![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/08/5.jpg\")
“If the farmer is starved, the country is starved.” A protest against wheat pricing in Raqqa on May 22, 2026.
\nAcross more than a decade of unfinished revolution and civil war in Syria, Syrian activists in exile participated in organizing in other parts of the world. At last, at the end of 2024, the regime of Bashar al-Assad fell, enabling them to begin to return home. One of the projects that Syrian exiles helped to establish is the Peoples Want network, a worldwide network of organizations and collectives seeking to foster an internationalism from below. In the following interview, participants in the Syria group within the Peoples Want discuss the situation they confront in Syria today and describe how they will participate in the Mujawara campaign, a month of events intended to interweave horizontal organizing initiatives around the world.
\n\nCan you give us a brief update on the current political situation in Syria? What is the dynamic on the ground for revolutionaries, social movements, and other popular struggles? How do exiled and diasporic communities factor into these?
\n\nThe fall of the regime enabled millions of people to return to their homes and lands, reuniting families. People are starting to rebuild villages and neighborhoods. Entire towns had been entirely cleansed of their populations.
\n\nSo the first barrier has fallen—people can safely come home—but the second barrier remains: the economy. The majority of people who left are still in camps or in exile, unable to come back. The government is prioritizing attracting foreign investors and monopolizing resources over rebuilding the large areas destroyed by the Assad regime, most of which were very poor. The horrors of the old regime are still present, too, as people discover mass graves and search for the forcibly disappeared, sometimes finding death certificates without finding the remains. Syrians are still waiting for justice.
\n\nWe are also living through economic and ecological disasters. Prices are extremely high, wages very low, and the new government has raised the costs for basic necessities such as electricity and food in an unprecedented disproportional way. At the same time, after years of drought, this year saw heavy rains and storms resulting in violent floods that impacted the wheat season and damaged infrastructure in areas including Deir Ezzor and Raqqa, leading to power and water cuts.
\n\nDuring this period, forces within or allied with the new government have committed two massacres, one on the western coast of Syria in March 2025 and one in Sweida in July 2025. The perpetrators enjoy near-total impunity. Serious clashes between the new regime and Kurdish forces in the northeast in January 2026 forced through the integration of large parts of the Syrian Democratic Forces into the new central government in Damascus. In the provinces of Deraa and Qunietra, the Israeli occupation continues to annex lands and strategic positions. In some areas, we are witnessing systematic sectarian pressure on minority groups via through direct violence as well as political and economic abuse of power, including the kidnapping of women and regular clashes between different ethnic or religious groups with or without the complicity of governmental forces.
\n\nNonetheless, despite everything, the fall of the regime has opened some space for collective organizing. Those who were operating underground have started working publicly; groups functioning informally now want to get more organized, and those doing local work want to connect with other initiatives around the country. We have seen groups including an independent journalist union, agricultural cooperatives, civil peace initiatives, and even a housewives’ syndicate. That represents a gain of the revolution. Today, it is possible to organize protests in the street without barrel bombs falling on your head. The government fears demonstrations and has reversed its decisions following protests about the alcohol ban in Damascus, a contested construction plan in Homs, and the price of wheat. Each time, the government has retreated, showing that it fears even small popular mobilization.
\n\n “If the farmer is starved, the country is starved.” A protest against wheat pricing in Raqqa on May 22, 2026.
\nStill, this will not last if there is no sustained fight to defend the gains of the revolution against a state increasingly veering into authoritarianism. The new government is building its own surveillance and repression apparatus; there are already cases of arbitrary detention, torture in prisons, and pressure to suspend political activities. The question is why it remains difficult to build an opposition capable of confronting its neoliberal, reactionary, and authoritarian tendencies. The political space is there, but the chief obstacle preventing people from organizing against oppression is not the new government per se so much as the country’s divisions along lines of identity.
\n\nIdentity-based conflicts are extremely strong. Over the past year, opposition movements have often emerged along ethnic and sectarian lines: Druze in the south demanding independence, Kurds in the northeast moving back towards a more Kurdish nationalist project, Alawites demanding separation or autonomy. At the same time, Sunni supremacism among supporters of the government leads to violence and hatred directed at entire communities. Despite the fact that anger at the government’s economic policies is growing across every community including Arab Sunnis, it remains difficult to establish concrete class-based alliances. This is a blessing for the new government: it protects it from any serious opposition, enabling it to present itself as the central balancing force able to restore order.
\n\nThe situation is further complicates by deep divisions within what used to be the revolutionary camp, especially following the two massacres, because some ex-revolutionaries have tried to justify them or downplay the horror. The chief strategic debate today is over how to position ourselves towards a new government that includes many ex-revolutionaries in public office and the new security forces. Some oppose the new government for reproducing the repressive logic of the old regime; others seek to avoid direct confrontations in a time of local, regional, and global instability.
\n\nWe believe that we should fight all expressions of authoritarianism and neoliberal policies whenever possible, while distancing ourselves from a reading of the situation that exclusively focuses on the religious ideology of those who run the state.
\n\nFor those of us who managed to return after the fall of the regime, it is important to learn to understand the context here and listen to those who did not leave the country. The transmission of experience between local activists and those returning from exile will be key, but those who were abroad, especially in Western countries, must not reproduce paternalistic attitudes like “We should teach people how things are done abroad.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/08/6.jpg\")
\nThe Syrian revolution received less recognition from revolutionaries in other parts of the world than struggles in Rojava, Palestine, or Chiapas have. What lessons have you derived from this? Why do you think that it is important to focus on expanding international networks of support and solidarity?
\n\nThere are a number of reasons why we did not see as much solidarity with the Syrian revolution. First, in comparison with the Kurdish movement, the Palestinian movement, or the Zapatistas, the Syrian revolution was a new awakening, which had to begin to establish international connections from scratch. All of those movements had established solidarity over a long period of time through extensive work and relationship building. In the case of the Syrian revolution, much of this work began after 2011, carried out by Syrians in exile and the diaspora, as Syrians who remained inside the country increasingly had to focus on survival.
\n\nAnother factor in the lack of solidarity for the Syrian revolution is the “campism” that has divided the left in both the West and the Arab world. Campism is the position held by those who see everything through an “anti-imperialist” lens according to which the United States, other Western states, and Israel are the only imperialist actors, or at least, the only imperialists that should be opposed. Consequently, campists invariably defend these nations’ geopolitical competitors—such as Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, and the Assad regime (the “axis of resistance”). They ignored or justified the oppression of Syrians, refusing to support the Syrian revolution and backing counterrevolutionary forces instead.
\n\nStill another factor is the lack of a clear discourse and narrative with which to address liberation struggles and leftist groups outside of Syria. The revolutionary movement in Syria was very decentralized. Much of it lacked strong ideological underpinnings, even if various shades of Islamist currents were increasingly present. One lesson is that we can’t count on support from the “international community” that uses the language of “human rights.” We needed to develop a positive project and articulate the kind of change we wanted to make, beyond bringing about the fall of Assad.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/08/4.jpg\")
Syrians participate in a sit-in in the Bab Tuma neighborhood of Damascus, on March 22, 2026. “The Syrian people are one; do not divide them with discriminatory laws.”
\nIt is often easier to build solidarity and networks based on trust and mutual support in times of relative “peace” in order to strengthen our alliances for the future. This is a time for Syrians inside and outside Syria to connect and deepen our relationships, as we have much to learn from each other, and also to build relationships with others from around the world. We believe that by working together, increasing our knowledge of transnational struggles, sharing our resources, and recognizing each other as actors in a common struggle for liberation, we can strengthen and sustain our movements at home.
\n\nWhat can you tell us about the Mujawara campaign of The Peoples Want and how it relates to self-organized initiatives underway in Syria?
\n\nThe “Mujawara” campaign is not a general slogan about solidarity, but a concrete attempt to build connections between spaces and initiatives that already exist on the ground both within Syria and outside it. The idea is to look for places where something of the spirit of self-organization has survived—houses, farms, social centers, local councils, agricultural initiatives, feminist and youth groups—and to see how we can support them, learn from them, and connect them with other experiences.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/08/1.jpg\")
\nIn Syria, we started working in a very concrete way: visiting, meeting, discussing, and assessing the spaces we could collaborate with. For example, in a particular city, there is a space run by a local team whose members did not leave the country, with a building and a garden and the capacity to receive people and organize meetings. This space is very close to the idea of “Mujawara”: an independent place rooted in the local environment, based on relations of trust, open to social, political, and cultural activities, and capable of hosting meetings for comrades from different areas. That is why we will organize a gathering there during the month of June as part of the Mujawara campaign. Through this gathering, we will get to know more about the people running the space, and we will invite other groups and places we have visited in Syria to join us. We will cook together, listen to each other’s experiences and struggles, and talk about the role that the Peoples Want network can play in the Syrian context.
\n\nWe have also visited and discussed with other places and collectives. In one city, there is a new initiative started by some old revolutionaries returning from exile: an Arab house that hosts political, social, and cultural activities for adults and children. In June, in this space, we will organize a film screening and discussion about the Sudanese revolution, in the presence of local activists and a Sudanese comrade who is a member of a resistance committee in Khartoum. The opportunity to do this—not only in exile but in Syria—represents the fulfillment of a dream: connecting people involved in the two revolutionary experiences that inspired our manifesto “Revolutions of Our Times” and which serve as something like a political compass for the network.
\n\nWe have visited a place in one of the suburbs of Damascus, a lovely social center with a café and large spaces around it. Political events were taking place there underground before the fall of the regime. In the countryside around Damascus, we have also visited agricultural projects, nurseries, and seed collections connected to question of food sovereignty and the rebuilding of the land after destruction. In the northwest, we have connections with other agricultural and women’s initiatives focused around medicinal plants and local knowledge. Ecological farming initiatives give us a clear example of how politics can begin not only from statements but from the seeds, from the water, from the land.
\n\nIn all these places, we have discussed internal organization and political visions for the future. We did not treat these initiatives with romanticism. Every place and project has its contradictions, its problems, its social and political questions and limits. That is why we do not see “Mujawara” as a stamp of approval that we place on any space, but rather a process of building trust and joint work.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/08/2.jpg\")
A banner for the Mujawara campaign elsewhere on the surface of the earth, displayed by other participants in the Peoples Want network.
\nWhat matters to us is connecting with and supporting self-organized initiatives, not replacing them or leading them. As Syrians, we know that people on the ground are tired of organizations that come with ready-made projects and of funding that creates a donor-recipient relationship. First, we ask: What do you need? How do you work? What is your relationship with the local environment? Can this space receive people from different areas? Does it contribute to building material and political autonomy for people?
\n\nThe connection of “Mujawara” with Syria comes from this: the Syrian revolution itself gave rise to a tremendous amount of experience in self-organization, from local councils to coordination committees, from collective kitchens to field hospitals, from justice initiatives for victims and the disappeared to farming projects and cooperatives. Today, after the fall of the regime, after all of this destruction, it is not enough to say “the revolution continues” as a slogan. The question is: where does it continue? And who carries it in a concrete way? In which house, farm, library, social center, community committee, or meeting between people from different places in Syria will it continue?
\n\nThat is why in Syria, “Mujawara” must be a small but practical step: meetings for collective thinking about how to build a long-lasting mutual support network. The goal is not to announce the “opening of a revolutionary headquarters,” but to contribute to restoring the connections between people, areas, and experiences that years of war and revolution has separated.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/08/3.jpg\")
\nThis is the original call to make June a month of global outreach and connection through the Mujawara campaign.
\n\n\n\n\nJoin us for a month of internationalist organising throughout the month of June! This is a global call to all local places and collectives for gatherings, actions, communal banquets, celebrations, fundraisers, marches and rituals in honor of those who have fallen.
\n\nThe goal is to build new internationalist connections and mutualize our resources to support the creation of new shared spaces by Syrian and Sudanese revolutionaries.
\n
We could begin again with a list. A list of threats, of wars, of uprisings cut short, of incomplete revolutions. A list of all the dead, of all our dead.
\n\nBut why state again what everyone knows, reads, sees, and feels: The world, once again, is devastated by the lust for power and the greed of the powerful.
\n\nSo how do we carry on? We who have known the jubilant crowds, the ransacked palaces, and the power of our tenderness. How do we carry on in the face of horror and powerlessness? How do we carry on as revolutionaries?
\n\nThere are the cynics, the “realists,” who, blinded by the anguish of their own weakness, tell us we must choose. Choose between those who massacre their own peoples and those who believe they can slow their own downfall by declaring war on the world.
\n\nThere are those who give up or stop hoping. Exhausted, resigned. But who may one day stand with us again.
\n\nAnd then there is us.
\n\nUs who weep, us who feel weak, us who sometimes doubt. But us, too, who have not given up. Neither our compass, nor our flame. Neither the hope of avenging our own, nor the hope of seeing a dawn at the end of the night.
\n\nUs who, rather than remain trapped in the shock of the present, search everywhere for those who continue to resist. For we remember that from our uprisings, a force has awakened. And though minds tend to forget, bodies remember.
\n\nUs who see this force still alive in plain sight, carried by a pirate generation shouting in the world’s face that the game is not over.
\n\nIt is this force that our comrades in Nepal have rekindled in the open, in flames that consumed their assembly. It is this force that we have glimpsed within the plenums of Serbia, those gigantic assemblies that, for months upon months, organised the revolt from below. It is this force too that is embodied in the inhabitants of Lebanese villages who remain on their land despite yet another evacuation order from the IDF, as well as in the farmers in Palestine who replant their crops again and again after the bombs. It is this force that we feel within the Sudanese emergency response rooms, born of war to take up the mantle, both at home and in exile, of the powerful resistance committees of the revolution.
\n\nIt is this force that keeps our comrades standing firm in the jungles of Myanmar or Chiapas, in the Ukrainian trenches, and in the mountains of Rojhelat. It is this force that we see flying at the mastheads of those boats setting sail to defy genocidal Israel. It is this force, finally, that drives the crowds in Iran, Minneapolis, Peru, Indonesia, the Philippines, Morocco, and Madagascar to brave, time and again, the death promised by all these regimes that hate their peoples.
\n\nYes, our strength is real. It is nascent, incomplete, fragmented, but real. Contrary to what counterrevolutionaries on both the right and the left would have us believe. And no party, no supreme savior, will be able to unify it in our place.
\n\nSo the task lies with us: to seek one another out, to recognize one another, and to make visible to the world—and to ourselves—the power that could emerge from our coming together.
\n\nThis is what we call Mujawara. The pooling of our efforts and our resources, through the interweaving of ropes, long and strong enough to allow us to hold together in the face of the challenges of our time. A revolutionary neighboring that we have already begun to weave from all these territories, these places, and popular powers born of our struggles. This Mujawara will not be made of empty talk or grand statements on every tremor our world experiences. It is being built, and will continue to be built, under the radar, in the tunnels of the revolutions to come.
\n\nAnd to inaugurate it, and to begin weaving this neighboring that crosses borders, we will organize, across five continents and throughout the month of June, a series of internationalist actions within all these places born before or in the wake of our uprisings and maintained over the years despite every hardship: neighboring councils, autonomous spaces, social centers, shelters, collective farms, self-managed bookshops, cooperatives.
\n\nAll that will allow us to bring into being, materially and symbolically, this neighboring we need: gatherings, actions, communal banquets, celebrations, fundraisers, marches, rituals in honour of those who have fallen.
\n\nFrom this global mutual aid that we will set in motion in June, new places will rise from the ground, safer paths will be forged, roofs will be repaired, new alliances will be woven, and from all of this, perhaps, wounds will be healed and new hopes will take root.
\n\nThis moment is but a step—yet a decisive one: that of the slow but unwavering construction of a grounded material power, linking across the four corners of the planet the fragments of our nascent strength.
\n\nFrom the places we have grown accustomed to naming:
\n\nTaipei, Mexico City, Nancy, the Beqaa Valley, Berlin, Santiago de Chile, Galloway hills, Paris/Montreuil, Damascus, la Provence, the Limousin mountain
\n\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2026/05/20/fuck-ice-struggles-against-trumps-immigration-policy-a-spanish-language-book-assembling-our-work-on-resistance-to-ice", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2026/05/20/fuck-ice-struggles-against-trumps-immigration-policy-a-spanish-language-book-assembling-our-work-on-resistance-to-ice", "title": "FUCK ICE: Struggles against Trump's Immigration Policy : A Spanish-Language Book Assembling Our Coverage of Resistance to ICE", "summary": "", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/20/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/20/header.jpg", "date_published": "2026-05-20T22:59:49Z", "date_modified": "2026-05-22T21:52:24Z", "tags": [ "spanish", "Español", "ICE", "borders" ], "content_html": "Our comrades at Kaos Editorial have published a Spanish-language book collecting our coverage of Trump’s return to power and popular resistance to the violence of border enforcement, entitled FUCK ICE: Luchas contra la política migratoria de Trump en Estados Unidos.
\n\nYou can order the book online here. You can download a digital version here:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/20/1.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the book.
\nFrom their description:
\n\n\n\n\nThis book is a compilation of texts originally written by individuals associated with the American [sic] collective CrimethInc. They contextualize Joe Biden’s downfall, chart the rise of Donald Trump’s neo-fascism, and analyze the expansion of ICE in the US. This is accompanied by chronicles of the various mobilizations and demonstrations that participants have organized in response to the repeated murders of those who have confronted fascist racism in recent times.
\n
To order copies for distribution, please contact the publishers.
\n\n\n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/20/2.png\") \n | \n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/20/3.png\") \n | \n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/20/4.png\") \n | \n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/20/5.png\") \n | \n
You can find the book on archive.org here and on our site here.
\n\nIf you are involved in an anarchist publishing project in Latin America and you want the printer files so you can produce a version of this book for your region, please contact us.
\n\nThanks to comrades from A Planeta and other projects for the assistance with translation into Spanish.
\n\nFrom the introduction:
\n\n\n\n\nA few years ago, amid the fervent crowds taking to the streets of many of the world’s metropolises, it would have been hard to imagine things could get any worse. And yet, that time has arrived.
\n\nThanks to the failure of global social democracy to maintain the bare minimum of the welfare state without any real change, our times are drawing dangerously close to the dark ages of the past. And thanks also to the elites who have rejected the idea of a more humane capitalism or a green transition, the most rancid and archaic form of fascism is making a comeback.
\n
In April, anarchists from the Twin Cities who have participated in resisting the ICE occupation there will travel the country speaking on their experiences. At each presentation, they will share what they have learned from building rapid response networks, explore how Minnesota thwarted Operation Metro Surge, and draw out lessons about how to defeat fascism.
\n\nThree different touring groups will carry out concurrent tours covering the Midwest, the East Coast, and the West Coast, for a total of two dozen events. You can find the tour schedule below.
\n\nIf you can help us to promote the event in your area, please contact us! Likewise, if you would like to set up an event like this in your community, reach out to us and we will try to include you in a future tour.
\n\nAfter travel expenses, all proceeds from this tour will go towards legal defense for ICE arrestees and mutual aid for vulnerable families in the Twin Cities.
\n\nFor background on the fight against ICE in the Twin Cities, begin here. You can find an archive of all of our coverage of ICE here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE__poster_bw.png\")
Click on the image to download the PDF to print in black and white.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE__poster_color.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the PDF to print in color.
\nWe will update these listings with more information on an ongoing basis.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-03-31-Atlanta-Georgia__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.png\")
March 31 Atlanta, GA
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-01-Asheville-North-Carolina__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.png\")
April 1 Asheville, NC
\nChicago, Illinois: 6:30 pm at Co-Prosperity, 3219 South Morgan Street
\nDurham, North Carolina: 7 pm at the Burrow, 207 North Church Street
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-02-Durham-North-Carolina__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.png\")
April 2 Durham, NC
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-03-Bloomington-Indiana__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.jpg\")
April 3 Bloomington, IN
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-03-Richmond-Virginia__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.png\")
April 3 Richmond, VA
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-04-Baltimore-Maryland__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE-color.jpg\")
April 4 Baltimore, MD
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-04-Cleveland-Ohio__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.png\")
April 4 Cleveland, OH
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-05-Buffalo-New-York__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.jpg\")
April 5 Buffalo, NY
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-06-Binghamton-New-York__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.png\")
April 6 Binghamton, NY
\nNew York City, New York—two concurrent events:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-07-Queens-New-York__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.jpg\")
April 7 Queens, NY
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-13-Berkeley-California__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.jpg\")
April 13 Berkeley, California
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-14-Sacramento-California__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.jpg\")
April 14 Sacramento, CA
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-17-Olympia-Washington__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.png\")
April 17 Olympia, WA
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-18-Seattle-Washington__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.png\")
April 18 Seattle, WA
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/1.jpg\")
\nIt has been a long time now since our last music release—but desperate times call for desperate measures. Taking up arms against a wave of authoritarianism and despair, North Carolina’s premier hardcore band, Catharsis, has recorded a new full-length album, “Hope Against Hope.” You can now download it from us here or pre-order the LP on vinyl from us here. It’s also available on the usual streaming platforms.
\n\nThis record picks up where the band’s last material left off, continuing to push the envelope in terms of what hardcore can do. They don’t retread the ground they broke on their previous albums, but press forward into ever more abrasive and dynamic territory. Politically, they remain uncompromisingly radical in their lives as well as lyrics. Hardcore draws its dramatic power from the connection between word and deed; this is not a band that has slowed down, toned down, or mellowed out.
\n\nYou can read an interview Kim Kelly conducted with the band here. An array of reviews are excerpted below.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/08/01/2.jpg\")
\nTrue to their roots in the do-it-yourself underground, Catharsis are releasing the album through CrimethInc. in the United States, Refuse Records in Europe, and No Gods No Masters in South America. The band recorded the drums with Benny Grotto at Mad Oak Studios and tracked the rest themselves. For the backing vocals, Catharsis tapped the vocalists of some of their favorite hardcore bands: Gosia (of Poland’s Mind Pollution, Next Victim, and Sorrow), Brazil’s Point of No Return, and North Carolina’s own Scarecrow and Vittna. Mixed by Kurt Ballou at God City Studio and mastered by Scott Crouse, “Hope Against Hope” is as explosive as our times.
\n\nTwenty-four years have passed since Catharsis released their last record, the split LP featuring “Arsonist’s Prayer,” though they did complete another song from that session for their discography in 2012. But they have been playing regularly together since 2013, adding Jimmy Chang (of Undying and Sect), who left the band in 1995, to the lineup that recorded the “Passion” LP. It was high time to record another album, making the most of material that has come together across two decades. In fact, Catharsis has never sounded better.
\n\n“Hope Against Hope” is an assault on a self-destructing society and a beacon of inspiration for all who are determined to survive.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/08/01/3.jpg\")
\nIn the words of the musicians themselves:
\n\n\n\n\nWe have recorded a new album, Hope Against Hope.
\n\nThis is our first full-length release in 26 years. We’ve been working on these songs for a long time—if you saw us on tour in fall 2000, you witnessed an early version of the oldest one.
\n\nWe’re still the same band, the four of us who recorded the Passion LP and Jimmy, who left the band almost thirty years ago and had to wait until we got back together in 2012 to resume playing with us. We’re still the same people, just a few years older, a few years angrier, more heartbroken, more haunted by the brutality of our society, more convinced of the urgency of our mission. We are still doing what we have always done, metabolizing our grief into fury, our despair into determination, reaching out to you across the gulfs that divide us, seeking to give hope to fellow rebel hearts.
\n\nIt is still true that, if the world we deserve to live in does not exist, then our clumsy efforts to bring it into being are the closest thing to it that we will ever experience, and the best way to mourn our distance from it, the best way to honor it and what is noblest within us. Hope Against Hope is our humble contribution.
\n\nFor us, hardcore is not a style of dance music or a marketing strategy. Hardcore is still a secret society at war with the world, a way of living in struggle against everything around us that is petty and servile, a way of fighting to defend the beauty of the world.
\n\nFor all, against all.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/08/01/6.jpg\")
You can download the lyric sheet at catharsis.band.
\nMore information about the band is available here, including updates about their upcoming shows.
\n\n\n\n\nA record that feels less like a comeback and more like a statement carved out of three decades in the trenches.
\n\nThe songs circle around collapse, memory, and resistance — from the bleak opening of “Nocturne” to the anthemic weight of “We Live” and “Last Words.”
\n\nHope Against Hope is exactly that: a reminder that even in despair, there’s still ground to stand on, and still reasons to push forward.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nThe passion, the sheer musical force, and the stubborn drive are more than enough to make it stand out not only as one of the releases of the year, but as one of its defining events.
\n\n \n
\n\n\n“Hope Against Hope” is not an attempt to update or chase after imitators—if anything, it calls them to order. […]
\n\n“Gone to Croatan” and “Power” hover between unease and ritual, evoking not so much post-hardcore/metal as we understand it today, but rather an idea of hardcore that has come to terms with the end of illusions. “Eremocene,” in terms of structure, inspiration, and intensity, is perhaps the pinnacle of the album: a song that transforms geological anxiety and the awareness of collapse into something lyrical and relentless, as if Catharsis had found a way to sing about extinction without resigning themselves to it. […]
\n\nIn an era in which the political urgency of hardcore is often digested and spat out as aesthetics or formal code, Catharsis rejects rhetoric and reappropriates a stance that has always rejected shortcuts: that of commitment as a long-term choice, of art as a form of responsibility.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nOne of the original innovators of metallic hardcore return with one of the most ferocious and relentless albums of the decade. Catharsis is everything hardcore aspires to be—crushing, sharp, and matched by an outspoken political acknowledgement of the world we inhabit, not empty bravado. Hope Against Hope grapples with a paralytic melancholy that is ultimately overcome through fury.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nLet’s start with a question. Do we deserve a new Catharsis album?
\n\n \n
\n\n\nCatharsis needs no introduction.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nHope against Hope is a triumph of art coinciding with life.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nSuch was the clarity of Catharsis’s musical vision and political conviction, it was hard for me to imagine them coming back as anything other than the Catharsis that so indelibly helped to shape my understanding of what hardcore can achieve.
\n\nMy confidence was not misplaced. Hope Against Hope succeeds both in dramatically progressing the band’s musical expression and also conveying a sense that they have never been away—this is simply the organic next step. Bleakly menacing, structurally ambitious, crust-tinged metallic hardcore continues to form the searing crucible that enables the band to ferment a barrage of unwavering, visceral intensity. It is clearly crafted with intent and a characteristically arresting inventiveness.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nWe could say that it’s difficult to come back hoping to make as much of an impression as with the Passion LP, but after listening to this, we understand that it happens naturally.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nThis might be an even stronger and more cohesive album than its two predecessors. It would have sent shockwaves through the hardcore scene in any era. In 2025 it proves that music this vital and incendiary does not age. The fact that the band members are now middle-aged has not dulled their edge. If anything, they can express their anger and anguish with more depth than before. Every riff here is coiled in sinewous tension, every beat is a mini-explosion played with energetic excess, every growl is an exhalation of relief. The production is amazing; raw and intense with power and clarity. There is little fuzz on the guitar distortion and the drums are played fast and loose, presumably without triggers and samples.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nThe band continues on the path established with their latest releases, but deepens their aggressiveness and expands their sound.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nCatharsis tap into the primordial essence of the hardcore scene.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nCatharsis did not return to remind us of the music that they once created; rather, they came to show us what they can do today—and that everything is possible.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nThey are an inspiration to us and a great example of what we stand for and what we’d like antifascist metal to become: anticapitalist, in opposition to the commercial structures of the music business, free, horizontally organized, unbound, unleashed.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nI didn’t get to think too much about what Catharsis 2025 could be or create any expectations other than that sudden rush of excitement, but it’s safe to say that they handled any kind of weight that a two and a half decade-long absence of an iconic band could have created with their typical effortless class. They did it by just being themselves, just like they’ve always been.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nMy album of the year could be none other than the magnificent comeback of this collective from North Carolina… Hope Against Hope is their most honest, coherent, and meaningful album. A monument to those who still believe that art and community can change the world.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nProbably the most intense, focused, ferocious, melancholic yet hopeful record to come out this year… Musically complex, richly layered, providing a soundscape reflective of the lyrical content it reeks of near perfection. Deeply considered, providing a dissection of power in the face of all our hopes and the vision of a better world, paired against the fear to actually take the first step. I once quipped that CATHARSIS is a band which perfects the musical vision of AMEBIX, TRAGEDY, and INTEGRITY layered over the lyrical focus of CRASS and this latest LP really drives that home.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nThis record practically came out of nowhere, took no prisoners and sounded fresh as hell for such a seasoned band. I was particularly blown away by its epic moments and “Power” may be the song of the year.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nWho better than Catharsis to rise from the dead in an age of obscurantism and deliver a powerful, passionate, and rebellious blow? (…)
\n\nHoping even when you know it’s hopeless. All Catharsis in a single title. To die with weapons in hand. The anger remains intact. So does the lucidity.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nI was immediately blown away.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nFuck is it good, man—it’s really, really good.
