A is for Anarchy beyond (the nostalgic captivity of) leftism.
A is for lone wolf, affinity or cell structured attack
R is for refusing to embrace or impose victimhood and identity representation
C is for the destruction of workerism, society and civilization
“We’re all animals prescribed medication in the form of artificiality. Moral values, roles and “higher purposes” are socially constructed and assigned to us to reinforce social control. Individualist anarchy contradicts the homogeny of civilized order. Our animality is imprisoned by an institutional society that enforces its order through domesticated membership. Beneath all of the socially constructed identities, roles, conditioning and subservience we crave anarchy-acting and experiencing life out of bounds, above and beyond indoctrinated captivity. When we undress all of these assignments and refuse the medication of civilized order we are naked, wild and unique. Life opens up as a playground, and like within a self-aware dream in which we decide to have fun, it becomes a playground of limitless potential. In a self-aware dream, we know we must hurry and have fun before we awake. Life is a dream in which we must hurry and play before we wake up dead.” — Blitz Molotov
Nihilism comes from the Latin nihil, meaning “nothing”. As a philosophical position, nihilism involves rejecting certain existence claims. Two prominent forms of nihilism are existential nihilism, whch rejects claims that human life is meaningful, and moral nihilism, which rejects claims that human actions can be right or wrong. Other forms include epistemological nihilism, mereological nihilism, and political nihilism. As with any other philosophical label, there is diversity within nihilism and disagreement over what counts as nihilism. Labels with some overlap include existentialism, absurdism, fatalism, and pessimism. Some people embrace nihilistic conclusions as a philosophical matter, while other people relate to nihilistic themes more as a matter of intuition, personal experience, or personal expression. With that said, this zine does not represent any “official” definition, nor a new program or political ideology. Instead it merely presents some common anarchist-nihilist ideas which encourage an anti-political critique of all social control and order, in favor of individual empowerment, anarchy and insurrection.
Critiquing the Left
Critiquing civilization as the logic, institutions, and physical apparatus of domestication, control, and domination.
A critique of communism, socialism, and all other left ideologies as they merely seek to redistribute the exploitations of the earth more evenly among classes of humans without addressing the destructive relationship between mass society and the earth.
Understanding that an attack upon capitalism that fails to target civilization can never abolish the institutionalized coercion that fuels society.
Critiquing the Left as nebulous, anachronistic, distracting, a failure & at key points a counterproductive force historically (“the left wing of capital”).
Critiquing Reductionism (Only particular aspects of the social struggle are included in leftist organizations. Other aspects are ignored, invalidated or respressed, leading to further and further compartmentalization of the struggle. Which in turn facilitates manipulation by elites and their eventual transformation into purely reformist lobbying societies with all generalized, radical critique emptied out.)
Critiquing Leftist activists for political careerism, celebrity culture, self-righteousness, privilege politics, vanguardism & martyrdom.
Critiquing Specialization or Professionalism (Those most involved in the day-to-day operation of the organization are selected — or self-selected — to perform increasingly specialized roles within the organization, often leading to an official division between leaders and led, with gradations of power and influence introduced in the form of intermediary roles in the evolving organizational hierarchy.)
Critiquing the tendency of Leftists to insulate themselves in academia, scenes & cliques while also attempting to opportunistically manage struggles.
Critiquing collectivism, the subordination of the individual to the group. Critiquing the ideology of collective responsibility (a critique that does not mean the refusal of social or class analysis, but rather that removes the moral judgment from such analysis, and refuses the dangerous practice of blaming individuals for activities that have been done in the name of, or that have been attributed to, a social category of which they are said to be a part, but about which they had no choice — e.g., “Jew”, “gypsy”, “male”, “white”, etc.)
“And if I call myself an individualist anarchist, an iconoclast and a nihilist, it is precisely because I believe that in these adjectives there is the highest and most complete expression of my willful and reckless individuality that, like an overflowing river, wants to expand, impetuously sweeping away dikes and hedges, until it crashes into a granite boulder, shattering and breaking up in its turn. I do not renounce life. I exalt and sing it.” — Renzo Novatore
Critiquing Morality
Moral nihilists consider morality to be a socially constructed, complex set of rules and recommendations that may give a psychological, social, or economical advantage to its adherents, but is otherwise without universal or even relative truth in any sense.
Critiquing Organizationalism
Critiquing permanent, formal, mass, mediated, rigid, growth-focused modes of organization in favor of temporary, informal, direct, spontaneous, intimate forms of relation.
Acknowledging that relative to their small size, affinity groups and cells can achieve a disproportionately powerful impact. In contrast to traditional top-down structures, they are free to adapt to any situation, they need not pass their decisions through a complicated process of ratification, and all the participants can act and react instantly without waiting for orders—yet with a clear idea of what to expect from one another. Lone wolf or individualized attacks have the tactical advantage of being more evasive and difficult for law enforcement to predict and control.
Critiquing the tendencies of unions & Leftist organizations to mimic political parties, acting as racketeers/mediators, with cadre-based hierarchies of theoretician & militant or intellectual & grunt, defailting toward institutionalization & ritualizing a meeting-voting-recruiting-marching pattern.
Critiquing the idea that any organization can represent exploited individuals or groups, social struggle, revolution or anarchy. Therefore also the rejection of all formal organizations — parties, unions, federations and their like — which, due to their programmatic nature, take on such a representative role.
