Destructive Urges

“Revolution is aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and set no glittering hopes on ‘institutions’.” – Max Stirner

“Don’t follow me… I’m not leading you…

Don’t walk ahead of me… I’ll not follow you…

Carve your own path… Become yourself…” – Conspiracy of Cells of Fire, Imprisoned Members Cell

“I know that there will be an end to this fight between the formidable arsenal of the State and me. I know that I will be vanquished, I will be the weaker, but I hope I can make you pay dearly for the victory.” – Octave Garnier

On this date over 100 years ago, 21st of April 1913, Illegalist and Individualist anarchist Raymond Callemin was executed by guillotine by order of the French state. On the anniversary of his execution I write this in memory of all those that have fallen or been jailed in the social war against society.

The illegalist current is an offshoot of individualist anarchism. Refusing to be exploited, forced to work for some rich tyrant, instead the illegalist chooses to rob them. It’s an anti-work ethic for individual autonomy to be realised in real life right away through Individual expropriation also known as individual reclamation.

Individual reclamation gained notoriety in France in the last decades of the 19th and early 20th century gave birth to what was to become known as illegalism.

Proponents of individual reclamation were anarchists such as Clement Duval and Marcus Jacob. Marcus Jacob stole to fund himself as well as the anarchist movement and other causes. This is the main factor that separates illegalism from individual reclamation, the illegalists stole solely for themselves. Although some Individual illegalists did fund individualist anarchist newspapers from the proceeds of their expropriations and give money to comrades that were in need.

The illegalists, many of whom, inspired by Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche were of the persuasion of why should they have to wait on the passive herd of exploited and poor classes to rise up and expropriate the rich? The poor seemed quite content with the conditions they inhabited. Why should the illegalists have to wait on the exploited workers to become enlightened with a revolutionary consciousness? Why should they have to continue to live a life of being exploited and worked to death while they wait for the future social revolution that may not ever happen? The illegalist anarchists had no faith in the workers struggle, so decided to fight back and rob the wealthy, it was a pure egoist endeavor.

Stirner would have called them “conscious egoists”, expropriating their lives back for themselves not asking for permission to exist. They refused to be slaves to bosses and the state.

The Illegalists choose to steal through conscious revolt against society

The illegalists anarchists robbed, shot, stabbed, counterfeited money and committed the odd bit of arson across Europe, but predominantly in France, Belgium, and Italy.

There were gun battles and shootouts with cops. Long jail sentences and executions.

One such group of illegalist anarchists were to becoming immortalized as “the Bonnot gang”.

Raymond Callemin was born in Belgium, a former socialist who became an anarchist after becoming disillusioned with the reformism of the Belgian Socialist party. Having become influenced by anarchism Raymond left the Socialist Party with Victor Serge and Jean De Boe who were equally disillusioned with the socialists electoral politics. Together they published an individualist anarchist newspaper “Le Revolte” which was totally hostile to unions and political parties, and was for permanent insurrection against the bourgeoisie.

Octave Garnier, on the run from France, he fled to Belgium to avoid being conscripted to the army, had already committed several expropriations on the rich via burglaries and had spent time in jail. He first started out in syndicalism but didn’t take long before developing a disgust with the union leaders being a kin to the bosses using and manipulating workers for their own ends. He then joined the ranks of the anarchists. Not being able to work in the profession of his choice having to working menial jobs, forced into being a wage slave in jobs he did not even want, in order to live he became a committed illegalist.

The four anarchists were in their early 20’s, they found each other through the anarchist circles in Belgium, shared a mutual hatred for the rich and their system of exploitation. Raymond and Octave carried out many burglaries together and tried their hand at counter fitting coins.

Victor Serge writing articles for Le Revolte brought a lot of attention on himself from the Belgium state. Since he was a refugee in Belgium from childhood he was expelled from Belgium as a dangerous subversive. He left for France and set up a libertarian commune with other anarchists. Not long after, Octave Garnier having warrants out for his arrest, followed Victor to France, with Raymond.

In France they met with Jules Bonnot who was on the run. Jules was in his early 30’s and an ex soldier. The police were looking for him for a murder, which was really an accidental shooting of a comrade. Jules having a lot of experience carrying out expropriation and being quite successful offered Octave and Raymond a proposition to carry out a big job together. The pair were only happy to accept Jules’s offer being fed up not making as much as they’d like to from the burglaries and counter fitting, risking a lot while not getting much back in return.

The three with another anarchist Eugène Dieudonné came up with a plan to rob a bank messenger who would be delivering money. They started by robbing a high powered car from a rich neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris. Jules learned how to drive in the army so he’d be the driver. Raymond, Octave, and Eugene would rob the bank messenger. And so on 21 December 1911 in broad daylight they robbed the messenger, they held up the messengers security guard, Octave and Raymonds task was to take the cash from the messenger. Octave demanded the messenger to handover the briefcase.

Raymond grabbed it and attempted to make his way for the getaway. But the messenger wouldn’t let go of the case, Octave shot him twice in the chest (the messenger badly wounded did not die). They made their getaway speeding through the streets of Paris in what was one of the best model cars of the time. It was the very first time a car was used in an armed robbery in France, because of that the media nicknamed them the “auto-bandits”.

From their robbery they made 5,000 francs which they weren’t happy with. They expected to have expropriated much more. A few days after the robbery of the bank messenger they broke into a gun shop stealing many guns including high powered rifles. Not long after on the 2nd of January 1912 they broke into the home of rich bourgeois killing him and his maid in the process, they got away with 30,000 francs in the burglary. They soon fled to Belgium carrying out more robberies and shot 3 cops along their way. Then back to Paris to rob another bank but this time they would hold up the bank. While doing the robbery they shot 3 bank clerks. After the robbery, a bounty of 700,000 francs was put on the anarchists heads, the Société Générale bank they robbed put another 100,000 francs on their heads.

There is a deep nihilism, egoism, and anti-reformism within illegalist praxis with its continuity today with groups like the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire, the Informal Anarchist Federation / International Revolutionary Front and individuals such as Chilian Anarcho-nihilist Sebastian Oversluijwho was shot dead while expropriating a bank and Mauricio Morales who was killed when the bomb he was transporting in his backpack detonated prematurely,

Modern day insurrectionary anarchy also has a direct lineage with this anarchist history. Many of the main components of ideas and praxis that comprise illegalism and individual reclamation (which includes propaganda of the deed which is individual direct action against the bourgeois class, their property and their flunkies i.e. pigs, screws and judges, in the hope the action will inspire others to follow suit; anti-organisational in the form of individual insurrection, affinity groups and informal organisation; and extreme disliking to the left and its tactics of reformism) are also found in the different strands of insurrectionary anarchism today.

What was branded the “Bonnot gang” by the media and the pigs was an affinity group

Jules Bonnot was not a leader of the group, there were none. The individuals that comprised the different affinity groups that carried out the so called crimes that were branded with the name the “Bonnot gang” were simply individuals with mutual aims that came together to carry out actions. The French state used the name to brand any anarchist they pleased with association to any of the so called crimes.

On the 30th of March 1912 André Soudy (an anarchist who took part in some of the robberies of the group) was caught by police. A few days late another anarchist involved with some of the robberies Édouard Carouy was arrested. On 7th of April Raymond Callemin. By the end of April 28 anarchists had been arrested in connection with the “Bonnot gang”.

On April 28 police discovered the location where Jules Bonnot was hiding in Paris. 500 armed police surrounded the house. Jules refused to give himself up, a shoot out commenced. After hours of exchanging shots the police detonate a bomb at the front of the house. When the police stormed the house they discovered Jules rolled up in a mattress, he was still firing shots at them. He was shot in the head and died later from his injuries in hospital.

On the 14th of May police discovered the location of Octave Garnier and Rene Valet (another member of the group). 300 cops and 800 soldiers surrounded the building. Like Bonnot the pair also refused to be arrested. The siege lasted hours, the police eventually detonated a bomb and blew part of the house up killing Octave. Rene badly injured was still firing off shots, he died not long after.

On the 3rd of February 1913 Raymond Callemin as well as many other anarchists including Victor Serge were put on trial by the French state. Although Raymond did carry out many robberies and shot dead a bank clerk, many others who were put on trial had no part whatsoever in any of the so called crimes that were contributed to the “Bonnot gang”. The French state was thirsty for revenge and so it gunned down, blew up, executed, locked up and exiled many anarchists. On 21 April 1913 Raymond Callemin, Étienne Monier and André Soudy were executed by guillotine. Many of their co defendants being sentenced to life and hard labour in French colonies.

