radical and maybe even liberal organisations. Remember, this should not be a recruitment tool, but a tool to find and highlight anarchist tendencies in these organisations and bring them to the fore with hard work without compromising our own particular anarchist organising strategies. The success of our tactics as especifist, will draw people already organising in the Black Radical Tradition toward anarchism and away from authoritarian leftism. And where black radicals are, you can bet the rest of the black community are not behind.

We can aid black radicals on a variety of fronts, as many of their concerns with society intersect with our own as anarchists. A rather glaring example is one of prison abolition. According to the Prison Reform Trust, ethnic minorities make up 27% of the prison population, despite people of African heritage making up only 4.2% of the general population. Black people are also far more likely to be sentenced at the Crown Court and Black people receive far longer sentences on average than their white counterparts, as well as spending longer in custody as part of their sentence. Not only is this a glaring miscarriage of justice, this can be a prime recruiting tool in the fight for prison abolition, the families, friends and loved ones of those incarcerated know intimately the importance of this fight. And it’s not only prison abolition, there are the outcomes in psychiatry, the medical outcomes, access to housing in their communities and so on. The list of potential points of unity abounds.

So yes, share a book, reblog and repost all you can, deface that wall in the name of Haiti, or Congo, or Sudan, but most importantly in my opinion, become an Especifist. Join that black mass-movement with the intent to turn people to our point of view with the strength of our ideas and the depth of your anarchist organisations methods. Organise, organise, organise.

Thank you.

This is a script of a talk given in 2024 at the Common Press bookshop as part of the Anarchist Bookfair In London. Daniel Adediran is a Black, disabled writer of Speculative Fiction, poetry and essays.

Principles for the coming Yankee invasion / Principios para la invasion gringa que se viene

Principles for the coming Yankee invasion

This is my prediction, as a Mexican anarchist, of what will happen in the next year if the Trump government is not stopped.

First, it is clear that they will try to Anschluss Canada. Fox News is already speaking of a “war” that “Canada started.” It’s ridiculous, but that is how fascists are. It doesn’t matter if we believe them, what matters is what they can do with this narrative, and how we can react against their actions.

Second, an invasion of Mexico will happen in conjunction with, or followed quickly, to an invasion of Canada. This worries me much because here will happen what was done to Iraq and Afghanistan. There are many questions at an international level: will Article 5 be activated to defend Canada? Who, if anyone, will interfere in favor of Mexico? Will the sides of WWIII be USA and Russia vs the world (Europe, Latin America and China)? Nobody knows. What I do know is that between anarchists we need to clarify a few things now and fast. Because the discourse shit the bed with Ukraine and I don’t want that to happen again while my family is killed.

An aside: This essay is mainly for anarchists within the Mexican state, but I want to make something clear: gringo anarchists need to turn their energy up to 11 if an invasion happens. Study and learn from the Russian anarchists and other resisters who have fought the war. Start now before it is too late.

With that said I continue to the principles that we need to all be clear about now:

1 – We need to be against military conscription. The Mexican Army is covered in the blood of innocents. How many students, indigenous people, strikers and immigrants have they killed? I will not see this violent state institution be turned into heroes. I will also not let millions of lives be stolen to be converted in pawns for a geopolitical game between states.

That is why we need to be in favor of desertion and fleeing of the country. We need to lie to recruiters, police and any bureaucrat that tries to steal our comrades, brothers, cousins, sons, fathers and uncles. And we need to defend trans women who the state will call “men” who “need to serve the fatherland.” This fucking fatherland has done nothing to help me, why do I need to serve it? We need to hide, transport and help all deserters and people who flee the country. If jobs are created that let men (and “men”) not be recruited we need to help our comrades grip onto these jobs to guarantee their lives. If cults of the state (like the white feather of the first world war) are created where people try to shame and force men to enlist we need to resist these societies actively and force them out of public space.

2 – We need to be against “anarchists” who join the army. We need to have a firm line that any “anarchist” who joins the army must be treated like a pariah. I don’t care if it’s your best friend or “the best anarchist I ever knew.” If they enlist they no longer are. As anarchists we need to have principles and enlisting in an army, any army, has to be a line that is not crossed. It is the enemy, and it always will be. If you are an anarchist don’t join an army!

For this reason we need to have clear support for all sabotage against the enemy. And clearly hopefully the majority of sabotage is against the Yankee invader, but there is no reason to forget that the Mexican army is also an invading force against the indigenous peoples. We need to help and hide any comrades brave enough to launch themselves against the army, whether in individual action or collective. We need to speak positively of these actions and not let the state or the press win the narrative. Especially in the occupied territories of the north and the coasts we need to differentiate between anarchist sabotage and actions taken by paramilitaries. And that brings me to my third point.

3 – We need to be against paramilitaries and state forces. This obviously includes guerrillas and commandos under command of the Mexican army, but it also includes narco groups that will, without a doubt, see a moment to legitimize themselves as “Mexican patriots.” All of these forces need to be resisted, as we have been doing for decades. And we also need to separate our insurgent actions, of anarchists and libertarians, from the actions of patriotic resistance. We cannot let ourselves be co-opted by the state system that will use a war to reinforce its state power.

4 – Finally we need to be prepared for how confusing and paralyzing a war is. The Yankee state, the Mexican state, various narcos and gangs, insurgent fascists, anarchists, indigenous peoples and the EZLN and more will all be competing. There will exist many sides and many alliances. They will be broken and created day to day. Though I have proposed hard lines and serious repercussions in this text things will be complicated and I will not be surprised if there are anarchist-narco alliances or even stranger things. We will all try and survive, and will maybe do little ethical things to do it. But we need to try and have these ethics and principles, because without them are we even anarchists?

I said that the invasion will result in atrocities like in Iraq, and I believe it. But the political situation that results could be more like Syria. Maybe the army and federal government don’t last against an invasion. And if the democratic state falls the narcos and fascists will have their opportunity to create something worse. Maybe and hopefully our war will be much shorter. Maybe we will have a similar victory to Syria and all the cages will be emptied.

What is clear is that a war is coming. We will need to resist the foreigner and the state forces we know. ¡No se va a caer, lo vamos a tumbar!

Principios para la invasion gringa que se viene

Esta es mi predicción de que va a pasar en el próximo año si no se para al gobierno de Trump.

Primero, está claro que a Canadá le van a intentar meter un Anschluss. Fox News ya está hablando de una “guerra” que “Canadá empezó”. Es ridículo, pero así son los fachas. No importa si les creemos o no, lo que importa es lo que ellos pueden hacer con esta narrativa, y como podemos reaccionar contra sus acciones.

Segundo, la invasión de México se llevara acabo en conjunto con, o seguirá rápidamente a, la invasión a Canadá. Esto me preocupa a mi mucho ya que acá van a hacer lo que se hizo en Irak y Afganistán. Hay muchas preguntas a nivel internacional: ¿se activará el Articulo 5 en el caso de Canadá? ¿quién, si alguien, interferirá a favor de México? ¿serán los bandos de la tercera guerra mundial EEUU y Rusia contra el mundo (Europa, Latinoamérica y China)? Nadie sabe. Lo que yo sí sé es que entre anarquistas se tiene que clarificar algunas cosas ahora y rápido. Porque el discurso la cagó con Ucrania y no quiero que pase otra vez mientras me matan a mis familiares.

Un apartado: Este escrito es principalmente para anarquistas en el estado mexicano, pero quiero tener algo claro: lxs anarquistas gringxs necesitaran subir su energía al máximo si pasa una invasión. Estudien y aprendan de lxs anarquistas rusos y otrxs que han resistido a la guerra. Empiezen ahora antes de que sea demasiado tarde.

Con eso dicho, continuo a los principios en los que debemos estar clarxs ahora:

1 – Debemos estar en contra de la conscripción militar. El ejército Mexicano está cubierto de la sangre de los inocentes. ¿Cuántos estudiantes, indígenas, personas en huelga e inmigrantes han matado? No voy a ver a esa institución de violencia estatal convertida en héroes. Y tampoco voy a dejar que millones de vidas sean arrebatadas para ser convertidas en peones en un juego geopolítico entre estados.

Por eso debemos estar en favor de la deserción y de la huida del país. Debemos mentirle a los reclutadores, los policías y a cualquier burócrata que intente robarnos a nuestros compas, hermanos, primos, hijos, padres y tíos. Y debemos defender a las mujeres trans que el estado llamará “hombres” que “tienen que servir a la patria”. La pinche patria no ha hecho nada para ayudarme, ¿porqué la tengo que servir? Debemos esconder, transportar y ayudar a todos los desertores y personas que huyen del país. Si se crean trabajos que dejan que los hombres (y “hombres”) no sean reclutados debemos ayudar a nuestrxs compas aferrarse a esos puestos para garantizar sus vidas. Si se crean cultos del estado (como el de la pluma blanca de la primera guerra mundial) donde personas intentan avergonzar y forzar a hombres que se alisten debemos resistir estas sociedades activamente y forzarles fuera del espacio público.

2 – Debemos estar en contra de los “anarquistas” que se unen al ejército. Debemos tener una línea firme que cualquier “anarquista” que se une al ejército debe ser tratado como un paria. No me importa si es tu mejor compa o “el mejor anarquista que has conocido”. Si se alista ya no lo es. Como anarquistas tenemos que tener principios y alistarse a un ejército, cualquier ejército, tiene que ser una linea que no cruzamos. Es el bando enemigo, y siempre lo será. ¡Si eres anarquista no te unas a un ejército!

Por estas razones tenemos que estar en claro apoyo de todo sabotaje contra el enemigo. Y claro ojalá la mayoría del sabotaje es contra los invasores gringos, pero no hay que olvidar que el ejército mexicano también es un ejército invasor en contra de los pueblos indígenas y originarios. Tenemos que ayudar y esconder a lxs compas valientes que se arrojan contra el ejército, en la acción individual y colectiva. Tenemos que hablar positivamente de estas acciones y no dejar que el estado y la prensa ganen la narrativa. Especialmente en los territorios ocupados en el norte y las costas tenemos que diferenciar entre acciones de sabotaje anarquistas y acciones llevadas por paramilitares. Y eso me lleva a mi tercer punto.

3 – Debemos estar en contra de paramilitares y fuerzas estatales. Esto obviamente incluye a grupos guerrilleros y comandos al mando del ejercito mexicano, pero también incluye a grupos narcos que, sin duda, algunos verán su momento para legitimarse como “patriotas mexicanos”. Todas estas fuerzas tienen que ser resistidas, como ya lo vamos haciendo hace décadas. Y también necesitaremos separar nuestras acciones insurgentes, las de anarquistas y libertarixs, de las acciones de la resistencia patriota. No nos podemos dejar ser cooptadxs por el sistema estatal que usará una guerra para reforzar su poder.

4 – Finalmente, tenemos que estar preparadxs para que tan confusa y paralizante será una guerra. El estado gringo, el estado mexicano, varios narcos y pandillas, los fachas insurgentes, lxs anarquistas, los pueblos indígenas y el EZLN y más estarán compitiendo para ver quien sale encima. Van a existir varios bandos y varias alianzas. Se van a romper y crear de día a día. Aunque he propuesto líneas firmes y acciones represalias fuertes en este texto la cosa sí va a ser complicada y no me sorprenderé si existen alianzas anarquista-narco o cosas aun más extrañas. Todxs vamos a intentar sobrevivir, y tal vez haremos cosas poco éticas para lograrlo. Pero tenemos que intentar mantener esas éticas y principios, porque sin ellas ¿somos anarquistas?

Dije que la invasión gringa resultaría en atrocidades como en Irak, y lo creo. Pero la situación política que resultará podríaser más como Siria. Puede ser que el ejército y gobierno federal no durarán contra una invasión. Y si se derrumba el estado democrático los narcos y fachas tendrán su oportunidad para crear algo aún peor. Tal vez y ojalá nuestra guerra será mucho más corta. Tal vez tendremos una victoria similar a Siria y todas las jaulas se vaciarán.

