The Power of Having Diverse Anarchisms
Building Alternatives Outside Neoliberal Globalisation

Introduction

A Little Bit of Context

It should go without saying, but it appears that nearly every individual and collective we encounter is struggling with self-organisation and mutual support. Almost every conversation that we have across those we connect with highlights the same few problems. We hear complaints of groups that prefer to focus on ‘building numbers’ even as they engage in supporting and defending abusers and bigots within their ranks, further pushing people out. We hear complaints of exclusionary behaviours with groups or organisers completely ignoring almost any degree of accessibility and often refusing to do what it takes to maintain a healthy environment. We still see people trying to create hierarchies of inclusion which, they claim, is a result of “not having enough resources” to do everything and having to focus on only the “most important” actions.

This isn’t to say that everyone is struggling in precisely the same ways because there is quite a bit of nuance and context in our varying regionalities, but there certainly seems to be an immense amount of overlap. Because of this, we frequently notice how burnt out people seem to be and how excruciatingly tired everyone is whenever we talk to them. It’s also genuinely difficult to not notice in our own experiences how many people seem to think that they don’t have responsibility to the others around them, especially when most of the complaints that people have seem to be very similar and are treated as nothing more than someone being a broken record when they keep pointing out problems that have gone unaddressed.

We don’t understand this attitude. If there are any problems, why is there such a desire to sweep them under the rug or ignore them until something else changes for the better?

We say this now because, as we’ve been listening to so many others and engaging with or reflecting upon our own collectives and groups, we have noticed another common theme: Many people have genuinely lost faith in those around them, and they frequently feel that those individuals and groups who claim to support them would actually never do so when the need arises.

It also seems that many are also tired because of the lack of community and are constantly feeling as if there is nowhere they truly belong to. Not only have they had to struggle to find somewhere to which they can belong, they have found that the few organisations and collectives they could find are not equipped or are entirely unwilling to support them and everyone else. This can be seen in the sudden dissolution of many of the online communities that sprang up during COVID lockdowns, falling apart almost as quickly as they were built. Very little was done to ensure that we maintained these connections after everything went “back to normal,” especially with regards to those who have been unable to be physically present for whatever reason. Perhaps—though this is said with a glimmer of hope for a better explanation for our dissipating organisational and community spaces—most of the people who had once collaborated with others online are now busy engaging in local offline movements. Maybe, we hope, the collectives are doing more to build and support their local communities.

Because when we consider online spaces, nearly every space that we had created fell apart and moved back to focusing on offline spaces and activities, leaving many of the most vulnerable in even more lonely, alienated, and precarious positions. We’ve been left struggling to find remnants of the communities that we had before the pandemic started, but we’ve also been left to watch our online communities gradually deteriorate in favour of things that feel “more real” because many of us have never truly shifted our understanding that online spaces are not a replacement for the offline but are, in fact, part of the same realities and should support one another. So we still have to wonder if they are doing what they can to meet the needs of everyone, rather than merely offering empty platitudes and half-assed excuses.

It’s difficult to really know. We can only really speak to our own experiences in the spaces we inhabit, looking at the ways in which they have seen dwindling participation because of their unwillingness to ensure the safety of the people they claim to support. We have seen people proudly proclaim that they are part of a specific collective and tout their position within it, knowing full well that they have done very little within it—or have, in some cases, supported causes antithetical to their collective’s goals—and are only using the name to try and bolster themselves and their reputation among others.

They desire to build their own version of some kind of ‘anarchist’ credentials, adding every interaction to their activist resumé.

We also feel like the spaces that have been available to us are entirely atomised and frequently alienated, both from the place around us and larger movements. Sometimes it’s because others refuse to engage with certain ideas because some element of them would upset the status quo that they enjoy. For us, this has been most clear with regards to marginalised anarchisms, especially anarcha-feminism and queer and trans anarchisms. It has also been brutally obvious every single time we mention anything to do with the abolition of the school and academia or when we state clearly that we should support and encourage youth liberation. We have seen the co-opting of non-white anarchisms (by people who refuse to reflect upon their own whiteness) and non-Western anarchisms (by people who think it’s logically coherent to support certain imperialist states over another).