This revenge practice by states is still carried out today with the Scripta Manent trials in Italy which are directly related to kneecapping of the manager of a nuclear power company by individualist anarchists Alfredo Caspito and Nicola Gia, and other acts of resistance. And the repressive trials in Russia against anarchists, anti-fascists, and the FSB’s (Federal Security Service) fabricated “Network” organization case. In retaliation Anarcho-communist Mikhail Zhlobitsky last October detonated a bomb in the Russian Federal Security Service Regional Headquarters in Arkhangelsk, dying in the process. And so the FSB carried out another round of repression against anarchists after the bombing; arresting, interrogating and slapping false charges on anarchists for payback for the attack.

On 22nd March 2019 a cell from the Informal Anarchist Federation naming itself FAI/FRI Revenge Faction – Mikhail Zholbitsky carried out a grenade attack against the Russian embassy in Athens for revenge for the repression carried out by the Russian state against anarchists.

Whichever current of anarchism an individual lives, it doesn’t matter, once its subversive and in conflict with whatever authority that attempts to infringe on an individual’s autonomy. The ongoing war against industrial capitalist society has been raging for over 200 years, which claimed many lives of anarchists with even more being jailed. The same insurrectional spirit of no mediation and no compromise with authority continues to flow in subversive anarchy today.

A Response to “Beyond Negativity: What Comes Next After Gender Nihilism?”

“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.

Rather, what comes after Gender Nihilism must be a materialist struggle against patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism which understands and is attentive to the complex interrelations between these structures and which refuses to reduce any one of them to any other.” 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.”

The essay Gender Nihilism: An Anti-Manifesto was an explosive reflection of my own experience with both “gender” and “nihilism”. As a queer who possessed no desire for queer recognition and societal assimilation, the quote above summarized a position of pure negation which I found exciting affinity with.

I wanted to write this essay, not as a critique of Gender Nihilism but as praise, and as a personal response to some of the questions posed in Beyond Negativity: What Comes After Gender Nihilism? In this essay I outline a few quotes from that piece and respond with my own gender nihilist perspective.

“As such we are left with the need for the abolition of gender, the need to push back against reformist projects that simply seek to make an expanded notion of gender. What remains to be created is the establishment of a path forward.”

I think it is important to acknowledge that many individuals craft their own paths of queer negation towards society and its projects of assimilatory reform. For me personally, a path forward means a queer nihilism armed, wild and ferocious against the social standardization of gender and industrial control. This includes but is not limited to an individualized path of destruction which targets the internalized governance and roles that define an assigned gendered identity. The personalization of this governance, which dictates the roles and behaviors of the assigned identity, surrenders the shapeless wildness of individuality to the solitary confinement of politics. Towards the abolition of gender and against reformist projects, my anarchist war does not limit itself to the confines of politics. Instead, it includes a queer nihilist life-experience of becoming ungoverned by gender and any other social constructs intended to subjugate and discourage individual uniqueness. Beyond the limitations of theory, this also includes clandestine attack on the manifestations of society, negating the domestication of law and order.

“Only real, concrete, and organized struggle can move us forward. Mere negation, senseless violence, or embrace of unintelligibility cannot be enough. In short we must move beyond negativity. The project at hand is to adequately account for the violence of gender, the necessity of its abolition, and the strategies for achieving that abolition in material terms. Only then will we have the ability to not only achieve abolition, but to change the world.”

I believe real, concrete, and organized struggle is most powerful when orchestrated at the individual level. Since in daily life, it is the individual who experiences the struggle of survival in this gendered nightmare, no one other than that individual is most qualified to materialize that revolt. Gendered violence is unique to each individual who accumulates a history of struggle against it. Electing identity-based movements or organizations to represent individualized experience often flattens differences found between individuals, erecting a false sense of unity. This often leads to one’s association with an identity determining the legitimacy of one’s experience, rather than the experience being legitimized as individually unique. This point was eloquently summarized by Lena Kafka in Destroy Gender:

“My personal experiences with gendered violence are only taken seriously in light of revealing myself as a trans woman. Our theories should start from the ways we have experienced gender violence in our daily lives, not identity. Our relationships to each other should be based upon our affinities and similarities with each other, rather than based upon the lowest-common-denomintator politics. Daily life is far too complicated to be reduced into two categories.”

From my own individualist perspective, nihilism is so much more than just pessimism, negation and violence; it is the personification of anarchy, the reclaiming of individuality and the embracing of ungovernable uniqueness. Queer negativity is hostility towards socially constructed expectations, those who enforce them, and is subsequently the emancipation of one’s undefinable “self” from gender conformity. This includes the expropriation of violence and the total abandonment of victimhood. Queer nihilism materializes itself as a declaration of war on society. For every possibility of sexual assault there is a blade being sharpened for self-defense. Dangerous spaces are personified, replacing the positive politics of safety. Armed queers don’t just make waves; they are tsunamis against the logic of submission.

“This means recognizing that these things can only be overcome by a communist politics oriented towards the future. Abandon nihilism, abandon hopelessness, demand and build a better world.”

My queerness is an experimentation that never ends. It is the totality of a life lived against the law, insubordinate and wild. It is not a communist politics but a nihilist negation to all systems that attempt to subordinate individuality. It is not the leftist politics of demanding and building a better world but an anarchist insurgency of reclaiming life day to day, and setting fire to its captors. Since gender is embedded in every fabric of this industrial, civilized society, I find no hope in salvaging any part of it- only joy in every second of its calculated demise.

“I think its telling that I am presented as the voice of the gender nihilism, when two of the other largest contributors are indigenous trans women. Their voices matter in this debate more than mine, yet people have completely and consistently centered my voice and perspective. This is harmful.”

Society and those who wish to preserve it require identity politics to categorize people based on socially assigned constructs. Identity politics is where individual experimentation goes to die. Like studying the bricks in a wall rather than venturing beyond the wall itself, identity politics, like all politics promotes the death of imaginative exploration. Politics represent the fixed ideological prescriptions of living, assigned to “the masses” who are treated as if they are incapable of thinking and acting as individuals.

In the realm of academic recognition, identity politics predetermines the popular narrative by reversing the hierarchy; those belonging to the marginalized category become the dominating group who then are given a pass to trivialize the experiences of those they view as opposite. But this hierarchical reversal doesn’t challenge hierarchy itself – it only reforms it in an attempt to create a power masquerading as equality. This power, composed of social capital, is then used as the power to ridicule, coerce and dominate others with impunity.

Anyone who presents a single individual as the voice of something as wide spread as gender nihilism is someone who interprets the world in terms of textbook definitions rather than the organic fluidity of free thought and social interaction. Quite simply, it erases all those individuals who had already discovered and lived gender nihilism but didn’t have the academic language or status to be credited and recognized in the mainstream. Alyson’s experiences with gender are not trivial to mine simply because I am a person of color. Their experiences are unique from mine, and far more complex than the oversimplifying measurement of social constructs and any theoretical analysis of identity and privilege. And it is this uniqueness of individual experience that gets lost in the homogenizing formations of identity politics. In my opinion, the harm here is the assertion that voices belonging to certain individuals matter more than others. Ironically, there is inequality in pursuit of “equality” and the common denominator is always a social construct in one form or another.

“Rather, what comes after Gender Nihilism must be a materialist struggle against patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism which understands and is attentive to the complex interrelations between these structures and which refuses to reduce any one of them to any other.”

Patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism have identity politics of their own. They each essentialize a role and behavior which reinforces their power socially. In addition to physically attacking these institutions, for me it is important to reclaim my self and emancipate from their mental captivity. This means refusing their language to define others, allowing others to define themselves beyond identity-based assumptions. It also means any positive projects that attempt to occupy space in the courtyard of capitalism compromises the integrity of their rebellion. The transforming of “queer” into another rigid, social identity by capitalism and liberalism is one of many examples. The positive politics of queer identity legitimizes the state and glorifies a civilized standard of submission. With the help of internalized and often celebrated victimhood, “queer” soon becomes another identity pacified and manufactured by capitalism.

This is why my queerness is not a positive project. It’s meaning runs contrary to the collectivized subordination in both capitalism and the left. Queer nihilism means arming negativity against the pacifying effects of positive politics, exploring the intimacy of criminal affinity with others, and arming individuality with the queerest savagery against domestication. The fire in my heart burns every gendered prison assigned to me. Queer is confrontation: my desire for freedom has intercourse with my hatred for civilization. What blooms is a lifelong dance that materializes the queerest attack on capital and social control. I find myself immersed in the chaos of bloodied weapons, broken glass and shrieking alarms. My body is a dangerous space of love and rage ungoverned by the morality of non-violence. With love, and in solidarity with the wild, and with all those who embrace queer anarchy with hysterical laughs of joy- towards the queerest attack upon the civilized order!