Lo que queda claro es que se viene una guerra. Tendremos que resistir al extranjero y a las fuerzas estatales que conocemos. ¡No se va a caer, lo vamos a tumbar!

Anonymous Communique

Decolonize Anarchism — May Day on Fire: Against Empire and Theocracy

The Western left will march on May 1^st under red banners, chanting slogans of internationalism and workers’ power. But we must ask — is there room for Iranian workers in your May Day?

On April 26, 2025, a massive explosion rocked the Shahid Rajaee port near Bandar Abbas, Iran’s largest commercial port. The blast resulted in at least 70 deaths and over 1,200 injuries, according to official reports. The explosion originated from improperly stored chemicals used in missile fuel. The responsible company operates under the umbrella of Bonyad Mostazafan, is part of a network of Islamic charitable foundations tied directly to the Supreme Leader and the IRGC. These foundations are exempt from labor law, exempt from accountability, and sustained through the direct appropriation of social surplus. They represent a fusion of state capital and clerical authority, animated not by market efficiency but by ideological legitimacy and paramilitary discipline.

This catastrophe, like countless others before it, occurred not in a vacuum but within the structural context of disposability, abandonment, and class warfare from above. Bandar Abbas’s port is staffed largely by contract workers from impoverished ethnic minorities, particularly Baloch, Arab and Afro-Iranian communities. Many of them are undocumented, excluded from the most basic forms of legal protection. Some are refugees. Most are hired on short-term contracts with no benefits, no health coverage, and no recourse to independent union representation. These workers were engaged in highly dangerous work-chemical handling, container loading — without adequate safety equipment or emergency protocols. The explosion was the consequence of precisely this neglect, compounded by systemic corruption and a lack of regulatory oversight.

This is not an isolated event. Between May 2024 and April 2025, over 2,081 Iranian workers died due to unsafe working conditions. Children as young as 12 labor in mines, waste disposal and textile workshops. In the informal economy — which comprises up to one-third of Iran’s workforce — accidents, injuries, and deaths go unreported. The state, which should enforce labor laws and safety standards, is instead the largest perpetrator of labor exploitation. Some 90% of workers in Iran are employed under temporary contracts, and over a third are uninsured. In practice, this means no job security, no severance, and no healthcare, even for those engaged in the most hazardous work.

The repression of labor activism is systemic and ferocious. At least 19 labor activists remain in prison as of this writing. Among them are Sharifeh Mohammadi, Pakhshan Azizi, and Verisheh Moradi, three Kurdish labor and women’s rights activists sentenced to death. Like many Kurdish militants, they were held in prolonged solitary confinement, denied legal access, and tortured into a confession in a sham trial that violates every basic principle of justice. They are not alone. The fact that these women are Kurdish, secular, and radically committed to collective self-organization makes them dangerous in the eyes of a regime that depends on ethnic division, patriarchal control and submission to centralized power. The rope around their necks is not just the regime’s — it is the hangman’s knot of all counterrevolution: nationalism, authoritarianism, and the mystification of captial.

The racialization of labor and repression is stark: in Kurdistan, kulbars (cross-border porters) are routinely killed by border guards in Iran’s southeast, Baloch workers, often undocumented, face daily exploitation and militarized violence. In April 2025, eight Pakistani Baloch workers were gunned down in Mehrestan. Killed not for politics, not for protest, but for being poor, racialized and disposable. At least 50% of executions in recent years have targeted Baloch individuals, who make up only 5% of the population. This racialized proletariat — mobile, informal, and excluded — represents one of the most vulnerable yet most radical sectors of the Iranian working class.

The plight of Iranian workers must also be read through the lens of gender. Women workers in Iran face the double burden of labor exploitation and patriarchal repression. They are pushed into the most invisible and least protected forms of labor. In unregulated sectors like domestic work and agricultural labor, they are routinely exposed to sexual violence and economic coercion. Female labor activists, such as Sosan Razani and Sepideh Qoliyan, have faced imprisonment, flogging and exile. At Bandar Abbas, many of the injured were women subcontracted into logistics and custodial roles, paid far less than their male counterparts, and denied maternity or medical leave.

Against this backdrop, the regime continues to perform an anti-imperialist script. Its leaders claim to defy U.S. hegemony while simultaneously engaging in back-channel negotiations with Washington. These diplomatic maneuvers serve only to reinforce elite power. They do nothing to alleviate the conditions of mass unemployment, unlivable wages and state terror faced by Iran’s workers. The regime uses anti-imperialist rhetoric to justify militarism abroad and pression at home, criminalizing dissent and blaming sanctions for domestic failures, while continuing to implement neoliberal austerity policies dictated by the IMF blueprint: privatization, deregulation, and the dismantling of public services.

This hypocrisy- where the Iranian state denounces imperialism while exploiting and repressing its own people-is too often mirrored by segments of the Western left. Trapped in a Cold War binary mindset, they reduce Iran to a simple victim of U.S. aggression, ignoring the reality that the regime crushes labor movements, jails teachers and retirees, and executes minority workers. By framing these atrocities as unfortunate but inevitable responses to sanctions, they erase the agency of Iranian workers and revolutionaries who resist both imperialism and the authoritarian regime. True anti-imperialism must center the struggles of the oppressed — not their oppressors in anti-American clothing.

The labor movement in Iran today is fragmented but persistent. Between January and April 2025 alone, there were 44 labor protests across 26 cities, from petrochemical workers in Mahshahr to rural health workers in Manab. These protests are not simply about wages; they are about the right to live, the right to organize, and the right to dignity. In Kurdistan, Balochistan, Khuzestan, and Hormogan — regions of ethnic oppression and economic dispossession — workers are rising up not only against economic exploitation but against the very structure of the state that maintains it.

The Western left will march on May 1^st under red banners, chanting slogans of internationalism and workers’ power. But we must ask — is there room for Iranian workers in your May Day?

When you denounce U.S. imperialism and condemn neoliberalism, do you name the 2,000 Iranian workers killed last year in preventable workplace “accidents”? Do you speak of the Baloch laborers criminalized and executed, or the Kurdish kilbars shot on mountain paths? Or are these lives too messy, too resistant to your binary frameworks — too inconvenient to your alignment with whichever state you feel obliged to defend or oppose? You claim solidarity. But when labor organizers in Iran are imprisoned, tortured, even sentenced to death, too many of you look away.

You do not need to echo the lies of Washington or Tel Aviv to name the crimes of Tehran.

If your anti-imperialism does not include those fighting from below — against both local despotism and global capital — then it is not solidarity. It is shadow diplomacy. International solidarity must refuse false choices. To support the working class of Iran is to support their right to organize autonomously, to resist both domestic repression and foreign domination and to imagine a future beyond theocratic capitalism and imperial violence.

May Day is not about choosing your favorite regime. It is about the power of a class that has no regime, no flag, no master.

Stolen from instagram.com/p/DJF7luJPnSz find more from the authors at linktr.ee/decolonizeanarchism

Group Of Informal Affinity — “Reject the National Army law”, “No Rules, Just Chaos”, and “Burn World Bank”

We are responsible for the burning of Two Hana Bank ATM machines, the Hana Bank office building, a capitalist-owned advertising videotron, and a motor vehicle belonging to the Indonesian National Army. The arson occurred after a space occupation carried out by demonstrators in the aftermath of a demonstration against the passage of the Indonesian National Army Law (TNI law), the arson occurred in Bandung, West Java on Friday night 21/03/2025.

The action carried out by the demonstrators in front of the Regional House of Representatives (DPRD) was not ignored at all by anti-riot police, despite the throwing of molotov cocktails, propane, stones and firecrackers into the veranda of the building. Until in the end, we chose direct action by burning at several points above.

We are completely beyond the authority of the language of the state and capitalism, we are irrationality, we are a form of the illogicality of the authority of the language itself. We are one of the informal organizations of the end of the world who do not believe in the coming of enlightenment for tomorrow, because for us the future is a new form of suffering. We are a fire that devours entire city buildings at night. We do not believe in the revolution of the left and other social anarchists. We are writers and poets, insurrection is poetry, poetry is insurrection.

Death to The State! Death to The National Army! Death to an Entire Civilization! Burn The World Bank! Long Live The Conspiracy of Cells of Fire! Long Live The Free Association of Autonomous Fire! Long Live FAI/IRF Long Live Anarchy!

The aforementioned National Army Law allows members of the Army to participate in civilian political life, a large protest campaign against this called #IndonesiaGelap (Darkening Indonesia) has been met with severe political repression from the authorities.

Stolen from:

darknights.noblogs.org/post/2025/03/22/bandung-west-java-indonesia-reject-the-national-army-law-no-rules-just-chaos-and-burn-world-bank-wrote-by-a-group-of-informal-affinity/

Muntjac Collective — Protect Yourself

Anyone, even those not involved in militant action, would benefit from brushing up on their personal and/or operational security. We all desire privacy and in an endlessly accelerating world of technological domination the realm in which we can achieve this requires more complicated means.

We are not experts but we have two recommendations, that you and your crew (if you’ve got one) should spend some time checking out:

1. No Trace Project [notrace.how]

2. AnarSec [anarsec.guide]

We’ve included some statements by both of these projects.

No Trace Project

The No Trace Project is an international anti-repression project. Its purpose is to help anarchists, activists, and other rebels understand and avoid State repression.

If you engage in activities deemed illegal by the State, or otherwise disrupt the smooth functioning of our capitalist society, you may end up under investigation. You may even end up under investigation because of the activities of your friends. By taking security precautions commensurate with the risk level of your activities, you can thwart investigative efforts and avoid imprisonment or other negative consequences.

The No Trace Project covers not only digital security, but also a wide range of surveillance-related topics, such as video surveillance, police infiltration, fingerprints and DNA, tailing, and many others. Everything is available on their website, to read online or as printable zines.

AnarSec

As anarchists, we must defend ourselves against police and intelligence agencies that conduct targeted digital surveillance for the purposes of incrimination and network mapping. Our goal is to obscure the State’s visibility into our lives and projects. Our recommendations are intended for all anarchists, and they are accompanied by guides to put the advice into practice.

We agree with the conclusion of an overview of targeted surveillance measures in France: “So let’s be clear about our responsibilities: if we knowingly bring a networked device equipped with a microphone and/or a camera (cell phone, baby monitor, computer, car GPS, networked watch, etc.) close to a conversation in which “private or confidential words are spoken” and must remain so, even if it’s switched off, we become a potential state informer…

Anon — Alexa, take me to Prison!

We are under assault by an apparatus of technological counterinsurgency — it feels like the space in which we aren’t subject to an array of surveillance technology is shrinking out of existence. But you didn’t need me to tell you that. Especially since, outside state surveillance infrastructure, it’s the personal devices we deploy ourselves which are driving the expansion forward. We don’t even crack jokes about our phones listening any more, for the observation has become trite. The constant warfare against our privacy, our minds, our time, is just yet more background noise in the cacophony of sensory overload. That isn’t to say we’ve been completely helpless; anarchists and others are well versed in deploying countermeasures such as encryption or even cutting out our devices entirely at choice moments. Nevertheless, every day it seems another inch of our lives falls under observation, another ‘smart’ device appears on the market managing to pander the police even better than the last one. This assault cannot be allowed to continue with the apparent ease it has enjoyed so far — it’s long past time we found a wrench to throw into the machine.

“Perhaps taking the example of architecture can better illustrate something as complex as technology: let’s take an empty and disused prison, what should be done with this structure except to tear it down? Its very architecture, its walls, its watchtowers, its cells, already contain the purpose of this building: to imprison people and destroy them psychologically. It would be impossible for me to live there, simply because the building is oppressive.” — Against the Smartphone

The technology that surrounds us grows increasingly complex, increasingly out of our understanding and ability to control. Driven by the intersecting interests of the surveillance capitalist entities that manufacture and control these devices, and the counterinsurgent state, we find ourselves within a landscape of technology that is actively hostile toward us. It should be noted I am writing from a perspective situated in the Global North. The discussion regarding the danger of hostile technology might be more universal, but the exploration of countermeasures is especially rooted in the kinds of environments I am familiar with.