\n\n-Myke C-Town, two and a half months later.
\n
\n\n\nI gotta say, it’s really good.
\n\n \n
Catharsis will be performing in the United States and Europe over the next three months.
\n\nOctober 13 - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Bonks
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/08/01/4.jpg\")
\n You can read a review of the show in Zagreb here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/08/01/1.jpg\")
\n“Hope against Hope” also topped that author’s top ten list for 2025. ↩
\nBy revisiting the struggles that took place at the turn of the century from the vantage point of our current dystopia, we can grasp how much is at stake in today’s struggles.
\n\nThis text appears as the introduction to the book Another War Is Possible, just published by PM Press, which documents the experiences of one anarchist fighting against capitalism and the state across three continents in the course of the so-called anti-globalization movement. You can read more about it in the appendix.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/01/6.jpg\")
\nIt was the end of the 20th century and capitalism had triumphed.
\n\n“Really existing socialism” had collapsed. Elections were taking place everywhere, bringing new politicians to power to sign neoliberal trade agreements. In place of dictatorships, the free market reigned victorious.
\n\nFrancis Fukuyama declared it “the end of history,” proclaiming
\n\n\n\n\nthe end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
\n
For politicians, advertising agents, and corporate executives, it was a time of jubilation.
\n\nThe social ferment of the 1960s had ebbed. In the United States, radical politics largely subsisted in subcultural milieux—environmental movements, radical bookstores, the hip hop and punk scenes. Europe also had the rave scene, the squatting movement with its network of social centers, and the vestiges of the powerful movements of the mid-20th century. On the opposing side, there were fascists, but they, too, were largely confined to subcultural milieux. Outside those enclaves, social peace prevailed, as everyone scrambled to get their piece of the pie or waited for their ship to come in.
\n\nIt was a fools’ paradise. Globalized capitalism was moving wealth around faster and further than ever before, but in the process, it was concentrating it into fewer and fewer hands, slowly immiserating the vast majority. Anarchists knew that the apparent unanimity around the new world order would not last forever. Eventually, there would be another round of conflicts and history would continue moving forward. The real question was how the lines would be drawn.
\n\nWe met at hardcore punk shows. We were reading about the Panthers, the Yippies, the Ranters, the Diggers, Up Against the Wall Motherfucker. When we heard that someone had spray-painted “NEVER WORK” on the wall of the Boulevard de Port-Royal during the May 1968 uprising, we took it literally, embarking on a life of crime.
\n\nOthers took a different approach, drawing on a different toolset. We quit our jobs; they unionized their workplaces. We squatted buildings; they did tenant organizing. We rejected formal organization; they created federations. We hitchhiked to events; they showed up with vans full of gear.
\n\nEventually, we began to run into each other at conferences and demonstrations. Everything that rises must converge.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/01/5.jpg\")
An anarchist sails across the heads of the police into the embrace of comrades during demonstrations against the presidential inauguration on January 20, 2001.
\nFortunately, anarchists were not the only ones who had a bone to pick with the reigning order. On the first day of 1994, just as the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation rose up against the Mexican government in Chiapas, setting a powerful example of grassroots struggle against neoliberalism. Inspired by the EZLN and other anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movements, people around the world began to organize protests, networks, occupations, global days of action.
\n\nTo most people in the United States, taking on the authorities seemed absurd, if not downright quaint. Corporate media journalists refused to even say the word capitalism aloud, substituting “anti-globalization” as if we were part of a worldwide movement for parochialism. The bitterest conflicts were over “violence”—to be precise, over whether it was acceptable to respond in kind to the perpetual top-down violence of the state. But the most difficult challenge was to enable people to imagine that the capitalist world order was not inevitable, that another world was possible.
\n\nNonetheless, for a few years—let’s say, from 1999 to 2001—the chief conflict playing out on the global stage was between neoliberal capitalism and the grassroots movements that opposed it. On June 18, 1999, thousands of people converged on London for a day of action heralded as the Carnival against Capitalism, during which some of them almost succeeded in destroying the London Stock Exchange. The following November, demonstrators successfully blockaded and shut down the summit of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. Over the next two years, almost every major international trade summit occasioned fierce street conflict.
\n\n“Should we try to get across?” I shouted, but we were already running, it was a split-second decision, we were already on the bridge by the time she answered “Let’s do it—we’re doing it” and we were sprinting for the other side. Behind us, I could hear the POP, POP as the cops fired tear gas and rubber bullets; around us, I could hear the impact of the bullets, the clatter as the canisters landed, the hiss as their noxious contents filled the air; ahead, I couldn’t see anything, the gas blotted out the sky, there was only the unknown—and beyond that, if we were lucky enough to reach it, a city to destroy, a world to create.
\n\nThe stakes were higher than we knew. If all of the people who were on the losing end of cutthroat capitalism failed to grasp that it was the source of their misfortunes, they would be susceptible to nationalism, racism, xenophobia, and demagoguery when they realized that the market was not fulfilling their hopes. But if we could make our case that capitalism was the chief cause of their misery, they might join us in our efforts to build a new society. There was a short window of time in which it seemed possible that we might succeed.
\n\nThis was the war in which the author of this book participated—a war fought to forestall all the senseless wars that came afterwards. We were fighting for a world in which all human beings could encounter each other as equals, in which the profit imperative would not trump the needs of human beings or the threat of climate change.
\n\nWe set out from the campus at noon. Hundreds of people were there, ready, suited up—hoods, helmets, shoulder pads, the works. One group was pushing a full-size catapult. I was walking behind some people who were pulling a giant puppet representing the World Bank. Sledgehammers kept falling out onto the asphalt from inside the papier mâché.
\n\nAmong the crowd, I recognized his crew from the inauguration the previous January. You develop an instinct for such things, even when everyone is masked. In idle social conversations and online forums, we were rivals. But in a situation like that, you want everyone there.
\n\nAt some point, the police drove a water cannon right at the crowd. A certain masked anarchist ran right up to it and smashed out the window before it could get a clear shot at us. The driver pulled away in a hurry.
\n\nWell, that’s fucking crazy, I thought. Wow.
\n\nPerhaps if everyone had been able to see what was coming, more people would have fought as hard as the author of this book. Few understood how dire things could get.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/01/4.jpg\")
\nUnfortunately, we were not the only force contending to determine how the lines of conflict would be drawn in the 21st century. Provoked by centuries of colonial violence, Salafi jihadists attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Neoconservatives in the Bush administration snatched the opportunity to invade Afghanistan and then Iraq, precipitating the so-called “clash of civilizations” they had been fantasizing about. The new century opened with a series of bloodbaths.
\n\nThis declaration of war served to obscure the possibility of any other war, any other stakes for which people might fight. The authorities in the United States and their symmetrical adversaries in al-Qaeda aimed to assert their rivalry as the central conflict in history, sidelining the rebels in Chiapas and the demonstrators who had shut down the Seattle WTO summit.
\n\nIn the United States, authoritarian socialist parties took advantage of the situation to seize the initiative from anarchists and other horizontally organized projects, gaining control of the anti-war movement through front groups (Not in Our Name for the Revolutionary Communist Party, ANSWER for the Workers World Party). The transformative grassroots models of the visionary anti-capitalist movement gave way to reactive protests addressing uncaring politicians.
\n\nThe US government passed the Patriot Act. The FBI stepped up operations targeting Muslims in particular, but also environmentalists and animal liberation activists. Politicians expanded and militarized the police. On November 30, 1999, the government of Seattle had fielded just 400 police to defend the summit of the World Trade Organization; in 2017, 28,000 security personnel defended Donald Trump’s inauguration.
\n\nOverseas, the brutal US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan cost nearly a million lives, driving more people into the ranks of the jihadists. The rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria a decade later showed that the invasions had only strengthened the forces that the neoconservatives purported to be attacking. In 2010, when a wave of revolutions began in Tunisia and spread across the Mideast, it hit a wall in Syria in part because of the Islamic State and its supporters. We’ll never know what the uprisings of the so-called Arab Spring and other social movements in the region could have accomplished if not for the harm wrought by the so-called “War on Terror.” When the Taliban recaptured Afghanistan in 2021, that only underscored how pointless as well as destructive the US invasions had been.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/01/1.jpg\")
Bashar al-Assad had hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered to maintain his grip on Syria, yet lost in the end nonetheless. The United States did the same in Afghanistan. These pointless and horrific tragedies are only a glimpse of what awaits if we continue down this road.
\nThe violence and poverty that resulted from all of these wars, occupations, and insurgencies drove refugees towards Europe from Africa and the Mideast by the million. Something similar was taking place south of the US border, as the havoc wreaked by the North American Free Trade Agreement and the militarization of police and paramilitaries plunged whole regions into bloodshed. Nativists on both sides of the Atlantic took advantage of the refugees’ desperation to drum up racism and fear.
\n\nMeanwhile, in the former Eastern Bloc, capitalist profiteering left many people worse off economically than they had been before the fall of the Berlin Wall. This generated waves of nationalism, enabling autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán to consolidate control. Emulating their model, politicians like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Giorgia Meloni came to power in the Americas and Western Europe. They channeled the rage of the eroding middle class towards openly fascist politics, encouraging their supporters to blame refugees, queer and trans people, Jewish people, and “communists” for the ways that the free market had failed them.
\n\nDriven by rampant industrialism, climate change hammered coastlines and incinerated forests. The COVID-19 pandemic—the spread of conspiracy theories and disinformation—the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few billionaires—the genocide in Gaza: all this will be familiar to you unless it has been eclipsed by even worse by the time you read this. The Russian invasion of Ukraine will not be the last of the wars to come if we continue down this road—wars made possible by the consolidation of autocratic power and inevitable by economic and ecological crises. Looking at the weaponization of refugees on the border between Belarus and Poland and the use of prisoners as cannon fodder in Ukraine, we can see that—unless we change course—life is going to be increasingly cheap in the 21st century.
\n\nOn June 18, 2023, exactly 24 years after the Carnival against Capitalism in London, the top article in the New York Times acknowledged what we had been saying for a quarter of a century: capitalist globalization creates catastrophic wealth inequalities, wrecking the biosphere and generating extreme-right nationalism. The article recited all the talking points of the average anti-capitalist protester of 1999, right down to the criticisms of the International Monetary Fund. Even the capitalists themselves now wish that we had won.
\n\nAll of these tragedies had yet to occur when the struggles described in this book took place. Who knows—if more of us had fought harder, we might have averted some of them.
\n\nBut we can’t fault the author of this book. He was always in the front lines.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/01/3.jpg\")
The anarchist black bloc marches out to confront the police during the riots in Québec City protesting the proposed (and ultimately defeated) “Free Trade Area of the Americas” in April 2001.
\nWe ran into each other at a book fair some years after the events described in these pages. I recognized him from the streets, but we had never had a proper conversation.
\n\nUnexpectedly, we hit it off immediately. In person, it didn’t matter that I was an adventurist dropout and he was a boring platformist.
\n\nHe wanted to know if we were going to release a sequel to a certain controversial memoir we had published about a delinquent living on the run. “Politically, it’s trash,” he said. “But as a story, it’s so exciting.”
\n\nI didn’t share his high opinion of it. I thought the humor compensated for the lack of character development, but speaking as a career criminal, the subject matter was positively banal. We had printed it as a strategy to undermine the materialism and timidity of kids from the suburbs, not to appeal to seasoned anarchists like himself.
\n\nHe persisted. “Come on, you have to do a sequel!”
\n\nI told him that he should write a memoir of his own, recounting his adventures in the streets. That would be worth publishing, I said.
\n\nIt only took him two decades.
\n\nWorld history is a vast stage. On the scale of all humanity, each of us is only one out of billions. But it is up to us how we approach our role in the drama. We can see ourselves as spectators and passively accept our fate—or we can understand ourselves as protagonists and set out to discover how much influence we can exert on the course of events.
\n\nThe author of this book took the latter approach. As a result, he participated in a surprising number of the historic events of the turn of the century. The litany of his adventures attests to how much a single person can accomplish with a bit of determination, whether in a time of social peace or of pitched conflict. Fortunately, he survived and, with a little encouragement, managed to write down some of what he experienced.
\n\nThe result is the valuable historical document that you are holding in your hands. Not everyone who lives through epoch-making street-fighting on three continents has the opportunity to write such a memoir. Buenaventura Durruti didn’t.
\n\nLike Peter Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist or Emma Goldman’s Living My Life, this book offers a firsthand record of a pivotal time period. You can learn a more about what things were really like from such a text than from any secondhand summary.
\n\nBut this is not simply historical reference material. None of the struggles described in this book have reached a conclusion. All of them continue on a much larger scale and with even higher stakes: the struggle against fascism, against the violence of borders, against the subordination of ecosystems and communities to the demands of capitalism, against the violence of the police and the military, against autocratic power.
\n\nAnother war was possible—and it still is today. If the consequences of our failure to abolish capitalism at the turn of the century were two decades of butchery, economic crisis, ecological disaster, and fascist reaction, think what will ensue if we fail to rise to the challenge this time. History didn’t have to turn out the way it did in 2001—and it doesn’t have to continue down that road now. This book remains timely because it tells part of a story that you have to finish.
\n\nThere are many ways to participate in these struggles. Physically fighting fascists and police officers is only one of a wide range of tactics, and it is hardly the most important. From the author of this book, you can learn what some of those who came before you tried and what you might be able to do yourself. We—the survivors of the previous round—will be fighting alongside you.
\n\nIf we don’t speed it on its way, capitalism will take another century or more to collapse. It will sweep us into wars like nothing we have seen before. The resulting catastrophe will bury all of us in the wreckage.
\n\nLet’s fight together for a better future. Another war is possible.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/01/2.jpg\")
“Across centuries of darkness, we can already see from here—the sun on the horizon of a new dawn.”
\nThe following is our description of the book Another War Is Possible, which appears on its back cover.
\n\nAt the turn of the century, the movement against capitalist globalization exploded onto the world stage with mass mobilizations in Québec City, Washington, Genoa, and other cities. Anarchists faced off against heads of state, captains of industry, and riot police by the thousands. While the authorities sought to bend all living things to the profit imperative, anarchists set out to demonstrate a way of fighting that could open the road to a future beyond capitalism. The twenty-first century was up for grabs. And every time, Tomas Rothaus was there, fighting on the front line.
\n\nIn Another War Is Possible, we follow Tomas from his days as a young militant to his tenure editing the publication Barricada. In vivid prose, he recounts the lessons he learned from veterans of the Spanish CNT—his first experience trading blows with police in the streets of Paris—his adventures slipping across borders to participate in epoch-making riots. With Tomas, we breathe tear gas, we tear down fences, we tour the squats and battlefields of three continents.
\n\nAlong the way, Tomas shows that the tragedies of the twenty-first century were not inevitable—that another war was possible. His testimony is proof that another world remains possible today.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2025/05/21/help-us-reprint-the-contradictionary-a-fundraiser-featuring-the-unicorn-edition", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2025/05/21/help-us-reprint-the-contradictionary-a-fundraiser-featuring-the-unicorn-edition", "title": "Help Us Reprint the Contradictionary : A Fundraiser Featuring the Unicorn Edition", "summary": "In order to help fund the next printing of our Contradictionary, we are offering a few copies of our limited Unicorn Edition.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/05/21/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/05/21/header.jpg", "date_published": "2025-05-21T21:26:00Z", "date_modified": "2025-06-09T20:34:03Z", "tags": [ "books" ], "content_html": "Once again, we’ve sold out of another printing of the Contradictionary, our Bestiary of Words in Revolt. In order to help fund the next printing, we offered a few copies of our limited edition printing of the book, the Unicorn Edition. Update: these are now sold out. If you nonetheless desire to support our efforts, you can do so here. Thank you!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/05/21/1.jpg\")
\nLike a photonegative of the original edition of the Contradictionary, the Unicorn Edition features a white faux leather cover. The title is stamped in holographic rainbow foil. We designed the Unicorn Edition in 2021 as a reward for those who assist us in reprinting the book.
\n\n\n\n\nIn the tradition of The Devil’s Dictionary and other works of alphabetized audacity, the Contradictionary assembles a wide range of wit and whimsy. It is no mere miscellany, but a lighthearted work of serious literature, concentrating a wealth of ideas into aphorisms and anecdotes.
\n\nWhence do Stockholm Syndrome and Broken Window Theory derive their names? What is the common root of aristocracy and democracy? Who gets diagnosed with Anarchia and Drapetomania? How did voting kill Edgar Allen Poe, and why is a crater on the dark side of the moon named for the man who blew up the Tsar? Alternately scathing and sublime, Contradictionary pulls back the curtain from the war within every word, revealing the conflict behind the façade of the commonplace.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/05/21/3.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/05/21/2.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/books/contradictionary/gallery/contradictionary-04.jpg\")
\nWith your assistance, we hope to have the standard edition of the Contradictionary back in print soon.
\n\nYou are also welcome to assist us with a donation here, or to sign up to become a monthly supporter. We are an all-volunteer project without any outside funding. We make all of our work available for free or, where that is impossible, for break-even prices. Your assistance determines the extent of what we can do.
\n\nOur comrades in Brazil have done new print runs of three of our books in Portuguese: Recipes for Disaster, Expect Resistance, and Days of War, Nights of Love.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/23/16.jpg\")
\nAcross three decades of activity, our books have appeared in many different languages—Work, for example, has appeared in German, Spanish, Russian, Serbo-Croat, Lithuanian, Korean, and Portuguese, most of which are available here. We offer material in a grand total of 43 different languages on this site. We believe that it is crucial to build bridges between people in different communities and different parts of the world, and to do so by working directly with native speakers rather than relying on automated translation software.
\n\nIn addition to offering ongoing coverage of social struggles in Brazil, CrimethInc. cells in Brazil have already published various CrimethInc. books, newspapers, and zines in Portuguese, as well as organizing speaking tours in both South and North America. Now, to begin 2024, they have published new and improved versions of three of our best-known books in Portuguese.
\n\nThese will be available at infoshops and book fairs across Brazil in the coming weeks. You can also purchase them online via the infoshop 1000contra, here:
\n\n\n\nRecipes for Disaster is a tactical handbook for direct action, extensively illustrated with technical diagrams and firsthand accounts. It combines decades of hard-won knowledge about everything from collective organizing and antifascist action to squatting, graffiti, and sabotage.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/23/10.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/23/9.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/23/8.jpg\")
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\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/23/11.jpg\")
\nYour ticket to a world free of charge. The first book we published, Days of War, Nights of Love, is the perfect starting place for anyone seeking a life of passionate revolt. It is a visionary manifesto, a daring challenge to everything we take for granted, a riotous explosive experiment of a book.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/23/15.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/23/14.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/23/13.jpg\")
\nA hybrid field manual and tragic novel, Expect Resistance picks up where Days of War, Nights of Love leaves off, extending the analysis and recounting the adventures of those who staked everything on their wildest dreams. An epic of personal secession and collective resistance.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/23/4.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/23/5.jpg\")
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\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/23/1.jpg\")
\nHappy new year! Congratulations on surviving. Let’s take stock of where we are.
\n\nIn our 2022 year in review report, we documented the ebb phase of social movements that followed the upheavals of 2019 and 2020, as the strategies that had previously been successful produced diminishing returns and the authorities learned from their defeats. It remains a defining feature of our era that even the fiercest struggles have largely failed to achieve their intermediate demands. Apparently, those who administer the increasingly fragile social order some call late capitalism are not in a position to give ground. Rather than offering concessions to the desperate and unruly, governments across the political spectrum are investing in repressive technologies and doubling down on their dependence on the police.
\n\nOverseas, the consequences of this were already clear a year ago:
\n\n\n\n\nThe invasion of Ukraine continued a process of militarization and displacement that had already gotten underway in Syria. Amid ecological collapse and war—the side effects of capital accumulation and its consequences—more and more people are being forced into exile around the world.
\n\nThe invasion of Ukraine is likely an indication of things to come. Over the past several decades, governments worldwide have invested billions of dollars in crowd control technology and military equipment while taking precious few steps to address mounting inequalities or the destruction of the natural world. As economic and ecological crises intensify, more governments will seek to solve their domestic problems by initiating hostilities with their neighbors.
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Unfortunately, the events of 2023 have borne out our fears. While the Russian invasion of Ukraine has given way to a grinding war of attrition, civil war broke out in Sudan, Azerbaijan invaded Nagorno-Karabakh for the purpose of ethnic cleansing, and now the Israeli government is carrying out ethnic cleansing in Gaza. These are not aberrations, but glimpses of the future if we do not manage to change course.
\n\nThis shows what is at stake in our awkward efforts to change the world. In these circumstances, if it is not possible to win intermediate demands, it may be easier to pursue revolutionary transformation outright.
\n\nFortunately, we are not the only ones concerned with these questions. This year, we have been inspired by the tenacity of participants in ongoing struggles such as the fight to stop Cop City—by the empathy that has moved people around the world to act in solidarity with the residents of Gaza—by the bravery of rebels from Ecuador to France. Our experiences coming together in demonstrations, mutual aid projects, concerts, book fairs, and passionate discussions have sustained our faith in the potential of humanity. This story is far from over.
\n\n2024 will probably be a roller coaster ride. In the United States, the election season is shaping up to be chaotic indeed, and that will spill over into social conflict on the streets. It’s up to us to show that, rather than choosing between fascists and centrists determined to preserve a self-destructing system, people can come together in networks based in solidarity, mutual aid, and a more ambitious vision of what our lives could be.
\n\nThis is the best way to prepare for whatever is ahead.
\n\nHere, we’ll review our own efforts over the past year—the coverage we have provided from within social movements and the projects we have contributed.
\n\nOn October 7, militants from Hamas and other Palestinian groups breached the Gaza border fence and carried out a series of attacks, killing 1139 people. The Israeli government seized the opportunity to pursue ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip. They had massacred well over 21,000 Palestinians by the end of 2023, two thirds of whom were women and children.
\n\nIn response, the United States has seen a surge of protest and direct action. At the beginning of November, we published a text from the Fayer collective, a Jewish collective that has participated in the struggle to Stop Cop City in Atlanta, explaining why they are committed to solidarity with Palestinians and what they believe it will take to halt the assault of the Israeli military. Over the following weeks, we published reports from anarchists who participated in blockading the Port of Tacoma, a Raytheon facility, and various Amazon locations in order to interrupt the flow of weapons and money to the Israeli military.
\n\nAs we enter 2024, stopping the ethnic cleansing in Gaza remains one of the most urgent challenges before us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/3.jpg\")
A demonstration at the Port of Tacoma in Washington on November 6, 2023.
\nOver the past two years, the movement to stop Cop City and defend Weelaunee Forest has become one of the fiercest struggles in North America. Utilizing a variety of strategies, opponents of the proposed police militarization facility have repeatedly destroyed equipment and forced contractors to withdraw from the construction. In retaliation, the authorities have set new precedents in repression, murdering one forest defender and pressing outlandish racketeering charges against 61 more, including the members of a legal support collective. The first of those defendants is scheduled to stand trial beginning in early January 2024.
\n\nWe have published an array of perspectives from various participants in the movement, including material about the values that inspire them to keep fighting. In the latest installment of our comprehensive history of the movement, we trace its trajectory across the second half of 2023, exploring how the movement has sought to maintain a participatory and confrontational character even under tremendous pressure.
\n\nWe understand the fight against Cop City as a bridge between the George Floyd rebellion of 2020 and the movements of the future. In seeking to overcome the limits that the uprising of 2020 reached, the participants have set an example that will be of use next time large numbers of people are catalyzed into action.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/14.jpg\")
The Cop City construction site on March 5, 2023.
\nIn January, we published a photoessay documenting the showdown between thousands of police and protesters in Lützerath, where the German government set out to evict an ecological encampment.
\n\nIn February, we published an article about the imprisoned Italian anarchist Alfredo Cospito. By then, he had been on hunger strike for over 100 days, demanding to be released from solitary confinement. We argued that Alfredo’s strike was a warning—a message about the conditions being prepared for all of us in a society that increasingly treats human life as cheap.
\n\nIn March, we covered the movement in France against the pension reform as it escalated into a major conflict. In June, the streets of France exploded once more after the police murdered 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk. Unfortunately, as one of our contributors observed afterwards, over the past few years, different segments of the population of France have revolted successively, rather than all at once, enabling the authorities to weather the storm.
\n\nFurther east, we covered the mutiny of the Wagner private military company against the government of Vladimir Putin from the perspective of Russian anarchists. As we see it, such internal conflicts are the inevitable consequence of the militarization of society and the increasing centrality of armed force in the pursuit of state policy. In Russia, as in Sudan, the government armed mercenaries to do their dirty work, setting the stage for an armed conflict. In Sudan, the resulting civil war has been catastrophic for civilians.
\n\nElsewhere, we reported an inspiring story about solidarity between refugees and exiles, in which Russian anarchists living in exile in Armenia sought to support Armenian squatters. When Azerbaijan invaded Nagorno-Karabakh, we published the perspectives of Armenian anarchists on the events.
\n\nFinally, we explored how the Greek government’s decision to evict the self-organized refugee camp at Lavrio represents the intersection of the Turkish government’s war on Kurdish people, the Greek government’s war on autonomous spaces, and the European Union’s war on migrants.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/4.jpg\")
What goes up most come down. France in spring 2023.
\nIn honor of March 8, International Women’s Day, we published an account of the genealogy of the slogan “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” (“Woman, Life, Freedom”) showing how it spread from the part of Kurdistan that is ruled by the Turkish government to Iran and elsewhere around the world. Shortly afterwards, in response to the earthquake that wracked Syria and Turkey in February, we published statements from supporters of liberation movements in those regions showing how the Turkish and Syrian governments not only failed to protect their subjects but took advantage of the catastrophe to blockade and even bomb them.
\n\nLater that month, we published a report from an Israeli anarchist exploring how Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to consolidate power and the protest movement that emerged in response to it represented a conflict between competing elites and their respective colonial models, neither of which offered any real proposal to address the oppression and displacement of Palestinians. In October, the day after the October 7 attacks, we published a widely read interview with another Israeli anarchist, Jonathan Pollak, discussing the escalation of violence in Palestine and the repression the Israeli government metes out to those who act in solidarity with Palestinians.
\n\nWe followed that up with a perspective from a Palestinian in the part of Palestine occupied in 1948, describing life under colonial rule and emphasizing the importance of grassroots organizing and solidarity in the struggle for Palestinian liberation.
\n\nIn Brazil, 2023 began with a clumsy repeat performance of the incident on January 6, 2021 when Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol in hopes of keeping him in office. At the same time, in Peru, a tumultuous protest movement culminated in a march on the capital city of Lima. We spoke with Peruvian anarchists to get insight into those events.
\n\nThe year ended with Javier Milei taking power in Argentina. We conducted an interview with anarchists from Rosario in order to understand the decades of social struggle and economic restructuring that created the conditions in which Javier Milei came to power.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/11/26/9.jpg\")
Barricades surround the presidential palace on December 20, 2001 immediately before President Fernando De la Rua fled from the rooftop in a helicopter. The last time a government tried to impose unbridled capitalism on the population of Argentina, it ended like this.
\nOur history publishing this year focused mostly on the early 21st century. We chronicled how anti-fascists won the “battle of York” in Pennsylvania in 2002, comparing that pitched struggle with the much grimmer situation two decades later. We explored the history of the queer anarchist organizing umbrella Bash Back! ahead of a new Bash Back! convergence. Finally, to offer a historical reference point to those seeking to take action against arms traffickers today, we revisited the Smash EDO campaign in Britain a decade ago.
\n\nThis coming year, we hope to publish more work about the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
\n\nThe vantage point of a police officer in Sainte-Soline in spring 2023.
\nIn January, police murdered Manuel Terán, known as Tortuguita to their fellow forest defenders. Tortuguita had been occupying Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta for months, and bravely chose to reoccupy it after a police raid the previous December. The thousands of people who have participated in the movement to Stop Cop City have kept Tortuguita’s memory alive in defiance of the forces of repression and erasure.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/1.jpg\")
Manuel Terán, known as Tortuguita.
\nIn February, our longtime friend Jen Angel was killed in Oakland, California. Jen spent her life building infrastructure for anarchist organizing, publishing, and relationships.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/2.jpg\")
Jen Angel.
\nOn April 19, 2023, three anarchists were killed in battle near Bakhmut: an American named Cooper Andrews, an Irishman named Finbar Cafferkey, and a Russian named Dmitry Petrov. We published a biography of Dmitry. Over the course of a decade and a half, he had participated in revolutionary struggle in Russia, Belarus, Rojava, and Ukraine against a backdrop of intensifying tyranny. The story of his life offers insight into the recent history of the former Soviet Union. It is also an inspiring example of all the things an anarchist can accomplish, even in adverse conditions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/6.jpg\")
Dmitry Petrov.