An open letter and anti-manifesto to Climate Offensive, Extinction Rebellion, Earth Strike, and other nonviolent movements

When the world ends, people come out of their apartments and meet their neighbors for the first time; they share food, stories, companionship. No one has to go to work or the laundromat; nobody remembers to check the mirror or scale or email account before leaving the house. Graffiti artists surge into the streets; strangers embrace, sobbing and laughing. Every moment possesses an immediacy formerly spread out across months. Burdens fall away, people confess secrets and grant forgiveness, the stars come out over New York City...and nine months later, a new generation is born.

(CrimethInc.)

We’re going to die?

"The Earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses." But us – me, you, even those who are killing the earth? We’re going to die.

In the worst case scenario, you drown, you starve, or you succumb to heat stroke. Not figuratively. You will drown, you will starve, you will succumb to heat stroke. Perhaps there’s the small chance that you will survive the mass migration to the last reaches of habitable land in and around the poles.

Perhaps.

But let’s be realistic here: In all likelihood, you’re going to die. A slow, horrible, excruciating death at that. We would like to say this is the future we’re hurtling towards at an ever-increasing rate. But it isn’t: it’s the present, the material, graspable present. Islands are sinking into the ocean. The poverty-stricken are freezing to death on the streets. People are burning to death in gigantic wildfires. The collapse is not to be a single event. It’s a process, and it’s currently underway. In the best case scenario, death is liberation. Perhaps the real “you” – your body, your consciousness, your soul, what have you – won’t die, per se: instead, the abstract “you” – your way of life, your social relationships under capitalism, your system of meaning that’s been drilled into your head since day one – will die.

Can’t we reform the system?

No. We can’t. The system is the problem, and the system runs deep. The problem isn’t just capitalism. It’s also the state, but it also isn’t just the state. It’s the ideology of consumption itself: that beings – plants, animals (including humans deemed to be subhuman), fungi, even inanimate natural “resources” – are objects to be bought, sold, and eventually, consumed. This ideology is perhaps the deepest ideology we have. It permeates every form of knowledge: from science, to art, to politics. It seeps through our language (one must think how often we refer to feeling, living beings – ones with the capacity to suffer – as “it.”) It permeates our relationships. It is the very basis of our societies, if it cannot be deemed our “society” itself – the group of capital-h Humans deemed to be worthy enough to be circumscribed by the abstract Community, that constructs itself in opposition to literally everything else.

Your favorite pet politician isn’t immune to this. Not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, not Bernie Sanders, not Jill Stein. Not the Democratic Socialists, not the Green Party, not the CPUSA, and not anyone else, either. Perhaps their hearts are in the right place – but sadly, that isn’t enough. To quote the amazing piece Anarchy Works by Peter Gelderloos:

Some people oppose capitalism on environmental grounds, but think some sort of state is necessary to prevent ecocide. But the state is itself a tool for the exploitation of nature. Socialist states such as the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China have been among the most ecocidal regimes imaginable. That these two societies never escaped the dynamics of capitalism is itself a feature of the state structure — it necessitates hierarchical, exploitative economic relationships of control and command, and once you start playing that game nothing beats capitalism.

What about nonviolence?

Concerning nonviolence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.

(Malcolm X)

The struggle against ecocide was never nonviolent, and it never will be, because it cannot be. That’s because ecocide is violence: violence against me and you, against animals (wild and domestic,) against the trees and the grass and the water and the mountains. Climate insurrection is self-defense. Strict adherence to nonviolence – that is, the rejection of violence – is complicity in the face of ecological destruction. It is not “offensive,” it is not “rebellion,” and it’s not a “strike” at climate change. Many of us do not have the privilege of being nonviolent – namely, those of us who already marginalized. We will be the first to go. We’re the rural farm workers and their families being sprayed with pesticides. We’re the houseless freezing to death in polar vortices. We’re the indigenous peoples whose homes are being swallowed by the sea. We’re the poor who will not have the capital necessary to complete the long trek north to the last remaining habitable lands. If we aren’t violent – if we don’t rebel against the system that oppresses us – we will be crushed. Don’t be complicit in our death, in your death.

What’s climate insurrection?

Perhaps the only hope me or you have. It’s destroying that which destroys us - by any means possible.

Wouldn’t that hurt the movement?

No. A better question would be: what has “nonviolent” protest won us in the long run? The answer: absolutely nothing. Many supposedly “nonviolent” movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement, were incredibly violent. There were hundreds of riots throughout the United States, and of course, the existence of armed paramilitary groups such as the Black Panthers, or the Brown Berets. One could make the argument that this narrative of nonviolence is pushed by the very people whose power would be threatened by violence, because violence means (perhaps immediate) change. Hence: why those in the US celebrate Martin Luther King Day, a federally recognized holiday; but not Malcolm X Day. Even the most-oft example of nonviolent resistance, the Indian independence movement, was not so. Bhagat Singh, who after his execution became a folk hero of the cause, was inspired by French anarchist Auguste Vaillant to bomb the British Raj’s Central Legislative Assembly. Less than a year before, he had assassinated a British police officer in retaliation for the death of the nationalist leader Lala Lajpat Rai.

Wouldn’t it be counterproductive?

Counterproductive to what? Getting meaningless reforms passed? Getting empty pyrrhic victories in the legal circuit? Performing impotent marches through major cities that don’t achieve anything other than receiving lukewarm press from second-rate newspapers? Ask the battery hen liberated from cramped cages by animal activists, or the old-growth forest protected indefinitely by logging saboteurs (and all the animals who call those forest home): is direct action productive?

Anarchist action— patient, hidden, tenacious, involving individuals, eating away at institutions like a worm eats away at fruit, as termites undermine majestic trees — such action does not lend itself to the theatrical effects of those who wish to draw attention to themselves.

To quote the great illusionist Georges Méliès, "I must say, to my great regret, the cheapest tricks have the greatest impact."

If insurrection is so great, how come people aren’t doing it now?

They are. You just haven’t heard of it because the media is smart enough to hide it. Hearing about the heroic stories of those who fight back would be too dangerous for most to hear – it runs the risk of radicalizing them. Movements like the Animal and Earth Liberation Fronts, have been waging war against ecocide since the 1970s.

I don’t want to go to prison.

We dream of a world without prisons.

I’m scared.

We’re scared too, friend. We should be, but we should be

strong, too

What can we do?

We’ll let the great animal activist Keith Mann speak for us.

Labs raided, locks glued, products spiked, depots ransacked, windows smashed, construction halted, mink set free, fences torn down, cabs burnt out, officesin flames, car tires slashed, cages emptied, phone lines severed, slogans daubed, muck spread, damage done, electrics cut, site flooded, hunt dogs stolen, fur coats slashed, buildings destroyed, foxes freed, kennels attacked, businesses burgled, uproar, anger, outrage, balaclava clad thugs.

What if I don’t have the ability to fight?

You do, even if you can’t physically. Despite the tone of this letter, we aren’t totally opposed to above-ground action. In fact, in some cases, we think it’s necessary. Groups like the Earth Liberation Prisoners Support Group and the Animal Liberation Front Supporters Group are active in representing and advocating for operatives. As Sinn Féin, the Irish political party once associated with the militant IRA has been described:

Both Sinn Féin and the IRA play different but converging roles in the war of national liberation. The Irish Republican Army wages an armed campaign... Sinn Féin maintains the propaganda war and is the public and political voice of the movement.

What happens next?

We don’t know. But with any luck, we’ve laid out our options.

“Anarchists are opposed to authority both from below and from above. They do not demand power for the masses, but seek to destroy all power and to decompose these masses into individuals who are masters of their own lives. Therefore anarchists are the most decisive enemies of all types of communism and those who profess to be communists or socialist cannot possibly be anarchists.”  - Enzo Martucci

For me, individuality is a weapon. It is the weaponized praxis of nihilist anarchy and personal ungovernability. An individual becomes ungovernable by becoming and asserting their negation to socially constructed identities, formally organized groups, or the monolith of mass society. From this perspective, negation embodies a refusal to surrender one’s uniqueness to the confines of formal membership. This is where I draw a line between anarchy and leftism. Leftism encourages the rearrangement of constructed identities, rigid formations, and roles within a formalized social group to which individuals surrender for a “greater good” or purpose. On the other hand, anarchy as life is the decomposition of formal social groups allowing for the existential informality of individual emancipation, development, and limitless exploration. Therefore, for me, anarchy is an individualistic refusal to surrender one’s self to an over-arching power which positions itself above all.