Many of our methods for resisting digital counterinsurgency are reliant upon hostile technologies. I’m sure a lot of us are familiar with the long lists of settings to tweak, the ‘secure’ software to use, and the often complex best practices which all reduce the chances that our technology use will turn back to bite us. While these can be critical in their potential to provide protection and increase the costs of repression, we remain stuck with the fundamental issue that none of these methods are capable of resolving: hostile technology is enemy territory. We have built a house upon sand, and the foundations have been sinking for a while. Our devices are becoming so extractive that we can’t even trust our phone keyboards not to snitch. Even if we choose open-source software, the hardware is closed, controlled by corporations who are only too happy to stand aside to any counterinsurgency efforts, or even throw their own weight behind them and assist. Software is vulnerable to being forcibly removed, or neutered of its value, as demonstrated by the removal of iCloud encryption for UK residents at the behest of the government. We might imagine utilising workarounds to access subversive software that finds itself banned in our regions, but it’s no longer difficult to imagine systems being locked down enough to make unauthorised applications a practical impossibility, not to mention the damage that could be done even with partial censorship.

The ability to utilise technology toward any of our own ends is being slowly removed by the manufacturers. In these synthetic environments, autonomy is a thing granted to us, and it can and will be taken away. The growing hostility of technology alongside the over-reliance upon it that we have fostered is a recipe for absolute disaster. The skills we need to get by without these devices have been dulled. We must develop methods of defence and resistance outside this tightening grip, before the rug is snatched out from under us.

“A safety minded carpenter might when presented with a board with exposed nails refuse utterly the reasoning that as they are both skillful and aware of the nails they may safely avoid an accident, rather by assuming they will be harmed and by hammering the nails flat, they render that assumed harm impossible.” — A Life of Lies

Despite our deepening dependency, anarchists have nevertheless long understood the dangers of hostile technology, engaging in some countermeasures independent of it from the beginning. Many of us still follow a sound strategy of compartmentalising any such devices from the activities they might expose, with common practices such as conducting meeting on walks without phones or any other such devices. While this compartmentalisation has undoubtedly provided a strong measure of immediate defence, it has not seemed to offer much of an impediment to the mass adoption and expansion of hostile technology. We leave our phones at home when we believe the situation requires it, but pay no mind to picking them back up again before every other kind of social encounter or routine activity. Some of us may make more permanent adjustments (or remain stalwart in our original ways) but the impact seems more and more akin to that of a small bucket bailing water from a foundering ship. We remain in a defensive posture, constantly losing ground outside the momentary and fragile shelter dug out by compartmentalisation.

Compartmentalisation as we currently employ it is a half measure. There is an unresolvable tension between what is deemed ‘risky’ and what is not. As ‘normal’ becomes characterised by near constant use of hostile technology, any interruptions stand out as glaring aberrations to surveillance actors. Compartmentalisation cannot protect us when we pick our phones back up, so what defence are we left with when under the eyes of surveillance? Are we to be actors, removing politics and resistance out of everyday life and into specialised moments? We play a dangerous game deciding when to employ countermeasures, attempting to differentiate the ‘malignant’ activities from the benign — does such a distinction even exist? With falling costs to processing and abstracting large amounts of information, how might our enemies be able to map our networks, to render us legible given enough information? It is often said one should assess their own threat model in the context of deciding whether to use common hostile technology like mobile phones, but in practice this can be overly individualising in the face of a what is ultimately a collective threat — it leaves those at high-risk to stand out as aberrations like a lone protestor in black bloc attire, and people currently tend to underestimate the threat surveillance may pose outside moments of characterised as political action.

Perhaps one reason we have struggled to find a better course of action is the collective incapacity that can result from attempting to understand and protect against a threat of an increasingly insurmountable complexity. This effect, which has been dubbed ‘Opsec fatigue’, conditions our behaviour in ways we may not even be conscious of – a constant awareness of the potential our ever-present devices have to surveil us, coupled with a lack of understanding of what to do about it, can freeze our capacity engage in action. Yet anarchists often escape this incapacity, finding empowerment in the rejection of security measures, throwing caution to the wind to remain unburdened against the perception of a seemingly indomitable adversary. This ‘security nihilism’ is liberating in the short term, but disastrous in the long run – so how do we break out of it? As long as the ubiquity of hostile technology continues unbarred, we will be suffocated under any attempts to manage the threat. There is only one realistic option, we must collectively attack and destroy this ubiquity.

“Until recently, the anarchist subculture was one of those pockets, where you could refuse to carry a smartphone and still socially exist. Now I’m less sure, and that’s fucking depressing.” – Signal Fails

It seems to me that we are developing a desperate awareness of just how deep the claws of hostile technology have sunk into our flesh, and are now searching for a way to pry them out without also ripping ourselves to shreds. We’re quite good at lamenting the replacement of face-to-face organising with the signal group chat, our addiction to social media, our unceasing obsession with the glowing rectangles. But though technology is the medium through which this assault is being carried out, it’d be a mistake to see it solely as a technical issue with a technical solution – we must adequately address those driving forces which are social and cultural. We have become prey to the attention economy, our relations have been hijacked by now indispensable mediator platforms which have set themselves up in between our social exchanges. In order to successfully halt and reverse the encroachment of hostile technology into our space, we must make it possible to break our dependency with solutions that have the potential to enrich and energise us, instead of solely inducing more costs and draining us. We must reach an understanding that a movement for security against digital counterinsurgency, and a movement against the attention hijacking, anxiety inducing, social hollowing of surveillance capitalism, are one and the same.

Our world has become comprised of non-places, dead liminal corridors to transport us between school, work, home, or commercial activities. Our compulsive retreat into the digital realm serves as sanctuary against those empty exterior surroundings, a replacement for a lack of public space and agency over our surroundings. For many of us, cutting out hostile technology would mean throwing ourselves out into a cold isolation. We could make a collective abandonment of it more viable by remaking our spaces to provide what we currently supplement with our digital activities. Spaces which would provide opportunities for open and equal social encounter, capable of delivering the deep texture of reality that our senses crave, contrasting the low-bandwidth flatness of a digital simulation. It is these spaces in which we might re-nurture the skills that have been dulled by our technological dependence, communicating with others face-to-face, finding our way around, even tolerating momentary boredom. We can prefigure lives independent of hostile technology.

We might recognise any radical space as a powerful site to engage in this action against hostile technology, forming a practice of conscious intervention into our dependence. Though I cannot imagine the full multitude of forms such action might take, the starting points could be simple, such as commitment to match any social media posts about an event with posters up on the side of the building, or pasted around the town. While it is often a struggle to sustain and breathe life into the few brick and mortar spaces we do have in the anarchist movement, we might also engage in more transient spaces, perhaps organising walks, or holding outdoor events and meetings, while explicitly excluding hostile technology. Struggles which engage with our relation to space, such as the anti-tresspass movement could be fertile ground to explore ways to agitate against hostile technology, and form connections between our alienation from our surroundings and our digital dependence.

Perhaps it must ultimately be acknowledged that those of us who wield these devices are collaborators in counterinsurgency, allowing policing to project itself deeper into our personal space much like a neighbourhood watch committee. We must bring the hidden tension of hostile technology to the surface, no longer maintaining silence in the face of this total warfare upon our safety. As it stands, it is too easy to view the benefits of, for example, bringing phones along to protests, as far more tangible and immediate than the risks, which are largely invisible and delayed. It’s no wonder people do not take the threat seriously. We need to visibilise the dangers through education and communication, from stickers, to zines, to conversations, to workshops. Ultimately we need to empower people to properly weigh up the risks of collective repression against the challenges that might arise without a phone.

If we are to bring the hidden tension of hostile technology into the forefront, we will need to treat surveillance devices as the counterinsurgent invasion that they are and strike back against them. We might more consistently denounce the presence of phones at protests or in our spaces. We might engage in physical intervention when certain lines are crossed, as per ‘In Defense of Smashing Streamer’s Cameras’: “if streamers and photographers are willing to put their egos above the movement. This is a call for people to smash their cameras and phones. Smash them, paint them, put umbrellas in their way, use make and distribute privacy shields, throw their phones/cameras in the fucking river.”

What will it take to build a capacity to strike against hostile technology with the ferocity it deserves? The campaign against Tesla is in part an attack against a surveillance device. Aside from mechanical sabotage, we also see a disincentive effect and a denormalisation of owning these cars where it went largely without question before. Might we bring the same disincentive and denormalising effect against the totality of citizen surveillance tech that have become background in our lives? We might imagine spaces without an unbroken doorbell camera in sight. Take out your phone, or drive a Tesla through it, and you’ll think better of it fast. The posters, stickers, and looks you get are warning, the rocks against your windscreen are consummation. When the new CCTV camera goes up to replace those painted and broken, it stands out as a shiny new target. The local store using facial recognition has increasingly rich window fitters.

“We will be safest from the right hand of repression and the left hand of recuperation when everyone is thoroughly confused as to whether we are frightening or loveable.” — Signals of Disorder

We will be perceived as awkward, paranoid, obstinate. Despite any efforts to create refuge against mandatory technology use, we will need to make sacrifices. Friendships will be lost, and some of that isolation and loneliness threatened by cutting out hostile technology will take effect. But we also need to shake the assumption that no one wants an alternative to this mess we have all found ourselves in. As everything becomes increasingly ‘enshittified’, and the mental health impact of these platforms gets worse, people do want out. We need to be the refuge for those willing to unplug from it all.

While I have found great value in the anti-tech theory expression by texts such as ‘Beyond the Screens, the Stars’ essential in formulating my perspectives against hostile technology. I would present the question of alternative technology as an open one which we are largely yet to explore. I think it’s important we push towards the possibilities, and decide for ourselves through careful and critical experimentation what such ventures might be capable of. Can we nurture a truly material international solidarity through communications technology? Sharing techniques, learning and forming bonds between people and struggles. Will we find ways to develop our own tools and technologies that are truly under our control with developments in open hardware and manufacturing?

But we need to deeply interrogate the design of our tools and how they might influence us for better or worse. As well as determine if they can be resourced without perpetuating extractive colonialism. Finding open-source alternatives to the current paradigm is not enough, we need a radical approach that critically evaluates tools all the way to their roots. As pointed out in ‘Signal Fails’: “just as ‘the medium is the message’ Signal is having profound effects on how anarchists relate and organize together that are too often overlooked.” I cannot say what the results of such experiments will be, we must ensure we also learn to operate without digital technology and build an independent capability of communication and collaboration.

The internet has often been a place of free expression, encounter and experimentation especially for those who have been locked out of such opportunities in the physical realm. I want to see the elements of the internet which I value protected from being threatened and stamped out by big tech and capitalism. As a black anarchist my experience of anarchism has been dependent on encountering other black anarchisms, and other black anarchists. The internet facilitated the process of encounter that raised my consciousness and gave me the power to conceptualise and articulate my own black anarchism. My primary experience with so-called anarchist and radical spaces has been one of dissatisfaction, and an alienating anti-blackness. So although I stress the importance of truly diverse and radical physical space, it has been an exercise of the imagination for me personally, while the internet has been a lived experience. This perspective is why I find the exploration of alternate technologies to be an important element of the struggle.

In any discussion of technological reliance, we must recognise the benefits that technology, hostile or otherwise, has brought to disabled people, and how it has augmented the ability for many engage in resistance. This includes safer communications and meetings in the face of pandemics. There is a line to walk between the power of technology to expand the possibilities of resistance, and it’s power to curtail them. We should never totally replace the face-to-face with poor substitutes, but we might supplement where necessary, and even just expand our capabilities altogether. If we seek freedom from the from hostile technology without alternatives to put in its place, we will leave disabled comrades behind if the benefits briefly granted by hostile technology are removed. I do not mean to suggest disabled people have no ability for resistance without digital technology, and of course ableism in physical spaces has had a massive effect on the ability for disabled people to participate in radical milieus. But even if better accessibility in physical space is achieved, it will not be able to grant those same benefits which are unique to digital technologies.