\nActive Distribution has published a small book collecting our biography alongside some of his writings and those of his comrades. PM Press is distributing these books in the United States now.
\n\nOn December 6,1 anarchist insurrectionist and author Alfredo Bonanno passed away. Bonanno proposed the refusal of work and the pursuit of joyous revolt as revolutionary measures in the struggle against all forms of domination and despair; his ideas played an influential role in the development of our own collective projects. We prepared a short history of his life.
\n\nFinally, we want to give thanks for those we feared we might lose in 2023 who are still with us today. It was easy to imagine that Alfredo Cospito might not survive his hunger strike, but he did. Likewise, a participant in the confrontational demonstration in Sainte-Soline, France remained in a coma for many days because a police officer had attempted to kill him by firing a grenade at his head. Thankfully, Serge recovered.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/5.jpg\")
“Tortuguita lives; the struggle continues.” A banner displayed at a memorial march in January 2023 during which a police car caught fire.
\nIn 2023, we participated in book fairs and presentations in the United States from Boston and New York to Sacramento and Oakland, as well as in Canada, Mexico, Ecuador, Brazil, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Germany, Slovenia, and elsewhere.
\n\nOne of the most exciting events of the year was the worldwide anarchist gathering in Saint-Imier, Switzerland. This festival celebrated the 151-year anniversary of the founding congress of the federation known as the Anti-Authoritarian International—the continuation of the International Workingmen’s [sic] Association, one of the most important European labor organizations of the 19th century. Drawing a reputed 5000 people—mostly from central Europe, but also from as far away as Chile and Australia—the gathering in Saint-Imier may have been the largest exclusively anarchist event of the year.
\n\nWith the assistance of participants from Germany, Russia, Belarus, Finland, the United States, and elsewhere around the world, we published a thorough report on the gathering, and followed it up with a memoir reflecting specifically on dynamics and discourse around gender and sexuality at the gathering.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/11.jpg\")
A sticker seen during the gathering in Saint-Imier.
\nThis year, to celebrate the umpteenth reprinting of our classic gender poster, we released a 2023 remix of that poster addressing the current threats to gender self-determination and the countervailing forms of solidarity and collective self-defense. Alongside those, we published a discussion of the ways that the battle lines in discourse about gender have shifted over the two decades since we debuted the original. It’s one of the more thoughtful and reflective texts we have completed this year.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/13.jpg\")
Our new “gender remix” poster in action.
\nIn addition to those, we prepared posters in solidarity with Palestinians and with those who seek to defend the forest in Atlanta and elsewhere around the world. All of these are available to download, print out, and paste up on the walls of your community.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/10.jpg\")
Another of our posters in the wild.
\nThis year, we released fully five zines about the movement to Stop Cop City, covering the history of the movement in detail, the various strategies that participants have employed, the RICO charges, and more. These have been distributed in Atlanta and at support events all around the United States.
\n\nWe also published zines offering a perspective from Palestine, discussing the fight for gender self-determination, describing how to survive a felony trial, and recounting the lessons of the “green scare,” the federal operation targeting ecological activists.
\n\nTo make printing easier, we introduced a new “ink lite” option for printing our zines when you are short on toner.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/12.jpg\")
A street in Atlanta following a clash between police and Stop Cop City demonstrators in November 2023.
\nAfter a lull in our audio efforts, we pulled together a new team to prepare audio versions of our articles. This year, we released 20 such “audio zines,” including five about efforts towards Palestinian solidarity and five about the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta.
\n\nYou can listen to all of them here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/8.jpg\")
\nOver the course of 2023, we published dozens of articles in Spanish; over a dozen in French, Italian, and Polish; and several articles each in Basque, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, German, Greek, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Turkish. We also added texts in Danish, Dutch, Japanese, and Kurdish. We’ve published posters and zines in many of those languages, as well. You can find a comprehensive guide to our non-English content here.
\n\nWe’ve recently added a Turkish version of our introduction to anarchism, To Change Everything. It’s now available in a total of 34 languages.
\n\nWe are grateful to all the translators around the world who have worked with us to help us make our work accessible to more people. If you can help us translate anything we have published into any language, please contact us!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/9.jpg\")
Police and protesters face off in Lützerath, Germany in January 2023.
\nIn honor of the life of Alfredo Bonanno, we made a short film dramatizing the final section of one of his best-known works, Armed Joy.
\n\nWe also published a short video to celebrate Steal Something from Work Day, drawing on the work of Yugoslavian director Dušan Makavejev.
\n\nFinally, we invite you to participate in a holiday tradition by watching the 2023 edition of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.”
\n\nIt’s the most wonderful time of the year, 2023 edition.
\nThat hardly scratches the surface of everything we’ve accomplished this year—the adventures we’ve embarked on, the relationships we’ve nourished, the art forms we’ve shared. The most exciting parts rarely enter the public record!
\n\nAs always, all of our efforts are copyright free, produced and distributed by volunteer labor. We’re not trying to concentrate power in our own hands, but to establish reproducible models and put resources at the disposal of horizontal movements. This explains why we rarely pester you with fundraising requests. If you wish to support us financially, you can do so here—but the very best thing you could do for us is to undertake your own projects in the same spirit, or participate in our efforts.
\n\nThank you for sticking with us through another year. We look forward to what is ahead.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/7.jpg\")
\nDecember 6 happened to be the anniversary of the murder of Alexandros Grigoropoulos, which set off the Greek uprising of 2008. The way that the uprising in Greece unfolded arguably vindicates some of Bonanno’s arguments in favor of confrontational organizing and autonomous structures. ↩
\nWe’ve reprinted our classic gender subversion poster, “For Every Girl/For Every Boy.” To mark the occasion, we’ve also printed a new poster in homage to the original, celebrating collective resistance to the forms of gender fascism threatening us today. Here, we offer a deep dive into the legacy of the original poster, exploring the tension between gender abolition and gender self-determination.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/06/12/6.jpg\")
Our classic gender subversion poster. Click on the image to order the poster.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/06/12/5.jpg\")
Our new poster celebrating gender self-determination. Click on the image to order the poster.
\nTwenty years ago, we published the gender subversion poster, drawing on the creative work of Nancy R. Smith, Jacinta Bunnell, Laura Ann Newburn, Irit Reinheimer, and others. Over the following decades, we distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of the poster.
\n\n\n\n\nThese posters have made their way around the world, into classrooms, libraries, clinics, guidance counselor’s offices, pride marches, dorm rooms, shelters, punk houses, teenage bedrooms, and colleges… I regularly receive texts from friends who spot this poster in all manner of places, sometimes even on a wall in a TV show. Recently, my friend Neko Case sent me a photo of the poster from the green room of Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
\n\n \n
Comrades printed the poster in Spanish, German, Ukrainian, and various other languages.
\n\nIn September 2021, we let the poster go out of print. At the time, it seemed that our society was progressing towards more expansive ways of understanding gender. Since then, unfortunately, a reactionary offensive led by bigots and far-right politicians has gained ground, using the state to intensify the subjugation of women and to impose new forms of violence on trans, queer, and nonbinary people and those who support them. At the same time, we continued to receive requests for us to reprint the original poster. In the end, we decided to put another run of them in circulation, while also producing a new version that speaks to the terrain of struggles over gender that we face in 2023.
\n\nAs before, we are distributing both versions for the costs of printing and postage alone. We have never sought to make money off this project, only to do our part to create a world in which all of us can make the most of our potential on our own terms, however that looks for each of us—a more welcoming and supportive world, without imposed gender norms or bigotry.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/06/12/2.jpg\")
The artwork from the Portuguese version of our gender poster sighted at the Vaca Louca Café in Maringá, Brazil.
\nTwenty years ago, our poster had the audacity to ask: “What would the world look like without gender?” Since then, this question has become even more urgent—and even more challenging to answer.
\n\nOn the one hand, we’ve witnessed major shifts in cultural understandings of gender. As Jacinta Bunnell explains, when the original poster appeared,
\n\n\n\n\n“There was not a culturally unified language for talking about gender fluidity at this point; so much of how we spoke of gender was still either/or.”
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Today, nonbinary identities and gender-neutral pronouns have emerged from trans/queer subcultures and online communities into workplaces, schools, and public debates. Trans communities have received unprecedented visibility.
\n\nOn the other hand, what had been a rising wave of conservative backlash has grown into a tsunami. It is no exaggeration to describe the reactionary program as gender fascism. As the popular saying goes, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” The struggle for gender self-determination has reached the “then they fight you” stage. Today, access to abortion care has been severely restricted in large regions of the US, while hundreds of proposed laws target trans people, especially youth, with restrictions on medical care, participation in sports, bathroom access, legal documentation, entertainment and culture, and more. At the same time, heads of state are citing the preservation of gender roles among their chief justifications for full-scale wars.
\n\nYet at the same time that reactionaries are attempting to use state power to crush gender non-conformity and eliminate reproductive autonomy, the identity politics that emerged from 20th century liberation struggles are experiencing a crisis.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/06/12/3.jpg\")
An illustration from the back of our classic gender poster.
\nWe saw evidence of this on the second day of Donald Trump’s administration in 2017. The Women’s March protests in Washington, DC and around the US were among the most widely attended protests in a decade or more. But anarchists and other radicals largely focused on other priorities, and the massive energy of the mobilization dissipated quickly—in part because the category of “woman” does not suffice to describe all those who suffer as a consequence of gender oppression.
\n\nThe right-wing culture war offensive on the terrain of gender seeks to take advantage of this crisis. While the breadth of support for abortion rights worries Republican strategists who are concerned with their electoral prospects, the right is gambling that it can target trans people with impunity, seeing them as a small and politically less powerful demographic ripe for scapegoating. By framing their attacks as defenses against existential threats to children, the family, and the gender order itself, they have inflamed their base with a sense of mission that identity-based coalitions have not been able to overcome.
\n\nThe same social changes that have uprooted fixed notions of gender and enabled more expansive ways of being have also destabilized models of organizing that relied on coherent notions of identity. We need new ways of understanding ourselves to fight the forces that divide and oppress us, new ways to conceptualize who we are and what we can become. As a Brazilian comrade put it,
\n\n\n\n\nIt is no longer possible to organize a collective action that still holds on to any fiction about “being a woman”; it is not possible to ignore the complicities of white/bourgeois feminism with colonial/racial power. The crisis of feminism is the vanguard of the revolutionary political crisis: there is no longer a subject of history; the demand for recognition/representativeness was swallowed up by neoliberal devices; there is no identity politics that can unite us; really, we don’t want to be part of the same story, we no longer want to organize our desires for a good and dignified life into a state grammar that can govern our lives. The beauty of feminism’s implosion is that it lets us see the hundreds of sharp shards we still have left. Feminism becomes a shattered place, but a place of investigation into what political action can be within life, with life and not outside it; what can make us dangerous again; how are we going to escape all these gender and identity traps?”
\n\n \n
These “gender and identity traps” loom all around us, and the stakes are urgent. How do we resist the rising tide of gender fascism without reverting to models of identity that no longer serve us?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/06/12/1.jpg\")
The poster in German, hanging on a classroom wall.
\nOne way to imagine our way towards the original poster’s provocation—“What would the world look like without gender?”—is to propose gender abolition. Inspired by the movements against the prison industrial complex that propose not more comfortable cages but an end to caging altogether, we could propose that gender itself is an oppressive system that cannot be reformed. This is not the same as saying that “gender isn’t real”—if it weren’t, there would be no need to abolish it!—but rather to insist that just as it has been constructed, it can be deconstructed.
\n\nWhat is gender, after all? As we know it, gender divides a wide range of human qualities and capabilities into mutually exclusive categories, such as “masculine” and “feminine.” This artificial division requires a wide range of forces—social pressures, policing, assorted mythologies, and a variety of technologies from laser hair removal to steroids and Viagra—to uphold the illusion that people come in two standard models rather than a wide spectrum of possibilities. To abolish gender would mean dismantling these varied systems of coercion that force us into one of two narrow boxes while hierarchically ranking them and punishing anyone who pushes their limits.
\n\nUnfortunately, some trans-exclusionary “radical feminists” have attempted to appropriate the language of “gender abolition” to describe their own hateful project. As contradictory as this may seem—given their efforts to gatekeep who counts as a woman and their alliances with the anti-feminist extreme right—they insist that gender, as a system of patriarchal social norms, perpetuates harm against people of the female sex. By itself, this assertion sounds reasonable—until they continue that, therefore, trans people are somehow uniquely responsible for upholding gender and thus causing harm to “women.” This cruel argument pits some victims of gender oppression against others, blaming trans people for their efforts to survive in a system they didn’t create. The supposed “abolition” that these transphobic activists pay lip service to only reinforces the rigid essentialism of sex, further stigmatizing efforts to shape our bodies and lives on our own terms. In fact, it can only perpetuate gender as we know it, not abolish it.
\n\nConfronting this context, we need to be clear about precisely what gender abolition in the service of liberation could mean today.
\n\nAs an alternate framework, we propose gender self-determination, insisting on our autonomy to shape our bodies, presentations, and identities according to our own needs and desires. As we argued last year,
\n\n\n\n\nBy shifting the discussion from the limits of rights to the horizon of self-determination, we propose a radically different world, in which no authorities—neither governments, religions, nuclear families, nor anything else—can confine us within their narrow visions of who we should be and who we can become.
\n
What could this look like in practice? We’ve seen an explosion of creative new forms of gender identification in recent years, with new language and pronouns expanding far beyond binaries of male/female and cis/trans. These are encouraging, but they may not suffice to dislodge the power of imposed gender norms to shape the material circumstances of our everyday lives. Self-determination must mean more than choice in a consumer framework, a maximum of individual options for constructing our online profiles and Amazon wish-lists. In an alienated consumer society in which we are constantly being appraised and compelled to sell ourselves, defining ourselves with ever more precise categories and hashtags will not be enough to get us free.
\n\nOthers have argued that we can appropriate pharmaceutical and surgical technologies to experiment with producing gender according to our own preferences. That’s an important start—and necessary, even life-saving, for some—and furious right-wing efforts to restrict our access to these methods indicates the threat they pose to guardians of the gender order. Nonetheless, so long as some gendered qualities and categories are valued while others are not, seizing the biomedical means of production to give us more latitude to construct our bodies and identities still will not serve undermine all the different ways that the prevailing gender roles constrain and oppress people.
\n\nHow might we approach the task of undoing gender, combining the best elements of gender abolition and gender self-determination? By identifying which aspects of gender need abolishing, we can propose some points of departure:
\n\nAbolish gender segregation—ensure that people of all genders have access to the same opportunities, resources, social spaces, and forms of agency.
\nAbolish fixed gender roles—break the association between certain traits and certain genders, demonstrating new constellations of the qualities and capabilities that are currently associated with one gender or another. As the original poster suggests, you can be strong without being a boy and sensitive without being a girl; while this sentiment is increasingly accepted today, how much further can we go towards breaking free of the fixed roles and binaries that organize our thinking about human beings?
\nAbolish gender hierarchies—End practices that privilege one gender over another, and those that value some qualities and capabilities over others because of the gender they are associated with. Hillary Clinton becoming president would not have served to qualify our society as feminist—if a person of any gender has to outdo all other contenders in demonstrating traditionally masculine characteristics in order to get a foothold in politics, and if all political institutions continue functioning according to patriarchal priorities and protocols, gender oppression remains in effect even if not everyone in a position of power is a man.
\nAbolish gender gatekeeping—Do away with the boundaries that control who can identify with any gender. Defending trans identity, gender nonconformity, and other departures from fixed binary gender represents a step towards this goal.
\nAbolishing these dimensions of gender can create the space for the free flourishing of all people outside of oppressive roles and identities. We can affirm both the creative impulses that lead millions of people today to define themselves in gendered terms outside of birth assignments and binaries, while also taking aim at the structural conditions that constrain our lives regardless of how we identify.
\n\nAs anarchists, we believe that we can only be free when all of us are free, and that everything that expands the horizons of freedom for others will benefit us, too. Nowhere is this plainer than on the terrain of gender.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/06/12/4.jpg\")
The classic poster.
\nThis is why we have prepared a remix of our classic gender poster. The front of the new version reads,
\n\n\n\n\nFor every fascist who plans to attack drag queen story hour, there are three anti-fascists ready to defend it. For every boss who harasses you, there are ten workers who will back you up. For every judge who seeks to ban abortion, there are twenty collectives stockpiling Mifepristone and Misoprostol. For every cop who is paid to enforce transphobic legislation, there are a hundred gender outlaws determined to defy them. For every politician who tries to prohibit talking about gender in school, there are a thousand students charting their own paths beyond the binary. For every bigot who wants to etch their biases in stone, there is a movement that is already changing the world. For every person that takes one step towards freedom, there is another who finds the road to liberation a little easier.
\n
The back of the poster presents a revised excerpt from our text, “The Fight for Gender Self-Determination.”
\n\nWe hope that both of these posters of ours—both the classic one and the new remix—can play a part in new efforts towards getting free of gender norms. May they continue to hang in grade-school classrooms and collective houses, breaking up old models and assumptions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/06/12/7.jpg\")
The back of our new poster celebrating gender self-determination. Click on the image to order the poster.
\nThe Ex-Worker is back! After a hiatus to work on other projects, our newly reassembled audio affinity group is leading the charge to produce audio versions of a wide range of CrimethInc. materials. Stay tuned for updates!
\n\nListen to the Ex-Worker #85: Stop Cop City / Defend Weelaunee Forest, Part I: History and Analysis
\n\n\n\nListen to the Ex-Worker #87: The Twitter Ban and the End of Social Media
\n\nListen to the Ex-Worker #88: 2022 in Review—A Year to Endure
\n\nListen to the Ex-Worker #89: The Battle of York, January 2002—Anti-Fascism, Then and Now
\n\n\n\nSince Elon Musk kicked us off of Twitter at the urging of a certain far-right troll, we haven’t slowed down—you’ll find us publishing regularly here at crimethinc.com and circulating our texts and ideas through accounts on Mastodon, Kolektiva, and other platforms. But we want to make sure that the analysis, reporting on current events across the globe, historical accounts, calls for action, and other anarchist content we’ve been providing for over two decades can reach the widest possible audience.
\n\nTo that end, the Ex-Worker Podcast has committed to producing audio versions of most of the new content we produce. Beginning this month, you’ll be able to find links at the top of each page to an audio version of the article you’re reading. You’ll also be able to get the latest audio releases from the Ex-Worker by streaming or downloading directly from the podcast page, through your favorite podcatcher, or from other audio/video platforms including YouTube and Soundcloud—stay tuned for updates as we roll these out.
\n\nToday, we’re releasing the first of two episodes on the struggle to Stop Cop City and defend the Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta, Georgia. In the coming days, you’ll see episodes appear on our banning from Twitter and our analysis of social media, navigating fascism and left electoralism in Brazil, and an audio version of our article on the Battle of York in 2002. Stay tuned!
\n\nAdditionally, we’re working our way through the back catalog of our most popular articles and zines that haven’t had audio versions produced yet. You can already find audio versions of some classics, including To Change Everything, From Democracy to Freedom, and our book No Wall They Can Build. Coming soon, you’ll be able to listen to a wide range of articles and zines, including Why We Don’t Make Demands, Against the Logic of the Guillotine, There’s No Such Thing as Revolutionary Government, and many more! If you’ve got requests for audio versions of your favorite article or zine, you can drop us a line to podcast at crimethinc dot com.
\n\nFinally, in response to popular demand, we’re working on a major project to produce an audiobook version of Work, our classic analysis of capitalism, economics, and resistance. Today, revolt against work is spreading across the world in the aftermath of the pandemic, and a wave of strikes and union organizing offers possibilities but also limits. We want to make sure that as many people as possible have tools for understanding the functioning of the economy from the bird’s-eye-view down to the cash register and the factory floor—and ideas about how to challenge the mythology of work and take action to escape from its clutches into a freer world. Stay tuned!
\n\nSince 2013, the Ex-Worker Podcast and our comrades at The Hotwire have offered an audio strike against a monotone world. The project has evolved over the years, and will continue to change as our lives and the terrain we’re fighting on goes on shifting. When we got started nearly ten years ago, other than our friends at The Final Straw Radio (who are still going strong!), there were hardly any anarchists working in the medium of podcasting. Today, we’re a part of the Channel Zero Network, which has hosted dozens of different audio projects produced by anarchists and anti-authoritarians. We have participated in international gatherings networking with podcasts, radio shows, and radio stations across dozens of countries.
\n\nBut we still think there’s a vital role for audio projects in support of our broader mission to hasten the end of all forms of hierarchy and domination and dream a free world into being. From your headphones to the streets, we’ll be seeing you!
\n\nIn solidarity,
\n\nThe Ex-Worker Podcast Collective
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2022/12/30/2022-in-review-a-year-to-endure", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2022/12/30/2022-in-review-a-year-to-endure", "title": "2022 in Review: A Year to Endure ", "summary": "We’ve survived 2022—and with it, the ebb tide following the upheavals of 2019 and 2020. We revisit how we got here, explore the year's events, and review our own contributions.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/12/29/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/12/29/header.jpg", "date_published": "2022-12-30T02:05:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:56Z", "tags": [ "2022", "history", "fascism", "centrism", "electoral politics" ], "content_html": "We’ve survived 2022—and with it, the ebb tide following the upheavals of 2019 and 2020. Both in the United States and around the world, this has been a year of challenges and reversals. In the following overview, we revisit how we got here, explore the events of the past twelve months, and review our own efforts to contribute to movements for liberation.
\n\nAs for our collective, we reach the end of 2022 embattled but unbowed. We began the year with our warehouse in ashes and concluded it by getting permanently suspended from Twitter by Elon Musk—at that time the world’s richest man—at the request of a notorious pro-fascist troll. Yet in response to the fire, our comrades raised tens of thousands of dollars to support us and we were able to go right back into action; likewise, thus far, our suspension from the chief corporate social media platforms has only multiplied the number of people visiting our website and ordering our materials.
\n\nWe didn’t expect this to be easy. We go into 2023 ready for the next round and we hope you’ll be right there beside us.
\n\nIn the United States, the George Floyd Rebellion of 2020 and the subsequent far-right counter-mobilization remain the most significant political events of our time. The events of 2021 and 2022 have played out in their shadow. To understand the developments of the past year, we must begin in 2020.
\n\nAs we argued in our retrospective on the fiasco of January 6, 2021,
\n\n\n\n\nWhen police murdered George Floyd, public trust and respect for law enforcement plummeted to unprecedented depths. Demands to defund or even abolish the police migrated from the extreme political margins to become serious proposals that were widely debated in the mainstream. Fox News and its imitators continued their racially charged crime alarmism, but with diminishing returns; efforts by police unions, PR firms, and liberal corporate media outlets to feature stories of cops doing good made little headway against the widespread suspicion that had taken hold from the left all the way to the center.
\n\nIn this environment, the failed coup of January 6 was a godsend to the state. Police could pose as both victims and heroes again, the National Guard as saviors and bulwarks against chaos; even the Federal Bureau of Investigation was doing its part to protect democracy from right-wing thugs. Liberals and mainstream media outlets seized upon these interpretations and ran with them, with extraordinary success.
\n
When Joe Biden took office in 2021, he didn’t have a solid enough grip on power to crack down on the networks that made the uprising of 2020 possible, nor on Donald Trump himself. Instead, Biden, the New York Times, and other centrists joined the right wing in calling for more police and re-legitimizing the judicial system. They succeeded in reconstructing a social consensus—or at least the appearance of one—around support for the coercive institutions of the state.
\n\nAnarchists and other rebels were already exhausted before Biden came into office—witness the attrition in attendance at demonstrations in the waning months of 2020. (Ahead of January 6, 2021, Trump tried to arrange for the National Guard to keep anti-fascists from interfering with the march on the Capitol, apparently regarding them as the chief threat to his coup attempt—but by that time, the anti-fascist movement was so overextended that very few anti-fascists went to Washington, DC at all.) The massive mutual aid projects that had emerged in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the routines of confrontation dating from spring 2020 had largely collapsed by mid-2021. But the same thing happened to the far right: after January 6, 2021, it took them a long time to regain their footing.
\n\nThe centrist grip on power remained tenuous until the 2022 elections. Democrats were convinced that, if previous precedents were any indication, they would be trounced by Republicans—that the polls were not capturing the strength of Trump’s continuing popularity and they were essentially in an interregnum between fascisms. Perhaps as a consequence, throughout 2022, the Biden administration did little to crack down on Trump himself, instead continuing the spectacle of investigation that has been running since at least 2017—which chiefly functions to help both parties solicit donations.
\n\nIn fact, Democrats outperformed their expectations in the elections of November 2022. This may embolden them to crack down on social movements, but it probably won’t shift their approach to Trump. If he remains weak, they won’t want to prevent him from becoming the Republican frontrunner in 2024, and if he regains his political footing, they will be back in the situation they were before, in which they are powerless to do anything besides wring their hands about his bad behavior.
\n\nThe outcome of this election bears further comment. In fall 2020, the New York Times and other centrists had spread fear that street protests would cost Biden the election, attempting to overwrite the popular memory of the George Floyd uprising with their own defeatist narrative. Yet when the votes had been counted and New York Times correspondents crunched the numbers in a report that was not widely circulated, they had to admit that the majority of those who cited the protests as a factor in their decision had voted for Biden. In other words, if anything, the demonstrations in response to the murder of George Floyd helped keep Republicans out of power. If not for the burning of the Third Precinct, most people would never have heard George Floyd’s name—nor been prepared to respond to a potential Trump coup—nor participated in a movement that shifted public discourse. Let no one say that confrontational anti-authoritarian movements inescapably drive people to support the right wing; in a polarized and deadlocked society, the opposite is probably true.
\n\nThis suggests that the suppression of the social movements of 2020 will not ultimately benefit the institutional left or political centrists. While Trump’s star is passing, sooner or later a more centrist Republican Party will probably take the seat of state power that the Democrats have effectively prepared for it by re-legitimizing the police, crushing rebellion, and framing Trump as exceptional.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/12/29/3.jpg\")
The George Floyd rebellion of 2020 continued to produce echoes around the world well into 2022.
\nIn short, at the end of 2022, we are finishing up the classic ebb phase that always follows a high point of struggle. This is to be expected. Once people have seen their long-cherished fantasies play out beyond their wildest dreams, discovering in the process what the limitations and shortfalls of those fantasies were, it takes a while to develop and pursue new visions. At the same time, the authorities have learned from the last round of revolt and are putting the pieces in place, one after another, to prevent history from repeating itself.
\n\nStill, the events of 2022 have continued to erode faith in the authorities and the state, especially among young people. At this point, a large proportion of both Democrats and Republicans are chiefly voting out of fear rather than hope. Most of the widely discussed “political issues” of 2022 have been framed as matters that only the state can address: gun control, inflation, student debt, abortion, what instructors can teach in schools, and the like. This is calculated to sideline ordinary people. But as soon as grassroots movements can show that ordinary people can address their needs directly without recourse to representatives, there will be another wave of social movements.
\n\nThe post-2020 lull has been exacerbated by the fact that social atomization and the digital erosion of our attention spans have rendered it difficult to retain any gains from 2020, in terms of both organization and collective memory. Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is another step towards the ruling class consolidating control of digital communications, which will create new challenges for future movements. Our species is in a race against time as capitalists implement new repressive technologies and clamp down on the possibilities that digital connectivity opened up.
\n\nMusk’s buyout of Twitter shows how far the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few billionaires has gone: they can now buy major infrastructure themselves as private individuals, rather than as corporations. This extreme accumulation of power is contributing to the shift towards authoritarianism across the board—as people have less and less power relative to those who claim to represent them, they become angrier at the same time that it becomes harder for them to imagine egalitarian relations or doing without a representative.
\n\nIn any case, the problems that caused people to get unruly in 2020 have not been resolved. There’s still tremendous potential, tremendous need.
\n\nIn this context, anarchists in the United States are still grasping for new models. There has been a boom in interest in labor organizing, but we have yet to see workers overcome the structural impediments that have made it so difficult to build a contemporary labor movement with teeth over the past several decades.
\n\nWe have sought to contribute analysis to these efforts, exploring the emergence of anti-work sentiments in the wake of the pandemic and studying what we can learn about how the economy has changed by comparing the general strikes of 1946 and 2011. On the same theme, we published an interview with Antijob, a Russian anarchist labor defense platform, and a history and analysis of graduate worker organizing at Columbia University, documenting how confronting the union bureaucracy has been essential to every victory across two decades.