Power structures, socially or institutionally, require the surrendering of individuality to massify their domination. The State can not exist without the individuals who choose to put on the badge and uniform. Capitalism can not exist without the subservience of individuals who make up the mass social body that reinforce its psychological and social validity and domination. Capitalism and the State require individual participation, multiplied to construct mass industrial society. I will give the leftists credit in pointing out that a massive enough worker strike could stunt industrial progress, since it is the worker — the individual wage-slave — that contributes to the life of the mega-machine. But as history has shown, a mass worker strike is not only exhausting to coordinate, but impossible to sustain long enough to collapse capitalism. While many leftists, including myself at one point, will point out that many workers simply do not have access to inspirational radical information, I have also come to learn that many workers simply do not want to strike. For too many reasons to list here, many workers go into work whether rebellions or strikes are happening or not. A fact that is often overlooked is that people are individuals. And as individuals, some choose to rebel against their work place, and some do not.

Collectives, Community Empowerment, and Organizing

Around 2013, I set off with the aim of building community power through collectivist projects that were intended to benefit people in my hood. Everything from a radical book lending library, a zine distro, really really free markets, food not bombs, and community film screenings. The collective I was part of was vibrant and full of energy. One year, we hosted a July 31 st Day of Action Against Racism and Fascism event which included film screening riot videos and clips of nazis gettin’ beat down. We left our door open for people in the hallway to come join, and our tiny apartment was packed with folks who lived above and below us, cheering in excitement while watching the videos. At the end we handed out zines and flyers, and promoted a really really free market we were doin’ the following two days. The next day, only three neighbors from the event showed up and chatted with us.

The day after that, they didn’t come back. At the time, I tried understanding why — despite the videos, the flyers and zines, and the conversations — our neighbors, who had talked about experiencing racism in their lives, were not interested in workin’ on projects with us. A one-on-one conversation with two of them a few weeks later reality-checked me: “That’s cool what y’all doin’, but, you know, we just tryin’ to do that money thing. We just tryin’ to get paid.” After a short debate about “gettin’ rich”, we departed with fist bumps and me feeling confused and defeated. “My” people in my own hood, in my own building, ain’t down with that revolutionary shit.

After a couple more years of hood-based banner drops, graffiti messages, wheat-pasting, a zine written to document and glorify the history of anti-racist rebellion where I grew up, and more community events I realized a truth that no leftist wants to hear: there is no such thing as a homogenized community to radicalize. What is a “community” when your hood is composed of individuals who each have different and often opposing objectives in life? I soon realized that the word “community” was merely a political word that often flattens important differences between individuals and propagates false unity. It is a social construct merely representing a population of people who live in a single area. Sure, we had a couple individuals here and there who were down with what we were doin’, got involved and stuck around for a little bit. But the hood was diverse. And it would be dishonest to say that they or we represented the interests of that hood. Everyone had their own individual opinions and life expectations.

I have seen some hood revolutionary projects that involved a large portion of a community materialize and flourish. Sometimes they last awhile and sometimes they lose membership and fizzle out. This is where my life experience started to define a difference between affinity groups and mass organizing. The individuals who were down with our shit came to us, with or without us having to propagate a program. They showed up because they saw other individuals that they could relate to. Other people just weren’t interested, despite us all living in the hood together, facing gentrification and being mostly POC.

I see something similar happening with anarchism. The same methods and appeals to the community, to the masses, to “the people”, are energetic and heartfelt, but yielding very little results. Potluck after potluck, radical social center or radical library, all end up bein’ filled with pre-existing radicals and end up becoming social clubs rather than places filled with non-radical people living in the immediate community. Attempts to mobilize the masses through street demonstrations end up with spectators on the sidewalk and the same radicals chanting, singing or marching in the street. I watched this spike during different times. When Trump was running for election, everyone and their momma was in the streets. Radicals were out, armed with flyers and zines and radical chants over megaphones. Shortly after the election, things normalized and soon just the radicals were back in the streets doing their thing. I admit, I was there too. Marching, chanting, handing out zines and flyers to sidewalk spectators. I remember, years ago, there was an Occupy march where we took Michigan Street in Chicago. A mass of students saw us, joined in for 3 minutes, then ran back to the sidewalk with high fives and went about their day. We were still in the streets tryin’ to invite them back with popular music. With the sudden drop in numbers, the police surrounded us and escorted us to the sidewalk. What is so wack about this is that this tactic is still being attempted today by radicals. As if the first dozen times it happened weren’t embarrassing enough.

Capitalist Individuality vs Individualist Anarchy

Individuality can be conditioned and subjugated by a socio-political environment that monopolizes a narrative of life. In the case of capitalism, we’re all born into a pre-configured society that reinforces its values, roles, and ideology with the psychological force of formalized institutions. When we walk outside, we see a reality that has been quantified and institutionally constructed to propagate itself. Cars, airplanes, highways, skyscrapers, fast food, etc — all normalized to generate the comfort of order. Without order, without normalization, there is a chaos that breaks the silence of personal subjugation. Organization and order go hand in hand. Values, roles, and ideology are better reinforced when massified to create the illusion of normalcy. This process discourages individuality, uniqueness, and chaos, since all three pose a threat to monolithic formations. While capitalism claims to encourage genuine individualism, it is an individualism that is pre-configured to reproduce capitalism on an individual level. In other words, individuals who surrender themselves to the system of capitalism become members limited to making capitalism functional. Any individual who refuses capitalism, or systems all together, will seek an existence that contradicts the interests of capitalism. From this perspective, individualist anarchy is a refusal to surrendering one’s self to the confines of a formalized system.

Chaos is the personalized strategy of negation to pre-configured order- an order that is pre-decided by those merely interested in gaining further membership. The strategy of creating a mass society or system of order is a strategy of discouraging individuality, chaos, and uniqueness. This strategy includes presenting a one-dimensional view of individualism that is defined by capitalism. But for individualism to be unique and chaotic, it can not be limited by the confines of formal organizations or socialized constructs.

Capitalism is a social construct that requires mass participation to create the illusion of normality to maintain social order. The mass participation composed of subservient individuals allows for capitalism to represent itself by materialized institutions- all physically built by the hands of individual workers. It is true, that the working class built this world, and therefore can unbuild it as well. But this assumes there are no subtle, peer pressuring forces at work that subdue the individual. This is why social war is not only necessary against massified existence, but also necessary with internally breaking the shackles of socially constructed identity and crushing the logic of submission.

The Right and the Left: Two Sides of a Coin Called “Identity”

Identity politics illustrates how different identities are stratified to create hierarchical power dynamics between groups of people. Identity politics also illustrates how individuality and uniqueness are discouraged to the point of social isolation. When people act out of bounds with the socially assigned identity, they are treated as “Others”, not validated to represent an experience. Depending on the system, certain experiences are preferred and validated. For example, to right-winger A, a successful “black” businessman is celebrated and seen as the promotion of capitalism as equal and non-discriminatory. But to right-winger B, that same man is seen as a threat to the white supremacist order and therefore not celebrated. Under leftist A, that same individual will be mocked as an “uncle Tom” or a “sellout”. But to leftist B, the “black” businessman represents successful assimilation, progress and hope for other black people. Both leftism and capitalism each have divided sides. But they all, in one way or another, share the commonality of order, homogenized identities, and membership. Therefore, in one way or another, this individual can be used as propaganda to promote a system. So now lets take for example, a “black” “man” who refuses the identity and roles of “blackness”, patriarchy, and the membership as a worker. Instead, this individual refuses leftism and capitalism. What systems can use this individual as propaganda now? From a leftist or capitalist perspective, what positive aspects of this individual can be used for promotion? As far as promoting a system, there is none. The confinements of a system on a social level have been suspended. All that remains is the anarchy in becoming ungovernable through individual uniqueness.

Individuals who deviate from the normalized social order are not only bad for propaganda, but maintain the threat of inspiring other emancipations. Individuals who desire freedom beyond the limitations of political programs don’t require a package-deal of future utopia. Rather than workin’ now to play later, play and adventure accompany a present determination for wild exploration. Armed with a sense of urgency, life becomes a playground of individual flowering and negation to social constraint- a playground that allows free, open-ended social associations and interactions not coerced by a structural permanence.

Individuality armed with chaos finds itself as an insurgent against the social forces that attempt to subjugate it. As individuality becomes wild, it becomes immune and ungovernable to the carefully constructed programs advertised by the politicians of identity and revolution. Those self-proclaimed revolutionaries can only conceive of revolution as merely reforming the social conditions that constitute order. But some of us prefer insurrection over revolution; an insurrection that doesn’t end with a new system but a life without measure. I want to weaponize chaos as an individualized attack on all governance and social order. I envision anarchy as a wildfire that blackens the civilized, domesticated kingdom of institutional and social domination. Getting free is more than just attacking capital and the state. At least for me, it also means creating your self every single day beyond society’s attempts to define you as a static being.