The many anarchisms of marginalised people are continually used as tools and weapons by those who, though they deny it, maintain support for the very hierarchies that we seek to dismantle. Clearly, there are problems that we desperately need to address.

To top all of that off, we see groups that are practically paralysed out of fear in this high-surveillance world where we are being targeted by the increasingly fascist and authoritarian governments thriving around us. All too often, people use that fear to excuse continuous inaction (even with regards to the simplest of activities) and to continually silence those interested in doing what they can. This has been particularly easy to observe in interactions between citizens and immigrants, where the former often complain about the lack of participation of the latter while doing very little to help ensure that their safety won’t end in their deportation.

While today it feels as if there is a constant cry about how we “can’t do that,” it’s hard to not remember the many times where there have always been people trying to find every loophole they possibly could in order to do whatever was possible. It feels like we’ve become too complacent and have forgotten that every little bit helps.

Reasoning: Persistent Frustrations

It’s undeniable that, for many people born after the 1970s, it has become increasingly easier to internalise and normalise a range of neoliberal values. For successive decades, we have seen the normalisation of beliefs that have supported hyper-individualisation, continued privatisation of the public sphere, the enabling of corporations to control vast swathes of the planet and social life, stagnating and decreasing incomes, and governments providing as much support for corporations and the wealthy which they then ‘pay for’ with cuts to whatever public spending remains. Though these beliefs have been around in some form for decades or centuries, the propaganda that they spread to support these ideas has become far more accessible to current generations and has permeated even some of our most “radical” movements. In some cases, it’s even built into and hidden within some of the most accessible media: books (especially non-fiction and textbooks), podcasts, television series, and movies.

It’s also necessary for us to recognise that most of the revolutionary movements that occurred throughout history have been violently erased, co-opted, whitewashed, and made equivalent to authoritarianism in the name of silencing and derailing any possible future movements. While we have ample evidence of this throughout history, we have all seen it happening to varying degrees in real-time. For those of us participating in or supporting the movements against the Palestinian genocide, we saw a number of people with media platforms try to equate the (mostly mild) actions of student protesters to the Nazis. For those of us working within abolition movements, we have watched as the movement to abolish prisons has morphed into some bizarre version of pretending to defund them while giving them more money than they could ever want. This happens all too often, and way too many people are content to let it pass with little—if any—challenge.

After all, we have been living in a world of brutal extraction, where those who operate the system’s machinery seek to take or destroy everything they possibly can from everyone and everything on this planet. This includes our movements and whatever we can do to make the world better.

The pandemic has also been a divisive point with many ignoring it for the sake of ‘normalcy’, and it has been a constant source of frustration for many due to the hyper-individualisation surrounding our responses to it. Along with the poor responses, both in terms of society and individual, it has also made it far easier to alienate us from each other. Though lockdowns were helpful to halt the spread of disease, nothing had been done during them to ensure that communities were supported as a whole. We saw little done that would later mitigate any future epidemics and pandemics, let alone any action that would help decrease the spread of any other diseases. The buildings that we exist within were left without updates to their ventilation systems that would help everyone, and nothing was done to improve air quality anywhere (at minimum). Tools that people need to ensure the safety and health of themselves and others, like masks, were not always made easily accessible or even cost-effective.

Now that we’re post-lockdown (but definitely not post-COVID), it’s even more evident than before that nothing will ever be done by those who have the most resources to do anything at all to ensure that everyone can healthily participate in “normal” society. In fact, what we’re seeing is that many governments (particularly those within the United States) are trying to make it illegal for people to wear masks in response to recent protests and are happily supporting eugenicist policies that further alienate and segregate disabled and immunocompromised people (while also working toward disabling more people).