“How do we want to connect with the people we care about? With strangers? What type of relationships do we want to nurture? These considerations are paved right over with fear and threats – you’ll lose all connection, you’ll lose touch with what’s going on, you’ll become irrelevant – a parasitic and relational blackmail.” – Beyond the Screens, The Stars

We must build a strong security culture capable of not only shielding us from the dangers of hostile technology, but also intercepting its spread. To make effective challenge we need to adapt on two fronts. One is severing our dependency on technology, nurturing skills outside of it, and striving for its total destruction. The time of its free rein over our lives and communities must come to an end. We won’t take down the surveillance state overnight, but its smooth march must end before the smart-prison constructed around us finishes completion.

The other front involves exploring alternative technology. This does mean continuing to be diligent in using secure open-source application for communication and other tasks, and keeping an eye out for future developments. It also means ensuring our alternatives are actually viable and valuable by making regular use of them, posting on the Fediverse and a multitude of counter-info sites, even if we start out with low traffic. We must undermine reliance on hostile social media platforms.

My hope is to re-frame some of the ways in which we consider the issue of hostile technology so that we can make progress and experimentation in the right direction. Our current understanding is rooted in ‘common sense’ such as the sentiment “don’t put anything online you wouldn’t like to hear repeated in court”. But generations are being raised within an environment of technological ubiquity which challenges any notion of ‘common sense’ that might have seemed obvious to those before, some of us held phones and tablets before we could talk. The youth are not ignorant, in fact the millennial optimism for the liberating potential of the internet and technology is on its deathbed. But the cynicism that has supplanted that optimism is often externalised in defeatism, paired with a declining technical aptitude and control as devices become increasingly abstracted and locked-down. We might move away from a vague basis in ‘common sense’ toward a clearer rationale that we cannot trust technology which we cannot understand and control, which currently applies to nearly every complex digital technology we currently interact with. This ensures a solid ground to stand on when we are thinking through measures for protection against technological threats, while also not excluding any opportunities to carefully engage with alternative non-hostile technologies.

I hope this text invites further exploration and thought. This is an issue that touches every single one of us, I think we should all begin to develop our own positions on it, considering how it affects us personally. How do you wish to relate to these devices? How are you affected by other peoples use of them? How does your use affect other people? What interventions can you make to undermine hostile technology?

There are so many areas left under-explored or unaddressed in this text. One major shortcoming is a failure to analyse our dependence on hostile technology in relation the colonial resource extraction that sustains it, something that has been severely overlooked by the majority of anarchists in the global north. This is something that needs to be reckoned with, especially in the context of anarchist involvement in any future development of alternative technologies. Another problem to address is that while dependence of hostile technology is a social reality we can make or unmake, we might need to a way to check our emails before we manage to unmake work. We need to develop ways navigate those required usages and how to prevent them taking over our lives. This is where technical solutions can shine, the zine ‘Kill the Cop in Your Pocket’ makes a great starting point. Also, there is a lot more to say about anarchists explorations of alternative technology and the black experience online. Questions of safety tools and moderation, of the legibility/opacity of our lives online and how we have been exploited, and of black agency in the traditionally white and male dominated environment of the free and open-source software space.

A security culture is a collective inter-supportive effort to establish norms, leveraging social dynamics to our advantage. It may be important to clarify that this is not a replacement for more specific operational security for particular endeavors, though it can strike against collective threats where individual strategies and responses might struggle. We need both specific practice (operational security, personal security, whatever you’d like to call it), and collective practice. Individuals may make informed decisions as to when the costs may outweigh the benefits for the use of a digital device for risky activity, developing operational security to reduce that risk, and compartmentalising as well as possible to contain the risk. As long as any such strategies never assume a level of control over technology that only ever existed in our imaginations.

Further Reading:

Signal Fails

Beyond the Screen, the Stars

What the Corona Virus Pandemic Can Teach Us About Security Culture

Mobile Phone Security: For Activists and Agitators

Kill the Cop In Your Pocket (anarsec)

In Defense of Smashing Streamer’s Cameras

Some Thoughts on The Limits of Surveillance

Haraami — Follow the Fires: Insurgency Against Identity

BIPOC radicalism is an imprecise name for a number of slippery dynamics and tendencies that foster repressive habits, discourses, and patterns of acting in our movements. It does not name a coherent political identity or bloc, some external force or conspiracy to be countered, but is an element of the social landscape of counterinsurgency that can flow through all of us in different forms and combinations across time and place. Where it emerges, it suffocates and snuffs out the fires that sustain militant culture.

BIPOC radicalism is not synonymous with any non-white radicalism, radicalisms that take seriously the question of race at political, strategic, personal, and communal levels, or radicalisms drawing on non-Western ways of being and lineages of resistance. It names a particular mix of elements of identitarian politics--essentialism, a rhetoric of safety and vulnerability, and a politics of deference--with tendencies of more rigid radicalisms--moralism, destructive critique, internal policing, and the formation of enclosed milieus bound by an insular shared language. BIPOC radicalism shares many characteristics with previous waves of radicalism emerging out of queer and feminist subcultures, and often overlaps with them, though the specificity of racial identity fosters unique dynamics and obstacles. While it is most often concerned and speaks for the category of “BIPOC,” it can also speak for any related subcategory at any given moment--Black, Brown, Indigenous, Palestinian, immigrant, and so on.

It might otherwise be recognized as “BIPOC radical liberalism,” “identitarian or racial authoritarianism,” “radical racial essentialism,” or “racial identitarian counterinsurgency” (even when enacted by genuine participants of a movement). While each name emphasizes different aspects of this tendency, and each has its own limitations, I use “BIPOC radicalism” to emphasize two things: first, how this politics coalesces around a particular set of identities under the umbrella of “BIPOC” and the taxonomic view of racial identity this relies on. Second, how it claims to represent genuine radical politics, perhaps even the most radical, in ways that make it harder to confront than its more ideologically liberal counterparts. At the intersection of “BIPOC” and “radicalism” emerges a set of ideas that claims to represent the most radical faction of non-white political actors, and thus to represent anti-colonial insurgency itself.

Whether these tendencies manifest as internalized policing of other participants in a movement or our self-cannibalizing impulses towards conflict and critique, they act as force multipliers for the actively repressive maneuvers of our enemies in the state and ruling classes. In the name of liberation they smuggle back in the very framework of racial identity, one of the originary moves of counterinsurgency that inaugurated the modern/colonial world, that turned life-worlds and relations into populations and bodies, subjects or objects of power and violence. Disguised in the mask of radicalism, these tendencies exploit real contradictions and fault lines in our movements in self-repressive ways. Most importantly, BIPOC radicalism is repressive of those of us named as “BIPOC,” locking us in a cycle of impotence that stifles the growth of autonomous anti-colonial insurgency.

BIPOC radicalism has not overcome the fatal limitations of (white) radicalisms, and often intensifies or replays the same dramas. It is not a movement connected to the autonomous self organization of the colonized, but a scene within a scene. It is defined by impotent rage against the existing scene and resentment of others for things that we do not feel capable of ourselves. Limited to a critique of others, BIPOC radicalism avoids the task of tracing a positive vision of what a revolutionary process looks like, of how to overcome the limits that each cycle of struggles and uprisings hit.

This tendency implicitly or explicitly adopts language—“directly impacted,” “centering,” “safety,” “allyship”—coming from university and nonprofit lineages, from politics meant to protect the middle class (including the BIPOC middle class or class-aspirational). BIPOC radicalism has inherited a political language that is a product of the limits and defeats of the revolutionary possibilities of the twentieth century—the counterinsurgency doctrines that dismembered revolutionary movements globally and the diversion of the revolutionary self-organization of the colonized into the designs of national bourgeoisies that built the current era of multi-national capital and authoritarian states. While these political frameworks previously belonged more exclusively to liberals, the post-2020 explosion of the Instagram-Infographic-Industrial-Complex has produced a new wave of BIPOC radicals who mix this more liberal identitarian framework with more anarchistic political positions on non-profits, the state, and mutual aid.

Just like other radical scenes, this scene produces an insular language and framework for acceptable activity that actually closes it off to the unruly messiness of autonomy and self-organization. The foreclosure of a revolutionary horizon, the erasure of the real insurgent practices animating previous cycles of struggle, and an inability to overcome the limits faced by these struggles, have led to a retreat to the interpersonal at the expense of all else. Anti-racism becomes a self-help politics for trauma-obsessed BIPOC and guilty white people alike.

Individual people of color conflate their own desires, opinions, and fears with those of all BIPOC. They then conflate those assumptions with political positions, with the milieu giving the false impression that these feelings are generally felt. Conflicts which are fundamentally about the ethics by which we relate to each other or the strategies we pursue in our conspiracies are misrepresented as simple identitarian divides. BIPOC radicals become absolved of their own complicity or missteps in these dynamics and weaponize authenticity politics to erase or undermine other “BIPOC” who take contradicting positions that undermine their representational claims. In its most destructive forms, the strongest proponents of such politics cause the self-destruction of the movements they engage in through the imposition of their rigid political doctrine and their habits of conflict and call-out, smothering any of the possibilities that they overlooked in their narrow analysis.

BIPOC radicalism produces a shared unhappy community of critique that is ultimately unsustainable. It erases and represses the inherent heterogeneity and dissent that lurk within each political identity, which eventually resurface as fault lines and sources of further disappointment.

Many BIPOC spaces are defined almost in their entirety by critiquing or distinguishing themselves from white people, white leftists, white anarchists. This shared critique produces a false sense of shared politics and safety. While BIPOC caucuses present themselves as representing some shared experience or identity, their framing already self-selects who shows up—those who already align with an identitarian frame show up, and those of us interested in something different stay at a distance, stay quiet, or are acting elsewhere.

Defining oneself by critique is an easy cop-out, because critique is an easy muscle. We are trained in it by a spectacular and social network-mediated society that teaches us to experience our agency through the very fact of expressing correct ideas–the practice of critique itself as power in a world where we are separated from our collective agency. Critique is easy because it reinforces our distance from the messiness of a situation where we are challenged to experiment within a set of practical limits. Critique enables us to easily judge and categorize people and events in a moral framework of good or bad.

The cruelest irony is that, once the easy target of the white person is removed from the picture, these spaces usually devour themselves in vicious cycles of critique and conflict. The conflicts range in content: fights over classifying if someone is white or “white-passing” frequently rehash the logics of race science, with BIPOC reaching for their calipers to guard entrance to their safe space; fragmentation on intra-identity lines of class and class-aspirations, gender, sexuality, disability, create even more insular scenes in an identitarian fractal; conflicts over politics and strategy in the context of specific, real struggles reveal our lack of affinity. Even the framework of BIPOC anarchist is limiting, as even the anarchist identity is full of its own internal fragmentations on personal, theoretical, and strategic questions—social anarchist, insurrectionary, nihilist, autonomous communist.

When the dust settles, the “BIPOC” spaces collapse and the “white anarchist” spaces remain, and we are left with the choice between burnout or finding possibility amidst complexity.

BIPOC radicalism converts racial identity into a moralistic category rather than a political one. This identitarian moralism offers a simplistic framework for judging events and organizations on the basis of what they are believed to be and the identities they are composed of rather than what they are doing. The reflexive critique of “this space/tactic/action/ideology is white” in actuality tells us little about the object of its critique. Describing what a body or collection of bodies is, particularly in terms of the social identities inscribed onto it, tells us little about what we desire, what we can do, what we can build or destroy as part of the struggle against the colonial world. Animated by a search for the perfect space with an idealized racial composition, where the “real BIPOC revolutionary subject” will supposedly be present, we are driven away from the messiness of reality: that we make revolution in the conditions we find ourselves in, with the people who show up, not the conditions we wish we had.