It is now an established fact that we live in a world of shit where the State and capital, basically undisturbed, impose all sorts of monstrosities on us. It is also certain that only a tiny minority of the population is trying to oppose the suppression of spaces of autonomy and freedom that make life worth living, in a more or less conscious way. As a part of this tiny minority, we anarchists are aware of the urgent need to destroy what oppresses us: why are we not more determined and acute?

Without doubt one of the greatest and most serious obstacles to action is the fear of really putting our lives at stake. This is a crucial point of the revolutionary struggle, which is often not sufficiently addressed because it forces us to come to terms with ourselves and our weaknesses.

We praise so-called easily reproducible ‘small actions’, which certainly don’t frighten the ‘people’; and even if we are aware of the urgency and necessity of destructive attack on the authoritarian-technological system we are reluctant to get involved to the end, to consider ourselves at war and act consequently.

Certainly it is much easier to find oneself along with hundreds/thousands of people defending a territory threatened by some eco-monstrosity than to find oneself on one’s own waiting for the planner [of the monstrosity] outside his house. I’m not talking about bravery. Everyone is afraid and implements his/her strategies in order to control and manage this. Even those who take part in so-called ‘social struggle’ risk ending up in prison or being wounded (there are hundred examples of this). I don’t think this is the distinction; it is something more complex, i.e. the determination to engage in struggle practices that don’t foresee any possibility of negotiation with power, and express total refusal of the existent.

We take part in meetings where we deceive ourselves by thinking we are contributing to making decisions, even if we usually adapt ourselves to what comrades with more charisma have suggested. Inevitably compromise is always downwards if we say we all have to grow up together (every time) without scaring anyone. We deceive ourselves into thinking we are contributing to some collective project, while it is often not our own.

The fact that we find ourselves ‘among the people’ gives us the illusion we really are working for imminent insurrection. We can share our responsibilities with others and hope we won’t be alone when things take a bad turn. We don’t realize how much of our individual freedom we are losing, on the contrary we feel reassured by the limits imposed by meetings where we can hide our indecision behind the risk that our impatience could undermine the common project.

But it is only doxycycline when we decide to put our lives totally at stake, when individually or with our comrades in affinity, we strike power right where we can do more harm, only then do we have total control of our lives and are able to say with joy and serenity that we are making our revolution.

By realizing a perspective of direct attack we are freeing ourselves from the obstruction of defensive struggles and opening infinite possibilities of action and freedom. I’m not making a mere aesthetic exaltation of individual action, I’m aware that insurrection is a collective event which will break out when the oppressed rise up in arms, but I’m making a point about the method to contribute to provoke it [insurrection]. Life is short and the work of demolition is too great and necessary to wait for everybody to be ready. On the contrary I’m convinced that only by fanning the flames with the example of action can we make that moment come closer.

I think another obstacle to anarchists’ possibilities of attack is the way many comrades approach so-called ‘social struggles’. In my opinion we often start from a wrong consideration: we feel different from the people and this leads us to seeing the social sphere as something in which we have to work and approach with caution in order not to create fear, slowly bringing it to more advanced positions so that, once it is ready, we can all be together on the barricades of insurrection.

I’m convinced that anarchists are part of the social sphere and have to relate with the ‘others’ without all those ‘paternalistic’ attitudes which inevitably lead to politics. Anarchists must strike and attack with all their power, and others who have similar tensions will follow the example of our actions. We’ll find new accomplices and finally, when all the other exploited decide to rise up, insurrection will break out. It is us who have to dictate deadlines and times for struggle. The more we are sharp and able to strike in the right places the more we create possibilities for practices of direct attack to spread. This doesn’t mean that we don’t have to take part in struggles that arise spontaneously, but we have to do it with our methods: sabotage and direct action.

If in a certain place people take to the streets to oppose something harmful it is not necessary for us to get to know these people one by one, that we cook polenta [typical northern Italy dish] with them and try to make the barricade they have erected advance a few centimetres. This won’t bring the insurrectional perspective any closer, on the contrary it will weaken our strength. We have to strike the company responsible for the construction of the toxicity, those who plan it, those who finance it: we have to make it clear that anyone can take their lives in their hands and destroy what destroys them. We have to clash with the police, not only when they try to disperse the demo in question; we have to provoke and attack them, let people see that it is possible, that they can/must strike first those who oppress them. Some might say that my way of seeing things and understanding action can harbour the germs of authoritarianism and vanguardism.

On the contrary I believe that my way contains the antidote to the two evils that plague revolutionary action. One doesn’t disguise one’s desires, one says clearly who one is and what one wants, and above all in an equal relationship with others one demonstrates that anyone can concretely oppose the status quo by arming their passions.

In my opinion politics lies exactly in the way one limits oneself in order to keep pace with all the others, in the way one puts some discourses aside in order not to ‘frighten’ people who are not ready to understand them. It must be clear that anarchists look for accomplices with whom to rise up and not public opinion in favour of vague speeches on freedom and self-management.

Another critique often addressed in a more or less intelligent or veiled way to those who practice attack on the State and capital is the risk of getting stuck in a vortex of action/repression with the apparatuses of power, without advancing on the road of insurrection. Of course it cannot be denied that the more we represent a danger for power the more the latter will harass and repress us. But unfortunately this is natural, and this concatenation of cause and effect will stop only when the spreading of attacks provokes an insurrectional rupture. To think that revolution will only be the fruit of the awareness of the exploited, after decades of ‘training’ in the gymnasiums of intermediate struggles, led by a minority of enlightened ones who hold their hands [of the exploited] and take a step a little ahead of them by continuously putting off the moment of armed conflict is pure illusion.

This tactic is a loser twice over: first because by renouncing direct action we renounce living our lives fully and making our revolution here and now; and secondly because it suggests that the State will give the oppressed time to become aware of their condition, to know each other, organize themselves and maybe rise up, before crushing them. A simple example could be that of the Free Republic of the Maddalena: swept away before anyone could deceive themselves and think they represented a real danger for the State authority.

Moreover the State has a very efficient weapon, perhaps more powerful than military force: recuperation. For example, when the housing problem becomes urgent and struggles and squatting multiply, when evictions don’t sort the problem out, power can play the card of legalization. Once they have a roof over their heads, what will the exploited with whom we have struggled side by side do? Perhaps they will demand more and continue to rebel, but it is more likely that they will be happy, while we will be compelled to dive headlong into the next struggle hoping we’ll be luckier this time… Only when our action doesn’t contemplate possibilities for negotiation, when our struggle aims at the destruction of what oppresses us, will the State not be able to trick us with recuperation: either it has the strength to crush us or it must succumb. If we have the ability to try and spread the practice of attack and direct action, if we are able to throw petrol on the fire of social tensions, by exacerbating them and trying to prevent them from recomposing themselves, perhaps we will really be able to set the prairie on fire.

Before I conclude I would like to dwell on another aspect that seems to be an obstacle to our action: the analysis of the effects and transformations of dominion. Far too often it seems that this analysis is useless and doesn’t give us the ability to affect reality; on the contrary it feeds fear and sense of impotence in the face of the magnitude of the challenge and the monstrosity of the harmfulness to be opposed. The more we analyze the authoritarian and deleterious aspects of technology and denounce the authoritarian projects of power, the less we sharpen our weapons.

With more or less developed research on the latest breakthrough of control we terrorize those who would like to act. I’m not saying that we don’t need analyses but that they don’t have to become an end in themselves, exercises of intellectual skill detached from direct action. What’s the use of publishing endless lists of companies responsible for the destruction of nature if nobody attacks them? Already the magnitude and awfulness of the State and economic apparatuses themselves often make us doubt our chances to strike them effectively. Eco-disasters such as the sea of petrol in the Gulf of Mexico or Fukushima seem to suggest that it is not possible to stop the war that industrial society is waging on man and nature.

In spite of everything we are not helpless. Bare instruments of analysis, direct action and the determination of the few can demonstrate that we are not all resigned to accept passively and at the same time they show to the other exploited that it is still possible to fight back. For example, the action of the comrades of the Olga Nucleus of the FAI/FRI tells us that it is possible to express solidarity with those who suffer nuclear catastrophe, even on the other side of the word, and strike the nuclear power industry effectively.