For many of us, we’re still struggling to find each other. Gathering again to self-organise is most certainly not the only issue here because it seems that even our own movements, collectives, and anarcho-syndicalist unions have suffered from disintegration prior to 2019. These things were already happening, and much of it was because so many issues were wilfully left unaddressed and were seen as unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Those who purport to be upholding the core values of anarchism, such as anti-capitalism and the desire for the liberation of all, have been enabling the dilution of these values in a myriad of ways. This has disrupted the possible collectivisation of our activities and has ignored the fights against all forms of oppression within our own circles.

Honestly, there are many things in which we can analyse to understand the situations in which we find ourselves in 2024, and we would encourage everyone to be brave enough to analyse them by returning to our historical roots (though, we also believe that we should not dwell purely upon those). In order to learn from our mistakes, we need to be self-critical of our own inconsistencies. We often see how proud we are to speak of and celebrate historical events such as the antifascist struggle during the Spanish Civil War, but then it’s absurdly clear how we lack the courage to face why Mujeres Libres started due to the misogyny and internal oppression of the comrades in the CNT against women. Furthermore, there are very few who celebrate Mujeres Libres who even want to learn from the problematic views that they have held against sex workers and trans people. Why is it that we refuse to look at the negatives within our movements? Why do we only want to focus on the positives?

We should be able to reflect upon the many and varied moments of anarchist (and anarchist-adjacent) history in order to acknowledge how our own romanticisation and idolisation of our movements’ histories and supposed ‘key’ figures negatively impacts us today. We would like to acknowledge the efforts of every person fighting for anarchist ideals and especially those who have changed themselves and their realities in order to live according to the practices of mutual aid, liberation and freedom for all, and creating communities outside the state-capitalist machinery. Instead, we find that people will either glorify these long-living organisations despite the harm they engage in or tell people to be shut up and wait until we’ve “won” to criticise them.

Using our previous example, if any part of the CNT is happy to engage in transphobia and work with the police because their own people are speaking against them, as it happened with the Barcelona branch of the CNT in 2023, why should we remain silent? What movement are we disrupting by criticising them for their lack of principles and their failure to understand what liberation truly means? The truth might hurt right now, but it’s beyond time to acknowledge when our own infrastructure is being used to spread harm.

This brings us back to our current historical situation. We have deep worries and fears about how to move forward, and these are intimately tied to our daily lives and realities. With this text, we would like to share some thoughts in order to try to understand what we are resisting and, at the same time, perhaps put forward some possibilities for action and resistance. Currently, we want to focus on three different topics that are interrelated, which spring from a critical vision of our movements that have so often been based on white European experiences. These include how we organise our movements, how diversity exists within them, and how our fight against the state has expanded greatly to include local and global corporations.

Organisation Within Our Movements: Building Mutual Care, Accountability, and Collective Responsibility

Humans are, in both delightful and infuriating ways, contradictory beings. We’re imperfect and sometimes strange, but we still maintain the capacity to reflect upon our actions, adjust our behaviours, and learn in many of the same ways that other animal species learn because we are a species of animal. Still, it seems as if some people enjoy wielding power over others, refusing to even examine their own flaws and toxic attitudes. They willingly neglect trying to recognise aspects of ourselves that stand as obstacles to the very principles we claim to hold so dear.

In short, they refuse to learn.

This is not a new revelation, either. It has been something that many of our movements have struggled with, as people sought ways to climb to the top of the hierarchy (even when there wasn’t supposed to be one). This was pointed out many times and across so many movements, including by Assata Shakur who highlighted the exact phenomenon in her own autobiography when she was discussing the Black Panther Party and some of the many organisational challenges that they faced (which were often ignored by leadership, despite being recognised by most people). Her words then still ring true today, and they are applicable to so many organisations and collectives: “Constructive criticism and self-criticism are extremely important for any revolutionary organisation. Without them, people tend to drown in their mistakes, not learn from them.”

So let us take some time to be self-critical and reflective.