This identitarian moralism locks in identity as a static positionality which one can never engage, destabilize, or escape, trapping white people and BIPOC alike. Judgment of spaces and actions on the basis of the real or perceived racial composition of a space, or assumptions about the “privileged” nature of militancy, closes us off to the possibilities and agency to be found in such spaces—whether mass actions, convergences, infrastructure projects, or militant networks. Hand-wringing about the supposedly privileged nature of militancy does not negate the necessity of militant activity such as blockades, occupations, riots, sabotage, and more. The self-righteousness of this position participates in the real erasure of principled anti-colonial militants of color who engage in these spaces or actions.

Identitarian moralism threatens to restrain the promiscuous and powerful affinities that flow across positionalities and replace them with a rigidly boxed-in identitarian non-affinity. Expectations around “centering” betray an investment in the logic of visibility, which cannot comprehend something as insurgent if the right identities are not represented in positions believed to be authoritative. This expectation, on the one hand, exposes those precisely misunderstood as “the most vulnerable” to higher risks of visibility and the higher labors of leadership. On the other, it locks us in to speak first as and for the identities scripted on to us, rather than to speak as and for our desires and capabilities. The obsession with our being, with who we are presently in this world, with listing identities and privileges, suppresses our imagination and experimentation with what we can become beyond this world, what we can become in the struggle against this world. Attempts to capture a snapshot of our position misses our movement, our constant motion towards something else. We become so focused on seeing and naming the walls of the cage we are in that we reinforce it, losing focus of the ways we escape, fight, shake, and break the cage.

BIPOC radicalism defines identity through victimization and vulnerability instead of agency and action and remains trapped in a negative cycle of powerlessness. When “BIPOC” are invoked it is usually to name some sort of injury or risk: “BIPOC are at higher risk of arrest and face worse repression,” “BIPOC don’t feel centered or heard in this space.” This framing is especially potent in activating the guilt of well-meaning white radicals, who then self-authorize to fight on behalf of their “BIPOC” allies and wreck other spaces they are in in the name of the White Guilt Crusade.

When the category of “BIPOC” is invoked, it is overwhelmingly demobilizing. Fears of vulnerability lead to risk aversion, peace policing, and restricting our activities to purely non-confrontational activities—romanticized community and mutual aid events without teeth, spectacularized rallies, and the occasional heavily planned non-violent direct action. Anything that breaks out of this rigid mold—spontaneous revolt, autonomous actions at a large march, decentralized activity, unplanned or breakaway marches, the emergent chaos of insurgency—are stigmatized for “putting others at risk.” The realities of repression are reduced to simplistic, decontextualized, immaterialist check-boxes of power and privilege mapping onto pre-defined racial identities, regardless of the actual amount of repression experienced—surveillance, door knocks, interrogation, financial instability, incarceration. Strategic conversations about risk, courage, and repression are replaced with blanket statements about safety that smother the fires of resistance; we become afraid of other people exercising an agency and autonomy that we deny ourselves.

BIPOC radicalism declaws its resistance under the framework of victimization and vulnerability, yet offers impotent critique when their organizing is inevitably co-opted by non-profits. The cooptation is no accident, but is built into the limitations of BIPOC radicalism. The milieus steeped in this politics inherit much of their organizing framework not from an anarchic ethos of self-organization, nor the lessons learned in the chaotic mess of the mass revolts of the past decades, but from an Activist™( milieu rooted in specialized frameworks of heavily planned protests, visibility and spectacle, and an abstract notion of community building or mutual aid. All of these forms of activity are easily adopted by non-profits, which often can simply out-organize the BIPOC radicals with their well-resourced networks and media capacities. By exorcising the spectre of unregulated resistance, BIPOC radicalism leaves itself completely open to an endless cycle of cooptation and impotent critique.

Once demobilized, declawed, and co-opted, all BIPOC radicalism has left is a politics of complaint that is perversely dependent upon the white radical milieu it critiques. Critiques of actions, convergences, and events for not meeting the milieu’s political standards mask an underlying powerlessness and dependence; BIPOC radicals have given up the the autonomous self-organization that would give them the power to fight and build on their own terms and are reduced to making demands and registering grievances of the white radicals. The white radical milieu ultimately maintains its central position and power as the BIPOC radicals have given up their own power entirely in their expectation that white radical allies serve them and cater to their needs. Rather than recognizing the unique resources and opportunities at their disposal and forming strategies to actualize their own visions, the BIPOC radicals are reduced to a position of impotent dissatisfaction with what others are doing.

BIPOC radicalism’s politics of deference runs counter to the necessity of principled co-struggle, critical reflection, and internationalism. The invocations to “center BIPOC,” and to “follow BIPOC leadership” are constant in these milieus. In practice, this usually means to take whichever BIPOC are present in the room, are vocalizing a particular critique, as unquestionable authorities. To politically disagree is to invalidate the “lived experience” of others.

Undoubtedly, political spaces must be responsive to the feelings, desires, and needs of the people in them. But this responsiveness should be guided by principles, strategy, and politics in a spirit of collective struggle and mutual critique. It cannot be led by the purely interpersonal response of people-pleasing and uncritically following charismatic leaders—and there are many such charismatic anarcho-influencers and petty identitarian narcissists among the BIPOC radicals and their associated army of white allies.

For the guilt-ridden (whites and BIPOC alike), this response is an easy palliative—it requires one to not develop one’s own politics and principles, to not study and experiment with insurgent practices, to not be at risk of political conflict with others. Often “listen to BIPOC” ends up being a shorthand for listening to those who already agree with you or validate your own liberalism, risk aversion, and comfortable activism. Best case, you end up with a sea of passive activists who are unable to take initiative or develop their own strategies for pushing the horizon of revolution. Worst case, you drive masses of new activists into manipulation by self-appointed and self-interested leaders who are practiced at weaponizing this guilt to silence critique, pushing people through an activist meat grinder that leaves people burned out and disillusioned.

If we understand race as a modality of governance that imposes social roles, distributions of labor, and categories of being and non-being, then BIPOC radicalism is a managerial inverse of this form of governance. Using guilt, control and suppression of unruly affinities, and the purging of dissident desires, it manipulates the terrain of a movement. That this gesture is a response to a sense of powerlessness in the face of the colonial world does not make it liberatory.

The unfortunate truth is: the BIPOC radical who is in the room may not have good ideas about strategy and tactics, and should not necessarily be listened to. They may be projecting their own fears and anxieties onto a situation. Perhaps they don’t actually have the same “lived experience” of exploitation or repression as others in the room. Most importantly, they are not the only people we should be developing our politics from. If we only listen to the BIPOC radicals in these insular rooms, we will ignore the actually existing forces of anti-colonial insurrection we can learn the most from.

Do you listen to the anxious BIPOC radical telling people to not act autonomously, or to the Black rioters smashing cars and shooting fireworks at the police? Do you listen to the middle class diasporic protest organizers whose solidarity is restrained by their own class position and anxieties? Do you listen to the anti-colonial militants who may not be in the room who have advocated more insurgent strategies—including those in the global south calling for escalating, militant solidarity? Do you notice when there actually isn’t a unified BIPOC voice, a BIPOC leadership, in the room you’re in? Who is in most need of your solidarity? How will you choose?

Dis-Orienting Ourselves

BIPOC radicalism does not have a true hegemony over the identities it claims to represent. Throughout previous strains of radicalism and waves of insurgency, we find currents that actually undermine this identitarianism with a politics of affinity, complicity, and autonomous militant action at the strategic levels necessary to end the colonial world. We must find our ways back into these currents to push past the limits we currently face. Some preliminary proposals on how we might do so:

Follow the horizon of insurgent anti-colonialism, not identities and leaders. Anti-colonialism is a loose, imperfect term, but one I want to salvage from the wreckage of the twentieth century. Tearing away the baggage of representation, nationalism, and leadership that steered the anti-colonial movements into authoritarian post-colonial capitalism, we can see the living thread of anti-colonialism in the actual self-organization of the colonized and globally oppressed. This thread runs back through the aborted, partial revolutions of national liberation, tapping into the legacies of masses of colonized and oppressed people remaking their lives and transforming themselves in the process. The growing sequence of insurrections against the state and capital, the toppling of elites local and transnational, is where this force continues to live.

This insurgency appears as hydras, as Acephale, as masses and crowds, camps and riots, assemblies and networks. Everywhere there appears a leader, a spokesperson, a representative, a center, we can see the creep of counterinsurgency. Those dedicated to this insurgency must participate in its self-defense from these forces and frustrate the attempts of those who would recapture the insurgency in the terrain of identity, legibility, visibility.

Insurgent anti-colonialism must hollow out and de-center the center, and decenter ourselves. It is a process that is not about us and our individual selves, but a total remaking of the world and our subjectivity. Anti-colonialism will require us to think, feel, desire, and be differently. We should not confuse our current selves for the selves that revolutionary processes make possible. Each step we take in this process will be terrifyingly exhilarating and painfully transformative. Moving in a mass crowd, clashing with the police, destroying property, deliberating in mass assemblies, growing and preparing food at scale, distributing guerrilla medicine–after every experience that pushes us closer towards this horizon, we will find our ideas, passions, and habits fundamentally altered.

This process requires us to step into our own power—the power which we fear and resent in others and ourselves. We cannot know what we will become at the outset. We must embrace this radical uncertainty, this risk, to dive headfirst into the unknown without the comfortable guarantees that the Activists™ would offer us. We do so because we know that what we will find is far more joyful, powerful, survivable than anything this world and the milieus parasitically dependent upon it have to offer. If we are serious about this, we could make white people irrelevant to what we are doing.

We feel new capacities growing in ourselves, and the growth of these capacities connect us to friends and co-conspirators the world over. By rediscovering our own resources, traditions, and skills to bring to the war against this world, we escape the pits of our resentment of what the white radicals have. We become a force capable of organizing our own needs, building our own material base, no longer dependent on others. We lose ourselves in the swell of the mass and rediscover other ways of being. Echoing Assata—echoing Marx—we have nothing to lose but our chains.

To follow this horizon will blow apart the identities we have inherited, enabling new forms of relation, affinity, and communal life unbound by the violent fictions of identity we have inherited from the colonial world. Abolishing not just our identities, but a world that could produce such identities, would mean the communization of all things, the seizure of the means of our collective life, and the reforging of the social relations we will need to animate them. This process proceeds in slow, molecular forms in daily life and explodes rapidly during ruptures and crises. We must turn our attention away from the question of identity and leadership towards the question of our practices, infrastructures, movements, and how they can further the insurrections against the global reign of racial capitalism.

This is a doing, not a being—or a doing being totally out of control. We cannot stop thinking about the composition of our movements and how to bring new sectors of society into this insurgent process–of how to generalize insurgency particularly among the colonized. But we cannot be solely obsessed with who is doing something at the exclusion of what they are doing. Such an insurgent process will not reinforce the identitarian lines we have inherited, but will blow them apart and enable new, unimagined forms of relation, affinity, and communal life unbound by the violent fictions of identity we have inherited from the colonial world. In this crumbling world there are still possibilities to be found wherever people are experimenting with this process, regardless of their particular identities.

There is not now, and perhaps has never been, a BIPOC experience or a BIPOC community. Many will continue to inhabit communities defined by ethnic, linguistic, and cultural lines in the wake of Race. Many others already live in far more promiscuous relationships, in non-normative communities that defy easy classifications of identity. Regardless of where we find ourselves, we will need a shared ethics of conviviality and conspiracy: of how to live well with each other and how to fight together.

Everywhere people are building fires—fires for burning down the infrastructures of this world and the identities ascribed to them, fires for gathering around in new forms of communal life with shared sustenance, story, and song. To follow the horizon of insurgent anti-colonialism, follow the fires.

Readings, Inspirations, Influences

Athena. “Addicted to Losing.” Ill Will, 2024.

Táíwò, Olúfémi O. “Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference.” The Philosopher, vol. 108, no. 4. 2020.

“The Fantasy and Fate of Ethnic Studies in an Age of Uprisings: An Interview with Nick Mitchell.” Undercommoning, July 2016.