I hope my consideration will serve to start off a debate among comrades, with the aim of highlighting and eliminating anything that limits our anarchist action. Courage and strength to the comrades who practice anonymous action, courage and strength to those who give a name to their anger, courage and strength to those who give birth to the FAI/FRI with their actions: there is an entire world to be demolished. Nicola Gai

First, let's define some basic terms. “Indigenous” means “of the land we are actually on”. “Anarchy” means “the rejection of authority”. The principles of anarchism include direct action, mutual aid, and voluntary cooperation. "Anarchy; A Journal of Desire Armed" envisions a primitive anarchy that is "radically cooperative & communitarian, ecological and feminist, spontaneous and wild".

Civilization is a culture that revolves around cities. A city is a collection of people that live permanently in one place, in densities high enough that they must import their food and resources from outside the city in order to survive and ensure the continued growth of the city. So, cities depend on the exploitation of external bodies to maintain themselves.

This externalisation alienates us from both our food supply and our waste. Our food is purchased from a supermarket, grown far from home, prepared and packaged on an assembly line. We are denied any participation in the processes that feed us. Our garbage gets trucked away to be disposed of somewhere out of our immediate sight, and our human waste is flushed down pipes. We don't fully know where it goes, what it affects, what place it has in our ecosystem.

Civilization aims to dominate life through its various structures that are designed to domesticate us. These structures include industry, colonialism, statism, capitalism, agriculture, racism, schooling, religion, media, police, prisons, military, patriarchy, slavery and more.

Indigenous peoples throughout history have fought and died to resist the forceful encroachment of civilization into their lives. This struggle continues today, as the "uncivilized" are pushed closer and closer to the edge of survival by the "civilized" all over the world, and the technological imbalance between us continues to expand and create a sociological divide that renders us unable to understand each other on even a basic level.

The lifestyles of the civilized and the uncivilized have diverged to such an extent that it has become near-impossible for the civilized to see that their civilization has become an obstacle to our basic survival. Instead, they hold their civilization up as the instrument of their survival and fear living in a world without it. They are so conditioned to the order of their civilization that they can't fathom a life in its absence.

The entire concept of 'civilization' depends on the rule of the colonizer and his brutal subjugation of indigenous peoples. The perpetual march of global civilization is fed by the forced labor and the exploitation of natural resources in the global South (and historically, all lands beyond the European continent).

In order to strip the land of its resources, the people that live on the land need to be displaced and moved to tightly-packed cities, farms or "reservations" where they will be forced to labor to turn those resources into consumer products for Western markets. This process of civilizing indigenous peoples is rapid, and our culture, language and history is often forcibly extinguished by the colonizers to ensure we don't attempt a return to our previous "uncivilized" lives and reclaim those lands that they have taken for their industry.

The ruling classes are always looking for new avenues to accumulate wealth for themselves. Rulers create subservient underclasses by depriving uncivilized peoples of their natural habitats so they have no choice but to accept domestication and be integrated into the industrial capitalist system. The ruler can then successfully convert the people they have tamed and domesticated into profitable commodities; docile workers that can labor their whole lives to create more wealth for the ruler.

A ruler sees no use for a hunter-gatherer or any person that is not creating wealth and power for the ruler. If people didn't need to work for rulers to acquire food and shelter, rulers would cease to have power. So the worst enemy of the ruler is a person that doesn't depend on rulers to survive, or worse; an entire culture of self-sufficient people. An uncivilized culture that he has no control over is a ruler's worst fear.

Under civilization, no longer will indigenous peoples be permitted to survive off of their ancestral lands, hunting and foraging. Now to survive in this new world forced on us by the colonizers, we must endure back-breaking labor in factories, warehouses, mines and industrial farms. Our children must be educated in the ways of the colonizers; to shape them into productive and submissive workers. We must depend on the state and colonizers to feed and clothe us. We must consume and waste and participate in destroying the ecosystems that sustained us for millennia. We must be "civilized" so that the ruling class may prosper at our expense.

Freedom Through Rejection

To reject civilization is to oppose this coercive arrangement where our history, our culture, and the collective knowledge that allowed us to survive and prosper on our land is taken from us by profiteering industrialists that would have us devote our entire lives to laboring for their benefit as they deny us access to our own lands and resources.

To reject civilization is to oppose urbanization; the cramming of people into small, barren, concreted areas that can be more easily controlled by our rulers to stop us from breaking with their demands that we be "civilized" and obedient.

To reject civilization is to oppose exploitative industrial agricultural methods that force the rural poor to sacrifice their labor to feed the materially wealthy cities, while rapidly despoiling the land of its fertility and sapping the groundwater for irrigation at a much faster rate than it can be replenished.

Civilization depends on a massively unequal concentration of wealth; a brutal capitalist hierarchy where the few that have been lucky enough to climb to the top control everyone beneath them. At the very bottom of civilization's hierarchy are the indigenous peoples of the world.

Control & Domestication

The voices of indigenous peoples, whether they are accepted by their colonizers as successfully "civilized", or rejected as "uncivilized", have been long ignored by everyone that benefits from the march of civilization and the shiny things it gives them. Shiny things made possible by the rampant exploitation of indigenous lands and the manipulation and control of indigenous peoples through domestication.

"Control" is the key word to understanding why civilization has come into being. The capitalist colonizers work hard to convince us that we need to be controlled by them and their civilization. That we need their civilization to protect us from harm. If we labor for them, we won't go hungry. If we give them our lands and relocate to their "reservations" or their farms or their cities, adopt their language and religion, they will give us protection, allow us to survive with "dignity", accept us as successfully domesticated and civilized.

The irony to this is staggering. The colonizers decimate our forests and slice open our land to empty it of its resources. They slaughter our wildlife to extinction and douse our plant life with herbicides to ensure we can't sustain ourselves. They render our water toxic and undrinkable. They destroy our climate with their burning of carbon. They murder us if we dare stand in their way.

And then they offer us sanctuary from their tyranny. A choice between enslavement or extinction. Move to their cities, slums, plantations and reservations and be accepted as "civilized", or die at their hands for being "subhuman uncivilized savages" that can't be "saved". Anything civilization can't control must be purged to ensure the march of civilization continues without obstacle.

To embrace anarchy is to oppose the very idea of control. To reject the authority of the colonizer and his coercive civilization that takes so much from us to provide comforts to cultures that would sooner see us slaughtered than threaten their industry-fueled lifestyles. Anarchy is to trust in ourselves and our neighbors to work together through mutual aid to solve our own problems, without needing the "charity" of powerful authorities.

Anti-civ indigenous anarchists recognize that the very concept of civilization depends on our colonizers' ability to control us. Our forced assimilation into the colonizers' alien civilization, and the punitive laws we're forced to obey are designed to keep us from resisting the perverse order our colonizers force on us. Their order depends on our domestication and the destruction of our way of life. Their civilization is designed to destroy everything it touches.

Embracing our "Inhospitable Wilderness"

The so-called "inhospitable wilderness" that civilization has seen fit to beat into submission is the lifeblood of our existence. For millennia, we lived in peace with this wilderness, nurturing it as much as it nurtured us. We were caretakers of the land, rather than exploiters of it. Now, as civilized people, we labor for a lifetime for the right to assert ownership over a tiny piece of the land. So that we may pave it over and erect a concrete block to live in. If we are successful. Most of us don't even get this privilege and are forced to pay wealthy landlords for the right to live in one of the concrete blocks they own.

Uncivilized, we roamed freely, wild fruit and herbs grew in every direction; ready for the picking. Freshwater streams filled with fish dotted the landscape. The sounds of wildlife filled the air. Our labor was minimal and the rewards were instantaneous. We only knew abundance. Or, more accurately: affluence without abundance.

Hunter-gatherers are able to meet their immediate needs without needing to stockpile a surplus the way civilized people must do to survive (with agriculture, jobs, loans, savings, mortgages, pensions, insurance). The uncivilized have no want of material possessions because such frivolous things would stand in the way of their ability to live nomadically with the seasons. Having too many possessions forces us to stay in one place at all times to guard those possessions with our lives, so that we can continue to possess them and not risk them being taken from us. It creates a paranoid security-centric lifestyle that puts owning and protecting property above our most basic needs.

Hunter-gatherers can trust that the environment will provide for us, that going for a walk to hunt or forage will give us and our loved ones with all the food and water we'll need for a few days. After taking that walk, the rest of the day is wide open for casual leisure.

Civilized people love to refer to hunter-gatherers as being stricken by "poverty". But this poverty is a material poverty; a lack of surplus, luxuries, things. In real terms, hunter-gatherers are far richer than the perpetually in-debt civilized workers who have little room for leisure and must measure their entire existence in terms of "time". The civilized, in their agriculture-based societies, must work 5 or 6 days a week simply to survive. The uncivilized have no want of such absurdities. As Marshall Sahlins noted, hunter-gatherers are the original affluent society. With no material needs, there is no need for poverty or wealth. All people may be equal; a true anarchy.