\n\nBesides labor organizing, most of the newer struggles in the US in 2022 have been defensive projects focusing on public space—protecting homeless encampments, resisting sweeps, defending wilderness. The defense of the Atlanta forest represents one of the most promising of these experiments, bringing together an array of different issues and tactics and producing new constellations of diverse social bodies. The participants succeeded in establishing a months-long autonomous zone, building a movement that is affirmative and generative as well as defensive.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/09/14.jpg\")
The burnt wreckage of a truck belonging to a developer in an occupied stretch of the Atlanta forest in summer 2022.
\nAlthough their electoral efforts have failed to secure them a firm grip on legislative or executive power in the United States, the far right has succeeded in solidifying their control in certain parts of the country. The same thing has occurred in France, Brazil, and other parts of the world, while outright fascists came to power in Italy this year. While centrists reign triumphant, the far right has consolidated a position as the chief alternative to the prevailing order, marginalizing those who would counterpose the possibility of revolutionary transformation and thereby serving centrists as a threat to keep potential revolutionaries in line. Future revolutionary movements will have to figure out how to overcome this challenge.
\n\nIn the street, elements of the far right have continued to experiment with new models of their own. In January 2022, a truck convoy established occupations and blockades along the Canadian border on the pretext of opposing COVID-19 lockdown measures, initiating a weeks-long standoff. (For our part, we were most sympathetic to the students who organized walkouts against institutional carelessness in the face of the pandemic.) Later, supporters of Bolsonaro emulated Canadian and Chilean truck blockades after he lost the Brazilian election of 2022.
\n\nThe year is ending with an ominous series of attacks on power stations in North Carolina and the Northwest. There are indications that these, too, may be the work of white supremacists experimenting with a new tactic to destabilize society and exert pressure. While the anti-social nature of such tactics might prevent fascists from building legitimacy with society at large, they would serve to play the role of terrorizing people into the arms of the reigning authorities.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/12/29/2.jpg\")
Graffiti on a housing defense barricade in Portland, Oregon in 2020.
\nThis year saw a steady assault on gender and reproductive autonomy from Republicans and fascists across the United States, while heads of state like Vladimir Putin have made homophobia into one of the chief points in their program. Rhetoric about “groomers” has helped fascists to continue polarizing people towards transphobia and homophobia, though their attacks on drag queen story hours and the like have not brought out anything comparable to the mobilizations of fascists in Washington, DC and the northwest in late 2020.
\n\nThe Supreme Court decisions of 2022 contributed to the impression that we are still living in the Trump era, while the lackluster grassroots response showed the extent to which the spirit of 2020 has been successfully suppressed. When the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, for example, the ensuing protests were divided distinctly into passive liberal street marches and clandestine invite-only direct action. This a classic symptom of a waning movement, in which professional organizers dictate what happens in mass gatherings while a few isolated radicals continue to try to escalate out of contact with a social base that could join them.
\n\nFor our part, in response to the assault on abortion access, we produced a poster, proposed a strategy to employ direct action to push back on the authorities, and published an interview with activists who assist people in accessing abortions in defiance of draconian Polish anti-abortion laws in hopes of equipping people in the United States to defend and extend abortion access here.
\n\nIn response to the wave of legislation, mass shootings, and fascist mobilizations targeting trans and queer people, we published an analysis spelling out the case for gender self-determination and proposing a framework for resistance. We also published a do-it-yourself guide to producing transdermal estrogen in hopes of making it easier for people to take the care they desire into their own hands.
\n\nAs in the United States, people in many other parts of the world are caught between an unsatisfactory ruling capitalist centrism and a far right that is not quite powerful enough to achieve supremacy but still poses a credible threat. The global wave of revolts of 2019 was undercut by the pandemic, which largely benefitted the center and the far right—in that order—outside the US. Since then, war, environmental catastrophes, and other disasters have mostly immobilized people rather than remobilizing them. In France, last October, many people anticipated a new round of protests about the rising cost of living, hoping that these might become a sequel to the Yellow Vest movement of 2018-2019. Yet the demonstrations turned out to be underwhelming. Perhaps, when the government can blame all economic problems on Russia, it is difficult for outrage to gain traction, especially with far-right presidential candidate Marine le Pen having done so well in the last election.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/12/29/4.jpg\")
A banner in Brazil in 2019, celebrating the global wave of revolts that year.
\nIn this situation, it appears that no one on the statist left has any bold new ideas or proposals. This is most dramatically evident in Brazil, where Workers Party presidential candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won the 2022 election—but by a much narrower margin than he did in 2002 and with much of the promise that he originally represented discredited almost a decade ago now. Instead, in Brazil, the chief function of the Bolsonaro years has been to discipline those who voted for Lula out of the aspirations that inspired them to revolt in 2013.
\n\nIt seems to be a defining feature of our era that the difficulties of survival regularly provoke revolt on a scale that exceeds any particular subculture or demographic, but that these movements have thus far almost universally failed to bring about fundamental changes. None of the pat answers for this conundrum (e.g., that it indicates the supposed need for a centralized authoritarian party) have helped anyone to produce different results. It still remains to us to hit upon new ways of living and fighting that are adequate to the crises of our times.
\n\nConsequently, the most significant new development of 2022 has been the spread of war.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/12/29/1.jpg\")
“No war but the class war.”
\nStarting on the very first day of 2022, the rising cost of living and the end of fuel subsidies sparked protests in Kazakhstan. Within days, an insurrection erupted in Almaty, the country’s largest city. The armies of six nations coordinated to suppress it.
\n\nThe uprising in Kazakhstan was only the latest in a long chain of events indicating how much pressure people are under in the former Soviet Union, both from economic privation and authoritarian domination. It was preceded by the brutal suppression of various protest movements in Russia and Belarus; in summer 2022, unrest also broke out in Uzbekistan. This situation came to a head with the Russian invasion of Ukraine at the end of February.
\n\nWe covered the situation leading up to the invasion from the Ukrainian side of the border, then reported on the anti-war movement in Russia.
\n\nIn the buildup to the invasion, Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko and Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin cynically lured refugees who were fleeing armed conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and other parts of Asia and Africa by promising them a safe migration route through Belarus to the European Union. While the European Union made some provisions to receive Ukrainian women (and trans men) who were permitted to flee the war, they heartlessly left refugees from other parts of the world stranded at the Belarusian border, starving and freezing in limbo between the two power blocs. We published an article detailing anarchists’ efforts to defy Polish law to get assistance to these refugees.
\n\nPanning back, we can see the invasion of Ukraine continued a process of militarization and displacement that had already gotten underway in Syria. Amid ecological collapse and war—the side effects of capital accumulation and its consequences—more and more people are being forced into exile around the world. One thing anarchists can focus on doing better in the future is to help refugees—whether from Ukraine, Central African Republic, or New Orleans—to develop political agency wherever they end up. Towards that end, we published an interview with Syrian refugees who managed to establish a collective in Paris and to continue to organize on an international scale.
\n\nThe invasion of Ukraine is likely an indication of things to come. Over the past several decades, governments worldwide have invested billions of dollars in crowd control technology and military equipment while taking precious few steps to address mounting inequalities or the destruction of the natural world. As economic and ecological crises intensify, more governments will seek to solve their domestic problems by initiating hostilities with their neighbors. Now that Russia is too distracted to call the shots in its previous sphere of influence, we are already seeing signs of this in Turkey’s eagerness to resume invading Rojava and in new conflicts between Azerbaijan and Armenia and, further to the east, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. At the same time, we are seeing saber-rattling in Serbia about Kosovo, in China and the United States about Taiwan, and elsewhere around the globe.
\n\nThough the war in Ukraine has generated difficult debates among anarchists, we had better take these seriously if we are likely to confront similar situations elsewhere in the future. For our part, we have continued to report on anti-war protests and draft resistance in Russia. We also published an interview with a clandestine collective of anarchist combatants carrying out sabotage actions against Putin’s war effort.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/12/29/5.jpg\")
Art by NO Bonzo.
\nElsewhere, 2022 was less eventful, for good or ill. With the exception of Ecuador, which experienced a reprise of the uprising of October 2019 in 2022, and Sudan, where street mobilizations have continued periodically all year, most of the places that saw uprisings in 2019 have been quiet this year. The powerful movement in Hong Kong that helped set the tone for autumn 2019 has effectively been suppressed, though unrest has finally begun to spread in China. The movement in Chile, which arguably achieved the most out of all the 2019 uprisings, was effectively channeled into electoral politics via the promise of replacing the Pinochet-era constitution, and consequently ran aground as the right wing finally regained the initiative.
\n\nThis past summer and fall, we published analyses from the Philippines and Brazil about the ways that electoral politics have served to strengthen the extreme right while giving centrists a pretext to discourage anarchist and anti-fascist organizing.
\n\nThis year’s most promising movements have taken place outside the epicenters of wealth and power. The revolt in Iran has initiated change in Iranian society at large, if not within the Iranian government, while the occupation movement in Sri Lanka succeeded in temporarily chasing the head of state out of the country. These victories will be reference points for the struggles of 2023.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/12/29/8.jpg\")
Anti-authoritarian revolutionaries facing off with the forces of the military dictatorship in Sudan in fall 2022.
\nThis year, we published a collective oral history of the historic protests against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund of April 2000. We also published a retrospective on the Gezi Park uprising in summer 2013, recalling a moment of optimism and possibility in Turkey and analyzing the ways that Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan consolidated autocratic power in the years that followed.
\n\nIn response to a destructive police raid on People’s Park, the longstanding commons in Berkeley, California, we produced a poster honoring Rosebud Abigail Denovo, an anarchist who was murdered by police while defending the park against an eviction threat in 1992.
\n\nFinally, one of the texts we most enjoyed putting together this year is “Punk: Dangerous Utopia.” This has just appeared as the foreword to a book about the intersections between punk and anarchism, published in the United Kingdom by Active Distribution. Punk was profoundly influential in introducing hundreds of thousands of people to participatory, horizontal, and decentralized models for organizing and culture, and there is still a lot we can learn from it today.
\n\nBefore we knew that Elon Musk would personally boot us off Twitter, we published a history tracing the trajectory of Twitter from its origins as a street protest tool to the billionaire’s acquisition of the platform.
\n\nBut long before that particular debacle, we knew we should not permit our access to the general public to depend on the good will of corporate executives. In 2022, we produced three new posters and twelve new zines in a total of ten different languages. This coming year, we’ll continue to publish new print projects.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/12/29/6.jpg\")
“When Donald Trump was booted off of Twitter after January 6, it became inevitable that someone from his faction of the ruling class would seek to take over the company,” as we wrote in “Canary in the Coal Mine.”
\nIn December 2008, after the Greek insurrection, a small number of anarchists intentionally promoted two tactical proposals as a way to break out of the impasse that summit-hopping and other approaches from the so-called “anti-globalization era” had reached. These were university occupations and anti-police revolt. Although both of these had occurred in the United States before, these anarchists believed that they had untapped potential.
\n\nThese experiments began humbly, with a few dozen people occupying buildings at the New School in New York and a few hundred people rioting in Oakland after Oscar Grant was murdered. The former led indirectly (via the “Occupy Everything” slogan of the student occupation movement and the subsequent occupation of the capitol building in Madison) to Occupy; the latter set a precedent for the revolts in Ferguson and later, in May 2020, Minneapolis. The long-term potential of those models was not immediately apparent in their awkward beginnings, nor were the permutations that the movements arising from those initial examples would undergo.
\n\nWe are once again at the beginning of a new era that will pose new challenges. This is the time to propose new tactics, new strategies, new horizons for experimentation.
\n\nAs you undertake projects of your own this coming year, imagine that these are not just ways to address immediate needs or respond to emergencies, but also opportunities to shape the imaginations of thousands of others like you. Imagine what it would look like to develop new models for revolt in an era of scarcity and ecological crisis, when people desperately need new ways to access and share space and resources. Imagine that your efforts could give rise to new experiments that will be infectious and that these will evolve in unpredictable ways. How can you contribute to this process? How can you accelerate it? How can you approach your own humble efforts as a step towards the movements of the future?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/12/29/7.jpg\")
Those who hold power today may appear invulnerable, but nothing lasts forever.
\nThis past year, 2021, concluded with our mail-order space in Olympia burning to the ground while everyone around the country came down with COVID-19.
\n\nStill, it was a hell of a lot better than last year.
\n\nBy the close of 2020, Donald Trump was tweeting that anarchists were responsible for rioting around the country, the New York Times was platforming a conspiracy theorist who alleged that the violence was our fault personally, and social media corporations were systematically cutting our lines of communication with the public while fascists ramped up street attacks around the country ahead of a coup attempt. So if 2021 has been a little bit quieter, that’s not entirely unwelcome. It has given our collective a chance to focus on some of our long-term projects, some of which we hope to debut next year.
\n\nBut have we used it to prepare properly for what’s ahead? That’s the question—because none of the tensions of 2020 have been resolved.
\n\nWe review our publishing efforts this past year, to ensure that you have all the resources you need to learn about the innovations of 2021 and prepare for 2022.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/01/04/1.jpg\")
A demonstration outside a jail in Chicago, Illinois in solidarity with prisoners on New Year’s Eve, 2021.
\nThe year 2021 was a year of reeling and recovery in the United States, as practically every political and social faction recuperated from the demands of 2020.
\n\nThe year 2021 opened with the belated, farcical culmination of the far-right momentum that had been building throughout the second half of 2020: a bungled coup attempt intended to keep Donald Trump in office by brute force—or at least to accustom Republicans to such stunts. As with Trump’s election, we had noted the signs that this was on the way, but it still took us by surprise when it occurred. It was hard to believe Trump would burn all his political capital with the center on such a long-shot attempt to stay in power. In retrospect, once he was no longer going to get to remain president, he had no incentive not to try to carry out a coup, as far-fetched his scheme was.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/01/07/header.jpg\")
Ominous vistas.
\nOn January 7, we published an analysis of the events that has not aged badly:
\n\n\n\n\nOur own interpretation is that earlier in 2020, Trump indeed took steps to see if he could take power regardless of the outcome of the election—but, likely fearing the the George Floyd uprising was just a foretaste of what would result from an actual coup attempt, important elements of the ruling class chose not to support him, with the result that by January 6, there was no real possibility of a coup, and all that remained possible was for Trump to have his supporters throw one last tantrum to punish the rest of the political class for not permitting him to retain power and to show that, even out of power, he and his supporters could be a dangerous force.
\n
Afterwards, we followed up with “Why We Need Real Anarchy,” identifying the ways that both the far right and centrists were using the failed pro-Trump putsch as an opportunity to confuse the issue of what counts as genuine revolt.
\n\nThere remains a lot more to say about the events of January 6 and the precedent that they set for the future, especially as prominent Republicans have, if anything, ceased to distance themselves from the spirit of that day in the year that has followed. We will get into the details of what there is to learn from these developments this Thursday, on the anniversary of the botched coup. Our colleagues at Unicorn Riot have published a helpful overview of what is currently known about Trump’s ill-fated plan to seize power that day.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1346910092273143809\n\n\n
On April 11, 2021, a police officer in the Twin Cities suburb Brooklyn Center pulled over Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, allegedly on account of expired tags—and murdered him. This tragedy occurred in the midst of the trial of the police officer who murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020; the authorities were already bracing for unrest. The murder of Daunte Wright showed that nothing had really changed in policing, even after all the protests; rather, as we argued, many different forces were conspiring to blunt the force of the revolt that had called attention to racist police violence in the first place.
\n\nIn June, immediately after the one-year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd and the beginning of the rebellion that bears his name, Minneapolis city officials made their first attempt to evict George Floyd Square. At the same time, US Marshals shot and killed Winston Boogie Smith Jr., a 32-year-old Black father, nearby—once more underscoring the continuity of police violence from 2020 to 2021. On June 13, a driver attacked a demonstration in remembrance of Winston Smith, killing Deona Marie Erickson. This tragedy was the predictable result of years of right-wing efforts to normalize—and even legalize—vehicular attacks.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1381455817388531714\n\n\n
In the end, the city government succeeded in evicting George Floyd Square—in no small part, by mobilizing independent groups that had played a role in the groundswell of May 2020 to do the work that the police could not. In “How (Not) to Abolish The Police,” we explored the ways that the movement to abolish the police was slowly supplanted by reformist efforts to make other institutions take on the same roles that the police currently perform without fundamentally changing the underlying logic.
\n\nFor those who wish to study how liberal politicians, police PR campaigns, liberal non-profit organizations, and corporate media used counter-insurgency strategies to suppress the movement against police that exploded into the public eye on May 26, 2020, we also recommend this analysis.
\n\nIn addition to covering the developments in Minneapolis throughout the year, we released We Are Now: The Story of an Armed No-Cop Zone in Atlanta, documenting the perspectives of Black demonstrators who occupied the site where Rayshard Brooks was murdered.
\n\nWe Are Now: The Story of an Armed No-Cop Zone in Atlanta.
\nTo coincide with the ultimate removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond, one of the last major Confederate statues to be removed after the 2020 uprising, we published a chronology of all the statues toppled during the George Floyd rebellion. For Columbus Day, we revisited the subject, presenting an essay about what should replace those statues.
\n\nThis year, a quarter of a century after we first took an anti-work position at a time when it was hardly thinkable, anti-work sentiments finally took off in a big way. Well over a quarter of the work force quit their jobs in the course of the year, and a popular anti-work reddit page has drawn over 1.5 million subscribers.
\n\nWe will engage substantively with the new wave of anti-work sentiment soon. In 2021, in addition to celebrating Steal Something from Work Day, we published two older texts about labor, an analysis of why traditional labor unions and union organizing models have produced diminishing returns and a worker’s-eye-view report on where sugar comes from.
\n\nAfter Hurricane Ida devastated communities along the Gulf of Mexico, we published an interview with a nurse in New Orleans and an essay titled “Disasters on the Horizon,” appraising the colonial roots of the ongoing catastrophes that the hurricane exacerbated in Louisiana and exploring what it would take to create truly resilient infrastructure for all.
\n\nEcological disasters are going to continue to occur on a greater and greater scale, with forest fires, extreme weather events, infrastructure failures, and other factors combining to displace people within the United States as well as around the world. Developing effective networks and horizontal institutions to respond to these crises will be essential to weathering the years ahead.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/02/7.jpg\")
A natural gas refinery after Hurricane Ida. The plumes of smoke burning off the stacks are not the consequence of the hurricane, but—the cause of it.
\nGenerally, we just comment on the social movements that we participate in, but occasionally we publish calls to action, as well.
\n\nAt the beginning of January, to close out the Trump era, we published a call to immediately push back against authoritarian border policies starting from the day Joe Biden was inaugurated. This call helped inspire people to gather in the streets of Seattle, Portland, Eugene, Sacramento, Minneapolis, Bloomington, and elsewhere around the country on January 20 to assert their continued determination to fight for a freer society, even under a centrist Democrat.
\n\nAs on every April 15, we celebrated Steal Something from Work Day with an essay entitled What Work Steals from Us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/04/15/1.jpg\")
\nThe rest of the world was somewhat less quiet in 2021 than the United States, though not reaching the levels of unrest we saw in dozens of countries in 2019.
\n\nAround the ten-year anniversary of the revolution in Tunisia, another movement was coming to a boil there, which we explored in “Tunisia: From the 2011 Revolution to the Revolt of 2021.” Eventually, in July, after many months of pressure, the president of Tunisia suspended the parliament and dismissed the prime minister.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1419456651636137984\n\n\n
In May, following a popular uprising in Palestine and in refugee communities abroad, we published “The Revolt in Haifa,” an eyewitness report of the events.
\n\nBeginning on July 9, 2021, when the high court upheld the conviction and sentencing of former South African president Jacob Zuma, looting and rioting broke out in two provinces in South Africa for nine days. We published a perspective from a South African about how to interpret the different agendas expressed in the unrest.
\n\nFinally, on the last day of 2021, we released an interview with anarchists in Sudan who have been confronting the military dictatorship that took power via a coup last October. Arguably, the most instructive element of the Sudanese organizing is the local resistance committees, which have demonstrated how a precarious and predominantly unemployed youth population can become a powerful force.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/12/31/5.jpg\")
Anarchists in Sudan.
\nThis year, the European continent has been riven by conflicts over state lockdowns and vaccine mandates, but conspiracy theorists and fascists have gained the upper hand in many of these; we recommend this text from Greece about why. Movements for liberation have been caught flat-footed in much of Europe, as the extreme right gains ground in France and the police intensify their attacks on the few remaining autonomous spaces in Germany.
\n\nWe published a report from the forest occupation movement in Germany, discussing different strategies of resistance. As climate change intensifies, many people are hoping that a new generation of fierce ecological movements will emerge.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/03/10/2.jpg\")
Inside a treehouse in Flensburg named Rødgrød, since destroyed by the police.
\nGreece has long been known for its powerful anarchist movement, but anarchists have faced brutal repression under the right-wing New Democracy government. We published fully six updates from Greece in the course of the year, charting the course of Greece under the pandemic from the beginning of 2021 through the hunger strike of Dimitris Koufontinas, a prisoner from the November 17 movement, to anti-police demonstrations, the end of the lockdown, the summer wildfires, and the demonstrations observing the historic dates of November 17 and December 6. It is our hope that the anarchist movement in Greece will outlive the current reactionary government, emerging stronger from these battles.
\n\nShifting our attention a few miles north and east, we published two reports from Russian anarchists discussing the protests of January 23, 2021, in which tens of thousands of protesters across the country rallied in response to the arrest of opposition leader Aleksei Navalny—expressing an anger that runs much deeper than support for any opposition candidate. We also were proud to publish a thoughtful analysis from anarchists who participated in the revolt in Belarus of 2020, discussing why it succeeded at first—and why the regime and its liberal opposition were able to undermine the movement before it could topple the dictatorship.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/06/30/1.jpg\")
A bloc of anarchists at a protest in Belarus. The banner reads “Solidarity is our weapon.”
\nWhen the United States military finally withdrew from Afghanistan, leaving the Taliban in control of the whole country, we published “The Taliban Victory in a Global Context,” a perspective from a veteran of the US occupation of Afghanistan. From the veteran’s perspective, the Taliban, the occupation, and its consequences are all elements in a worldwide wave of fascism and fundamentalism that is also gaining ground in the United States.
\n\nIndia, too, has suffered under this wave of fascism and fundamentalism. Yet in November, after a year-long struggle, farmers achieved a stirring victory against the far-right government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, setting a hopeful precedent for the region. An author in India described the horizontal and anti-authoritarian aspects of their mobilization in “How Farmers Defeated the Government of India.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/11/19/2.jpg\")
Congratulations to the farmers of India on their victory.
\nIn the culmination of our series on mutual aid during the pandemic, we began the year by publishing a feature on self-organization in Puerto Rico.
\n\nLooking elsewhere in the Caribbean, in response to the protests that broke out in Cuba on July 11, we published two interviews with Cuban anarchists and translated a statement from an anarchist initiative in Cuba. Those who oppose the imperialism of the United States government but support the imperial aspirations of Russia and China, or who at least sympathize with the embattled governments of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Iran even when they set about brutalizing the people they claim to represent, are often exasperated—to say the least—when we support social movements that oppose their preferred rulers. From our perspective, we owe our solidarity to ordinary people who are standing up for themselves, not to bureaucrats or police of any nationality.
\n\nIn 2021, we published two lengthy expositions of the situation in Brazil under Trump’s Latin American equivalent, Jair Bolsonaro—”Brazil, Epicenter of the Virus of Populism” and “Only Revolt Can Bring Down Bolsonaro.” Brazilian anarchists understood Bolsonaro’s intentionally genocidal approach to COVID-19 in the context of a legacy of military rule, arguing that the conditions in Brazil can only be fundamentally changed by means of autonomous organization and revolt, not a mere electoral victory.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/12/5.jpg\")
Anti-fascists in Belo Horizonte, Brazil blockade the street in front of a burning barricade.
\nIn 2021, Colombians initiated a massive uprising that culminated in a weeks-long standoff with one of Latin America’s most notoriously violent and oppressive governments. Working with anarchists in Cali, we published “Colombia Has Lost Its Fear” and “Instead We Became Millions,” including translations of reports from within the struggle and interviews with participants.
\n\nOne essential innovation of the movement in Colombia were the gathering points variously referred to as “puntos de concentración,” “puntos de resistencia,” or “puntos de paro”—literally, “concentration points,” “resistance points,” and “strike points.” These points simultaneously served to block commerce, to provide for the free distribution of food and other necessities, and to provide space for free expression. They were spaces of encounter and social life beyond the bounds of state and capital, developed for an era of increasing precarity and isolation.
\n\nThe uprising in Colombia offered an instructive example of what a “general strike” looks like in the present day. As we wrote,
\n\n\n\n\nThis is a 21st-century strike. In a country where the majority worked precarious jobs in an informal economy, now devastated by the pandemic and government restrictions, this strike is less about not going to work than about actively shutting everything down. Blockades have managed to halt commerce in many cities, but they serve a double role: these points are also where people gather and experiment with new ways of living together and caring for one another, outside of dictates of capitalism and the state.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/04/9.jpg\")
Colombia: “For our dead—a minute of silence and a life of combat.”
\nAt the southern and western extremity of the continent, Chile had experienced a tumultuous uprising in 2019. This period of tremendous potential concluded with electoral victories for the left and a significant concession—the opportunity to revise the constitution that remains from the times of Augusto Pinochet’s blood-soaked dictatorship. In “The Hot Potato Changes Hands,” our Chilean correspondents asked what new challenges electoral victory might pose to autonomous movements in Chile, drawing from the example of Brazil, Greece, and the period of conflict that set the stage for the accession of Pinochet himself.
\n\nThey also authored a eulogy for Luisa Toledo Sepúlveda, an important elder in popular anti-state movements in Chile, and an inspiring report from her funeral.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/07/09/header.jpg\")
The funeral for Luisa Toledo Sepulvéda in Santiago, Chile.
\nWe published a lot of historical material in the course of 2021, looking back in order to get oriented for the future. We started the year with a chronology of resistance throughout the Trump years, reviewing the history we had all just lived through.
\n\nIn February, we published an interview with two longtime Brazilian anarcho-punks, “From Punk to Indigenous Solidarity,” tracing anarchism and indigenous solidarity across four decades—starting with the reemergence of anarchism in Brazil in the 1980s after the end of the military dictatorship and tracing it through the rise and fall of the Workers Party government to Bolsonaro’s regime today.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/18/header.jpg\")
Anarcho-punks in Brazil in the 20th century.
\nIn March, to observe the 100-year anniversary of the Kronstadt rebellion, we published an overview and chronology of the struggle, including the entire text of all 14 issues of the newspaper published by the rebels. This was one of our most ambitious projects of the year.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/03/02/izvestia%203_print_black_and_white.jpg\")
An English-language facsimile of the third issue of the Izvestia [news] of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of Sailors, Soldiers, and Workers of the Town of Kronstadt.
\nWe followed up with an analysis of the composition of the Kronstadt revolt—a subject of longtime debate—by a Russian anarchist historian. Exploring the afterlife of that revolt in cinema, we went on to publish a discussion of Maggots and Men, a film that reimagines the Kronstadt uprising as a queer and trans utopia, and an interview with Cary Cronenwett, the director of Maggots and Men. We also published an introduction to La Commune de Paris, 1871, Peter Watkins’s daring assault on spectatorship from within the medium of film itself, which brings the Paris Commune of 1871 back to life along with all the questions it posed.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/03/28/1.jpg\")
As the Situationist International put it, “Real poetry brings back into play all the unsettled debts of history.” Peter Watkins’s The Paris Commune, 1871.
\nTo celebrate Peter Kropotkin’s birthday, we published an account of his escape from prison, a glimpse into our forthcoming ambitious historical narrative. This story unexpectedly appeared on hacker news, drawing untold thousands of readers in a very short time.
\n\nFinally, we published “Every Flag Is Black in a Fire,” a selection of images and quotations exploring the meaning of the anarchist black flag across a century and a half.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/06/14/1.jpg\")
A black flag at the South Pole. The artist Santiago Sierra helped to coordinate the placing of black flags at both the North and South Poles in 2015 as a gesture of defiance against nationalist colonialism.
\nIn 2021, we put particular effort into using the anniversaries of the counter-globalization mobilizations of the turn of the century to educate newer anarchists about the movements that came before them.
\n\nIn “Epilogue on the Movement against Capitalist Globalization,” we describe the global wave of organizing that built up to the era of massive protest convergences at international trade summits. In “The Revolutionary Anti-Capitalist Offensive,” one participant dramatically recounts the battle of Québec City in April 2001, when anarchists from all around North America converged to oppose a transcontinental summit intended to establish a “Free Trade Area of the Americas.”
\n\nIn the end, the Free Trade Area of the Americas was soundly defeated.