Shemon. “Fanon, Floyd, and Me.” Hardcrackers, May 2021.

Robinson, Idris. “How it Might Should Be Done.” Ill Will, August 2020.

Bey, Marquis. “Impossible Life: A Meditation on Paraontology.” Ill Will, April 2023.

Bey, Marquis. Black Trans Feminism. (Duke University Press: 2022).

CROATAN. ”Who Is Oakland: Anti-Oppression Activism, the Politics of Safety, and State Co-optation.” Escalating Identity, April 2012.

Wang, Jackie. “Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Safety.” LIES Journal, Vol. 1. 2022.

Moten, Fred and Stefano Harney. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. (Minor Compositions: 2013).

Bergman, Carla and Nick Montgomery. Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times. (AK Press/Institute for Anarchist Studies: 2017).

This essay was adapted from a talk that has been given in slightly different forms at three gatherings in three different regions of the U.S. in the last six months.

livingandfighting.net/Follow-the-Fires

Mutt. — What Color Is The Smoke? (In conversation with Follow The Fires)

First of all, I should stress that I’m from England and as such my experiences are going to be very different from anyone involved in radical (anti)politics in another continent, however lots of this article had me feeling like Haraami has shed further light on something that isn’t new, per say, but still isn’t talked about enough.

Follow The Fires assertion that “BIPOC radicalism” doesn’t exist and has likely never existed is correct. Further to this, many (if not all) attempts at fostering any kind of “BIPOC Radicalism” force together people from several tendencies with their own histories, tradjectories, intellectual traditions and tactics in a way that sadly doesn’t develop into new strategies and new clashes with the forces of capital but instead exists almost solely to critique the other parts of the movement they’re in and once they’ve taken their chunks out of the rest of the movement they’ve sadly tended to turn on themselves.

Follow The Fires is however a frustrating read in with how it never names any project, person or event that does this bullshit, illustrating our positions against the unhappy community of critique, in my opinion would require we take aim at an actual target.

Follow The Fires also fails to name a group, project or movement who exist or have existed in the opposite manner, in the aforementioned promiscuous relationships with a shared ethics of conviviality and conspiracy. One example which is glaring at me is the Maroons, who were a galaxy of Black, Mulatto, and Indigenous anti-colonial movements in the western colonies who wrought havoc on their oppressors while also forming cultures of their own. Another could be the uprising in Moss side in which white kids from Wittenshawe and Black kids from Moss side linked up and rioted outside Moss side police station. Another could be the tandem revolts in the territories claimed by the french state last year: first Kanaky, then Martinqiue, then Guadeloupe.

Unhappy Communities Of Critique: Three Examples.

To Illustrate what I think Follow The Fires is getting at, I want to provide sketches of 3 projects that at various points failed to crystallise into something dangerous. Namely RACE, APOC and Anarkatas of the UK. The former two will be unfamiliar to most readers outside the so-called US and the last one is hardly heard of at all unless you were really online during the early stages of the COVID-19 lockdown. While, they are all different in the specific instances that brought them down, they are all the same in that they put the positionality of “POC” or “Black” before everything else.

RACE (Revolutionary Anti-authoritarians of Color)

RACE was a short-lived organisation (2001–03?) who produced a one issue of a Journal also called RACE (Which I’ve sadly not been able to track down a copy of) and they put on Hip Hop and spoken word shows in the Bay Area. The culture behind their shows developed out of their own frustrations with both the Punk and Hip Hop scenes.

They pointed out how on one hand, distributing anarchist zines at Punk shows was often ‘preaching to the converted’, despite the anarchistic ethics and message of most punk music, the shows themselves were also almost always crowds of middle class white people the how macho jock hardcore dancing Americans love so much killed the vibe. While on the other hand, the Hip Hop shows were more expensive, often promoted in a misogynist way “shortest skirt gets a free drink” and when distributing zines at these shows, they’d be competing with Trotskyist and Marxist Leninist groups who were out on recruiting drives.

With this in mind, the alternative they put on was a series of Spoken Word/Open Mic style Slam Poetry and Hip Hop shows which they say helped blur the lines between audience and performer. RACE also penned a zine about Critical Race Theory, in which they (alongside a huge glossary of terms) write how CRT informs their anarchist politics and is the basis of what they hoped would be a broader anarchist theory of race. However, further theory from them never came to be as the groups very public beef with Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin appeared to be their very last post anywhere before disappearing off the radar in 2003.

The APOC Network

APOC (Autonomous/Anarchist People of Color) was a network that started in 2001, founded by Ernesto Aguilar, a social anarchist and member of Black Fist, a multi-tenancy anarchist journal and collective. He took the first steps towards the network’s growth by creating a caucus within the emerging Anarchist Black Cross Federation. He, in the initial proposal, writes that the objectives of the caucus were to:

“- To give a place for people of color in the anarchist movement and revolutionaries of color generally to strategize, network and organize solutions relating to their history, experiences and communities.

- To strive for and build principled unity among all our comrades in the struggle for freedom, autonomy, self determination and revolution.

- To address the issues faced by people of color, such as criminalization, incarceration, colonialism, white supremacy and the counterinsurgency we face and relate such with the struggle for freedom for political prisoners and Prisoners of War.

- To give support and solidarity to the thousands of people, including prison organizers and “politicised” prisoners, who are captives of a system built of centuries of oppression.”

In 2002, the organisers of the event from the very beginning grew frustrated, one wrote that he felt a lot of the people involved were middle class POC uninterested in projects that reach out to the non politicized, impoverished POC.

From the 3^rd to the 5^th of October 2003 APOC would have their first conference, this would be where the debate about organisation would begin. As part of the many workshops that were to take place during the conference, there were two different angles. One group wanted to discuss a ‘Network’ type structure. While the other, led by members of the Black Autonomy Network of Community Organizers advocating instead for (what I assume was) a more federal structure under their proposal for a ‘United Front’.

However, neither of these proposals were ever discussed as the ‘Network’ proposers suggested that the ‘United Front’ proposal be discussed as a workshop as most conference pre-registrants had not expressed any interest in making a formal APOC organisation. In response the ‘United Front’ proposers called this idea “Undemocratic” and issued a statement titled “Stop Character Assassination and Sectarianism in the APOC Movement.” which condemned the ‘Network’ proposers and several other people in the project. However, during the event itself, neither proposals were discussed or workshopped. While digging around online I believe I’ve actually found a zine version of the ‘Network’ proposal, or at least a zine with a similar name, that references an upcoming event in Detroit, the crux of it reads:

“The organizing catalyst we envision is a loosely-knit network of groups and individuals, with a basic process, organizing and communications framework established as a means of working together. Membership should be based on agreement with the mission, points of unity and statement of purpose.

[...]

Decisions should be made in a spokescouncil format, where delegates elected by local and regional groups participate in discussions and decisions (although the audience is open to all members). Committees and spokescouncil members should be accountable to the group.

Committees should be based around common work, such as process, publicity and organizing strategy, and be coordinated by a chair elected by committee members on the basis of the potential chair’s commitment to spending time in skills sharing and project completion. Committees should report back monthly to the spokescouncil.”

This chairperson thing, I should add, isn’t all that strange in the context of the neo trotskyist bullshit around in the Anarchist movement in the 2000s . The history of pretty much any and all formal orgs is typically a confusing slew of acronyms and micro tendencies named after popular authors.

From what I can tell, this was never implemented and what APOC ended up being is a loose network of groups and individuals, based almost entirely on their position as anarchists/anti-authoritarians and as racialized (as non white) people.

APOC local groups would start to pop up after this convergence, the NYC chapter, for example, who previously had mainly existed as a study group, would put on a fundraiser show/party to help with the costs of the flights to Detroit and the coming flights to Miami for the demonstrations against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), at which a contingent of APOC would form their own Bloc during the demonstrations. But at this fundraiser, three plainclothes cops followed by up to fifty in uniform barged in and assaulted the attendees. At the Miami anti FTAA demonstrations, repression would force the APOC’ers to focus largely on supporting people who were arrested, including 50 arrested while doing said arrestee support outside a prison.

In 2004, Gregory Lewis, member of the Black Autonomy Federation, who gave a karate workshop at the first conference proposed that the network becomes an organisation and introduces a tiered form of membership ranging from supporters (which could include whites) to collectives and individual organisers which can apply for grants via funds collected from membership dues, what’s perhaps perplexing about this proposal is the idea of a ‘National Spokesperson’ and the idea that an organisation like this could somehow pay for Healthcare of its members.

Later that year, Our Culture, Our Resistance, a collection of interviews by people involved with APOC was released as two zines after being turned down by AK Press.

In 2005, Roger White’s book ‘Post Colonial Anarchism’ is published, in that same year, APOC member Pedro Ribeiro pens an article, with one part really pricking my interest:

“[...] APOC is more than a safe zone for people to feel good about not being in a room without white folk, but is a conscious project of self-determination for people of color.”

So, it seems like at least some of the members of APOC had the idea that the project needed to be (or perhaps, in their eyes was) more than just a scene within a scene but somewhere to actually further their own struggles independently of the white anarchists they found so frustrating.

APOC planned another conference for early October of 2005 but the social strife caused by the effects of Hurricane Katrina led to the meeting being postponed. APOC members shifted their focus instead to contribute to relief efforts and supporting mutual aid projects such as the Common Ground Wellness Center in the Algiers neighbourhood of New Orleans who provided medical care and supplies.

Ernesto Aguilar was pushed to leave APOC after being called out for cheating on his partner [16] and the website was passed on to Greg Jackson. About a year later, the domain was lost entirely. I have no data on 2006, no doubt partially due to the lost data from the website change. In 2007, they had a conference in Asheville, North Carolina. In 2008, they held a caucus at the Nashville, Tennessee Food Not Bombs gathering and they held an APOC caucus at the Earth First Summer event.

2009 is probably their most active year and the events of it likely led to the network’s downfall. On the 7^th of February, APOC in Philadelphia held a POC-only Music and Poetry benefit for Ojore Lutalo, a Black Liberation Army prisoner and anarchist, but it’s perhaps worth noting that years later he’d recall in an interview that:

“[...] I never received a post-card from anyone who identified themselves as an ‘anarchist person of color’. Anarchist people of color today have a lot of political education to do, to decide who they are, where they’re going, and how they’re supposed to assist in the liberation of people of color.”

Hopefully people did write him letters, since they did at least include his address in the event announcement but perhaps few used the term “Anarchist Person of Color” to identify themselves. In Washington, DC APOC did banner drops, graffiti and issued a communique in which they explicitly named him. The anonymous authors wrote:

“These actions were carried out in February for the call to action of a Black Liberation “month.” We wanted to commemorate an often forgotten warrior Ojore Lutalo for the actions he carried out in support of the Black Liberation Army. There were several banner drops and other actions around the D.C. Metro area to support Ojore Lutalo, Assata Shakur and the Black Liberation Army. To all radicals and revolutionaries of color the time for action is long overdue. There is no excuse. Take action now. It’s freedom or death. We’ve chosen freedom. What will you choose?”

In March, APOC in Philadelphia put on a vegan Caribbean Dinner & Film Screening Benefit for Ojore Lutalo [20]. March 21, 2009, a group of APOC blockaded a ANSWER Coalition demonstration, annoyingly, the footage and audio of all of this hasn’t been saved but one line in the report stuck out like a sore thumb: “Hezbollah flag waved high!!” Now, I’m probably clutching at straws here but the idea that anarchists would wave flags of a political party kinda helps guide me towards a common problem in groups like this where people, sometimes, aren’t anarchist enough. Even anarchists in fuckin’ Lebanon don’t meatride a political party responsible for the represssion of any semblance of autonomous political self organisation in the country.

Where things get really deppressing is the Crimethinc conference in July of 2009. One report about it written by members of APOC who attended reads:

“What seemed like an awesome, performative disruption—a reclamation of space, an expression of anger, an opening up of dialogue—shifted quickly into something else entirely. At the end of a night of Cabaret at the CrimethInc. Convergence in late July, about half a dozen anarchist/autonomist people of color—some who had participated in the convergence all week and some who came into town just for this “action”—stormed into a hall full of people, reading a statement about gentrification and white supremacy, while screaming slogans.