Historically, most types of anarchism have shared some common principles that have backed our revolutionary intent to (re)build new communities outside of capitalism and the state. Time after time, many of us have had to endure experiences with manarchists, anarcho-extractionists, enwhitened individuals, and those who defend and support violent and abusive individuals while claiming to stand “in solidarity” with us. Not only are these people enabled to share space with us, but they are often some of the most protected people within our organisations and are allowed to remain while their victims are frequently kicked out, removed, pushed to leave of their “own volition,” and purged. Their defenders and collaborators will waste our time and energy excusing the bigoted or violent actions, making various claims that amount to how the organisation or collective will break down should that person suffer any kind of consequences.

However, those of us who have witnessed these kinds of situations know that the organisation will break down, even if it continues to exist. Disappointing though it may be, having experienced this multiple times is precisely why some of us understand that we haven’t seen advancement in collective liberation in the last few decades. It doesn’t seem to matter how much “progress” we make, since it often feels like we’re right back at square one and fighting many of the same fights. It’s as if some people have been holding down the brakes, trying their best to hold all of us back by excluding us, attacking us in different violent ways, and trying to maintain control over our shared spaces and our communication channels.

We can’t create free communities while we still face these internal oppressions. We can’t build together when we have to face and resist internal attacks from people who are supposed to stand in solidarity with us. We have to begin to acknowledge and determinedly work to become conscious of how we behave, ensuring that we do not concede our principles along the way.

We cannot continue, particularly within anarchist spaces, to have the same struggles that we’ve seen throughout history over and over again. None of us can afford to continue many of these fights because our lives are on the line.

And yet we have to because those who claim to stand with us simply won’t acknowledge the harms they perpetuate.

If we simply look at the concepts of freedom and oppression, we know there are a lot of people who claim to be fighting for freedom and often say that they want everyone to be liberated. However, many of them are also constantly limiting the ability of others to be free and creating obstacles to universal liberation. This isn’t, as we have seen many claim, a result of the fact that freedom has natural ethical boundaries that we must recognise whenever people we interact with tell us that we’re either nearing or overstepping them. If anything, it’s largely as a result of people refusing to recognise the ways in which they are both the oppressed and the oppressor. Much of this largely stems from the fact that there are many who utilise their oppression to overlook or excuse the ways in which they engage in oppressing others, even those who they ostensibly claim to support.

We also want to take a moment to focus on the value of collective responsibility, which is equally crucial. It is one thing to recognise our own individual responsibility to each other and the natural world around us, but we often neglect to recognise our collective responsibility. It is imperative for us to remind ourselves of the necessity of collective responsibility so that we can truly ensure the liberation of everyone. This is not a new thought, as it’s possible to simply look back in history to see many others echoing this sentiment. One such person was Nestor Makhno who once stated that “[a]narchism’s outward form is a free, non-governed society, which offers freedom, equality and solidarity for its members. Its foundations are to be found in a [person]’s sense of mutual responsibility, which has remained unchanged in all places and times. This sense of responsibility is capable of securing freedom and social justice for all [people] by its own unaided efforts. It is also the foundation of true communism.”

As such, it is necessary for us to face the ways in which we have all internalised patriarchal patterns, whiteness, the normalisation of hierarchies, and much more. Unfortunately, even among anarchists, some individuals who have internalised those values along with that of hyper-individuality tend to scream at the top of their lungs that they have the right to be free and to do or say whatever it is that they want. This is something that is particularly true among us white anarchists. So frequently, we ignore the oppressions of other people and completely neglect the ways in which we continue to perpetuate harms against others. But this can be expanded to many people as a whole: It’s necessary for all of us to recognise the ways in which we continue to support the oppression of others, even though we are likely oppressed ourselves. We all need to be far more willing than we currently are to (un)learn these constricting systems, and many more of us need to recognise the varying ways in which we benefit from colonialism, imperialism, and genocide. If we refuse to learn, we cannot effectively combat them while meeting the needs of those who continue to be harmed by these structures and systems.