\n\nIn “Memories from the Front Lines,” we present a composite account of the front lines of the clashes at the notorious G8 summit that took place in Genoa in July 2001. The demonstrations in Genoa arguably represented the high-water mark of an era of global protest, in which both confrontational tactics and police repression reached their apex.
\n\nWhen the attacks of September 11, 2001 occurred, they interrupted the momentum of the movement. On the twenty-year anniversary of the attacks, we published an account by two young anarchist organizers who had come to DC to prepare for the mobilization against the IMF. They describe their experience of the September 11 attacks, during which they stood before the flaming Pentagon, looking into the burning future that we now inhabit.
\n\nFinally, as an homage to the culture of the time, we prepared a poster version of an illustration from those days and presented it with the history of its various components.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/04/26/1.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the poster.
\nWe began 2021 with “A Demonstrator’s Guide to Understanding Riot Munitions,” an introduction to the chemical weapons and “less-lethal” projectiles police use.
\n\nThe next month, after a winter storm knocked out electricity to millions of people in Texas, we saw via social media that some comrades were using a guide from our book, Recipes for Disaster, to make a rocketstove in order to boil water and cook food. We scrambled to put that chapter online for others in the same situation.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/MonkeyWrenchATX/status/1361883739219914752\n\n\n
In addition, ahead of students going back to school in the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, we finally put two old texts of ours online: “Deschooling,” about anti-authoritarian educational alternatives, and “No Gods, No Masters Degrees,” a memoir about how university students can engage in class mutiny, weaponizing their access to resources in order to contribute to broader struggles against capitalism.
\n\nIn the course of 2021, we largely focused our efforts on print projects we hope to complete in 2022. In the meantime, we made an effort to get some of our older material back into print.
\n\nIn February, we reprinted 25,000 more copies of To Change Everything, our anarchist outreach project, bringing the total print run in English to 175,000.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/10/1.jpg\")
To Change Everything is available in 31 languages, from Arabic to Thai, including both European and American variants in French and Spanish. You can find all of these via the web version.
\nIn November, we undertook a campaign to reprint two of our books, Days of War, Nights of Love and the Contradictionary. The campaign was successful, but towards the end of it, a catastrophic fire destroyed our mail-order space, along with thousands of our books, posters, and stickers and other necessary equipment and supplies. Thankfully, we immediately received a tremendous outpouring of support, as people raised enough money for us to reprint everything and secure another space within a few days. We begin 2022 full of profound gratitude to everyone who has helped us to keep doing this.
\n\nFootage of the fire that destroyed our space.
\nFinally, although we released few new zine designs this year, we recommend our zine version of “The Anarchists versus the Plague,” our narrative recounting the efforts of Errico Malatesta and his fellow anarchists to organize a grassroots response to the cholera epidemic in Naples. History repeats itself—both the bad parts and the good parts.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/01/04/2.jpg\")
A demonstration outside a jail in Austin, Texas in solidarity with prisoners on New Year’s Eve, 2021.
\n2012: The Empire Has No Clothes
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/18/19.jpg\")
“Here, there are no authorities but yourself.” No Gods No Masters festival at Espaço Cultural Semente Negra.
\nLast week, a catastrophic fire destroyed our mail-order space along with thousands of books and posters and many other things. It was a stunning blow. But in response, people around the world immediately mobilized to support us, raising tens of thousands of dollars for us and flooding us with messages of encouragement. We will be able to resume our activities shortly—and we owe it all to you. Here, we present a full update on the situation.
\n\nFootage of the fire.
\nNo, none of us were injured in the fire, thank goodness. No, unfortunately, we did not have insurance of any kind, nor did the building owner. Yes, if you might ever be in a situation like ours, you should probably consider getting insurance. Yes, you’re absolutely right, it’s easier to afford insurance if you are a wealthy capitalist profiteer, not a scrappy band of volunteers who sell everything at break-even prices. No, the fire does not appear to have been an arson attack targeting us, though many online fascists have celebrated it as if it were. Yes, our spirit is unbroken—we remain as eager as ever. The most important elements in a project like ours are the determination of the participants and the goodwill of those we work with, and we are fortunate to have both of those in abundance.
\n\nAll we ask in all the world is to be able to continue our chosen task—and you have made this possible for us. This is the most profound gift we could receive. It is humbling to be presented with so much care and support from so many people we admire and aspire to build solidarity with. You have conferred a tremendous responsibility upon us, and we will do everything in our power to deserve your faith in us.
\n\nAs soon as we have succeeded in securing a new space, reprinting all the material we lost, and catching up on backlogged orders, we will look for new ways to resume fulfilling our mission to equip rebels in all walks of life with the information and ideas they need to thrive. We’ve been at this for over 25 years now, and we are ready to put in another quarter century. The struggle continues.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1472099583660593154\n\n\n
When the fire broke out, we were in the middle of raising the funds to reprint two of our older books—Days of War, Nights of Love, originally published in the year 2000, and the Contradictionary, published in 2013. Yesterday, we completed that fundraising process. To our surprise and gratitude, we raised more than twice what we had asked for in that campaign, as well, receiving preorders for roughly a thousand copies of each book.
\n\nAs soon as we get those books back from the factory, we will send them out. That process should not be significantly delayed by this mishap. The original run of pins that we made for backers is now a shapeless lump of melted metal in the burnt-out, cordoned-off husk of what was once our mail-order space, but we have already gotten the wheels in motion to mint another round of them and they should be ready in time. As we have said for decades now, always a problem—always a solution.
\n\nSome people have asked for other ways to help us besides financial assistance. Here are a few possibilities:
\n\nThis is just a minute fraction of the messages that we saw on only one out of many different platforms on which people reached out. If you see a message here that you posted and you would prefer we not display it in this context, we’ll gladly remove it.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/spencerhaugh/status/1472657860932870147\n\n\n
You can download the Catharsis album in question for free here, along with all the other music we have released over the years.
\n\nWe were also pleased to see contemporary underground musicians supporting us:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/DawnRayd/status/1472500794180124676\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/Antifa_Stripper/status/1472584668142735371\n\n\n
Yes, someone donated $10,000 to the fundraiser. Yes, that surprised us, too. No, we don’t know who it was.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/IGD_News/status/1471846098163621890\n\n\n
Our colleagues from It’s Going Down are currently in the midst of a fundraising effort of their own.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/23Meridian/status/1472366459317735425\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/blocbybloc/status/1472300539715141634\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/PUPr3ss/status/1472288490800893953\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/decolonialatlas/status/1472272914074710016\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/CynicalSyndie/status/1472260258508718089\n\n\n
This is correct. We call for the abolition of the police, the state justice industry, and the prison-industrial complex. A fire is certainly not going to change our political aspirations. And just like the alleged “crime wave” that conservatives of all stripes have been referencing as they seek to counter abolitionist gains, we note that this fire occurred under the prevailing police state, not as a consequence of defunding police or fire departments.
\n\nCops don’t keep us safe. We have to look out for each other.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Davey_TNT/status/1472054790951784450\n\n\n
A charming homage to our classic poster.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/myliquidlibrary/status/1472038846065950722\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/Gays_4_Galleani/status/1472035466840981504\n\n\n
“CrimethInc. LLC” seems to be a figment of someone’s imagination.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/muffinsurrecta/status/1472020140250345475\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/IanColdwater/status/1471855371266498561\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/AKLAnarchists/status/1471977880435392513\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/Jericho4PPs/status/1471937055978668036\n\n\n
The Jericho Movement—an organization for supporting political prisoners—calling on people to assist us is humbling indeed. Please, whatever you do with your resources, think first of those who are held captive by the state.
\n\nThe same goes for the support we received from various chapters of the Anarchist Black Cross:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/nycabc/status/1471866350935105542\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/la_abcf/status/1471870036956659720\n\n\n
And the same goes for the support crew for anarchist prisoner Eric King:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/SupportEricKing/status/1471870087153991686\n\n\n
…And the comrades who produce the Certain Days calendar:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/CertainDays/status/1471869905519665157\n\n\n
But it’s especially moving to receive direct support from a long-term earth liberation prisoner:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/thetinyraccoon/status/1471869623800844303\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/littleblackcart/status/1471925886622396416\n\n\n
We are deeply grateful to LBC for supporting us in memory of Aragorn!
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/asiaarttours/status/1471928228277374981\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/BlackFlagsLA/status/1471915235501957120\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/IntFedAnarchist/status/1471914395567628296\n\n\n
We were overjoyed to see messages from around the world in German, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Russian, Indonesian, even Turkish:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/barikatmedya/status/1471911729974202368\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/AKPressDistro/status/1471892987349065728\n\n\n
AK Press experienced a similar fire a few years ago. The comrades from AK Press reached out to us immediately with a profound gesture of support and care. We can’t thank them enough.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/PMPressOrg/status/1471906182365204480\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/EmmaAintDead/status/1471903587349499908\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/AnarchistAgency/status/1471878457416052736\n\n\n
We have been fortunate to work with the people from Anarchist Agency repeatedly over the years and are very grateful for their efforts, quite apart from their support for us in this instance.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/sarahgilbert/status/1471877490507333632\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/dcylf/status/1471875409264640001\n\n\n
It’s an honor for us to be supported by chapters of the Youth Liberation Front!
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/dreadpiratejene/status/1471862666578780169\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/RedoubtAFA/status/1471859944454758401\n\n\n
Really, we can only blush.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/butchanarchy/status/1471833400600195078\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/PallasRiot/status/1471833205569474574\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/Anarkism_info/status/1471779848708313096\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/Freedom_Paper/status/1471813425554726916\n\n\n
Freedom press, no less!
\n\nOnce more, thank you to everyone. See you on the streets.
\n\nPOŽAR NI POGASIL OGNJA UPORA—An interview about the fire and related subjects on the Slovenian anarchist radio program ČRNA LUKNJA
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2021/11/23/help-us-reprint-days-of-war-nights-of-love-and-the-contradictionary", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2021/11/23/help-us-reprint-days-of-war-nights-of-love-and-the-contradictionary", "title": "Help Us Reprint Days of War, Nights of Love and the Contradictionary", "summary": "We are reprinting our classic books, Days of War, Nights of Love and the Contradictionary. Please help us with our campaign to raise the funds!", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/11/23/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/11/23/header.jpg", "date_published": "2021-11-23T20:28:48Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:51Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "We are reprinting two of our classic books, Days of War, Nights of Love and the Contradictionary. If we can raise enough money to do long-lasting print runs of each, we will make them freely available in high-quality digital editions forever.
\n\nGo to the Kickstarter campaign.
\n\nWe’re doing a Kickstarter campaign to raise the funds we need. In return for your assistance, we’ve prepared special limited editions of the books for you. We’re especially excited about the brand-new Unicorn Edition of the Contradictionary. If you’ve missed one or both of these important works, this is your chance.
\n\nHere’s our pitch.
\nThe Trump era presented a non-stop series of crises; some things got lost in the shuffle as we navigated the climactic final months. Consequently, these two classic books have been out of print for over a year. We’ve spent most of 2021 regrouping and preparing our next round of ambitious projects. This is the last loose end we need to tie up.
\n\nWe’ve arranged Kickstarter levels for those who want to order the books wholesale in order to distribute them. At each quantity, the books are priced below what their wholesale prices will be upon release. This is the best time to order the books and help the campaign. We’ll also email PDFs to backers a month before the general release.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/11/23/6.jpg\")
A preview of the Contradictionary Unicorn Edition beside the original design. This mock-up doesn’t do justice to the holographic rainbow foil stamp, which is truly over the top.
\nIn addition to contributing money to the campaign, you can assist us by spreading the word on social media. Use the following share links to raise awareness of the project:
\n\nTwitter :: Instagram :: Facebook :: Mastodon :: Tumblr
\n\nThanks to the generous assistance of hundreds of people, we have met our funding goal! We are deeply grateful to all of you. This campaign will keeping running for three more weeks for everyone who wants to get copies of the books and the other rewards.
\n\nTo express our appreciation for all your support, if we reach our stretch goal of $20,000, we will add another element to this project: a sticker in homage to our friend David Graeber, who passed away far too soon last year. David said, “The principle of direct action is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.”
\n\nEveryone who has pledged $10 or more will receive one sticker printed on holographic vinyl, which gives the stickers an otherworldly rainbow sheen. For every book in your order, you’ll also receive 5 stickers printed on recycled paper (in order to make it difficult to remove them once applied).
\n\nUnfortunately, the printers have told us that due to production issues at the plant, they have pushed back the estimated arrival of the books to March or even April. Rest assured that the job is already submitted for printing and we’ve secured our place in the queue.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/11/23/10.jpg\")
On the left, the paper version, for public deployment; on the right, a mock-up of the holographic vinyl version, which does not do justice to it.
\nDays of War, Nights of Love presents a passionate appeal for a politics of liberation that approaches life as a joyous adventure. It was the first book we published—it has been more than twenty-one years now since we got the first printing back from the factory. A classic foundational document of 21st-century anarchism, it has introduced several generations to radical ideas and possibilities. More details here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/11/23/9.jpg\")
Days of War, Nights of Love Hardcover Edition.
\nThe Hardcover Edition of Days of War, Nights of Love is the best version of the book that we’ve ever made, featuring Smyth sewn binding between heavy boards complete with sewn-in black ribbon bookmark. These are limited to 1000 copies, reserved for special occasions like this. Detailed photos here.
\n\nDays of War is clearly the work of enthusiastic young people—but there are some truths that starry-eyed young people can perceive and articulate more clearly than anyone else, truths that all of us would do well to keep close to heart throughout our lives.
\n\n\n\n\nWhatever medical science may profess, there is a difference between life and survival. There is more to being alive than just having a heartbeat and brain activity. Being alive, really alive, is something much subtler and more magnificent. Their instruments measure blood pressure and temperature, but overlook joy, passion, love, all the things that make life really matter. To make our lives matter again, to really get the most out of them, we have to redefine life itself. We have to dispense with their merely clinical definitions, in favor of ones which have to do with what we actually feel.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/11/23/7.jpg\")
From within Days of War.
\nWe published the Contradictionary in 2013: a glossary of revolution exploring the war in every word. In the tradition of The Devil’s Dictionary and other works of alphabetized audacity, the Contradictionary assembles a wide range of wit and whimsy. It is no mere miscellany, but a lighthearted work of serious literature, concentrating a wealth of ideas and history into aphorisms and anecdotes. More details here.
\n\nWe’ve designed the Unicorn Edition of the Contradictionary exclusively for those who help us with this reprint. Like a photonegative of the original edition, it features a white faux leather cover. The title is stamped in holographic rainbow foil. Like the Days of War hardcover edition, it is the best version of this book that we have ever prepared, and it’s only available through this fundraiser.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/11/23/8.jpg\")
From within the Contradictionary.
\n\n\n\nWhence do Stockholm Syndrome and Broken Window Theory derive their names? What is the common root of aristocracy and democracy? Who gets diagnosed with Anarchia and Drapetomania? How did voting kill Edgar Allen Poe, and why is a crater on the dark side of the moon named for the man who blew up the Tsar? Alternately scathing and sublime, the Contradictionary pulls back the curtain from the war within every word, revealing the conflict behind the façade of the commonplace.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/11/23/11.jpg\")
Supporters will also receive an enamel pin presenting our classic bulb & bones logo.
\nWe’re making enamel pins featuring our classic bulb & bones logo to express our appreciation for your help. Again, these will not be available in our online store or via any other venue. They are exclusively for those who help us to get these books back in print.
\n\nIf you can’t contribute to this particular fundraising drive, please consider signing up to become a monthly supporter. This fund helps us to cover our day-to-day operating costs—to keep all our stickers and posters in print, pay for storage space and mail-order supplies, and the like. With a bit more help, we’ll be able to publish some new print projects. We don’t receive any outside funding; your assistance determines everything that we can do.
\n\nWe rarely ask for donations. We know how to do a great deal with very little and we never keep any profit for ourselves. But some costs, like book printing, are inescapable.
\n\nWe are CrimethInc.—an international network of aspiring revolutionaries. For twenty-five years, we’ve published a wide range of material by and for people fighting for a better world—all copyright free, composed collectively and anonymously, produced and distributed by volunteers. Thank you for helping us to continue this work.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2021/05/19/we-are-now-the-story-of-an-armed-no-cop-zone-in-atlanta-a-documentary-film", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2021/05/19/we-are-now-the-story-of-an-armed-no-cop-zone-in-atlanta-a-documentary-film", "title": "We Are Now: The Story of an Armed No-Cop Zone in Atlanta : A Documentary Film", "summary": "A film about time and memory at the armed occupation of the parking lot where Atlanta cops killed Rayshard Brooks during the George Floyd revolt.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/19/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/19/header.jpg", "date_published": "2021-05-19T21:12:20Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:49Z", "tags": [ "police", "Atlanta", "Black Lives Matter", "rayshard brooks", "documentary", "police murders" ], "content_html": "On the night of June 12, 2020, Atlanta police officers murdered Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old Black man, at a Wendy’s in south Atlanta, Georgia. This took place immediately following the high point of the countrywide uprising in which people responded to the murders of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, and countless other Black people around the United States. In response, a new wave of protest and revolt broke out across Atlanta, in which the Wendy’s burned to the ground. Armed Black demonstrators occupied the site of the Wendy’s, mourning for Rayshard Brooks and seeking to create spaces of Black empowerment.
\n\nAhead of the anniversary of the George Floyd uprising, we present We Are Now, a film centering the voices of participants in the occupation of the Wendy’s. We hope that this will help to pass on the memories of some of the forms of courageous resistance to white supremacy and policing that took place in 2020, along with the lessons that people derived from their experiences. None of the struggles depicted in this documentary are concluded. Let’s learn from the past and prepare for the next chapter.
\n\nContent warning: this film shows lethal police violence and resistance to it.
\n\nWe Are Now: The Story of an Armed No-Cop Zone in Atlanta.
\nTo show solidarity to those still fighting in Atlanta today, you can support the following projects:
\n\nHere is a version of the film without subtitles. We invite translators to prepare the subtitles in other languages; contact us for the SRT file.
\n\nA version of the film without subtitles.
\nWe didn’t know the Wendy’s occupation was still happening. It was a few hundred miles away and it felt like every stretch of highway we had previously ignored suddenly led to something strange and promising—a mystery of not whether, but how people’s misery would be expressed. The map was bigger now. Every town wanted to represent and there was a shit ton of news coming at us. On all devices. At all hours. From all kinds of people you kind of think you remember from that band that played that party… A whirlwind of memory and doubt about the veracity of any information. Objectivity defenestrated.
\n\nNevertheless, some things were real. Rayshard Brooks was a Black father of four, shot dead in Atlanta by two police officers—by every police officer—on June 12. It was caught on camera and word spread fast. On June 13, demonstrators—mournful, angry, and hyped—burned down the Wendy’s. On June 14, people began occupying the Wendy’s as a “cop-free zone.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/19/1.jpg\")
\nWe didn’t know any of this. We were in Atlanta for a rave and figured the Wendy’s was over or heavily co-opted. We didn’t know shit. We had heard about a protest plaza in DC, the CHOP in Seattle, a tent city in Philadelphia, a Confederate monument transformed into an open-air revolutionary social center in Richmond, but we didn’t know if any of these were ongoing on any given day.
\n\nTo know for sure, you had to go.
\nAnd we had to know.
Into Atlanta a few hours before the party.
\nShould we go check it out?
\nThat’s it. It’s still happening.
\nThe signs look weird with their lights out.
\nCan we get closer?
\nOther people are going in.
\nOk let’s try but if they tell us to fuck off…
“Welcome to the Wendy’s of not Georgia. Some ID please. Hold on a second.” Not like a cop… more like that time I went to a Caracol in Chiapas and had to surrender my passport to enter. Guns too. I can’t wait for a world without guns or identification. There’s already no cops here, and you can just sense that they aren’t coming anytime soon. He looks so tired. It’s been more than a second… more than a minute. Finally, “Ok, just don’t park over there.” He gestures to the flowerful corner where Rayshard Brooks was killed.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/19/3.jpg\")
\nWe gather in the back with the multi-racial, but mostly white, crew of multi-tendency—but mostly anarchist—carpenters while the multi-racial, but mostly black, security team watches the entrance in multi-quality, but mostly cool, cars with good speakers and bass music. A man walks over. “I just want to thank y’all for what you’re doing.” Oh shit, that is a lot of weed. And it’s gushy. The carpenters exchange straight-edge inside glances, and people have COVID-19 nerves, too, but I see the love in that man’s eyes and I will smoke his weed. It is one thing to be permitted—it is another to be welcomed.
\n\nWe need a guide. We find a guide. Old friend guide. This old feeling. No one’s in control. Cars come in fast and their tires sing screeching hysteria to us. They’re gone. We’re gone too. Winding around the city. “Don’t stand there, that’s where people get shot.” A few weeks later someone is shot there. We find the rave. Bass. It’s happening. I’m in love with everyone. Or free. I’m keeping the faith. With everyone. Or both because same. Same and both.
\n\nSame?
\nYes.
\nMore?
\nYES! MORE!
“Dude, we’ve only ever hung out in official states of emergency. This is like number four.”
\n\n“MORE!”
\n\n“You’re out!”
\n\n“You’re back!?”
\n\nThe sun is rising. Everyone is arms all over each other. There’s a kitten when we get to our car. It’s time to find darkness.
\n\nWe release this film in memory of everyone who has lost their lives to state violence—across the United States, but also worldwide, from Colombia to Myanmar and Palestine—in hopes that together, we might one day bring about the end of every institution that treats human beings as disposable.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/19/2.jpg\")
\nWe’ve reprinted To Change Everything, our anarchist outreach project. As the dust settles from the Trump era—following a year when the President of the United States singled out “anarchists” as one of his chief targets—and a new phase of corporate capitalism gets underway, this is an important time to reach out to others to articulate a critique of authoritarian power and popularize approaches to social change based in horizontality and autonomy.
\n\nOrder copies here for the price of postage alone.
\n\nTo Change Everything is a full-color 48-page booklet. In fresh, accessible language, it explores the virtues of self-determination, illuminates why authoritarian power structures cannot resolve the crises they produce, and discusses how to weave our personal revolts together into a collective struggle for liberation. Submedia.tv produced a condensed video version as well.
\n\nWe published To Change Everything in 2015, with tours and release events on several continents. By 2018, we had distributed all 150,000 copies of the English-language printing.
\n\nIn collaboration with Firestorm Books and a few other collectives, we’ve reprinted 25,000 copies to distribute in 2021. One exasperated Firestorm volunteer said:
\n\n\n\n\nWe’ve been bugging CrimethInc. to do a reprint for years! Members of our collective give them away from our space, in the streets, and by mail. To Change Everything is an emotive presentation of the anarchist critique with a price tag you can’t beat (free!). It’s the delicious propaganda you can count on to wash away the taste of a million Marxist-Leninist newspapers you never wanted.”
\n
\nTo Change Everything is available in 31 languages, from Arabic to Thai, including both European and American variants in French and Spanish. You can find all of these via the web version.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/10/2.jpg\")
\nThis has been a rough year for everyone, including us. At the nadir, Donald Trump was tweeting that anarchists were responsible for all the rioting around the country, the New York Times was alleging that the violence was our fault personally, and social media corporations were cutting our lines of communication with the public. In the old days, if all those things happened to you in a row, the next thing to expect would be a police raid. This year, though, all that is just par for the course—most people have had an even rougher time, with tens of thousands of political arrests and hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 deaths in the United States alone. Despite all these challenges, in many ways, we had one of our most productive years. In the following report, we review the events of 2020 and the highlights of our publishing efforts.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/02/05/1.jpg\")
This poster that we published before the pandemic reached the United States captures the spirit of 2020, from COVID-19 and forest fires to the George Floyd Uprising.
\nOne of our achievements in 2020 was expanding our website to be fully multi-lingual: we got the infrastructure of the site functioning in French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, and we added new material in a grand total of 28 different languages. While the COVID-19 pandemic gave governments an excuse to clamp down national borders and foment new gulfs between populations, we’ve made another important step towards cultivating international connections and consciousness in the anarchist movement.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/13/header.jpg\")
\nThe pandemic created a captive audience of several billion people, all depending on the internet for information; we saw massive spike in traffic to our website. On the other hand, busy responding to constant emergencies, we didn’t complete any new print projects in English besides an array of new zines. Our German-speaking comrades upstaged us, producing a new book collecting German versions of CrimethInc. texts from the past eight years.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/03/7.jpg\")
A new collection of our work in German.
\nIt has been a difficult time for creative experimentation, with unceasing crises making it difficult to do anything other than continuously react. Nonetheless, we managed to publish a few artistic projects—notably a multi-continental art project celebrating the poetry of Kenneth Rexroth and our exploration of Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism, originally solicited for the second issue of Antipolitika, the premier Balkan anarchist journal, in a theme issue engaging with the legacy of Yugoslavia.
\n\nFor the same reason, it has been a bad year for reflective theoretical projects, though we did publish “What Would an Anarchist Program Look Like?”, an exercise intended to provoke people into formulating their own proposals for what anarchist revolution will involve.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/22/7.jpg\")
A scene from our art project celebrating the poetry of Kenneth Rexroth.
\nThe aforementioned spike in web traffic enabled us to reach more people, as the tactics and analyses we have been developing for a quarter of a century suddenly became relevant to countless thousands who found themselves caught between an uprising and a police state. But not being able to travel, speak publicly, or sell books through book stores also made us more dependent on corporate channels to communicate. Midway through 2020, the empire struck back, with Facebook banning us from their platform along with dozens of other anarchist writers and news sites on the pretext that they were banning pages that “support violence.” Though they spun this as a measure to crack down on militia organizing, in fact, militias were permitted to continue organizing on Facebook: the militia mobilization in which Kyle Rittenhouse murdered two people and shot a third was organized via Facebook shortly after the ban went into effect. Far from cracking down on violence, in banning us and an array of other anarchist journalists, Facebook was simply bowing to right-wing pressure to suppress the voices of those who were documenting the rise of fascist violence.
\n\nIn response, thousands of public figures including David Graeber, Noam Chomsky, Cory Doctorow, and Chelsea Manning published an open letter protesting the banning of anarchist journalists from Facebook and rejecting the company’s false equivalence between right-wing groups that organize violent attacks and anti-fascist groups that report on them.
\n\nNext, the New York Times platformed a far-right conspiracy hack with no prior journalistic experience to allege that CrimethInc. was somehow responsible for orchestrating all the unrest around the country. It seems almost incomprehensible that reputable journalists would sully their credibility simply in order to bolster the narrative spread by their avowed adversary, Donald Trump. The only way we can understand this is by framing it in the context of ongoing centrist attempts to undermine the momentum of the George Floyd uprising by alleging it would return Trump to office and employing divisive narratives about outside agitators.
\n\nIt took until mid-December for Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, to follow Facebook’s example, closing our account without explanation or justification. Presumably, both platforms will slowly, steadily suppress anarchists and other principled voices from here forward. This makes it especially pressing to establish other means of communicating. To that end, we’ve established a Telegram channel, a Mastodon account, and notifications via Signalboost.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/19/banned-on-facebook.jpg\")
\nEverything we contributed in 2020—from composing eyewitness reports and analysis to programming this site and mailing out books—we accomplished by means of 100% volunteer labor, working collectively and anonymously the way we have since the mid-1990s. We seek neither financial gain nor fame nor personal credit for what we do. We are driven solely by our desire for collective liberation and the joy we take in collaborating on creative projects together.
\n\nAs always—if you like what we do, the best thing you can do is do it yourself. Take action in your own community, develop and refine your own analyses and strategies, reach out to others and fight for social change. You can also contribute to our efforts in a variety of ways, or, failing that, donate to us to help us print new outreach materials. Please contact us if you can help in some other way!
\n\nWe lost a lot of talented and hardworking comrades this year. It will be challenging to fill their shoes.
\n\nIn February, anarchist author, publisher, and gadfly Aragorn! passed away. We published a transcription of an interview conducted in summer 2018 in which Aragorn! describes the development of counterculture and anarchism across four decades—from his youth in the hardcore scene during the Reagan years to gang conflicts with Nazi skinheads, the first Gulf War, the emergence of the Internet, and all the different publishing and infrastructure projects he participated in.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/02/19/10.jpg\")
Aragorn!
\nIn September, our friend David Graeber also passed away. David was a tireless and wide-ranging anarchist thinker. Like Aragorn!, we all assumed he still had decades of important work ahead of him when he was suddenly taken from us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/09/03/5.jpg\")
David Graeber.
\nLongtime anarchist Stuart Christie, the Anarchist Black Cross organizer who carried the torch of anarchism through the bleak mid-20th century until its resurgence in the 1980s. We recommend his writing as well as the anarchist film archive he curated.
\n\nWe also lost Diane di Prima, one of the most important beat poets and an anarchist proponent of revolution across two centuries, and Lucio Urtubia Jiménez, the anarchist illegalist whose inspiring political counterfeiting efforts are chronicled in the documentary Lucio.