Civilized people plant rows of crops in fenced in, sterilized industrial monocultures that barely resemble the diverse mutually-sustaining interconnected food forests that fed us throughout history. Farmers repeatedly strain the same plots of land year after year to grow these single crops, soaking them with chemical fertilizers and pesticides so nothing but the monocrop can survive. The soil is eroded, barren of life, dependent on the chemical concoctions the farmer must go into debt to procure.

In civilization, water is scarce, controlled and expensive. Fruit comes wrapped in plastic and you must labor in misery for a full day to afford it. Fish is contaminated by the toxic waste that industry spews into waterways, and yet we still are charged for the privilege of eating it. Wildlife has been largely replaced by vast expanses of caged livestock. The endless excrement from these industrial meat facilities also pours into the waterways, further poisoning the ecosystem and sterilizing the land.

The wildness that once defined us has been coerced out of us by our colonizers. Like dogs bred from wild wolves to be obedient and subservient to their masters, we have come to depend on the state and capitalists for our basic survival. Sick and domesticated, we fight each other for the scraps of food thrown down to us by the rulers that deprive us of our land and our very lives.

Understanding Neo-Colonialism

Ghana’s first President, Kwame Nkrumah succinctly explained Neo-colonialism in 1965:

The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside. The methods and form of this direction can take various shapes. (Most) often, neo-colonialist control is exercised through economic or monetary means. Control over government policy in the neo-colonial State may be secured by payments towards the cost of running the State, by the provision of civil servants in positions where they can dictate policy, and by monetary control over foreign exchange through the imposition of a banking system controlled by the imperial power.

This description of neo-colonialism still rings true today, with indigenous cultures all over the world experiencing what Nkrumah described in its various forms. Most recently, Chinese neo-colonialists have flowed into indigenous lands, promising to lift us up with their wealth. Their investors, bankers, traders, lenders, developers and charities all promise to improve our lives for the better.

African countries are especially incurring massive debt to Beijing, offering up their land, oil, gas, minerals and other resources as collatoral for every new billion-dollar loan they take out. When they inevitably default on these unsustainable loans, China will seize the collatoral and strip the continent of its natural wealth. Malaysia recently realized the dangers of this debt trap and pulled out of Chinese development deals. Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad warned the world, "there is a new version of Colonialism happening."

The non-profit Confucius Institute that operates in indigenous lands is a vehicle for Chinese propaganda, restricting what the teachers they supply from China can say, distorting what students learn. This propaganda-via-schooling is designed to promote China's economic interests by conditioning indigenous children to accept colonization and a life of subservience. Colonizers go to great lengths to normalize the terror they bring and convince us it is good for us.

Kwame Nkrumah:

Neo-colonialism might be also the worst form of imperialism. For those who practice it, it means power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress. In the days of old-fashioned colonialism, the imperial power had at least to explain and justify at home the actions it was taking abroad. In the colony those who served the ruling imperial power could at least look to its protection against any violent move by their opponents. With neo-colonialism neither is the case.

Similarly to China, South Korea and its multinational corporations have bought farming rights to millions of hectares of agricultural land in "under-developed" countries, in order to secure food resources for their citizens. The history of colonialism and banana republics have shown us that this kind of arrangement has only led to misery for indigenous peoples and the degradation of our lands.

South Korea's RG Energy Resources Asset Management CEO Park Yong-soo:

The (South Korean) nation does not produce a single drop of crude oil and other key industrial minerals. To power economic growth and support people's livelihoods, we cannot emphasize too much that securing natural resources in foreign countries is a must for our future survival.

The head of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Jacques Diouf, warned that the rise in these land deals could create a form of neocolonialism, with poorer regions producing food for the rich at the expense of their own hungry people. It's safe to say that this latest form of neocolonialism has already arrived, and our corrupt governments are signing deals that make us increasingly dependent on these foreign nations and their promises to "lift us up" by building us cities and infrastructure.

It's integral that we resist their attempts to civilize our lands so that we will be forced to labor for them; helping them steal our natural resources to grow their empires so they may expand further and exploit more indigenous populations across the world.

And our local authorities, who are so quick to sell our futures for the fleeting luxuries of concrete towers and faster trains are just as culpable in this neo-colonial push to shape us into the beggared workers of foreign empires.

The Maasai, a semi-nomadic tribe that inhabits mostly Tanzania and Kenya, have been migrating with the seasons for centuries. They have increasingly been pushed out of their land by the states and business interests that collude to write laws that prohibit them from cultivating plants and grazing their animals on large tracts of their traditional land.

Tens of thousands of Maasai were left homeless after their homes in the Ngorongoro Crater sightseeing area were set on fire, supposedly to "preserve the region’s ecosystem" and attract more tourists.

The Tanzanian government works with Tanzania Conservation Limited, which is owned by the US-based Thomson Safaris, and Ortello Business Corporation; a luxury hunting company based in the United Arab Emirates, to drive the Maasai off of their land. They're beaten, shot, and their property is confiscated. Young herders are so frightened that they now run whenever they see a vehicle approaching, fearing for their lives.

The state has now ordered the Maasai people to leave their homeland so it can be turned into a hunting ground for affluent tourists who pay a premium to shoot big game animals and take the carcasses home with them as stuffed trophies.

The state aids in these genocidal acts to secure foreign investment to build its cities. The state will always put the civilized before the uncivilized because the entire reason a state exist is to grow its cities and plunder food and resources to feed that growth.

Civilization has always been the weapon used by the powerful to condemn us to a life of servitude. Reject civilization. Reject the state. Reject capitalism. Reject all attempts to conquer our lands and enslave our peoples.

Looking a Gift-Horse in the Mouth: The Technological Divide

We should understand that there's a big difference between the concepts of "tools" and "technology". Tools can be made on a small-scale with local materials, either by individuals or small groups of people on occasions when the tools are needed. Unlike technology, tools don't construct systems of authority and obedience to allow one group to dominate another, just so long as everyone is able to realistically create or acquire tools on their own. Technology depends on the ability to mount immense operations of extraction, production, distribution and consumption. This demands coercive authority and hierarchy. Oppression.

The Fifth Estate explained the pitfalls of technology in 1981:

Technology is not a simple tool which can be used in any way we like. It is a form of social organization, a set of social relations. It has its own laws. If we are to engage in its use, we must accept its authority. The enormous size, complex interconnections and stratification of tasks which make up modern technological systems make authoritarian command necessary and independent, individual decision-making impossible.

Technology is used by rulers to control and pacify their citizens. The societies of the colonists are laden with technological marvels. But their people are detached from the land they live on, alienated from each other, their eyes constantly fixated on mindless distractions emanating from their screens, as their lands dry up and burn to pay for their addiction to these toxic industrial products.

Technology is used to conquer, to assert dominance, to destroy entire cultures that dare to reject the empire's world order. Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, entire countries decimated by the great technology of the imperialists, raining death down from the skies.

The colonizers will always have better technology than us. Whatever technologies they promise us in return for our cooperation with their agenda will pale in comparison to the technologies that drive their own societies. They'll tell us we need their technology to be civilized, to avoid falling behind the rest of the world, but there is no catching up with the empire's machine. It will grind us up and churn us out long before it ever gives up the secrets it promises.

Technology is a weapon wielded by the most powerful and there is no way for us to ever match that power, so why try? Why dedicate our lives to playing their game, by their rules? To receive their obsolete cast-offs in return? They use their technology to convince us that we are less than them, that we are "backwards" and that they need to "save" us from our "savage" existence. They say all this while their technological supremacy depends on our resources and our labor, on them being able to coerce us into sacrificing ourselves and our children and our children's children to give them the fuel for their big important machines. Machines that allow them to maintain their dominance over us, so that we remain perpetually inferior to them. If they ever gave us what they promise; the liberation they say their technology will bring, their power over us would be lost. We would no longer need them to "save" us from our wildness because we would be as civilized as them.

When we give up so much of ourselves so that they will give us their technology, they make sure we will need them to maintain it. We become dependent on their technology, and thus dependent on them to continue feeding it to us and to fix it when it breaks. Our lives begin to revolve around the technology and we forget how to live without it. And while we're distracted by the calming glow of our little screens, our ecosystems are decimated by the colonists.

Technology is a carrot on a stick and it cannot liberate us, only domesticate and enslave us. Reject it. Reject being measured by our technological prowess or how civilized we are. Reject the colonizer and his false-gifts and manipulations. Reject his civilization. Reject his control over who we are and who we will be.

First appeared as Contributo Barbaro, as a contribution to the International Anarchist Gathering in Zurich, November 2012.