To put it shortly after so many words, many of us are going to need to be willing to give up certain privileges because keeping them is doing no one any good. It is necessary for us to remember that, in order to build collective freedom—one without exceptions, without violence, and without oppression—we must take individual accountability for our own oppressive actions against others and consciously put forth effort to change ourselves and unlearn the values many of us were raised with or around. But, at the same time, we also need to take collective responsibility in working towards pushing everyone around us to unlearn those harmful structures and to question what it is that we’re doing.

Unlearning the values of a patriarchal society to fight the internal oppressions that separate us—homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism, racism and whiteness, misogyny, casteism, ageism, and many more—is an individual responsibility that needs to be supported by collective responsibility.

The final core value that we want to look at in this section is mutual aid. Mutual aid is highly necessary and anybody who identifies as an anarchist or has related values will argue about the importance of this practice to rebuild alternatives outside of capitalism. Still, mutual aid can quickly become utilitarian if there is an emotional vacuum to it. Many of us have experienced being involved in spaces that were built upon mutual aid only to struggle with the creation of meaningful interpersonal connections with people in the same spaces. This is because, without mutual care and support, mutual aid is nothing more than a simple tool, and it requires connection with practical action to build our spaces. Through mutual care and support, we take care of each other at emotional levels, collectivising the care tasks that capitalism has largely encouraged us to overlook. We know that capitalist societies are maintained through the reproductive care and emotional labour that is largely pushed upon feminine people, and perhaps this emotional value is something that many manarchists avoid due to their internalised patriarchal patterns.

This is far from being news to anyone who has been paying attention, particularly if we focus on the example of the ways in which patriarchal values have gone largely unchallenged in anarchist spaces since the supposed inception of the concept. A lot of anarchists of all genders are not aware of their own biases and, as a result, are not keen to work on changing themselves. It is time to take a closer look in the mirror and rid ourselves of shitty internalised authoritarian and bigoted attitudes.

This point goes hand in hand with the next.

Collaboration in Diversity: The Strength of Heterogeneity

We need each other. That much is clear in these times where so many governments are ripping off the masks that hid their true level of fascistic ideology from most people. Already at the beginning of the 20^th century, several comrades–such as Malatesta, Volin, and De Cleyre–tried to prefigure and practice united fronts, gathering different anarchist positions together. This, of course, was intended to happen with organic structures, but the common goals were still to form one united front against state oppression. This can be useful and even necessary sometimes, but we all know how difficult it can be to do, especially when we have so much work to do as described in the first point.

In the last decade, we have learned to seek affinity with people regardless of their precise labels, but we still want to ensure that we have clear common ethical goals. It is undeniable that we need to have clear anarchist principles that should be updated and expanded to take into account what is happening in this particular period of history, but that is why we have been inclined to talk about many different anarchisms rather than a specific and singular form of anarchism. Understanding and embracing our own practical diversity has to come with defense of this same diversity. We strongly believe that many types of anarchism are necessary and that one person can embody an anarchism that is both built by and supports the many in our daily practices and political struggles. There is no reasonable need to push ourselves into a homogenous and static anarchist unity, both within and outside of ourselves.

By choice, we ought to seek heterogeneous collaborations between anarchisms because we see the differences between them as capable of providing strength.

However, it is worth recognising that some manarchists and other patriarchal anarchists blame identity politics and even anti-colonial activists in wanting to destroy our movements, which mirrors the patriarchal and nationalist movements that exist around us already. It is still a problem that some people cannot and will not manage to understand that we experience different types of oppressions in our daily lives and actively refuse to recognise the oppressions that others may experience that differ from their own, even though we may supposedly share many ethical and political principles.

This is one of many reasons why we find it difficult, and even a bit unnecessary, to try to unify all types of anarchist perspectives and theoretical approaches. Instead, we should work much harder to find out what commonalities we share and how we can work to further those projects.

We also find that this helps to build more horizontal collaborative processes between anarchisms. As many of us have experienced and as can be seen in historical movements, we have had some hierarchies separating our anarchisms, tending to value some as being “more real” or “more valuable” than others. For instance, we have encountered those who tend to work within anarcho-communist or anarcho-syndicalist practices while openly discarding anarcha-feminists, Black anarchists, or trans anarcha-feminists as “just” being focused on certain groups of people.