\n\nWe mourn the death of Michael Forest Reinoehl, the anti-fascist who was extrajudicially murdered by police and US marshals at the urging of Donald Trump for the crime of defending himself from a fascist attack.
\n\nBrian McCarville, an anarchist imprisoned in Oregon, passed away on his 68th birthday, September 27. He had participated in struggles against the prison system since the turn of the century. Fierce anti-prison organizers Karen Smith and Rebecca L. Hensley passed away in December, followed by Lois Martin, an octogenarian volunteer with No More Deaths and a veteran of six decades of activism.
\n\nWhile we were completing this text, we learned of the passing of anarchist historian Alexandre Skirda. He was known best for his biography of Nestor Makhno, Anarchy’s Cossack, which remains the definitive work on the life of the Ukrainian revolutionary.
\n\nFinally, we grieve the passing of all those who have been killed by police, imprisonment, and COVID-19—all the squandered potential of our age.
\n\nIt’s easy to forget that 2020 began the same way it is ending, with saber-rattling from Trump threatening a war with Iran. In Chile and Lebanon, the uprisings that had exploded in late 2019 were still simmering. In the United States, things seemed relatively quiet.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/30/against-all-wars-farsi_front_black_and_white.jpg\")
Working with comrades around the world, we made versions of this poster reading “Against all wars—against all governments—against all oppression” in Farsi, Arabic, Indonesian, Spanish, Portuguese, and English.
\nThe COVID-19 pandemic is the first of a series of biological and ecological crises that late capitalism will face. We foreshadowed how a health system based around control would fail to protect people in “The Operation Succeeded, but the Patient Died,” our analysis of how what Michel Foucault called “biopower” functions in both hospitals and prisons.
\n\nIn our introduction to “Against the Coronavirus and the Opportunism of the State,” a report from Italy when COVID-19 was spiking there ahead of the outbreak in the United States, we laid out the basic problem that the virus forced our society to confront:
\n\n\n\n\nFundamentally, the problem is that we lack a discourse about health that is not premised on centralized control. Across the political spectrum, every metaphor we have for safety and health is predicated on the exclusion of difference (for example, borders, segregation, isolation, protection) rather than the aim of developing a positive relationship with difference (for example, extending health-care resources to all, including those outside the borders of the US).
\n\nWe need a way of conceiving of well-being that understands bodily health, social ties, human dignity, and freedom as all being interconnected. We need a way of responding to crisis based in mutual aid—that doesn’t grant even more power and legitimacy to tyrants.
\n
Indeed, state strategies based in borders and segregation failed to keep the virus out of Europe and the United States. The chief forces that limited the impact of the pandemic and the ensuing economic turmoil here were mutual aid projects and voluntary decentralized measures such as wearing a mask and engaging in social distancing. Had access to proper medical care and enough resources to be able to take a year off from work been more evenly distributed, that would surely have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
\n\nThe economic imperatives that supposedly foster “productivity” have only been a threat to the general population and an obstacle to rational solutions. If most people were free to apply themselves to the tasks that they consider most meaningful rather than being forced to do whatever turns a profit for capitalists in order to avoid getting evicted from their homes, that would surely have resulted in more of the resources of our society being put towards solutions like finding and distributing a safe and effective vaccine, not fewer.
\n\n\n\n\nRather than placing blind faith in the state, we must focus on what we can do with our own agency, looking back to previous precedents for guidance. Let no one charge that anarchistic organizing is not “disciplined” or “coordinated” enough to address an issue like this. We have seen over and over that capitalist and state structures are at their most “disciplined” and “coordinated” precisely in the ways that they impose unnecessary crises on us—poverty, climate change, the prison-industrial complex. Anarchism, as we see it, is not a hypothetical blueprint for an alternate world, but the immediate necessity of acting outside and against the dictates of profit and authority in order to counteract their consequences. While the current models of “addressing the pandemic” that states are carrying out are based on top-down control that nevertheless fail to protect the most vulnerable, an anarchist approach would focus chiefly on shifting resources such as medical care toward all who require them, while empowering individuals and communities to be able to limit the amount of risk they choose to expose themselves to without tremendous negative consequences.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/03/18/5.jpg\")
\nOur follow-up text, “Surviving the Virus: An Anarchist Guide,” was likely our most widely-read article of 2020, reaching hundreds of thousands of people in sixteen different languages. Expanding on it, we offered an analysis of the perils of expanding state power in the COVID-19 era, sketching out three contending programs in the face of the crisis: the adherents of untrammeled capitalism (representing death), the proponents of technocracy (representing survival), and the partisans of freedom (that is, of life itself).
\n\nWe returned to some of these themes in “What’s Worth Dying for?”, exploring why so many people in the United States—including poor people—are in favor of sacrificing human beings on the altar of the economy.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/capitalism-is-a-death-cult/capitalism-is-a-death-cult_front_black_and_white.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the poster.
\nAs people grasped for points of intervention to respond to the emerging crises, we focused on housing resistance, publishing an interview with Station 40 in San Francisco, the housing collective that was one of the first groups to publicly declare a rent strike, followed by outreach material and a history of rent strikes worldwide. We also published a narrative from a delivery driver in Manhattan describing the ways that risk is distributed according to class. Finally, we collected an array of stickers and graffiti capturing anarchists’ initial reactions to the pandemic all around the world.
\n\nIn our most ambitious historical effort of the year, “The Anarchists versus the Plague,” we chronicled the efforts of Malatesta and his comrades to respond to the cholera epidemic of 1884, translating a wealth of previously unavailable texts from French and Italian to distill lessons for twenty-first-century anarchists facing today’s pandemic.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/25/16.jpg\")
“A court for king cholera.” In 1884 as today, poverty and oppression were the chief comorbidities afflicting the population alongside the plague.
\nAt the beginning of the uprising in Minneapolis, we recognized how powerful and far-reaching the ensuing movement would become. We chronicled scenes from the first three weeks in our “Snapshots from the Uprising.” Our report from the uprising itself, “The Siege of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis,” became our second most widely-read article of the year, thanks in part to Fox News and the like.
\n\nAs a general principle, we try to avoid counterproductive exposure—it’s better for our publishing to reach people who will use it to do good work in the world, and otherwise to remain unheralded. But sometimes it becomes impossible to avoid publicity.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/17/header-2.jpg\")
The uprising that began in Minneapolis extended the model offered by the 2014 uprising in Ferguson to the entire United States.
\nAs the movement expanded and explored new tactics, we published accounts from autonomous zones around the country and other experiments, notably an ambitious attempt to topple a statue of Christopher Columbus in Chicago.
\n\nWe also supported the movement with analytical texts, such as “What Will It Take to Stop the Police from Killing.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/16/4.jpg\")
Far from enabling Trump to win reelection, the uprising showed that Trump had not succeeded in securing control of the United States, discouraging his supporters among the capitalist class from throwing their weight behind his effort to seize power regardless of the outcome of the election.
\nWe covered solidarity actions in 54 countries supporting the uprising in the United States. We also published reports from homegrown uprisings in Serbia, Belarus, Colombia, Iran, and elsewhere around the world.
\n\nOn the one-year anniversary of the Turkish invasion of Rojava, we published an extensive interview with anarchists in northeast Syria, comparing their experiences fighting the Islamic State and Turkey, exploring what has occurred in Syria since the invasion, and evaluating the effectiveness of anarchist interventions in Rojava.
\n\nWe’ve also been publishing a monthly news update from Greece, to support the anarchist movement there as it contends with successive waves of repression under the aptly-named “New Democracy” government.
\n\nAfter US military officials refused to deploy the armed forces inside the United States to suppress protests against police and white supremacy, Trump set out to identify which of the armed elements of the federal government were loyal enough to him to go to war against US citizens on his behalf. He sent federal troops from the Department of Homeland Security to Portland, Oregon in a test run to see if they would be able to control the population if he attempted to seize power after the election. Thousands responded, turning the city into a warzone for weeks. We published a call for solidarity with those on the streets of Portland that contributed to another wave of resistance around the country.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/16/3.jpg\")
Cognitive dissonance: in Portland, even those who still believe in electoral politics found themselves at the forefront of clashes with the police.
\nOver the following months, Joe Biden embraced Donald Trump’s talking points about anarchists and anti-fascists, agreeing that “arsonists and anarchists should be prosecuted.” We responded with “The Insidious Workings of The Political Ratchet”:
\n\n\n\n\nThe US two-party system functions like a ratchet, with the Republican Party steadily pulling public policy and permissible discourse to the right while Democrats, in seeking to acquire power by chasing the political center, serve as a mechanism that prevents policy and discourse from shifting back. As the Democrats follow the Republicans in steadily countenancing more and more authoritarianism, the work that Trump is doing to frame anarchists, anti-fascists, and other protesters as legitimate targets will also be useful to Biden’s party.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/21/4.jpg\")
\nAs the election approached, we spelled out the dangers and the stakes in our articles “Preparing for Electoral Unrest and a Right-Wing Power Grab” and “Between Electoral Politics and Civil War.”
\n\nIn Chile, where the powerful street movements of 2019 had been suppressed by the pandemic and then channeled towards reformism, our correspondents reported on the role of electoral politics in containing and coopting struggles following the referendum in which voters demanded the replacement of the constitution left from the dictatorship era. In both countries, the elections functioned to reduce the horizon of imaginable social change. By October 2020, it was difficult to remember that over the summer, a Newsweek poll had found that fully 54% of those questioned believed the burning of the Minneapolis Police Precinct was justified after George Floyd’s killing at a time when Biden was polling around 46% and Trump at 38%. It takes a steady stream of centrist and far-right propaganda to maintain the impression that “ordinary people” want to keep things the way they are.
\n\nImmediately ahead of the US election, we organized “Everybody Out,” an awareness campaign rejecting both political parties and spreading access to the tactics demonstrators had developed during the clashes in Portland and elsewhere over the summer, in case they became necessary in the event of Trump attempting to seize power or Biden attempting to preserve Trump’s policies.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/27/3.jpg\")
\nIn the end, Biden won the election. But Trump has made it very clear that if he could have seized power by brute force, he would have done so—and the rebels who made parts of many cities around the country ungovernable in May and June were among the chief factors discouraging a massive part of the capitalist class from supporting him in this endeavor. Without our grassroots resistance, his scheme could have succeeded.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1325120376867872768\n\n\n
Elections may shift who holds power within the state, but they don’t bring about immediate changes on the level of society. Aided and abetted by prosecutors and police, fascists continue to mobilize, and the dismay Trump’s loss has spread among his supporters will likely facilitate their recruiting efforts. From Washington, DC to the Pacific Northwest,
\n\n\n\n\nBiden’s electoral victory has done nothing to curtail the escalating violence of the far right. It has only emboldened them, while at the same time giving liberals an excuse to leave the most vulnerable sectors of the population to face their violence alone.
\n
Back in power, neoliberal democrats are approaching 2021 will the intention of preserving business as usual at all costs. The coming year will see the trials and tribulations of 2020 continue on a terrain that has only changed superficially: the same cutthroat capitalism, the same pandemic, the same racist police, the same authoritarian measures to exert control—and hopefully, the same courageous rebellion and resistance.
\n\nWe can conclude 2020 proud of our accomplishments, cherishing the starkly beautiful moments when people defied a world of dangers to offer a glimpse of all our lives could be.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/NYCAntifa/status/1266214274722082818\n\n\n
One of our other projects this past year was to release a series of do-it-yourself guides to protest skills and equipment. These include protecting yourself from doxxing and police batons, and everything you need to know to pick out the best helmets, body armor, and goggles and gas masks for your needs.
\n\nWe published two guides chiefly for street medics, about how to treat common injuries from police weapons and gunshot wounds.
\n\nFinally, we collected an array of tactics employed during the struggle against police and federal troops in Portland, including such innovations as employing leaf blowers to repel tear gas.
\n\nIn 2021, we’ll follow up with more guides. For good or for ill, none of the struggles we participated in this past year are concluded.
\n\nIf you also survived 2020, congratulations, and we’ll see you in the streets. Thank you for doing whatever you had to do to make it here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/21/10.png\")
\nWorking with the German publisher Unrast, our friends from Black Mosquito have published a collection of our writing from 2012-2020 in German, entitled Writings on the Wall. Together, these texts offer a view from the front lines of struggles from Minneapolis to Kurdistan, exploring some of the most urgent subjects of debate in contemporary social movements—violence, vengeance, consent and consensus, how to persevere in the face of seemingly impossible odds, what revolution could mean in the 21st century. In the introduction, presented below in English, we describe the times and conditions we were writing in and what our experiences might offer the struggles of the future.
\n\nThe German version of this page will be updated on an ongoing basis with information about presentations, reviews, and readings of the book. The contents of the book are listed after the introduction.
\n\n\nNo government possesses inherent authority. No contract, procedure, or tradition has any legitimate claim on us beyond what we agree to voluntarily. No law should override our consciences. Rather than offering some version of the Nuremberg defense to excuse our decisions—be it religious, political, economic, or legal—we must take personal responsibility for the impact that our actions have on the world.
\n\nHistory is not an inexorable process that plays out according to iron laws. It is the chaotic conjuncture of innumerable forces including our own agency. “Theory” has no value except as a set of hypotheses we continuously test and refine in the course of our efforts to intercede in events. Revolutionary analysis must not be not the domain of a priest class that cites Marx the way earlier ideologues cited the Bible. It can only belong to those who learn about the world in the process of attempting to change it.
\n\nWhen we act, we act without guarantees. We cannot be certain of the result in advance; the end of this story has yet to be written. We risk everything because we know that death is inescapable, but to live—to achieve the full unfolding of our collective potential in spite of a social order that isolates and stunts us—to live is the rarest thing of all.
\n\nThis is what we mean when we say that we are anarchists.
\n\nWe believe that it is most ennobling to engage with other people as equals rather than as authorities to obey or subjects to rule. Let there be no one above us—and no one below. We believe that everyone stands to gain from the abolition of hierarchies, even those who ostensibly benefit from them, for in alienating us from each other and from what is most beautiful in ourselves, they drain our lives of meaning. For us, anarchism is not the blueprint of a possible future world, but the necessity of immediately taking sides in the conflicts that are taking place today—with the aim of disabling the mechanisms that impose disparities and seeking to foster self-determination and solidarity wherever they can take root.
\n\nIn our experience, ungovernable grassroots movements that rely on direct action are far more efficient and effective than legalistic top-down campaigns that set out to win reforms. If we limit ourselves to petitioning our rulers for change, there will always be rival petitioners who can bribe them more effectively than we can. It is only when we show that we are capable of bringing about the changes we want directly that politicians come running after us offering to grant the concessions they fear we will take by force. Of course, if we can make the changes we wish to see ourselves, we don’t need rulers in the first place.
\n\nWe saw this confirmed yet again shortly before this book went to press when rebels burned down the Third Precinct of the Minneapolis police in response to the murder of George Floyd. Until people saw rioters defeat the police by main force, it was unthinkable that mainstream political discourse in the United States could ever entertain the proposal to abolish police. Afterwards, police abolition became a widespread discussion topic, forcing liberals to try to undermine the movement against police by watering it down from within.
\n\nOur greatest obstacle is that we don’t know our own strength.
\n\nThis book brings together a selection of our work from 2012 to 2020.
\n\nOur collective has been publishing since the early 1990s. A quarter of a century ago, when we embarked on this project, anarchism manifested itself chiefly as a refusal of paradise. Neoliberal capitalism and state democracy appeared to have triumphed in what Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history,” but we—willfully damned souls—rejected the utopia they offered us as a mirage. “Better self-determination in hell than service in heaven,” we declared, like Milton’s Satan, refusing to sell ourselves on the market and eking out a precarious existence in the margins.
\n\nFukuyama and his cronies thought they were finished with history, but history was not finished with them. As we warned, a global system driven by the imperative to turn a profit can only progressively impoverish the vast majority of humanity while concentrating power in the hands of the most rapacious. Today, the disastrous effects of neoliberal capitalism are plain for all to see, and more and more people are taking up the tactics we spent decades refining.
\n\nIn the interceding years, we have developed networks spanning five continents and dozens of languages. Together, we try to think through the strategic questions confronting us, comparing our experiences in different struggles and contexts in order to formulate new proposals to employ in social movements. Like the global anarchist movement as a whole, we have no party line, only the intellectual biodiversity of debate and the shared determination to create a world in which no human being may rule another.
\n\nThe last global wave of revolt arrived hot on the heels of the last recession. It opened with the Greek insurrection of December 2008, a precursor of the so-called “Arab Spring” and the various Occupy movements. Arguably, it concluded in 2014 with nationalists hijacking the uprisings in Brazil and Ukraine and with the militarization and ultimate defeat of the revolutionary movement in western Syria. In our book From Democracy to Freedom, we explored some of the limits that these movements reached as a result of focusing on trying to legitimize new institutions of governance rather than seeing the revolt through to its logical conclusion.
\n\nFor six years, we have reaped the bitter harvest of this defeat in the form of a global wave of reaction. Just as the eclipse of the “anti-globalization” movement at the turn of the century enabled nationalists like Donald Trump to come to power by falsely presenting themselves as adversaries of neoliberalism, the eventual failure of the Gezi Park resistance enabled Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to establish autocracy in Turkey and invade Rojava—and similar tragedies have played out all around the world. This wave of reaction has taken many forms, from the consolidation of one-party dictatorships in Russia and China to nationalist electoral victories in the United States and Brazil and a resurgence of authoritarian politics among leftists.
\n\nYet every order that does not encompass the whole inevitably gives rise to its own opposition. Years of bare-knuckled capitalism have fostered a bitterness that has yet to find a political outlet. While a minority of people have gravitated to outright fascism, greater numbers have lost faith in electoral politics altogether without finding an alternative to invest themselves in. It’s up to us to supply a model for what they can do with their rage.
\n\nA new phase of unrest began at the end of 2018 with the emergence of the Gilets Jaunes in France. At first, this movement was hardly promising, pitting “apolitical” consumer protesters including far-right elements against a neoliberal centrist government that was trying to offload the cost of its “ecological” policies onto the working class. But over the next several weeks, anarchists and other rebels used vandalism to carve out a space where an anti-capitalist current could take hold. In the course of the following year, revolts broke out in Hong Kong, Sudan, Haiti, Ecuador, Chile, Honduras, Lebanon, Iraq, Catalunya, and elsewhere. Almost all of these were sparked by cost-of-living increases (a fuel tax in France and Ecuador, a tax on WhatsApp in Lebanon, a spike in subway fare in Chile), confirming that the economic recovery from the recession of 2008 had done little to benefit ordinary people. On a deeper level, the revolts were driven by questions about the legitimacy of authority, even if these questions assumed distorted forms such as demands for independent national sovereignty.
\n\nJust as the 2008 uprising in Greece foreshadowed the revolutions that began in Tunisia two years later, we guessed that the unrest from Hong Kong to Chile presaged another global wave of revolt. Yet in the United States, the year 2020 opened upon a political wasteland. Anarchists were exhausted from three years of scrambling to respond to atrocities, and many of those who had joined us in the streets at the beginning of Trump’s presidency had returned to seeking change via state channels—the centrists pursuing a doomed strategy of partnering with the FBI to impeach Trump, the socialists reprising their equally naïve campaign to elect Bernie Sanders president.
\n\nBy the time the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world, all of these efforts had failed. Trump exacerbated the situation, seizing the opportunity to transfer billions of dollars to the richest stratum of society in the midst of the worst economic recession in living memory. Millions of people in the US, alongside billions worldwide, spent mid-March to late May in isolation contemplating their own mortality and seething at their rulers’ cruelty. It had never been clearer that the institutions of power are fundamentally destructive to the lives of ordinary people.
\n\nWhen video circulated depicting the senseless murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, those who suffer most from racism and poverty recognized that it was now or never. Heroically, all around the US, they staked their lives in an all-out attack on their oppressors—and millions of stir-crazy people of all classes and backgrounds joined them in marching through cities, attacking police, burning police cars, blocking freeways, and looting shopping districts. In the midst of the pandemic, even white middle-class liberals felt the tragedy of George Floyd’s death viscerally. In impacting people from all walks of life, the virus had suspended some of the mechanisms that ordinarily prevent the privileged from identifying with the most marginalized.
\n\nTrump and other politicians have expressed shock at the riots that followed George Floyd’s murder, alleging that anarchists must have coordinated them. In fact, the ruling class did more to provoke the riots than we ever could. It was the policies of the state itself that spread the collective intelligence that guided the revolt—marking police, banks, and corporations as legitimate targets and making it easy for just about anyone to understand why it made sense to attack them. Trump’s explicit support for white supremacists, his xenophobic border policies, his efforts to abolish healthcare access, his decisions to accelerate global warming, and his refusal to provide any sort of support for those threatened by unemployment and COVID-19 showed everyone that we are all facing a life-or-death struggle, not just those who are regularly murdered by police.
\n\nPerhaps the darkest hour does herald the dawn, after all.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/03/6.jpg\")
\nAs this book goes to press, in the United States, we are hoping that we are already past the apex of the global wave of reaction that brought Trump to power. But the struggles of the future will continue to be three-sided, pitting autonomous social movements against both neoliberal centrists who seek to reestablish the “impartial rule of law” and far-right nationalists who aim to ride out the declining phase of capitalism by redefining whose interests the state exists to serve. Both sides are advancing proposals about how to preserve capitalism and the state; they only differ over how violence and suffering should be distributed. Yet we must not make the mistake of strategizing as if we are in a binary conflict. Each of these adversaries would benefit from our concentrating only on eliminating the other one, enabling them to concentrate on eliminating us. We have to fight in ways that reveal what centrists and nationalists have in common and that show what distinguishes our proposals for the future.
\n\nThe pursuit of autonomy has been central to many of the struggles of the past two years, albeit in the distorted form of a demand for independent national sovereignty. Kashmir seeks independence from India; Hong Kong seeks autonomy from China; Catalunya seeks autonomy from Spain; Rojava seeks autonomy from Syria, and the whole world—Turkey, Syria, the United States, Russia, and the United Nations—conspires to crush it. National independence—which reproduces the internal hierarchies of the imperialist nations on a smaller scale—is not the solution to these conflicts. Conflict between nations is the domain of the state, whether or not the nations in question have received formal recognition from the United Nations. Autonomy is not a matter of separating from others, but of establishing horizontal relations of mutual aid and collective defense that are strong and wide-reaching enough to deter attacks.
\n\nLikewise, as the conflicts of our age intensify, it will be tempting to resort to militarizing our movements, but this represents a dead end for the same reason that the pursuit of national independence is a dead end. In the short term, leadership in military conflicts goes to whoever can access the most arms, as we saw in the Syrian revolution; in the long term, the outcome of such conflicts is determined by whichever party has the biggest air force, as we saw in the subsequent Syrian civil war. “The force of insurrection is social, not military,” as the Italian insurrectionists wrote. Our goal should not be to compete with the state on its own territory, the field of military conquest, but to identify all the needs and desires that the state cannot fulfill—a tremendous number, today, when governments can do so little to mitigate the impact of capitalism—and take those as the point of departure for contagious grassroots uprisings that can render us all impossible to govern.
\n\nIf we want revolution rather than war, we have to organize on both sides of every border. This goes for every other form of identity alongside national citizenship. We must seek to spread resistance to domination across all boundaries—national, ethnic, religious—transcending all forms of constructed identity. The only thing that could secure the freedom of Kurdish people in Rojava would be a revolution in Turkey; the only thing that could secure the freedom of people in Hong Kong would be a revolution in China; the only thing that could secure the freedom of people in Syria and for that matter the Baltic states would be a revolution in Russia; the only thing that could secure the freedom of people in Mexico and Honduras and likely Chile as well would be a revolution in the United States, just as the only thing that could secure the safety of Black people in any of those countries would be the abolition of all the different forms of policing that maintain the privileges known as “whiteness.” We have to intensify our efforts to build connections across all of these gulfs alongside our efforts to build the capacity for collective self-defense, understanding these two projects as one and the same.
\n\nThe state excels at concentrating, subsuming, subordinating, and dividing. To stand a chance against it, we must act like a hydra—dispersing, reproducing, connecting, and proliferating.
\n\nThis book is comprised of our reflections on the struggles we have participated in over the past decade—our efforts to learn from our successes and failures, to identify the real problem at the root of each situation, to make the most of our tremendous potential on our own terms. May it serve you in your own efforts to do the same.
\n\nAs some of us wrote at the turn of the century, when the world was young, the best reason to be a revolutionary is that it is simply a better way to live.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/03/5.jpg\")
\nThe backstories of the various contents of the book follow, by section.
\n\nWe published To Change Everything at the beginning of 2015 in collaboration with collectives on five continents. The idea was to offer an accessible introduction to anarchist ideas.
\n\nAltogether, approximately 250,000 print copies of To Change Everything circulated in over 30 languages. We helped the publishers in Brazil, Argentina, Romania, and Slovenia to fund their print versions. Versions in Arabic and Farsi were distributed along the Balkan route during the so-called “migrant crisis” of 2015; we also arranged for prisoner support groups to send thousands of copies to prisoners in the US. To our knowledge, it seems to be the only anarchist text printed in Maltese.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/03/3.jpg\")
\nThis selection of texts concentrates many of our conclusions about movement strategy and ethics, accumulated in the course of a period that saw the shape of protest in the United States change dramatically.
\n\nWe published “The Illegitimacy of Violence, the Violence of Legitimacy” in March 2012, during the waning phase of the Occupy movement, in response to liberals like Chris Hedges who attacked some participants for concealing their identities from surveillance and defending themselves from police attacks. Hedges’s rhetoric reappeared verbatim in the mouths of the authorities that May, when they made statements to the media explaining FBI efforts to entrap activists in Cleveland and Chicago. The years-long prison sentences those activists consequently served show just how useful Hedges was to US government efforts to repress the movement.
\n\nOn the one-year anniversary of the beginning of the Occupy movement, we forced Hedges to debate a member of our collective in front of a thousand people in New York City. We arranged to broadcast the debate simultaneously at live showings around the country. This demonstrated that the perspective that Hedges was trying to delegitimize was too powerful to silence. Just two years later, the uprising in Ferguson confirmed that we had been right to argue that to be effective, future movements would have to be confrontational and involve anonymity. This time, many people understood why protesters were wearing masks and fighting the police.
\n\n“Breaking with Consensus Reality” appeared a few weeks after “The Illegitimacy of Violence.” It was the first chapter of Terror Incognita, a reflection on the dynamics of insurrectionary desire—the forces that can make it contagious or prevent it from spreading.
\n\nIn late 2013, we published “After the Crest,” a series of articles reflecting on what anarchists can accomplish during the waning phase of social movements—beginning from the premise that, as movements tend to explode into being, they spend most of their time in decline. Only the introductory text is included here. The original series included case studies from the Occupy movement in Oakland, the student movement in Montréal, and the series of strikes, occupations, and riots that swept Barcelona between 2010 and 2012.
\n\nThe uprisings against police and white supremacy that burst onto the world stage with the revolt in Ferguson in August 2014 changed the atmosphere in the United States and the way that people thought about protest movements. We published “Why We Don’t Make Demands” in spring 2015, immediately after the uprising in Baltimore in response to the murder of Freddie Gray, arguably the high-water mark of anti-police uprisings until May 2020.
\n\n“There’s No Such Thing as Revolutionary Government” and “Against the Logic of the Guillotine” appeared in 2018 and 2019, in the midst of the reactionary Trump era, when some authoritarian leftists sought to imitate the success of far right at employing populism to acquire power.
\n\nThe first version of “We Fight Because We Like It” appeared in “Conflictual Wisdom: Revolutionary Introspection towards the Preservation of the Anarchist Individual & Community.” It was composed at a grim moment at the beginning of 2018, when the Trump era was just getting underway, many of our comrades were still facing the likelihood of decades in prison as a consequence of the demonstration on the day he took office, and it was not yet clear how bad things would get.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/03/1.jpg\")
\n“Music as a Weapon” represents our reflections on decades of experimentation in connecting the punk underground with the international anarchist movement. The first version of this text appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of our biannual journal Rolling Thunder. This slightly revised version appeared on our website in late 2018 when we finally grudgingly set about digitizing all the music released through the record label facet of CrimethInc. from the 1990s into the early years of the 21st century.
\n\n“The Climate is Changing” first appeared in December 2009 during the demonstrations outside the “COP-15” United Nations conference on climate change in Copenhagen. We included it in our book about capitalism, Work, which has also appeared in German. The version in this collection is a revised translation that has not been published before.
\n\n“Accounting for Ourselves” appeared in 2013. It represents another aspect of the same conversations about consent and accountability that produced “Breaking with Consensus Reality.”