“The rejection of identity politics is the recognition that, while various oppressed groups experience their dispossession in ways specific to their oppression and analysis of these specificities is necessary in order to get a full understanding of how domination functions, nonetheless, dispossession is fundamentally the stealing away of the capacity of each of us as individuals to create our lives on our own terms in free association with others. The reappropriation of life on the social level, as well as its full reappropriation on the individual level, can only occur when we stop identifying ourselves essentially in terms of our social identities.” — Wolfi Landstreicher
Critiquing Identity Politics
Critiquing identity politics insofar as it preserves victimization-enabled identities & social roles (i.e. affirming rather than negating gender, class, etc.) & inflicts guilt-induced paralysis, amongst others.
Critiquing identity politics insofar as it locates someone within a social category, and thus within a particular hierarchy: it shapes how people relate to one another. In this operation, social identities are applied to individuals from an external source, and individuals are judged and treated accordingly. Identity categories then become internalized. They become standards to which the individual aspires, seeking to take on and enact these categories based on what is consider to be their essential qualities.
Critiquing identity politics insofar as it homogenizes and overrides difference within. In asserting a commonality across an identity, those that fall outside these descriptions have their voices silenced and actual differences are suppressed. This is especially true of identity politics when it engages in representation, where individuals or organizations who presume that their experiences are generalizable speak on behalf of all members of that particular identity.
Critiquing the idea that anyone, either due to “privilege” or due to supposed membership in a particular oppressed group, owes uncritical solidarity to any struggle or movement, and the recognition that such a conception is a major obstruction in any serious revolutionary process.
Critiquing single-issue, identity-based campaigns or orientations.
Moving beyond anarchISM as a static historical praxis into anarchY as a living praxis.
Focusing on daily life & the intersectionality thereof rather than dialectics/totalizing narratives (except anarcho-primitivists tend toward epistemology)
Emphasizing personal autonomy & a rejection of work (as forced labor, alienated labor, workplace-centricity)
Critiquing industrial notions of mass society, production, productivity, efficiency, “Progress”, technophilia, civilization.
“We are radicals who have had enough with attempts to salvage gender. We do not believe we can make it work for us. We look at the transmisogyny we have faced in our own lives, the gendered violence that our comrades, both trans and cis have faced, and we realize that the apparatus itself makes such violence inevitable. We have had enough....We are not looking to create a better system, for we are not interested in positive politics at all. All we demand in the present is a relentless attack on gender and the modes of social meaning and intelligibility it creates.” — Alyson Escalante
Critiquing gender
A critique of genders as socially constructed categories that correspond to nebulous parameters. While histories and experiences of gendered violence are real and legitimate, gender confines and discourages individual uniqueness and variation. Similar to the concept of race, gender operates as another form of social control.
Like all forms of representation, the cis/trans binary as an all-encompassing set of categories is both flattening and inadequate. There are genders that are not cis but do not place themselves under the trans umbrella.
Gender is a hierarchy, one of the apparatuses of governance, that differentiates and categorizes bodies/people.
On a social level, gender sets standards and norms for bodies and behaviors. Bodies get put into categories based on secondary sex characteristics, voice, behaviors, dress/aesthetic/ethnicity, etc. These expectations vary based upon social/cultural situation and position.
“Our insurrection against gender cannot stop with just gender self-identification, or with a new list of terms for everyone to learn to respect. Insurrection must push beyond these limits to a free-play of actions, behaviors, sexuality, etc. Where doing or enjoying one action or another does not categorize you into a limiting role.” — Lena Kafka
Violence is a commonly preferred tactic, whether applied to insurrection, riot, attack, or simple refusal. The international growth of the various FA(I)-IRF cells, the example of the Greek CCF and Revolutionary Struggle, the concomitant growth of the non-anarchist but equally engaging actions of the eco-extremists in Mexico, Chile and Brazil, and the myriad anonymous burnings, ATM destruction, and attacks that populate the current global anarchist media utilize violence as a necessary and desirable form of social warfare. The Animal Liberation Brigade founded in the US, bombed Chiron and Shaklee’s corporate offices in 2003. ALB targeted corporate customers of animal testing laboratory Huntingdon Life Sciences and animal researchers at UCLA and the California National Primate Research Center. Animal Rights Militia was known for sending letter bombs, placing incendiary devices under cars and in buildings, contaminating food products, and sending death threats to its targets.
Illegalism as a practice includes acts of bombings, assassinations, burglary, stealing from stores etc., and is expressed as a personal, violent rejection of law and order. Illegalism is seen as both useful in funding insurrectionary projects and useful in promoting individual creativity with circumnavigating the legal channels of acquiring funds and the necessities of survival.
Insurrectionary anarchy is a way of conceptualizing anarchy within the present moment. Rather than waiting for a revolutionary moment in the future, or spending valuable time and resources attempting to recruit “the masses”, the insurrectionary anarchist recognizes that the moment to attack is now. While some say the insurrection is coming, others actualize it here and now with individual attack, sabotage and guerilla warfare.
Reclaim Your Mind: Manifesto
Destroy Gender
Anarchy: Civil or Subversive?
From Politics to Life: Ridding Anarchy of the Leftist Millstone
Essentialism and The Problem of Identity Politics
I Am Also a Nihilist by Renzo Novatore