People watched in silence, uncertain of how to respond to such intense aggression from this small group of friends. With no provocation, the disrupters started grabbing people’s backpacks and sleeping bags and throwing them out into the hallway, under a rallying cry of, “Get the fuck out of here! Get the fuck out of Pittsburgh! We’re not fucking kidding!” They cleared people’s bags from the shelves, from off the ground; they grabbed lamps, chairs, anything they could get their hands on. Tossing everything out of the room, people’s belongings were dumped into jumbled piles everywhere. The disrupters screamed that white people were gentrifying the neighborhood the Convergence was in—neighborhoods everywhere—and that they wouldn’t stop what they were doing until all of the white people from the convergence were out of the building, out of Pittsburgh. It was the middle of the night, and almost everyone had been staying in that building. With nowhere to go, many people started to leave.

The disrupters became increasingly aggressive with the people in the room. They got up in people’s faces, and yelled at them to leave, “Go back to Europe! I’m sick of looking at your white fucking face!” Provoked into fear and panic, many people left the room, tears streaming down their faces. Others responded with a variety of racist comments demonstrating just how far a lot of people have to go in terms of understanding white supremacy and privilege. The disrupters used thinly veiled intimidation and threats, like screaming, “Get the fuck out of here! I am not a pacifist!” while pulling bags out of people’s hands; they muscled past the people who tried to block the flow of backpacks and purses out into the hallway, thrusting the belongings into people’s heads, backs, and other parts of their bodies.

In an attempt to deescalate the situation, people eventually started encouraging everyone to leave. Convergence attendees poured out onto the sidewalks, and started organizing alternate housing and carpools. Many people’s belongings were still lost and strewn all over the convergence space, but with the police arriving to investigate the scene, everyone had to go somewhere. By nearly 2 am, all of the people who did not identify as people of color—and all those too traumatized by the aggression of the disrupters—were out of the upstairs, yet the disrupters still refused to leave. Some people of color from the convergence called a caucus with the disrupters, but after an unproductive attempt at dialogue, finally, the disrupters left.

Apparently, a few friends of the disrupters had known about the planned disruption beforehand, but afterwards, everyone apologetically explained that they had expected the disruption to have a radically different character. Some people mentioned the feminist disruption of an anarchist gathering in the UK where women hijacked a meeting to screen a movie about feminism when describing what they had imagined. We certainly hope people would have intervened if they had foreseen the aggression and violence the disrupters chose to employ.

Several attendees made their own personal accounts, an interesting fragment reads:

“In 2005, not more than 250 miles away, over 600 black and brown folks rioted in Toledo to intervene in a National Socialist Movement/white power demonstration and ended up setting fire to the bar frequented by local politicians and police. If the kind of anger and resentment the disruptors felt was really shared by the neighborhood, it seems likely that CrimethInc. would have been targeted similarly. It is disgusting that the disruptors tokenized the Garfield community the way it did.”

This is all rather contrasting with the “Smack a White Boy Round Two” reportback issued by the disrupters, it’s worth noting that I’m no huge fan of CrimethInc. But the critique put forward by the Disrupters isn’t too hot, especially considering that CrimethInc’s politics are nothing but a product of the people inside the project, some of whom are or at least were, also members of APOC.

The report is long and vague but I want to concentrate a little on the language they use and some of the specifics of what they say. At the very start they rightfully go for the whites with dreads, but then right after they have a crack at “crusties with their scabies friends” they then go into the methodology of the disruption, as they moved backpacks around unopposed in the dark, before yelling at people and having the scuffle. As the cops turned up the mood died down and they had the aforementioned failed dialogue with the other people of color at the event, they then packed up and left.

The “Why was the CrimethInc. Convergence specifically targeted?” section reveals that this whole disruption was the conclusion of a failed boycott effort of the conference. Also, alarmingly, in this section they point out how two Abusers were at the conference, if this is the case, why didn’t the disrupters target them specifically, instead? The energy expended into other APOC members in an action that did little more than doom the network over the next years could’ve been targeted at a real target.

Part of the The “Why CrimethInc.?” section reads:

“CrimethInc has been/is the breeding ground for white anarchists. They encourage the culture of dropping out of society, which makes the assumption that the reader/attendee has that privilege and therefore their words speak only to those that have it.”

I can’t help but think: Do we not have several examples of Black and Indigenous “oogles” who’ve dropped out, hopped trains, stolen and couchsurfed their way around for years?

In the “Why the White “Anarchist” Movement?” the authors correctly point out how “The anarchist scene reproduces the same oppressive social relationships we face throughout society, and furthers the notion that oppression does not exist within the movement. This silences many.” and how “Euro-centric anarchism that also fetishizes people of colors struggles” and further compare this to the whiteness in the Feminist movement, the Gay Rights movement and so on.

The article then ends with a long list of rather funny quotes. Where you can see a hint at more reflections from APOC’ers is in the comment section, the comments themselves really show how half baked 2000s anarchism was, makes me almost feel better about today’s nonsense. Overall It’s about 70/30 on positive and negative feelings on what happened that night. One rather interesting comment by someone called in the burgh reads.

This was found on the table after the action:

Saturday, July 25, 2009

A crimethinc ex-worker communiqué

The police will not respect your social views, sexual preferences, race or place of origin.

You are not here to hook up, you are here to organise.

If you are unprepared for a raid of ANY KIND, then you will put everyone around you in jeopardy.

This is not a joke, anarchy and activism is not a safe and cozy place.

It is tear gas, mace and barbed wire, people die for these causes.

Whatever was said last night, 100 people were caught by surprise,

100 people who will now be more effective activists.

Props to those members of APOC for shaking this convention.

Props to everyone here for not running and hiding, for staying to confront these issues.

For crimethinc organisers, a simulated raid should be part of every crimethinc convergence.

The consensus in this room is that this was an act of love and growth.

Relax, The future is not written.

A crimethinc communique.

In that same year, interestingly, Bash Back! A insurrectionary queer anarchist tendency/project/movement referenced in the Smack a white Boy round two reportback, were the hosts of a communique called “Smack a White Boy Part Three: This one’s for Silvia” which reads:

In September 2009, Madison APOC made its grand entrance into the world with an action against David Carter, a self-proclaimed historian who denies any significant participation of trans folk and people of color in Stonewall. He also frames the queer liberation movement in the US as a gay white man’s movement, not to mention he shit-talks Sylvia and Marsha to no end. (feel free to Google his name and read the transcripts of his speeches). The University of Wisconsin-Madison had invited Carter to speak on campus, and as the room started to fill with white intellectuals and college students, madAPOC got into position and.

“Trans, women, POC- you can’t write us out of history!”

Copies of a communique were thrown into the air and scattered across the lecture room. It read:

We are a group of autonomous individuals collectively known as APOC (Anarchist/Autonomous/Anti-Authoritarian People of Color). We are not affiliated with any other local groups or organizations. We strive to smash every form of oppression, including white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, heterosexism, speciesism, transphobia, queerphobia, environmental racism, ageism, classism and authoritarianism. This is our response to this fake historian’s “interpretation” of history.

The Stonewall uprising was a series of actions by queer and transfolk, both whites and people of color. The queer and trans population of Greenwich Village acted boldly to defend themselves against police brutality in their own neighborhood.

We are disgusted by David Carter’s blatant racism and transphobia. Transfolk, women, and people of color have been crucial to not only the Stonewall uprising, but also to the bigger struggle for queer and trans liberation. With his interpretation, Carter has attempted to write us out of our own history. If he takes it upon himself to talk about a movement, he should be held accountable for getting that shit right. Queer insurrection is not only for white males, and we are here to make sure he doesn’t forget it.

David Carter, we hope you get what you deserve.

Love, APOC

Smack ‘em all, let’s spread the Madness.

WE’LL SEE YOU IN MILWAUKEE!”

After all of this, on the 16^th and 17^th of October there’s a summit in Philadelphia, hosted by some of the disrupters from the CrimethInc conference, then there’s a 3 year gap where I could find no info on what the network was up to. Then in 2012 they held a convergence in New Orleans and the New York chapter held a film screening and dance party. After this point the trail kinda goes cold, what remains of APOC’s digital footprint is two Facebook pages, one of which is now posting articles from PSL (Party For Socialism and Liberation, a Marxist Leninist Party/Cult).

Anarkatas of the UK

During the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown in the UK, a friend of mine nudged me online to check out Anarkatas of the UK. A Facebook page, with a poster advertising a study group for Black Anarchists. I was excited thinking I’d soon have something to look forward to since my schedule at the time pretty much only looked like going to work and doom scrolling.

So attending the first meeting, we read a piece by Malatesta, chatted and then disappeared, the 2^nd piece was a longer one by Angela Davis and most hadn’t done the required reading, so I offered the others a chance to get a TL:DR before the meeting would start. I was told off for this, it then got weirder, we were told that the next (mandatory) reading would be a section from the Quran, which, as you can imagine, no one turned up to.

This is around the time I dipped, that summer, as we were squabbling amongst ourselves. Black teenagers resisted the eviction of an “illegal” house party in Brixton by overpowering the police. Some then brought a table to the frontline and snapped its legs off, using them as batons to smack the sides of the retreating police van with a creative and destructive methodology that negation is made of.

Years later I was made aware that the whole project only existed because a Black person decided to kick off with all the white Anarchists in a mutual aid project, demanding everyone else leave and then using the shell of that group to create the Anarkatas of the UK project and after it eventually collapsed this person went on to use a similar tactic to mess with a local queer group, embarrassing.

The smoke is jet fucking Black!

For me, studying projects like Race and APOC along with my own experiences both in projects that put positionality as people who are racialized as non-white before any actual (Anti-)politics and being tokenized to in the white anarchist scene has taught me alot and I’ve come away with 3 conclusions.

1.

Open projects, no matter their racial or cultural makeup, should be viewed as a way to meet people, look who’s joining you in the collective eye-rolls at the bullshit and move with them instead. Get your crew of disgruntled ones together and start trouble at the liberal demos, use crowds as distractions, go tagging as practice, steal shit as prefiguration, be brave, be dangerous, take care of eachother. By acting, we’ll find both what we’re capable of and hopefully run into more people who are ready to act alongside us, look for the people at these pointless parades who throw flares at the police, look at exactly who the police are trying to grab and back them up.

1.

Our challenge as anarchists is both supporting these ruptures where they do appear, to help push them from just being a feature of a beautiful night into a new way of living. Setting the ROE (Rules of Engagement) for ourselves is, in my view, a way out of the often perceived helplessness when we face the reality that most “social movements” only serve to suck the life out of the people involved in them.

1.

If anything happens here that is going to disrupt the flow of daily life, likely it’s gonna be fronted by the people who are under double or triple oppression, weather that’s the young Black woman who started it all in 2011 by throwing rocks at the police, the Chinese teenagers in France in 2017, or the Romani families in Harehills last year.

When the next outrage has us boil over, let’s not allow it to end at nightfall when the protest stewards hand their jackets in and clock out, let’s give these pigs, their defenders and their false critics the reckoning they deserve, none shall escape!

Full Notes and more by Mutt. are available on his website:

ananarchistcalledmutt.noblogs.org/post/2025/04/30/smoke

Mar — Introvert’s Guide to the Insurrection

Note: This guide is intended only as polite recommendation because we would not tell anyone what to do, obviously. Please use with caution.

Step one:

Wake up. You did it. Well done.

Step two:

Feed cat.

Step three:

Do your morning meditation and set your intention for today (insurrection).

Step four:

Make a cup of tea or coffee, and a big healthy breakfast. You’ll need the energy.

Step five:

Gather your things. Take your emotional support squishy and/or crystal which you have charged under the full moon light and put it safely in your pocket.

Step six:

Don’t forget the rifle.