\n\n“How to Stop the Police from Killing” appeared on the last day of May 2020, when the revolt in response to the murder of George Floyd was beginning to spread around the country. A zine version of the text was widely distributed at the various occupations and police-free zones of June 2020.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/03/4.jpg\")
\nWe published “From Germany to Bakur” in late 2015, at a tense point in the struggle in Rojava and Turkey against the Islamic State and the autocracy of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Tragically, in 2019, we were compelled to publish “Remembering Xelîl,” eulogizing one of the contributors to that earlier text who was killed in the process of that struggle.
\n\n“Surviving the Virus” and the follow-up text “And After the Virus?” appeared in March and April 2020, in response to the arrival of COVID-19 and the state-ordered quarantine. We feared that panic occasioned by the pandemic would drive people to embrace authoritarian politics, imagining strong top-down control to be the only way to avert to mass casualties. Instead, state governments from China to the United States botched their responses to the pandemic, while grassroots networks emerged around the world to organize mutual aid projects according to anarchist principles. To our surprise, “Surviving the Virus” reached hundreds of thousands of people in sixteen different languages. Apparently, people were hungry for an anarchist alternative.
\n\nFinally, “The Siege of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis” offers a participants’ analysis of the historic attack on the police precinct in May 2020. We published it in early June at the high point of the movement responding to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black people. It represents a necessary corrective to subsequent liberal mystifications of the movement that seek to conceal how multiethnic, decentralized, confrontational tactics were essential elements in its most important victories.
\n\nWe can fight the police and win. We can organize our own means of survival and face down the state. Together, we can take hold of our tremendous untapped potential and create the lives we deserve to live. Never forget this.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/03/8.jpg\")
“Become ungovernable,” a stencil included in the book.
\nFor seven years, we have produced a widely acclaimed podcast; now, covering the uprising in Chile, we are preparing to make our first documentary film. But we need your help to acquire the supplies we need.
\n\nA full-scale uprising is unfolding in Chile. Starting in October, people of all walks of life have come together to block austerity measures, fight police repression, and defy a military occupation. Sparked in part by a revolt in Ecuador, the uprising in Chile represents the crest of a global wave of revolts from Haiti, Puerto Rico, Hong Kong, and Sudan to Honduras, Catalunya, and Lebanon.
\n\nAll around the world, neoliberalism is in crisis. Far-right nationalists have cashed in on this crisis to push through the Brexit and win elections from Italy to Brazil; with his rhetoric about so-called “globalism,” Trump aims to present his own brand of xenophobic capitalism as the only alternative. In Chile, however, people have responded to the crisis of neoliberalism with a popular anti-capitalist movement with a predominantly anti-authoritarian character. In a time when reactionaries have been passing themselves off as rebels while many activists have despaired of changing the world for the better, the Chilean uprising offers a much-needed dose of inspiration and a promising model for future movements worldwide.
\n\nWe have been on the ground in Chile since day one, publishing a series of bilingual podcast episodes detailing each stage of the uprising and interviewing a wide range of participants. Yet audio recordings alone cannot do justice to the global implications of what is happening in Chile. After seven years producing the Ex-Worker and Hotwire podcasts, we want to shoot our first documentary film.
\n\nBut we need your help.
\n\nExpanding from podcast to video won’t be easy. We are asking for supporters to help us acquire the equipment we need to shoot a feature-length documentary. A list of the resources we need appears at the end of this text. We can get donations here from South America, North America, and Europe. If you can contribute any of the items that we need directly or help us purchase new equipment, please reach out to us at podcast@crimethinc.com.
\n\nWe’ve decided not to start a kickstarter or gofundme for this project; it wouldn’t feel right while so many comrades in Chile need money for medical and legal expenses as a consequence of their courageous contributions to the movement. One form of movement infrastructure that is severely lacking in Chile is a legal, public way to raise money from outside of the country. If you know any lawyers or NGO accountants with knowledge of Chilean law and banking, please put them in touch with us.
\n\nWe’ve been covering anarchism in Chile for years now; we have a network of trusted comrades here and we are well-informed and willing to do whatever it takes to bring you important lessons and inspiring stories. We just need the equipment and technical means. With your help, we can produce complete versions of the film in both English and Spanish and make them freely available to all.
\n\nWe have to move quickly now if we are to be ready to begin filming when the students who started the uprising last October go back to school at the end of February. The date for the constitutional plebiscite is set for April 26,\njust days before May Day. The plebiscite is the biggest concession won through street protest so far; it will decide whether Chile’s dictatorship-era constitution will be replaced by a new one. What happens next will illuminate the prospects and pitfalls facing social movements around the world in the 21st century.
\n\nWe want to make a film that will spread the inspiration that the Chilean uprising has awoken in us—so that the crisis of neoliberalism will cease to serve the Trumps and Bolsonaros and Putins of the world and become an opportunity to start building a world without capitalism, without the state, without patriarchy—a world that isn’t ordered by authority and competition but by freedom and cooperation.
\n\nThe conflicts that have come to a head in Chile today will erupt everywhere soon. This is a rare moment in which we can prepare for the upheavals that are looming ahead on the horizon. We are uniquely positioned to bring the most important lessons and inspiring moments from Chile to audiences and movements around the world. Please help us.
\n\nContact us: podcast@crimethinc.com
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/01/09/1.jpg\")
Fuck Netflix, watch crimethinc.com/videos.
\nThe beginning of a new year offers us an opportunity to look back over our accomplishments and the things we stand to learn from the previous year. In the following report, we will review our efforts throughout 2019, set in the context of world events. This has been a year of stalemate in the US, while elsewhere, a new wave of confrontational movements has inspired some commentators to predict a global revival of anarchism on an unprecedented scale.
\n\nWhile this strikes us as optimistic, it adequately describes the stakes of the situation today. The first decade of the 21st century saw the end of the era of capitalist triumphalism; the second decade saw an explosion of uprisings followed by a wave of repression and reactionary nationalism. The decade ahead of us marks a decisive turning point in the history of our species. Increasingly polarized and nationalistic geopolitics are producing one war after another now. Desperate and oppressed people are rising up—though often without a clear analysis of the causes of their misery—while governments and corporations race to develop technology that can effectively surveil populations and suppress revolt. Meanwhile, industrially driven climate disruption is generating ecological disasters that threaten the biosphere itself.
\n\nWe will either figure out how to break down the existing mechanisms of control on a massive scale, as people have been doing in Chile over the past several months, or we will enter a period of worldwide tyranny from which humanity may never emerge.
\n\nCurrently, we are hardly prepared for the struggles this coming decade will bring. Still, it is helpful that some projects and networks persist from the struggles of the previous decades—including this particular project, the CrimethInc. ex-Workers’ Collective. At the bare minimum, we have to pass on the lessons of past struggles, update our analyses and strategies for the current era, and form much more ambitious and wide-reaching networks and initiatives. The price of failing to do this will be unspeakable.
\n\nChilean anarchists and other rebels celebrating New Year’s Eve in Plaza de la Dignidad by driving back the police and honoring the dead.
\nEverything our collective accomplished in 2019—from writing articles and recording podcasts to programming this site and mailing out book orders—we achieved by means of 100% volunteer labor, working collectively and anonymously the way we have since the mid-1990s. We seek neither financial gain nor personal fame for what we do. We are driven solely by the desire for liberation—liberation for all, in all the different forms it takes.
\n\nAs others recently put it,
\n\n\n\n\n“For our part, we seek to live without masters or bosses, in harmony with nature and animals, in a dignified and responsible manner, respecting each other, understanding that each one has different abilities, but that each is of equal value… [we believe in] self-education, sharing in free association for the pleasure of doing so and not for the need to survive, relying on values such as solidarity, altruism, honesty, and mutual support.”
\n
If you like what we do, the best thing you can do is do it yourself—take action in your own community, develop and refine your own analyses and strategies, reach out to others and mobilize for social change. You can also contribute to our efforts in a variety of ways, or, failing that, donate to us to help us print new outreach materials. Please contact us if you want to help in some other way! Later this week, we’ll publish a more specific request for assistance with our next round of projects.
\n\nFor further reading in the vein of the following report, you could consult the 2019 overview from Anarchist Agency, a similar report from our Brazilian counterparts, and the reports we published looking back on 2018 and 2017.
\n\n\n \n\n \n
A New Year’s Eve dinner in Plaza de la Dignidad bringing together anarchists and other front-line fighters in the Chilean uprising with supporters from the older generation and the hungry and needy. Scenes like this show us how inspiring mutual aid practices can be in the midst of our ongoing struggles.
\nOver two years later, 2017 remains the high point of struggles against Trump and the repressive agenda his regime represents. For good or for ill, the airport blockades, the deplatforming of Milo Yiannopoulos in Berkeley, and the groundswell of anti-fascism that followed the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville mark the high-water mark of contemporary direct action efforts. This is instructive: the moment of greatest possibility often occurs at the opening of a new era, when the horizon of what can happen has not yet been fixed in the popular imagination. Rather than planning to slowly build momentum, it is sometimes important to seize the window of opportunity and figure out how to build from there.
\n\nConversely, one of the reasons anarchists in the United States are experiencing a relative lull in activity is that, since 2017, we have been compelled to put more energy into mobilizing in response to emergencies than into slowly, steadily cultivating communities that can act together. The subcultures that nourished generations of rebels have largely melted away or been coopted; online networking is a poor substitute for long-term networks based in shared activities.
\n\nBut we should not hold ourselves solely responsible for the current lull. It takes place in the larger context of massive institutional efforts to substitute the spectator sport of electoral politics for the revolutionary practice of direct action.
\n\nAs we argued in “Life in ‘Mueller Time’,” the Democratic Party has intentionally introduced a series of spectacles aimed at centralizing itself in the popular imagination as the chief representative of anti-Trump sentiment and the only hope for social change. Foremost of these spectacles are the Mueller investigation, the recent impeachment proceedings, and the ongoing Democratic primaries. Neither the Mueller investigation nor the impeachment have threatened Trump’s power—and the 2020 election may not, either. But all three of them serve to focus attention on institutional processes and invest legitimacy in existing authority figures—including career politicians, judges, and the FBI.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/02/26/1.jpg\")
Against those who count on the authorities to resolve the problems caused by those in authority…
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/hope-is-in-the-streets/hope-is-in-the-streets_front_color.jpg\")
…we know it’s up to us to deal with the situation.
\nIn this context of cooption, 2018 saw an impasse emerge in struggles between the nationalists around Trump, the centrists around the Democratic Party, and social movements, in which none of these three forces was able to definitively gain the upper hand. This impasse continued throughout 2019.
\n\nWe can see the evidence of this impasse in the desperately needed but not yet successful efforts to get a powerful new ecological movement off the ground in the US, despite the spread of Extinction Rebellion overseas; Extinction Rebellion is too legalistic and pacifist for our tastes, but its popularity speaks to a real need for ecological action. We can also see the impasse in the comparatively tame response to the Turkish invasion of Syria, at least outside the Bay Area and a couple other hotspots, and in the limits that solidarity efforts reached mobilizing against the latest wave of state attacks on the undocumented. Unfortunately, one of the more effective efforts in that struggle may have been the action Willem Van Spronsen carried out on the Northwest Detention Center, a private immigration detainment facility. Police killed Van Spronsen in response. But a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official subsequently explained to the media that the dramatic increase in anti-immigrant raids that Trump had called for had not taken place in part because of the fear Van Spronsen’s action had generated among the mercenaries serving ICE.
\n\nWe do not believe in canonizing people as heroes. Likewise, we strongly urge against people intentionally sacrificing their lives. If anti-border movements had found more effective collective means of action against ICE operations, maybe Van Spronsen would still be alive—and some of the millions of people who have been deported from the United States would still be at liberty. We honor the long-running efforts to support undocumented people that our comrades have maintained in the face of repression. The question of how to build on them remains a challenge for all of us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/the-border-is-everywhere/the-border-is-everywhere_front_color.jpg\")
Click the image to download the PDF.
\nMeanwhile, outside the United States, from France and Hong Kong to Sudan and Haiti, protracted struggles were playing out between governments and powerful social movements. This ferment reached as far as Puerto Rico, a United States territory, though denied equal status to the states proper.
\n\nIn October, conflict came to a boil on many fronts at once. Trump had been threatening to let Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan invade Rojava since December 2018; at the beginning of October, he finally did exactly that, giving Turkey carte blanche to slaughter and displace hundreds of thousands of people on the Syrian side of the border.
\n\nWe scrambled to respond, publishing a call for solidarity actions against the Turkish invasion that was endorsed by well over 100 organizations, alongside a series of articles on the situation, including “Why the Turkish Invasion Matters” and “The ‘Ceasefire’ Is a Deadly Fraud,” debunking Vice President Mike Pence’s lie that he had brokered a ceasefire in the region.
\n\nAt the same time, the wave of uprisings that had begun with Haiti, Hong Kong, and Sudan spread to Ecuador, Chile, Honduras, Catalunya, Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere. As our networks extend throughout many parts of the world, we went to great lengths to present on-the-ground reporting and analysis from many of these upheavals.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/10/23/3.jpg\")
Street fighters holding back the police during clashes in Catalunya, October 2019.
\nIn 2019, we published firsthand reports on struggles around the world, from Lebanon to Sudan. Here are some of the highlights.
\n\nCorresponding with anarchist participants in the powerful social movement against the Chinese-backed government of Hong Kong, we were fortunate to publish two of the most influential texts expressing the perspectives of anti-authoritarians within the movement, “Anarchists in the Resistance to the Extradition Bill” and “Three Months of Insurrection.” We recommend these two interviews as some of our best and most thought-provoking work in 2019.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/09/20/15.jpg\")
Three Months of Insurrection: An Anarchist Collective in Hong Kong Appraises the Achievements and Limits of the Revolt.
\nThis year, Greece saw the inevitable end of the disappointing left government of Syriza, which was replaced by the aptly-named far-right New Democracy party. New Democracy immediately declared an all-out war against refugees, anarchists, squatters, students, and the world-famous Athenian neighborhood of Exarchia. In response, we worked with comrades in Athens to chronicle resistance and repression from one month to the next:
\n\nEarlier in 2019, we also published “Putting Ideas on Trial: The Greek State’s Laboratory of Repression,” an interview with Greek anarchist prisoner Nikos Romanos.
\n\nIn Ecuador, a state austerity package prompted an uprising that nearly overthrew the government. We interviewed a participant immediately before the government caved in and canceled the package, while barricades still stood in the streets of the nation’s capital: “Inside the Quito Commune.”
\n\nThe uprising in Ecuador helped to inspire a similar uprising in Chile, which continues to this day. We published two articles charting its first days, “Chile: Resisting under Martial Law” and “On the Front Lines in Chile:\nSix Accounts from the Uprising.” Since then, we have continued to publish updates and interviews from the streets of Chile via our podcast.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/11/08/14.jpg\")
Altered billboards in Chile: “Looting is how a university student has to pay over twenty years what a congressman makes in two months.”—”Violence is when the police burst into a high school and shoot at the students.”—”The destruction of something man-made is called ‘vandalism,’ while the destruction of nature is called ‘progress.’” From our text, “Not Falling for It: How the Uprising in Chile Has Outlasted State Repression.”
\nFollowing our critical coverage of the independence movement in Catalunya two years ago, we published a report on the clashes that broke out in Catalunya in October 2019. We followed it up shortly afterwards with a first-person account from the front lines of the fighting, one of the most exciting texts we published this past year.
\n\nThroughout the first half of 2019, we continued to publish reports from the Yellow Vest movement in France as it slowly wound down and transitioned into other movements. Continuing the analysis we began in From Democracy to Freedom, our most important text about the Gilets Jaunes in 2019 was probably “Between the Reaction and the Referendum,” a look at nationalism and “direct democracy” in the Yellow Vest movement.
\n\nAt the same time, a year after the state raids and evictions at la ZAD—the Zone à Défendre (Zone to Defend) at Notre-Dame-des-Landes in western France, where occupiers had successfully blocked an unwanted airport—we published “Reflections on the ZAD: Another History.” While some activists steer away from dealing with the complex internal dynamics of inspiring projects like the ZAD, we feel that in the pursuit of liberation, it is just as important to learn from internal struggles as it is to learn from conflicts with the authorities; failing to do so will doom us to repeat the same mistakes.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/04/23/header.jpg\")
La ZAD in France.
\nLike many other anarchists, we spent much of 2019 scrambling to react to emergencies rather than making progress on our own beloved projects. Especially in October and November, we put everything else on hold. One of our longer-term goals is to expand our capacity to such a point that we can continue to make progress towards our long-term projects while responding to current events.
\n\nUnexpectedly, one of our most widely read texts of 2019 was “Against the Logic of the Guillotine,” a critique of fantasies about using the institutions of the state to exact revenge. The popularity of articles like this suggests that we should be putting more energy into reflective and theoretical writing.
\n\nWe also reached many readers with “Storming the Gates,” an analysis of the importance of uncompromising anti-carceral movements, and “The Wrong ICE is Melting, The Wrong Amazon is Burning,” emphasizing the importance of direct action to ecological movements. We followed up the latter article with “What Is Burning the Amazon?”, a perspective from Brazil.
\n\nIn 2020, we aspire to step back from the constant commotion of events to publish more reflective texts like these.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/05/23/15.jpg\")
Storming the Gates: The New Wave of Frontal Attacks on Prisons, Jails, and Detention Centers.
\nBy and large, participants in CrimethInc. projects do most of our direct action organizing in other venues. However, we do occasionally coordinate mobilizations, such as our decade-running annual day of action, Steal Something from Work Day.
\n\nIn February 2019, facing another potential government shutdown over funding for Trump’s xenophobic border wall, we announced a call to action under the watchword “Block the Wall.” This campaign brought together a network of anti-border activists, giving rise to a variety of small outreach actions and longer-running solidarity efforts including a freestanding website.
\n\nAs mentioned above, our most significant mobilizing effort was our call to action against the Turkish invasion of Syria, which was endorsed by everyone from the Democratic Socialists of America and Cooperation Jackson to Noam Chomsky, David Graeber, and Debbie Bookchin.
\n\nFinally, at the end of the year, we announced a call for a day of action against the rising cost of living on November 29, 2019 under the banner #NobodyPays. This was inspired by the fare-dodging protests that had helped to catalyze the uprising in Chile. The call also appeared in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Swedish, and Finnish.
\n\nIn the United States, following two major demonstrations in New York City against police violence on public transit, #NobodyPays actions took place in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, Minneapolis, Toronto, and elsewhere, as chronicled here. Although the actions did not trigger a countrywide upheaval, like the evasión masiva actions in Chile, nor give rise to a fare-dodgers’ union, like planka.nu in Sweden, they did put the tactic of fare-dodging in the public consciousness as a means of taking collective direct action to counter austerity measures.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/IGD_News/status/1200962321251733504\n\n\n
As we emphasized above, one of our missions is to pass on the experiences and lessons from recent anarchist efforts. Tomorrow’s rebels will be better equipped to act effectively if they are informed about the movements of the past several decades as well as classical reference points like the Paris Commune.
\n\nAt the beginning of 2019, two years after the #J20 demonstrations at Trump’s inauguration, we published a series of articles appraising the mobilization and the legal case that followed it. This included “Anarchist Resistance to the Trump Inauguration,” a minute-by-minute analysis of the events of January 20, 2017 in Washington, DC; “I Was a J20 Street Medic and Defendant,” a narrative from one of the first defendants to go to trial in the subsequent conspiracy case; and “We’ve Got Your Back: The Story of the J20 Defense,” a full retrospective on the solidarity and legal support strategies that ultimately resulted in the dropping of charges against the vast majority of J20 defendants.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/21/header.jpg\")
Anarchist Resistance to the Trump Inauguration: Understanding the Events of January 20, 2017.
\nWe published two other lengthy accounts of anarchist participation in 21st-century upheavals: “Looting Back,” chronicling the uprising that took place in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 in response to the police murder of Michael Brown, and “The Battle for Ungdomshuset,” recounting the history of Denmark’s most combative social center.
\n\nFollowing the Turkish invasion of Syria, we published “The Roots of Turkish Fascism,” charting the rise of fascism in Turkey across a century in order to explain the context of Erdoğan’s assault. For lighter reading, we observed Valentine’s Day with “Love, Anarchy, and Drama,”\nexploring several classical anarchists’ experiments with non-monogamy.
\n\nFinally, continuing our series on the Russian Counterrevolution that we began on the 100-year anniversary of the seizure of the Winter Palace in 1917, we published “When the Bolsheviks Turned on the Workers,” a retrospective on the Putilov and Astrakhan strikes of 1919.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/09/33a.jpg\")
Looting Back: An Account of the Ferguson Uprising.
\nIn 2019, we published a full audiobook version of our book No Wall They Can Build: A Guide to Borders and Migration across North America. We hope this can set a precedent for us to release audiobook versions of future books, as well.
\n\nThe podcast crew also mobilized to respond to the Turkish invasion of Syria, releasing a four-episode series within only ten days. Then they did the same thing in response to the uprising in Chile, releasing three fully bilingual episodes from on the ground at the center of the uprising, with a fourth episode to be released shortly.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/podcast/70/ep70-1400.jpg\")
\nAt long last, we are poised to make this site fully functional in a wide range of languages in addition to English. Already, we have es.crimethinc.com and de.crimethinc.com functioning for those who access the site from Spanish-speaking and German-speaking parts of the world; already, you can peruse crimethinc.com/languages to find a list of the articles we have available in each of ten different tongues.
\n\nA considerable number of posters, zines, and book pdfs are also available on this site now in Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, and other languages, and we hope to add a lot more soon. In 2019, we also added a Japanese version of our anarchist primer To Change Everything to the site, bringing the total number of language options for that project to 32. Currently, it is our most translated project; soon, we hope to make much more of our material available multilingually.
\n\nIf you can help us translate texts, or simply collect and proofread existing translations, please contact us.
\n\nOne of our responsibilities in maintaining this site is to keep 25 years worth of CrimethInc. texts and projects accessible to new generations. In 2019, we added a journals page to our archive, including all the issues of our magazine Rolling Thunder, and also added scans of a much older journal we started publishing in the 1990s, the hardcore zine Inside Front.
\n\nWe also reprinted two of our classic books, Work (2011) and Expect Resistance (2007).
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/02/06/header.jpg\")
\nWe didn’t do as much with the arts in 2019 as we hope to in 2020. Our most widely circulated creative work was probably\n“Police: An Ethnography,” a photoessay exploring the common threads that tie together police psychology all around the world. In the art-for-art’s-sake category, for Valentine’s Day we published two works of pure fiction, “Injury against Erasure/Damage against Time.”
\n\nWe also published two games this year—our acclaimed J20 Protest Simulator, a choose-your-own-adventure game enabling the player to participate in the black bloc that interrupted the spectacle of Trump’s inauguration, and Up against the Wall, Motherfucker, a simulation of the 1968 occupation of Columbia University.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/games/j20/images/header.jpg\")
\nClick here to play our J20 Protest Simulator.
\n\nThroughout 2019, CrimethInc. agents distributed literature at events across the United States, including the Asheville Anarchist Book Fair, the Olympia Zine Fest, the Boston Anarchist Book Fair, the New York City Anarchist Book Fair, the East Bay Alternative Book and Zine fest in Oakland, the Howard Zinn Book Fair in San Francisco, and the Humboldt County Anarchist Book Fair, among others.
\n\nCrimethInc. agents also conducted tours of the southern half of Brazil between June and July and the West Coast of the United States in December, promoting the English and Portuguese versions of the book From Democracy to Freedom and speaking about various forms of contemporary anarchist struggle. The report from the tour in Brazil includes an overview of anarchist projects and popular struggles throughout the country.
\n\nThis report only covers a fraction of what we did in 2019. We have a lot planned for 2020, but as usual, it’s better not to promise things—but simply to do them. We’ll see you on the front lines this year.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/01/06/1.jpg\")
Celebrants in the Plaza de la Dignidad on New Year’s Eve, 2019: “Only by fighting do we advance.”
\nSince 2017, we’ve distributed 50,000 stickers proclaiming “Immigrants Welcome.” Now, thanks in part to your support, we have printed 50,000 more copies. You can order them here for the costs of production and delivery alone.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/08/1.jpg\")
\nIn a time when digital media is the dominant form of communication, we remain passionately committed to print media and other forms of communication that intervene in the offline world. It is catastrophic that massive technology companies control so many of the channels through which we communicate with one another. While we acknowledge the importance of utilizing these channels, we recognize that it puts us in an extremely vulnerable position to depend on state-regulated capitalist institutions for our access to each other.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/08/2.jpg\")
We have always found it deeply fulfilling to encounter the materials we produce in the wild.
\nAlready this year, we’ve seen several of our posts removed from social media sites on the pretext that the material violated their content policies. Across the board, these content policies are hypocritical and incoherent—for example, providers claiming to prohibit advocacy of “violence” yet gladly providing a venue for the US military, among the most murderous and destructive institutions in human history. Obviously, we shed no tears when sites like The Daily Stormer and 8chan are refused a platform via which to recruit white supremacists. We believe that no one should be under any obligation to provide services to racists or other advocates of oppression. But while we celebrate the digital de-platforming of the far right, history shows us that the next thing that will happen is that these tactics will be used against those who challenge the state and capitalism in favor of genuine liberation.
\n\nAs a general principle, top-down control of communications infrastructure is chiefly useful for maintaining the status quo. The precedents set for de-platforming those who are trying to change things for the worse will also be used against anyone who wants to change things for the better. The vast majority of the agenda of the far right does not conflict with the hypocritical content policies of our digital overlords: they don’t consider it “advocacy of violence” to campaign for more state violence against immigrants, for example. If, indeed, those who seek liberation from capitalism and the state are the next to be de-platformed, the resulting vacuum will make it easier, if anything, for authoritarians whose proposals fall within the confines of those content policies to present themselves to the general public as the only ones who have any sort of proposals for social change whatsoever.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/08/3.jpg\")
In some places, you can see posters like this one that have hung there for years.
\nAs fascists shift their attention from maintaining their own publishing efforts to trying to force those who hold corporate and state power to shut down ours, we can expect more and more repressive clampdowns in the future. There are many things we can do to push back against this. We have to do everything in our power to popularize our perspectives, while de-legitimizing capitalism, the state, and anyone who would like to make it impossible to speak freely about radical social change.
\n\nOne of the ways we can prepare for this sort of repression is to continue to focus on print projects and other ways of communicating that do not depend on digital media services. We have been a print project from the very beginning. The first CrimethInc. projects took place before the prevalence of digital communication. We collaborated by means of the postal service and landline telephones. Even if one day we find ourselves entirely banned from online activity, it would be impossible for any corporation or government to track down and destroy every single one of the hundreds of thousands of books we have distributed, or the literally millions of posters and zines we have put into circulation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/08/4.jpg\")
You, too, can be a publisher and distributor!
\nWe will continue to focus on print as a medium that is less vulnerable to the whims of capitalist gatekeepers. But we can’t do this without your help. While we produce books for sale, we also offer free digital versions of zines and posters with the hope that you will print and distribute them. If you have access to a printer, you are a micro-publisher—you can spread these materials and anything else that you consider important.
\n\nLikewise, you can order stickers from us and put them up whenever and wherever, on every lamp post, in every bathroom. In a strictly legal way, of course!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/08/5.jpg\")
\nIn response to Donald Trump’s efforts to direct hatred against the most vulnerable sectors of the population—and the ongoing wave of shootings carried out by Trump’s supporters—we have prepared a line of posters expressing our readiness to defend everyone they are targeting. We hope these posters will appear across the country, challenging the vicious atmosphere that they are trying to create and opening up spaces in which everyone feels welcome. Please put up these posters in public places, including business establishments, universities, and schools, as well as homes and social centers. The posters are available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/06/2.jpg\")
\nIf you use Facebook, you can obtain a matching overlay for your profile picture here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/06/have-a-heart_high_ink.jpg\")
Click the image to download the poster.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/06/have-a-heart_color_low_ink.jpg\")
Click the image to download the poster.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/06/have-a-heart_BW.jpg\")
Click the image to download the poster.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/06/1.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/06/Spanish_WeAreAntifascist.jpg\")
Click the image to download the poster.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/06/Spanish_v2_WeAreAntifascist.jpg\")
Click the image to download the poster.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/06/Spanish_bw_WeAreAntifascist.jpg\")
Click the image to download the poster.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/06/we_defend_poster_portuguese_red_and_black.jpg\")
Click the image to download the poster.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/06/we_defend_poster_portuguese_red_and_white.jpg\")
Click the image to download the poster.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/06/we_defend_poster_portuguese_black_and_white.jpg\")
Click the image to download the poster.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/06/3.jpg\")
\nFor similar material, see our Immigrants Welcome stickers.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2019/08/05/report-from-democracy-to-freedom-brazil-tour-including-a-review-of-anarchist-projects-and-struggles-throughout-brazil", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2019/08/05/report-from-democracy-to-freedom-brazil-tour-including-a-review-of-anarchist-projects-and-struggles-throughout-brazil", "title": "Report: From Democracy to Freedom Brazil Tour : Including a Review of Anarchist Projects and Struggles throughout Brazil", "summary": "In June and July 2019, we visited fifteen cities in Brazil. This is our full report, including an overview of anarchist activity in Brazil today.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/header.jpg", "date_published": "2019-08-05T18:23:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:39Z", "tags": [ "democracy", "resistance", "Brazil", "tour", "Bolsonaro", "fascism" ], "content_html": "Throughout June and July 2019, CrimethInc. operatives from South and North America visited fifteen cities in seven different Brazilian states to present the print edition of Da Democracia à Liberdade, the Portuguese version of our book From Democracy to Freedom. The tour also served as an opportunity to compare notes about resistance to the Trump regime and the far-right populist government of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. This report from our trip also offers an overview of the some of the social centers and organizing going on in Brazil today. We have been publishing reports and analysis of social struggles from Brazil for many years; you can read some of our articles here.