The truth is that many existing anarchist movements exist because they were never allowed in the first ‘traditional’ anarchist spaces. As a result, we self-organised our own spaces to finally have the space to breathe. This just proves that our collectives are composed by flawed human beings and, at the same time, that we are not completely immune against our own internalised bigotries. Accepting the reality that some of us feel safe building our own realities with those who share similar experiences, it shows that it is fair to embrace our diversity and find ways to gather around our common political goals.

Even more, looking for affinities should not be based only in our theoretical similarities but mostly in our practices. There are a lot of people and collectives that don’t define themselves as anarchist, but their practices are common and close to our own. Many anarchists are careful and even against the idea, which is because historical evidence highlights the many ways in which left unity has always been used against us to our own detriment (and even death). The affinity that we seek between us and other groups has to be organic and based in practice, regardless of how long it may last. Hopefully that work can make a lasting impact in changing some of our realities, one step at a time.

This brings us to a natural conversation about international solidarity, which is (or at least should be) part of our movements and one of our historical principles. There have been discussions of people seeking a different term, as ‘international’ implies the maintenance of borders, but whatever term you choose to use for the solidarity we should have for people across the globe, the ideas behind it are necessary in our heavily globalised world and the inherent globe-spanning connections in technologies like the internet. It is unlikely that we will find perfect, or any, answers from the classical bearded bunch considering just how much has changed from their time to ours.

Though many people across the world and in different spaces have been gathering information and building resistance platforms, we know that the increase of international border control systems, high tech surveillance, the digitisation of monetary systems that are strongly married to voracious financial chains, the prevalence of corporation-friendly systems, the persistent erasure of our right to privacy, and the continued harassment of all activists in different geographies makes international solidarity slightly more difficult than it was barely 100 years ago. Despite this harsh and undeniable reality, and seeking this mutual support in burning borders and nations, international solidarity is still alive by its own right.

But it requires a lot of support and a lot of work, ensuring that we are supporting people in building liberation while also maintaining criticisms and suspicion of any system seeking control. We can support people in their fights for liberation while reflecting upon their successes and failures, and we can flat out deny our support to hierarchical institutions and systems that seek to replace the old.

Resisting the Triple Supremacy of Globalised Capitalism: IGOs, Corporations, and International Alliances

Often, we find ourselves wondering what most of the ‘famous’ theorists would say if they got the chance to live now. Could they ever imagine how capitalists would manage to reconstruct, morph, and mutate another level of power within intergovernmental organisations that have taken control within our corporation-states?

Historically, when anarchists have fought against systems of oppression, it would be nation-states, institutionalised religions, or the industry of warfare. This hasn’t necessarily changed, but it has expanded. Since the beginning of the 20^th century and as a result of the World Wars and the birth of neoliberalism, the political overview has dramatically changed before our eyes, becoming akin to a hydra. The many heads of this hydra have made it increasingly complicated to put the responsibility for what is happening in concrete people and institutions, making it more difficult to point the finger at those responsible for continuous genocides and the raging ecocide that we are enduring.

Even when we know who to blame, they obscure their responsibility by shifting the responsibility. These systems protect them by through being oppressive, repressing protests, and doing as little as possible to respond to the concerns of the people most impacted. They silence all dissent. Our early anarchist analysis of these systems and pushes to dismantle, resist, and abolish them have become extremely tenuous. We’ve managed to name and outline the terms ‘globalisation’ and ‘neoliberalism’, helping us to see some of the problems; however, the way that the system defends against all attacks and denies its responsibility for spreading harm has made it far more difficult for us to fight it.

Intergovernmental organisations were constructed to gather certain types of power and are provided privileges and immunities that are intended to ensure their independent and effective function from corporation-states and other local political powers. They are specified in the treaties that give rise to global organisations, such as the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations and the Agreement on the Privileges and Immunities of the International Criminal Court. These are normally supplemented by further multinational agreements and national regulations, like the International Organizations Immunities Act in the United States. The intergovernmental organisations have a life of their own, completely detached from democratic processes that they claim to uphold; they are also immune from the jurisdiction of certain national courts. Certain privileges and immunities are also specified in documents like the Vienna Convention on the Representation of States in their Relations with International Organizations of a Universal Character of 1975.