When we try to read the reality that surrounds us we realize that we are assisting to profound transformations when we look at the management of economic and political power. Such changes are also reflected on a social level. It is necessary to confront ourselves with the current transformations and to take them into consideration in relation to our analysis and perspective of attack.

Capital is not in crisis, but the financial choices of the states ‘simply’ have created some difficulties in the traditional management of the market and have produced, in general, a worsening of conditions in the life of consumer-citizens. The contradictions that capital has developed have contributed to possible moments of conflict in some zones, more or less brutal and of longer or shorter time span, between the structures and guardians of power and those pockets of population that have had enough with being excluded from the comforts promised by the fake well-being of the society of consumption.

Looking at this situation it is natural to ask ourselves what to do. Being “here and now” is in fact at the basis of our desire of violent rupture with all systems of values, with capital and its many variations.

Within such reflections and within the definition of perspectives that can guide us through uncertain and unexplored paths of revolt we believe it necessary to avoid looking at reality through easy enthusiasms that risk leading us to see insurrections at every street corner, accomplices in every protester, revolutionary subjects in all exploited. At the same time we believe it is equally dangerous to remain anchored in a kind of realist pessimism that risks paralysing us faced with the current time, of transforming us into permanently awaiting, trapped in a deterministic logic.

What we believe to be fundamental is to place ourselves in a perspective of lucid observation that could allow us to grasp the current transformations, identifying the aspects which are vulnerable to our enemy, to better aim towards how and what to attack.

In the mental and material condition that is dominated by the urgency of being there (and not of being), as a definition of our own role within a diffused conflictuality, we risk losing sight of the central point: the necessity of starting from ourselves, from our own anarchist ideas and perspectives. Then, during a moment of a spontaneous revolt, the problem of anarchists is not that of seeking a role among other roles, of finding a way to be accepted by the others, to be agreeable or to hide our own real desires, to just make alliances. It would be a lot more useful to choose conditions of attack that hinder a return to normality; experimenting in the actions that belong to us, finding targets that spontaneity alone is not able to find. Any insurrectionary hypothesis is unpredictable and independent from us, but as anarchists, in a perspective of permanent conflictuality and of defining insurrectionary projects we can certainly give a fundamental contribution to what is going on.

The problems that we should confront ourselves with are not so much how to relate to the possibilities of revolt in the streets, of territorial and/or specific struggles that could become radical and widespread, but more how to continue to act and attack, in both a practical and theoretical dimension, in the light of the current transformations within society and the mechanisms of domination.

Analysing the practices and the paths of struggle in relation to the objective is the fundamental step of a discussion aimed towards individuating the limits and the perspectives of the theory and the practice of social subversion. To be able to better touch on the different questions and proposals that we intend to put forward on this occasion, we would like to bring certain points to the attention of comrades.

We believe it is urgent to confront the question of the ways of communication among comrades. The problem can be faced distinguishing two aspects: that of the ways with which we decide to communicate and that of the value that we give to the tools that each time we choose to use. Specifically, we are referring to the use of the internet and the way we relate to it. Our own use of these tools – even within limits – is a fact, however this is certainly not a factor from which we can consider them useful in the case of an insurrection or a fundamental tool in the definition of our perspective, or more, something which we can dispose of as we please.

The systems of virtual communication have caused enormous developments within the society we live in over the last twenty years and permeate every day more the reality and the relations between people. We cannot ignore that such systems have slowly entered our lives, inevitably conditioning also our way of relating with others, with what surrounds us and with the mediums of communication themselves. All of this happened in spite of our awareness that virtual irreality is functional to power and is one of its forces.

Over the last decade the traditional methods through which our ideas circulated, such as newspapers, brochures, flyers, poster and books have been severely reduced and the spreading of ideas has been almost entirely delegated to the virtual universe. More than ever it is indispensable to return and dust off the old forms of encounter and communication between comrades and experiment with new ones, ones that are only ours and not of the enemy. Meeting each other and taking the time to do so. Something that is more and more difficult given the daily rhythm imposed by modern life, rhythms that more or less consciously we have made our own.

It often happens to hear someone referring to the possibility of using computerized tools in certain situations. However finding ourselves in practice face to face with the daily use of the internet – particularly through the exchange of information and ideas – has shown us how much virtual reality has been able to condition in a negative way the current way of building relations. The idea of a good use of the virtual reality in a revolutionary perspective does not convince us. In fact we think that taking into consideration such a possibility would entail choosing paths that give no guarantee, given that they are functional to capital and the management of power. On the contrary, computerization and technological development have to become potential targets of attack. 

***

The machine of capital is fed by structures of power (bureaucracies and institutions), by mechanisms of repression and control (prisons, courthouses, military and police forces, surveillance systems), by work, by consensus, by production. Radical critique and the perspective of attack have to therefore develop on many levels, both through theory and through practice. Specifically the system of production and consumption is what binds and chains individuals to capital and all its variations. The creation of false needs determines submission, more or less conscious, to the exploitation of work, to the logics of economic colonialism. The production of energy, industrial complexes and more or less displaced factories, the distribution of merchandise are at the basis of the functioning of this world.

And it is precisely in this direction that we need to act without waiting for this wall of commodification, which is seeping into every pore of our existences, to collapse on top of us, while we are busy scratching away on the surface and not at its foundation, burying any future possibility of attack. Acquiring, exchanging and spreading information, practical and theoretical, in regards to the place and the use of tools and knowledge is one of the aspects that we believe is indispensable to discuss and develop.

We can ask ourselves questions about how to act and how to attack, but it is equally important to ask ourselves against what to act and which targets to take into consideration, aiming towards taking the initiative rather than locking ourselves up in a logic of retaliation. What surrounds us is swarming with places through which capital proliferates. Places that were born or were transformed over the last decades. We can, briefly, give an example, with which it is easy to highlight some changes we are referring to. Let’s consider the difference there is between paper archives and databases. In the past, burning the documentation of a registry office, of a workplace, of a large industrial complex could be considered a concrete destructive action. Today not. Information and archives are preserved in databases, in minuscule electronic devices, and run along thousands of kilometres of cables and wires. Is it not perhaps necessary to take this into account? Is it not perhaps obvious that the changes of the enemy have been radical and cannot be ignored, and therefore it is necessary to get to know them better and deeper?

On this occasion we do not want to make a list of what could possibly be considered targets of attack, we prefer leaving these matters to the imagination of the research and the creativity of one’s own definition of perspectives of revolt.

Another point that we are interested in briefly discussing is the international dimension that we believe an insurrectionary perspective should assume or return to. Occasions such as this one allow us to meet, discuss, confront ourselves with other comrades from different places, and need to constitute a starting point to the deepening of future relationships. However the possibility to make these bonds on an individual basis or among realities from different places should not be the end, but a starting point and an aspect within the internationalist dimension that we aspire to. Having relations with comrades who live elsewhere is not enough, it is necessary that each one of us knows how to project ourselves in a perspective of observation and action that goes beyond territorial boundaries.

To explain ourselves better, let’s take as an example what happened in Greece over the last years. The insurrection of December, the thousands of attacks spread over its entire territory, the repeating conflicts with the police forces as well as various symbols and structures of power, the looting of supermarkets and many other actions that have warmed our hearts and fired our souls. Fires, though, that rarely spilled over our souls to assume a concrete dimension.

Reasons can be different one from another. Lack of contacts? A reality too far removed from our own? Internal conditions hard to decipher? Sporadic news that often is exclusively linked to sources of the regime? Of course these are reasons that probably weighed in. But first among all, the most determining one, was that we were not and are not prepared and therefore incapable of seizing the moment. Being able to take beyond the Greek borders a permanent conflictuality and targeted attacks, being able to understand the contradictions that capital is developing a bit everywhere, being able to counterattack having at our disposal tools developed beforehand, could have made the difference. It is also through reflecting on this missed occasion, of which we could mention many more, that we can understand how much it is necessary to have the capacity to see beyond the few things that are in our short range of view and to be ready, to be prepared.

In the urgency of wanting to be there, in the excitement of participation in the possibility of spreading opposition we run the risk of losing ourselves between the provocations of capital and the trajectory of paths that don’t belong to us. We don’t have a world to save, nor consciences to conquest, nor a message to spread. Even though creativity as part of the unpredictable is quite fundamental, the perspectives and the objectives should not be pulled out of a magic hat. We cannot debase ourselves in an obsessive search for roles, numbers and head-counts. It is nonetheless important to explore new paths of attack, explore new means, tools and techniques in relation not only to objectives, but also taking into consideration contexts and available forces.

Infinite possibilities of intervention exist in a critical and destructive path against the reality that surrounds us, and in such a path we find it important to extend and diversify the practices of conflict attempting to make them, time after time, reproducible.

Palermo, October 31st.