\n\nWe participated in a total of 21 events, hosted by social centers, occupations, union headquarters, universities, autonomous research centers, and a few more unusual venues. The idea was to present the ideas in the book, but also to exchange experiences with those participating in social struggles in all the places we visited.
\n\nA video from one of the presentations in Porto Alegre, edited down to the English parts, summarizing anarchist resistance at the outset of the Trump administration.
\nEverywhere we went, we met people who were eager to discuss anarchist perspectives on democracy and exchange experiences of resisting capitalism and the far-right governments that hold power in the Americas and elsewhere around the world. It was also helpful that we brought hundreds of copies of the To Change Everything pamphlet in Portuguese, an accessible introduction to anarchist ideas.
\n\nWe built new ties and strengthened longstanding relationships between movements, collectives, and social centers and occupations throughout the cities we visited. There are many differences between Brazil and the United States, but the differences that exist within each country are much greater than the differences between the countries. Borders and nationality are among the constructs that our rulers employ in hopes of preventing solidarity from emerging between the oppressed of all countries. For this reason, one of our chief objectives has always been to foster dialogue on an international basis.
\n\nThe book From Democracy to Freedom was translated collectively. Digital and zine versions have been available in Portuguese since 2017. Now, thanks to the efforts of independent editorial collectives including No Gods No Masters, Subta, and Facção Fictícia, there is a high-quality print run of a thousand copies.
\n\nHere follows a short account of what we saw and learned on this tour, as a means to keep building these connections. Due to limited time and resources, it was only possible to visit three of the five major regions of Brazil. Next time, we aim to visit the North and Northeast regions of Brazil as well, in order to continue to broaden our exchange of experiences and solidarity.
\n\nStarting in São Paulo, we flew with our bags full of books and zines to the events in Goiânia and Brasilia. Lacking access to a vehicle for much of the trip, we depended on busses, planes, taxis, various metros, rideshares, and, of course, long treks on foot. All this, carrying hundreds of books and zines. We destroyed the wheels on several bags and carts along the way.
\n\nOur first stop was in Goiânia, at Casa Liberté, a social center that hosts activities organized by different collectives and anarchist movements in the region, such as the Autonomous Workers Federation (FAT). The event was organized in conjunction with the independent music label Two Beers or Not Two Beers Records.
\n\nBefore the discussion, the organizers showed the documentary “Parque Oeste, Story of a Struggle for Housing in Goiânia,” which chronicles the illegal and lethally violent eviction of the Sonho Real occupation in 2005 and the victorious housing struggle of the families that survived. The police operation left 14,000 people homeless; they also executed at least two people in cold blood.
\n\nThe event was attended by the film’s director and also by activist Eronildes Nascimento, a survivor of the eviction. Pedro Nascimento, Eronildes’s husband and the father of her son, was one of the people murdered by police during the eviction.
\n\nOver 100 people attended the event. We shared a panel with Eronildes, who expanded on the story told in the documentary and spoke about the struggles of the families who occupy a new area today known as Real Conquista, also in Goiânia.
\n\nAnarchists from all over Brazil participated in or supported the defense of the Sonho Real neighborhood. Brad Will, an anarchist and Indymedia journalist from the United States known to some of us personally, filmed the occupation and the eviction. His footage is included in the Parque Oeste documentary that was screened that night. Brad was murdered in Mexico in 2006 while filming the popular uprising in Oaxaca, one year after the eviction in Goiânia.
\n\nEronildes knew Brad. She spoke about how his footage helped to corroborate reports about the violence of the state; without his courage, there would be considerably less evidence of what happened during the eviction. She told us that residents have had two plazas named for the two people known to have been murdered during the eviction, and are attempting to have another plaza named for Brad Will. We were deeply moved to learn this. We owe a lot to Brad for demonstrating that it is possible for activists from the United States to offer meaningful solidarity to people in much more targeted communities in the Global South and giving poor people in Brazil cause to trust anarchists from our circles.
\n\nAlso, if we had not made our way to Goiânia, Brad’s friends in the United States might never have learned of this documentary made with his footage, or of the ways he is remembered in Brazil. It is poignant to imagine that there might have been a plaza in Goiânia named for a murdered US anarchist without news of this ever reaching his home. We will never know all of the ways that our efforts impact the world.
\n\nToday, Eronildes is one of the most important leaders in housing struggles in Goiânia. She explained that every day she is more inclined to anarchism because she has seen that it is only possible to obtain meaningful victories through grassroots organizing and struggle. She described how, in her experience, political representatives and parties always pursue their own interests.
\n\nDocumentary trailer for Parque Oeste.
\nThe next evening, in Brasilia, we held a lively discussion in an unusual venue: a video game arcade and bar. We met a lot of new people and exchanged materials and ideas about local struggles; we also discussed future publishing projects together. We had heard a lot about the buildings designed by communist architect Oscar Niemeyer for Brasilia, which was constructed as a planned city to become the capital of Brazil in 1960, but we didn’t have time to go downtown to see them on our tight schedule. The next morning, we flew back to São Paulo and took a bus the same evening to Maringá in the state of Paraná.
\n\nIn Maringá, we spent the day with comrades in the city and got to know a little about its local history and spaces. We visited a delicious vegetarian and vegan establishment run by comrades, the Vaca Louca Café, where the doors of the restrooms are painted with the design from our classic gender poster, and walked past a venue where protesters gathered to oppose a Bolsonaro rally in early 2018. In the evening, we set up a table in front of the State University Student Directory, where many people were already waiting for the presentation and others gathered as they passed by.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/2.jpg\")
The artwork from our gender poster on the restrooms at the Vaca Louca Café in Maringá.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/3.jpg\")
A stencil at the university in Maringá.
\nIn Curitiba, we spoke at another café, Veg Veg, which also had delicious vegan food and the artwork from our gender poster painted on their wall.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/18.jpg\")
The artwork from our gender poster at the Vaca Louca Café in Curitiba.
\nIn Florianópolis, we spoke on the campus of the Federal University of Santa Catarina at the Tarrafa Hacker Club, a community laboratory dedicated to disseminating skills in technology, digital security, science, and digital art. Despite several interesting political activities going on that night at USFC, dozens of people packed into the room, including many experienced activists. We had a lively discussion drawing on participants’ experiences in the Brazilian movements of 2013, indigenous organizing contexts, and experimenting with both democratic and autonomous decision-making models. Afterwards, we set up our literature table by a samba band performing for a large crowd in the center of campus.
\n\nThe event in Criciúma was organized by Anarchists Against Racism at the Sociedade Recreativa União Operária club, a space run by seven collectives from the city’s Black liberation movements. The social center is the result of many people’s hard work to reclaim a longstanding community space, a Black community club founded in the 1930s. Since many people in Criciúma did not feel welcome in the predominantly white clubs at the time, they founded their own club for culture, recreation, socializing, and resistance. The massive building is set in a broad square with two grassy soccer fields in the middle of what is now considered a wealthy area. The participants are working hard to revitalize the space after years of abandonment. It was inspiring to exchange experiences of grassroots organizing and struggle with our hosts. We hope to do more to support their projects in the future.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/20.jpg\")
Banners from Anarchists Against Racism at the Sociedade Recreativa União Operária club, a space run by Black liberation movements, in Criciúma.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/21.jpg\")
Another banner at the Sociedade Recreativa União Operária club in Criciúma.
\nWe took three days in Porto Alegre to offer both of the presentations we were doing on the tour and to learn about many of the projects that our comrades there maintain. On Saturday, June 29, we spoke about From Democracy to Freedom at the Humanities Research and Practice Association (Associação de Pesquisa e Práticas em Humanidades, APPH). We were excited to see another independent space dedicated to research and practical forms of anti-capitalist organizaing. APPH is a community space offering free or affordable workshops, lectures, and courses, dedicated to making the knowledge from universities and social movements accessible to all. Earlier in the morning, before our presentation, the philosopher Debora Danowski had spoken on climate change and the Anthropocene.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/4.jpg\")
Tabling at the APPH in Porto Alegre. The poster says “When in Rome, do as the Vandals do.”
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/22.jpg\")
Artwork from Days of War, Nights of Love at Café Bonobo in Porto Alegre.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/26.jpg\")
Artwork from Days of War, Nights of Love at Café Bonobo in Porto Alegre.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/27.jpg\")
Artwork from Days of War, Nights of Love at Café Bonobo in Porto Alegre.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/23.jpg\")
A Brazilian edition of Expect Resistance at Café Bonobo in Porto Alegre.
\nThe next day, Sunday, we presented “Anarchist Resistance in the Trump Era” for the first time on the tour, at Café Bonobo, a vegan, anarchic, self-managed space. It was one of the most crowded events of the tour. In Porto Alegre, there are many cooperative initiatives such as this, at which people organize their labor, their schedules, and their plans without bosses or hierarchies. Another example is the Aurora space, which offers lunch without fixed prices—diners pay however much they choose to and take as much as they want from the tray of paçoca, the delicious peanut snack local to southern Brazil.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/7.jpg\")
The Aurora Café in Porto Alegre.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/6.jpg\")
Artwork at the Aurora Café, next to a flag of the MST, one of the world’s most powerful land occupation movements.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/5.jpg\")
The ceiling of the Aurora Café in Porto Alegre.
\nMonday was the first day off on the tour. Our generous hosts loaned us their bikes to see the city. We visited the anarchist bookstore Taverna, returned to the aforementioned Aurora, and received a tour of the occupation Utopia e Luta one of the largest squatted residential buildings in the Americas. This amazing space in the city center includes 43 apartments, a huge roof garden, a screenprinting workshop, a capoeira studio, and many other resources. The visit took a long time and unfortunately we could not visit the Ateneu Libertário of the Gaucha Anarchist Federation. Next time!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/24.jpg\")
The façade of the occupation Utopia e Luta in Porto Alegre.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/25.jpg\")
The façade of the occupation Utopia e Luta in Porto Alegre.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/29.jpg\")
The foyer of the occupation Utopia e Luta in Porto Alegre: “You are entering a territory of popular self-determination.”
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/8.jpg\")
Banners hanging in one of the common spaces of the occupation Utopia e Luta in Porto Alegre.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/28.jpg\")
All of the stairwells are decorated with artwork like this in the occupation Utopia e Luta in Porto Alegre.
\nIn São Paulo, in addition to consuming liters of açai, going to the museum to see a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, and sneaking onto the university campus to see capybara, we spoke in many venues, including a room in the Copam building, the Casa Plana bookstore, and the Centro de Cultura Social (CCS). Active since 1933, the CCS is one of the oldest anarchist spaces in Brazil; it hosts an archive that goes back over a century, having survived the military dictatorship of 1964-1985. Looking through it’s holdings, we found a picture depicting the lantern of knowledge driving off the representatives of the Church, then found a photograph from the very beginning of the 20th century showing the picture hanging behind a group of anarchists from that era. It was heartening to be among objects that bear witness to the indomitable spirit of Brazilian anarchists across the decades.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/9.jpg\")
A figurine representing the anarchist fighters in the Spanish Civil War at the longstanding Centro de Cultura Social (CCS) in São Paulo.
\nAfter the talk at CCS, we hurried to the Casa da Lagartixa Preta pizza party in Santo André. Run by the Activism ABC Collective, the Lagartixa Preta has been around for over 15 years; it is one of the major projects that materialized in a social center after the end of the anti-globalization movements of the early 2000s. During the pizza party, we heard a series of spoken word performances and looked through their archive of anarchist literature.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/30.jpg\")
The “Wash Your Own Dishes” poster in Portuguese over the sink at the Casa da Lagartixa Preta in Santo André.
\nHaving eaten our fill of delicious vegan pizza, we visited Semente Negra, the beautiful ecological space where the annual No Gods No Masters festival takes place, near the tiny town of Peruíbe. There, we restocked our bags with books and zines and attended the little town’s Festa Junina Fair. Our hosts also took us to visit their comrades at the Tapirema Village on recently reclaimed Tupi Guarani territory. This is one of 12 villages that have been reestablished on ancestral land at precisely the location where the colonization of so-called Brazil first began. Anarchists from the coast of São Paulo having been working in solidarity with the Guarani peoples as they reconstitute their traditional settlements and defend the forests and water from the latest capitalist and state assaults. For a few hours, we compared notes with them and saw the results of the inspiring work they have been doing.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/10.jpg\")
The gate of Semente Negra, an ecological land project where the annual No Gods No Masters festival takes place, near the tiny town of Peruíbe.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/32.jpg\")
A view of a pool at Semente Negra, an anarchist sustainable ecological project that organizes in solidarity with local indigenous groups.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/33.jpg\")
Another part of the Semente Negra project, which extends across a broad area.
\nThe last event in the state of São Paulo was in the town of Santos, at the Cinemateca de Santos, an autonomous space that maintains a huge collection of films and hosts movie clubs and discussions. The event was organized by anarchist comrades from the Carlo Aldegheri Library. A serendipitous moment occurred during the discussion, when one of the speakers drew an example from an assembly during the protests in Miami against the 2003 Ministerial regarding the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, at which a representative from the official labor unions had duplicitously attempted to persuade anarchists and other activists to cancel their protest completely. It turned out that one of the older Brazilians in the audience had also attended that same assembly in Miami, and also experienced this infuriating betrayal from the labor unions.
\n\nIn the small city of Divinópolis, we spoke at SINPRO, the headquarters of the state teachers’ union. The audience was comprised of an unusual mix of fierce union members and Stirnerist punks. We enjoyed an in-depth conversation about the relationship between democracy and racial issues in the Brazilian and US contexts. Some participants expressed the intention to deliver a copy of the book to each teachers’ union in the city and to the libraries of as many schools as possible.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/39.jpg\")
Cover of the album of the band Malespero, from Divinópolis, which summarizes one of the themes we discussed on the tour.
\nThe next day, we spoke at a bar in Itaúna, like old-fashioned labor agitators, then hit the road early to Belo Horizonte.
\n\nIn Belo Horizonte, we spoke at two venues. The first was at the Federal University School of Architecture, where we joined in a panel alongside two participants in social movements and local politics. One of the speakers was a militant involved in the housing movements (Popular Brigades) and a councilwoman of the Muitas/PSOL platform, which, like other parties such as Podemos in Spain or Syriza in Greece, emerged from social movements and popular unrest and managed to get candidates from a long trajectory of grassroots social movements elected to legislative positions. Another person on the panel was a member of the Popular Unit, a newly formed socialist party that also focuses on militant housing struggles (MLB / PCR).
\n\nEach of the three participants presented their reflections on democracy based on the struggles and movements in which they participate. We spoke last, opening up a lively debate about the uses and limits of democratic discourse and electoral strategies. Unlike many cities in Brazil, during the June 2013 uprising Belo Horizonte saw various spectra of the left, anarchists, Trotskyists, Stalinists, socialists, and independent individuals all attend the Horizontal People’s Assembly (APH) and take the streets together, creating a common conviviality. This is why such a panel was possible at all.
\n\nFor our part, we sought to identify the differences between principles and projects that seek to employ the state apparatus and those that refuse and delegitimize it. We want to see participants in our movements critically evaluate the costs of participating in institutional politics, as well as the apparent benefits. It seems that our colleagues, although they participate in political parties and exercise legislative mandates, agree—at least in theory—that the most effective and efficient way to promote social change is via self-organized direct action. Likewise, they were all quick to agree that democracy has failed to deliver on its promises. Yet they continue to legitimize the idea of government itself and to invest in strategies that take for granted that political power must be centralized in monolithic institutions. All around the world, we see that faith in democracy has eroded, but nothing else has taken its place. This leaves organizers struggling to squeeze diminishing returns out of discredited rhetoric and rituals, while authoritarians endeavor to fill the resulting vacuum. That is why we consider it so important to popularize a robust anarchist alternative to democratic discourse, emphasizing the importance of horizontality, decentralization, and solidarity.
\n\nThe next day, on Friday, we spoke at Kasa Invisível about anarchist resistance to the Trump administration. In Belo Horizonte, like almost all major Brazilian cities, there are occupied neighborhoods and buildings in which hundreds or thousands of people live. However, Kasa Invisível is currently the foremost occupation in Belo Horizonte based on the framework of the international okupa/squatting movements. Composed of three houses located where the city center abuts one of the wealthiest areas, it is the longest occupation of its kind in the city. It serves as residential housing and as a cultural center open to the community, providing space for meetings, seminars, and events for collectives and social movements that do not have their own space. It remains an autonomous space, unconnected with parties or other institutions, operating according to the principles of horizontality, self-management, and opposition to capitalism.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/42.jpg\")
Kasa Invisível in Belo Horizonte.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/43.jpg\")
Kasa Invisível.
\nShortly after Friday’s presentation in Belo Horizonte, we caught a series of buses to reach the FLIPEI book fair in Paraty, just in time to participate in a panel early Saturday afternoon about insurrection in Brazil and the release of Chamada, a collection of calls and manifestos. That night, we participated in another panel about anarchist and anti-fascist resistance. We shared the latter panel with Acácio Augusto, an anarchist comrade and university professor from São Paulo State University, and with Mark Bray, who was in Brazil to see his book Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook launched in Portuguese.
\n\nFLIPEI, the Literary Party of Independent Publishers, is organized by left and independent publishers; it takes place in Paraty at the same time as FLIP, a longstanding literary fair that is among the largest in the Americas. Dozens of debates and lectures occur at FLIPEI, with the speakers presenting from atop a pirate boat docked in the port. The first floor of the boat functions as a bookstore offering a wide range of publications. Big names from social movements, intellectuals, and all sorts of activists, left-wing activists, and anarchists attended the five days of the meeting. Unfortunately, due to our demanding schedule, we were only able to be there on Saturday.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/11.jpg\")
The FLIPEI by day in Paraty.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/12.jpg\")
The boat from which the speakers present at the FLIPEI by night.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/13.jpg\")
The audience listening from the shore at FLIPEI by night.
\nAt night, the scene was enchanting. The crowd listened from on dry land while we swayed in the river, just 500 meters from where it meets the sea. After so many airplanes, buses, trains, cars, and bicycles, all that remained was for us to catch a boat to complete our tour of different modes of travel in Brazil.
\n\nOn Sunday, we hurried to the city of Rio de Janeiro for the penultimate event of the tour: a full evening of presentations at the Fosso space in Santa Tereza. The neighborhood looks out over the city, between Morro dos Prazeres and Fallet. The view is breathtaking—the metropolis spread out before us like a toy set. Sometimes we saw tiny monkeys hopping from tree to tree in front of us. From the balcony, we could hear all the sounds of the various neighborhoods of Rio below: raucous socializing, live music, car engines, dogs barking, and—occasionally—gunfire.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/14.jpg\")
The view of Rio de Janeiro from the balcony of at the Fosso space in Santa Tereza.
\nOur last activity was scheduled for Tuesday, July 16: a discussion at Morro da Providência, the oldest favela in Rio de Janeiro, in the heart of downtown. Our hosts were the Organização Anarquista Terra e Liberdade (OATL) and the Rede de Informações Anarquistas (RIA). The presentation took place in front of the location of the Pré-Vestibular Comunitário Machado de Assis, where since 2009 anarchists have offered the community a popular preparatory course to equip young people from Providência and the surrounding areas to take college entrance exams.
\n\nThe first speaker was a former student in the program, who is graduating from college today and is now a teacher in the project. The discussion that followed was one of the liveliest of the tour. It felt good to end the tour in the company of all the students, teachers, and activists from various groups who attended, hosted by a lasting and important project. Several younger people spoke eloquently about different forms of resistance, about the mechanisms of repression in Brazil and specifically in the favelas, about organization and social movements, drawing parallels between the conditions of the oppressed and Black populations and the forms of struggle in the United States and Brazil.
\n\nAs we said, what unites us in our struggle against oppression is far greater than the borders, language, and contextual differences that might separate us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/37.jpg\")
\nWe would like to thank everyone who helped to make this tour possible, whether by organizing events, helping us to spread the books, posters, and zines we brought, or sharing ideas, food, mattresses, and space with us. We are also grateful for all the publications and other materials we obtained on this trip. This support network is what makes it possible for us to cross countries and continents and to establish lasting connections between anarchist and anti-capitalist movements and social centers.
\n\nOur struggle for freedom depends on us building bonds, solidarity, and dialogue, breaking down every fence and border that could divide us.
\n\nAté a próxima! See you in the fight!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/38.jpg\")
Some of the books, zines, posters, and CDs we acquired in the course of our trip.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/40.jpg\")
More books and zines we acquired in the course of our trip.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/41.jpg\")
Still more of our acquisitions.
\nCompared to the United States, the streets of Brazil are filled with unpermitted expression, from the intentionally anti-aesthetic pixação scrawls to breathtaking compositions the span of a full city block. Here are just a couple examples that caught our attention.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/1.jpg\")
Wall art Casa Liberté in Goiânia.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/15.jpg\")
We for ourselves.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/16.jpg\")
Vandal love.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/17.jpg\")
Capitalism will destroy itself—but first, it will make you destroy yourself for it.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/19.jpg\")
A cryptic poster at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Florianópolis.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/31.jpg\")
Anarchist artwork in one of the venues we visited.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/34.jpg\")
Street art in Belo Horizonte.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/35.jpg\")
Anti-fascist graffiti in Rio de Janeiro.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/36.jpg\")
Classic anarchist graffiti in Rio de Janeiro from the movements of half a decade ago, which still remains today.
\nNas próximas quatro semanas, agentes do coletivo Crimethinc. estarão em turnê pelo Brasil, passando por mais de uma dúzia de cidades debatendo o recém traduzido livro Da Democracia à Liberdade e comparando experiências sobre lutas contra os governos de Jair Bolsonaro e Donald Trump. Muitos outros texto do Crimethinc foram preparados antes dessa turnê e em breve postaremos cada um deles. Fiquem de olho aqui para mais novidades.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/06/22/12.jpg\")
\nDemocracia é o ideal político mais universal de nossos dias: George Bush o usou para justificar a invasão do Iraque; Dilma Rousseff parabenizou as pessoas que tomaram às ruas em 2013 por se manifestarem “democraticamente”; o movimento Occupy Wall Street alegou praticar a democracia em sua forma mais pura. Da República Popular Democrática da Coreia do Norte até a região autônoma de Rojava, praticamente todo governo e movimento popular diz ser democrático.
\n\nE, no entanto, foi a democracia que levou tanto Donald Trump como Jair Bolsonaro ao poder. Isso para não mencionar Adolf Hitler e o partido Nazista.
\n\nImpelidos por nossas experiências em movimentos sociais, retornamos essas questões. Nossa conclusão é que os dramáticos desequilíbrios nos poderes políticos e econômicos que levaram as pessoas às desde a Primavera Árabe não são defeitos incidentais em democracias específicas, mas características estruturais que datam das próprias origens da democracia; elas aparecem em praticamente todo exemplo de governo democrático da história. A democracia representativa preservou todo o aparato burocrático que foi originalmente inventado para servir aos reis; a democracia direta tende a recriá-los em escalas menores, mesmo fora das estruturas formais do estado. Democracia não é o mesmo que auto-determinação.
\n\nMas que é democracia precisamente? Como podemos nos defender contra tiranos democraticamente eleitos? Existe uma diferença entre governo e autodeterminação? Existem outras maneiras de descrever o que estamos fazendo juntos quando tomamos decisões? Com base em Da Democracia à Liberdade, o último livro da CrimethInc., vamos explorar essas questões e muito mais. Junte-se a nós para uma discussão animada!
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\nComo Donald Trump chegou ao poder e o que sua ascensão nos diz sobre os tempos em que vivemos? Quais estratégias os anarquistas nos Estados Unidos estão usando para combater a agenda de Trump e a ascensão de uma base social para a direita e para o nacionalismo? Como isso se relaciona com a situação no Brasil comandado por Jair Bolsonaro?
\n\nContextualizando o governo de Trump em um contexto global, discutiremos as novas condições para a luta social e exploraremos as abordagens de auto-organização e autodefesa que anarquistas empregaram nos Estados Unidos desde o final de 2016.
\n\nDa Democracia à Liberdade é uma coleção que examina as características que conectam as várias formas de democracia, buscando sua origem clássicas até suas variantes contemporâneas – representativa, direta e baseada em consenso – avaliando como o discurso e os procedimentos democráticos servem aos movimentos sociais que os adotam. No caminho, explora como seria se buscássemos a liberdade diretamente e não através de um governo democrático.
\n\nO texto conta com análises dos movimentos que ocuparam as ruas e praças pelo mundo nessa última década: o 15M na Espanha, o Movimento Occupy nos Estados Unidos, a insurreição popular na Eslovênia e na Bósnia em 2014, os levantes na Grécia e uma análise sobre Democracia e a Primavera dos Povos que varreu Paris de 1848.
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\nAo longo de 25 anos, CrimethInc. se consolidou como uma rede internacional anarquista publicando notícias, análises, jornais, revistas, vídeos, panfletos e vários livros, incluindo alguns dos títulos anarquistas contemporâneos mais vendidos no mundo, como Dias de Guerra e Noites de Amor. Outros títulos importantes lançados em português são: Trabalho, uma breve análise do trabalho no Capitalismo do século XXI.
\n\nRespondendo às várias ondas de levantes populares que invadiram os quatro continentes desde a Primavera Árabe, passando pelo movimento Occupy e os levantes de 2013 no Brasil, CrimethInc. convidou coletivos de uma dúzia de países para produzir um guia impresso introdutório ao anarquismo. O projeto Para Mudar Tudo (tochangeeverything.com ou paramudartudo.com) foi lançado em conjunto em mais de 30 línguas e distribuído gratuitamente. Por aqui, circulam quase 20 mil cópias da publicação impressa, utilizadas para atingir novos públicos interessados e movimentos anticapitalistas e até mesmo em escolas e centros sociais como forma de debater políticas anarquistas numa abordagem atual e de fácil acesso. A nova turnê e os debates apresentados servem para dar continuidade a esse intercâmbio mundial sobre como vencer os limites democráticos à libertação das pessoas e do planeta e como resistir a um governo conservador eleito através do voto – mesmo contra a vontade da maioria das pessoas.
\n\nPara saber mais sobre o coletivo acesse: crimethinc.com
\n\nPara materiais traduzidos para o português: crimepensar.noblogs.org
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In the field.
\nWe’ve reprinted two of our classic books, Work (2011) and Expect Resistance (2007). These books still have a lot to offer today and we’re excited to keep them in circulation. If you haven’t read them yet, here is your chance.
\n\nWork presents a schematic analysis of how a profit-driven society distributes power and agency, exploring the ways that the economy has shifted since the age of industrialism and the Fordist compromise and proposing how we might update our strategies for anti-capitalist resistance. This book is one of the few popularly accessible efforts to update anti-capitalist analysis from the dusty Marxist models of the 19th century. If you want to understand why unions have not been able to stabilize wages for two generations, why neoliberal globalization prevents governments from enacting reforms without immediate negative consequences via the financial market, how labor movements that originally fought for the liberation from work were coopted into preserving and stabilizing the capitalist system, and what it would take to abolish capitalism once and for all—this is the book for you.
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\nExpect Resistance is one of the most ambitious and beautiful projects we’ve ever undertaken. It combines a novel that allegorically recounts our experiences from the rise of the so-called “anti-globalization movement” to the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq with a wide range of anarchist theory, analysis, and art.
\n\nThe red text tells a story; the black text presents a critique of all the different forms of alienation, confinement, and coercion in our everyday lives and points the way to a resilient struggle for collective liberation.
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\nTo learn more about Expect Resistance, consult this whimsical reviewer’s guide from 2008.
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The books in production.
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The reprints in transit.
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A copy of Expect Resistance at a research station in Antarctica in 2008.
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