In practice, this means that our historical fights against the free market and the nation-states now should include these intergovernmental organisations. The vast problem here is, of course, that the states support themselves through deliberately malfunctioning parliamentarianism, and these other intergovernmental organisations are free to operate on their own terms and choose who is involved in them and who leads them. For the ordinary person, this is a level of power that we cannot reach but still has a huge impact in our own lives.

Earlier anarchists were trying to spread education about the failures of parliamentarianism, spreading lessons about why we shouldn’t participate within it. Today, we’re now dealing with international organisations that have a global range of power, are allowed to act independently and often with little scrutiny, and are closely tied to financial powers. The United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, NATO, the European Union, the World Economic Forum, or the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, or even BRICS have different roles in these networks of power that create yet another level of oppressive powers with a common goal: the maintenance of neoliberalism grounded in free market prioritisation. We know perfectly well how lobbyism works in those circles and how they often move national politicians, wealthy people, or other actors willing to be of use to them into key positions where they can continue operating in ways to ensure ecocides and all forms of genocide can carry on without any interruption.

These systems also support a neocolonial form that has continued to develop, supporting continued oppression through debt. In this way, it is relevant to acknowledge that people living in colonised countries are the ones who are more strongly suffering under the pressure of these intergovernmental organisations and corporation-states. The World Bank is not shy about showing how many millions of dollars are being stolen and how they’ve been given the blessings to do so by international treaties and conventions, moving resources primarily to privileged Western countries from those that have remained under their thumbs despite supposed “independence” movements that claimed to allow them to “leave” the clutches of colonial powers.

For ordinary people, which is the overwhelming majority of people on this planet, these layers of organisational power are anonymous beasts that impact our lives. In addition to understanding the alliances among intergovernmental organisations and international debt, another consequence of this is that the cost of living has increased along with rent, food, transport, and other costs while our ability to survive in this economy has decreased critically since the 1970s. A quick search on the internet can show anyone how neoliberalism has been stifling us for the last 50 years while killing the planet. The problem is that these changes have been chugging along for at least three generations, and the impact of neoliberal values in people’s lives is blatantly obvious. We have people all over the world who do not understand these systems and the levels of organisational oppression that we face, and they often actively work in support of these agencies and structures even when those very systems harm them. At the same time, we are all fighting for survival to different degrees, but we have mostly individualised it (as many people will utilised the theory of “survival of the fittest” to support their decisions) rather than looking at how we should support each other.

It is undeniable that the resistance in many territories is very much alive, but we have a major question that’s always in the back of our head: What are anarchists from colonising territories doing to educate, agitate, and keep creating mutual aid and international solidarity? Our possibilities are dramatically narrowed because, on top of these different levels of international oppression, we are facing a ‘rise’ (or unmasking) of fascism. Historically, we know that when people experience insecurity and scarcity, some tend to fall into authoritarian solutions.

How can we fight now when this authoritarian oppression has a strong PR team that pinkwashes their bloody activities, selling us multi-level globalised oppression as the natural organisational neoliberal way of living? How can we fight when the ongoing enclosure of lands is being carried on by faceless multinational corporations while some of us drown in financial debt to survive?

Conclusion

It is just the plain reality which gets us back to the impetus for where this text started.

As we can understand from these easy, flawed, and incomplete analyses, as much as we can rely on our past theorists, movements, and individuals to learn from their wisdom and their mistakes, we really need to gather in all of our diversities to face the present emergency situations from our own local communities and territories. If we are going to stop and change the current ecocide, dismantling capitalism and all of its oppressive systems. We can start with the ones in our heads and hearts, so we can reconstruct our collective paths to freedom and collectivisation of our communities once and for all.