Step seven:

Make your way to the local library where you and your fellow insurrectionists are gathering. Go over the plan together. You start to feel a little anxious, but gain quiet confidence because while everyone else was out partying you have been sitting in the comfort of your own home perfecting reloading rounds in record speed.

Step eight:

As you reach for your phone to put it in the safe box [11], you see a notification. It’s your astrology app telling you to seek guidance from the ancestors. This is less zen than it sounds and is a little bit stressful actually because your communist grandparents who fought in the independence war back home would be so disappointed in you if this fails. Use that shame as fuel.

Step nine:

Head over to the insurrection. Today we are seizing and commoning land “owned” by the elderly gentleman who lives in the Grade II-listed estate down the valley, the one with the big pond with the fountain in it. You feel kind of bad because he’s actually nice to you when you do his gardening, plus he’s got arthritis and has been looking especially sad and lonely since his pet praying mantis Pedro died. Then you remember he’s wealth-hoarding landed gentry who must be overthrown.

Step ten:

Of course the motherfucker calls the cops. This is okay because you are prepared. Do not talk to cops, which is easy because you are Gifted and Talented at not talking to anyone.

Step eleven:

Outgunned, the cops call in the army. The regiment arrives but they are paralysed. No one in living memory has experience with anarchists successfully organising anything remotely close to a mutual aid project without everyone falling out and never speaking to each other again, let alone an armed insurrection [12]. They capitulate in confusion.

Step twelve:

We win. Darren [2b] gives you a high-five. You glance at your watch and realise it’s not even two o’clock. Join the rest of your comrades who have taken over Alastair’s [13] kitchen and cook a massive community meal onhisour Aga.

Step thirteen:

Finish lunch and politely take leave so you can go and have your afternoon nap.

Step fourteen:

Nap.

Step fifteen:

Wake up from nap.

Step sixteen:

Normally you would spend the rest of the evening reading the book/pamphlet/zine you picked up at the last Anarchist Book Fair but decide you will make an exception since it is the insurrection after all so you muster all strength to go down the pub. You are more nervous about this than about the insurrection. There, you find everyone liberated from the surrounding villages celebrating. You surprise yourself by cheering and, for two regrettable seconds, dancing. For the fourth time in your adult life, you enjoy the presence of others.

Step seventeen:

Lol who are you kidding. You decide you have stayed at the insurrection party long enough to be socially acceptable and quietly weave your way out the door. Step outside. The night sky is clear and the stars are bright. Take a deep breath and smile.

Step eighteen:

Go home, feed Luciente [14], and get ready for bed.

Step nineteen:

Fall deeply asleep, dreaming of more insurrections to come.

[2b] Not his government name.

Anon — Selections From Disquietude Laboratory (2023)

Translated from ‘Disquietude Laboratory’ (‘Laboratorium Kegundahan’) poetry collection published by Der Einzege, 2023.

MARHABAN

Botol kaca, bahan bakar

Kacamata, sarung tangan.

Ku keluarkan semuanya

Kau perhatikan percikannya.

Kita kan bermain

Aku dimensi yang lain.

GREETINGS

Glass bottle, fuel

Goggles, gloves.

I take them out

You watch the sparks.

We shall play

I am another dimension.

--

MAINTEXT

Bagiku kolektif hanyalah kesadaran anarkis

pada titik paling berandal.

MAINTEXT

To me the collective is anarchist consciousness

at its most rebellious.

--

KONTRA ARKAIS

Mula-mula mempersenjatai kita

Dengan taktik, granat, tanpa harap.

Kemudian semua melupa

Pada gejala tiap amarah yang dipunya.

Diri lepas dari semuanya.

COUNTER-ARCHAIC

First arming us

With tactics, grenades, without hope.

Then we forget

at first symptom of anger.

The self lets go of all.

Translated by Mar, you can download/read the entire zine in Indonesian here:

archive.org/details/stensil-der-einzige-folder

You can follow it’s creators here: instagram.com/__dereinzige & linktr.ee/dereinzige

available

V/A — Selections from KOMPILASI PUIZINE (2025)

INSUREKSI ADALAH PUISI!

Puisi saja takkan cukup, anarkisme juga takkan cukup. Kita perlu keduanya, serangan-serangan indah, bahasa-bahasa yang tak dimengerti: berada di luar logika kekuasaan. Kita perlu banyak penyair yang siap melempar batu dan peledak. Kita juga perlu anarkis-anarkis yang memiliki puisi di dalam dirinya! Ketidaklogisan puisi, senjata yang masuk akal untuk menghancurkan dominasi!

Hidup kita penuh akan penderitaan, maka jalan satu-satunya adalah pemberontakan yang takkan pernah usai. Sampai semua bebas, sampai negara dan seisinya luluhlantak rata dengan tanah. Pertarungan kita tidak berhenti di sini, tidak berhenti di setiap puisi yang kita tulis. Pertarungan kita melampaui setiap tanggal, melampaui masyarakat, melampaui negara dan kapitalisme. Pertarungan kita berpencar ke segala Arah!

Puisi-puisi kita tidak berhenti di setiap lembaran kertas, di beranda sosial media, di setiap komunitas sastra serta di museum kesenian yang dijaga satpam-satpam kesenian yang tua, banyak omong dan menjengkelkan. Puisi-puisi kita jelek, kurus, onar dan tak bisa diatur. Keindahan-keindahan puisi kita adalah teror: molotov, bom rakitan, petasan dan batu yang

menyerang titik-titik vital negara dan kapitalisme. Puisi-puisi kita adalah api, menjalar serentak membakar matahari!

PUISI ADALAH INSUREKSI!

INSURRECTION IS POETRY!

Poetry alone is not enough, anarchism is not enough either. We need both, beautiful attacks, languages ​​that are not understood: beyond the logic of power. We need many poets who are ready to throw stones and explosives. We also need anarchists who have poetry in them! The illogicality of poetry, a reasonable weapon to destroy domination!

Our lives are full of suffering, so the only way is a rebellion that will never end.

Until all are free, until the country and everything in it is destroyed to the ground. Our fight does not stop here, it does not stop in every poem we write. Our fight goes beyond every date, beyond society, beyond the state and capitalism. Our fight spreads in all directions!

Our poems do not stop on every sheet of paper, on social media homepages, in every literary community and in art museums guarded by old, talkative and annoying art guards. Our poems are ugly, thin, troublemaking and unruly. The beauties of our poems are terror: molotov cocktails, homemade bombs, firecrackers and stones that attack vital points of the state and capitalism. Our poems are fire, spreading and burning the sun!

POETRY IS INSURRECTION!

–

SIALNYA, ORANG TUAKU POLISI

Oleh G Kribo, anak dari penjual motor antik dan buruh setrika, bukan anak polisi

Papa Mama bolehkah aku durhaka

Saban hari serupa neraka

Aku anggap malapetaka

Aku percaya hidup ini

hanya menjalankan takdir

Tapi aku percaya ditakdirkan untuk melawan tirani

Karena negara tak pernah beri hidup kita sebuah arti

Kita hanya mencari diksi dan berjuang lalu mati

Tapi kobaran api tak pernah berhenti

Tuhan, jika kau ada, kaulah yang pertama kubunuh

Terlahir dari rahim mesin pembunuh

Aku muak diasuh oleh penyembah peluru

UNFORTUNATELY, MY PARENTS ARE POLICE

By G Kribo, son of an antique motorbike seller and an ironing worker, not the son of a policeman

Papa Mama, can I be disobedient

Every day is like hell

I consider it a disaster

I believe this life is

only carrying out destiny

But I believe I am destined to fight tyranny

Because the state never gives our lives a meaning

We only seek diction and fight then die

But the flames never stop

God, if you exist, you are the first I will kill

Born from the womb of a killing machine

I am sick of being raised by a bullet worshiper

–

BERINGAS

Oleh R A

Ruai takdir begitu jalang

sama muka kita terpendam dengan pelik

nyata terang habis dibakar—dilupakan

apa yang kau ambil dari semua siasat busuk itu?

Jiwa dan hati manusia dihapuskan

dengan nyata kulihat tipu daya ini benar adanya

rentang waktu bergulir menuju akhir

semakin jelas kudengar tawa lepasmu sialan!

Tiap-tiap makna dilucuti

memperkosa ruang pikir

agar semua orang berkata

ini benar dan aku adalah aku!

Rayakanlah kemenanganmu

ambil dan kulai tiap makna yang kau berangus

tapi nyalaku akan selalu menerjang

membakar tiap mimpi buruk yang kau wujudkan

VIOLENT

By R A

Ruai fate is so bitchy

with our faces buried with complicated

clearly clear burned out—forgotten

what did you take from all those rotten tricks?

The soul and heart of man are erased

I clearly see this trickery is true

the span of time rolls towards the end

I hear your damn free laughter more clearly!

Every meaning is stripped away

raping the space of thought

so that everyone says

this is true and I am me!

Celebrate your victory

take and conquer every meaning that you have destroyed

but my flame will always strike

burn every nightmare that you have made come true

–

BOTOL

Oleh A N

Hari ke hari

Pekan ke pekan

Kondisi negara

Makin gak karuan.

Pelan-pelan

Kita harus

Nyiapin bekal

Buat ngehantam

Aparat sialan.

“Puter dulu botolnya

kawan”

Orang kecil

Kayak kita

Juga bisa

Kalo cuman

Ngebakar gedung

Tempat ngumpulnya

Aparat bajingan.

“Tuang bensinnya kawan”

Jangan kebelah

Apalagi ngebuka

Celah.

Paling penting

Jaga kanan-kiri

Biar gak gampang

Diprovokasi.

Karena

Musuh kita

Sebenernya cuman

Satu.

Yaitu, negara

Beserta

Kroni-kroninya.

“Nyalakan dan lempar kawan”

BOTTLE

By A N

Day by day

Week by week

The condition of the country

Is getting worse.

Slowly

We have to

Prepare supplies

To hit

The damn authorities.

“Spin the bottle first comrade”

Little people

Like us

Can also

If it’s just

Burning down buildings

Where the bastard authorities gather.

“Pour the gasoline, friend”

Don’t split

Let alone open

Gaps.

Most importantly

Guard the right and left

So that you won’t be easily

Provoked.

Because

Our enemy

Is actually only

One.

Namely, the state

Along with

its cronies.

“Light it up and throw it, friend”

Taken from a pair of zines published in Indonesia in 2025. Machine translated, you can download both zines here: ananarchistcalledmutt.noblogs.org/post/2025/04/07/kompilasi-puizine

you can follow the publishers work at instagram.com/sengisengzine & linktr.ee/talaspress

poet of da soil — untitled

internatonalise tha basque space program

turn dat christmas rebellion in2

easter rebellion

halloween rebellion

18^th of june

february

and november rebellion

every single day rebellion

bring walls of jericho down

and burn babylon 2 tha ground

slavery never ends

just metamorphosizes

while killing off butterflies

caterpillars

and tha flora they call home

so grit your teeth and mash up tha concrete

grab a lighter

grab a bottle/brick/shoe/fist/teeth

and get 2 work

or should eye say fuck work and get 2 living

poetofdasoil.substack.com

[1] kalasnyikov.hu/dokumentumok/frank-kitson-gangs-countergangs.pdf

[2] iwoc.iww.org.uk/2024/11/03

[3] actforfree.noblogs.org/2025/01/29

[4] pearnuallak.com/against-hate-crime

[5] returnfire.noblogs.org/post/2024/03/25 Page 49.

[6] For more like this: www.notrace.how/threat-library

[7] thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/post/2025/01/26

[8] ananarchistcalledmutt.noblogs.org/post/2025/03/08/the-kkke

[9] archive.ph/65VH6

[10] thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/post/2025/03/30

[11] Never take a smartphone to an action, obviously.

[12] Last time, Darren [2b] forgot the Twitter password to update the event poster so everyone showed up three days late.

[13] Sorry I forgot to tell you his name earlier but it doesn’t matter anyway because he has fled never to be seen again.

[14] Your cat.