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Author: muntjac

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

Posted on 02/05/2025 - 05/05/2025 by muntjac

Part of Muntjac Issue 2: Insurgency & Counter Insurgency

Introduction

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

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

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

Part I: Historical Context and Intellectual Trajectory

Mariátegui’s Early Life and Influences

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

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

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

Encounters with Marxism and Latin American Realities

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

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

Decolonial Praxis in the Early 20th Century

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

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

Part II: Mariátegui’s Core Contributions to Revolutionary Theory

  1. The Indigenous Question and Decolonial Socialism

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

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

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

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

  1. Critique of Oligarchy and Colonial Legacies

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

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

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

  1. The Role of Culture and Myth in Revolution

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

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

Part III: Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Latin America

  1. Defining Insurgency & Counterinsurgency

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

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

  1. The Peruvian Experience: Shining Path and Beyond

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

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

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

  1. Counterinsurgency as Neo-colonial Continuity

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

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

Part IV: Decolonization and the Legacy of Mariátegui

  1. Connecting Mariátegui to Decolonial Theory

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

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

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

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

  1. The Relevance for Contemporary Movements

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

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

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

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

Part V: Decolonial Reflections on Insurgency & Counterinsurgency

  1. The Moral and Ethical Dimensions of Resistance

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

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

  1. Counterinsurgency as Epistemic Violence

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

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

  1. Lessons for Present and Future Movements

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

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

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

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

Part VI: Critical Engagements and Contemporary Resonances

  1. Anarchist Critiques of Mariátegui

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

  1. His Commitment to the Party Form: Mariátegui did attempt to form a socialist party in Peru, the Peruvian Socialist Party (which later became the Peruvian Communist Party). This orientation implies a degree of centralisation that may clash with anarchist opposition to political parties. However, Mariátegui’s support for a party did not necessarily translate into authoritarian or rigid Leninism. His writings suggest a more flexible, localised approach to political organisation.
  2. Underdeveloped Analysis of Patriarchy: Like many male revolutionaries of his time, Mariátegui did not fully articulate how patriarchal oppression is intertwined with class and colonial domination. Anarchist feminists, particularly women of colour, might argue that his vision remains incomplete without a robust gender analysis. Nevertheless, his emphasis on the communal and the critique of colonial patriarchy provides an entry point for expanding his ideas in more explicitly feminist directions.
  3. Beyond the Peruvian Context: Latin American Solidarity

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

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

  1. Paths Toward Decolonial Futures

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Posted on 02/05/2025 - 05/05/2025 by muntjac

Part of Muntjac Issue 2: Insurgency & Counter Insurgency

“On slave ships, hurling

ourselves into oceans.

Slitting the throats of our captors.

We took their whips and their ships.

Blood flowed in the Atlantic

and it wasn’t all ours.

We carried it on.”

— Assata Shakur

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes On Slavery and The Stripping Of Black Agency

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Posted on 02/05/2025 - 05/05/2025 by muntjac

Part of Muntjac Issue 2: Insurgency & Counter Insurgency

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

Our history is a history of names of the dead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Memory Is A Burning Fuse

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

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

The perpetrator gets away, the attack remains unsolved.

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

KRAK KRAK KRAK.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Black Liberation Army Is A Living Tension

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

submitted anonymously to pugetsoundanarchists.org

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

Posted on 02/05/2025 - 05/05/2025 by muntjac

Part of Muntjac Issue 2: Insurgency & Counter Insurgency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Huey P. Newton, On Revolution

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

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

I repeat, the death penalty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

hooks continues:

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

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

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

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

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

Daniel Adediran – Where is Black Anarchism in the UK?

Posted on 02/05/2025 - 05/05/2025 by muntjac

Part of Muntjac Issue 2: Insurgency & Counter Insurgency

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ervin was not the only Black Panther to have turned away from their political program and embraced Anarchism. Kuwasi Balagoon, an openly bisexual man (both hard and easy to be in the Black Radical Tradition, ask James Baldwin) joined the Panthers in 1967, having been radicalised in London. In 1969 he was arrested and indicted for a piece of propaganda by the deed. The trial was known as that of the Panther 21 and was at the time, the most expensive trial in New York State history. Though the trial collapsed, the state was determined to do whatever it could to crush this black rebel and had him sent to jail for 23 years of a bank robbery in New Jersey. It was in prison that Balagoon, disillusioned by the in-fighting of the Panthers and their pivot away from the people embraced anarchism and joined the broadly anarchist Black Liberation Army. Balagoon would escape prison twice and on the second attempt aid Assata Shakur in her famed escape, but would ultimately die in prison from AIDS-related pneumonia, a warrior and a revolutionary. Rest in Power. As I hope I’ve shown above, both Ervin, Sostre and Baloogun developed their blend of anarchism, not with input from white anarchists who would have and should have been in their milieu, but both from space and time away from the struggle for an egalitarian society, in prison. All were steeped in the famed black radical tradition, Ervin and Baloogun with the Panthers and Sostre with the Afro-Asian Bookstore, but both found flaws in ideology that the Black Radical Tradition normally espoused, like Islam, The Black Panthers, Marxist-Leninists, Maoists, The Democratic Party. Both discarded those tired old ideas and grappled with a philosophy that until the mid-20th century had been an overwhelmingly European one. Not only did they grapple, they made it their own. I for one, don’t think I’m nearly as courageous as these men. I really don’t think it is necessary for black men and women to go to jail (or die there) to realise that anarchism is the only viable solution to our Problems.

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

One part of it, I assume, is ignorance of the true aims of the philosophy, that it espouses chaos, or more likely, it’s plain dismissal as ‘cool, but idealistic/unrealistic/never gonna happen’. Another reason is that our intellectuals and culture heroes on the black left only talk of some sort of Scandinavian Social Democracy or a creeping, still undercover authoritarian leftism. This is a hangup of global extraction. From the revolutionary Richard Wright and W.E.B. DuBois to the Panther leadership, Marxist Leninists and Maoists made great overtures to the plight of black people in the United States for most of the 20th Century. A lot of the independence movements in Africa during the 1950s and 60s and their support from the USSR, was responsible for cementing the image of socialism in the minds of Africans on the continent (and possibly destroying it, but that’s a topic for another time). But we as anarchists and you as white anarchists need to ask, still more questions. There’s nothing to be said, for what we could have done in the past, what are we doing now? Where is the black block, the sight of the black flag at The Sudanese and Congo protests? Where are the stickers and the posters and the Zines, highlighting the plight of Haitians dying right now? Why is the most famous political prisoner in the UK not a young (or old) black man or woman? Especially, as I’ll show later, with our over representation in the carceral system. And what can be done by comrades, white and black alike to increase our presence in black radical movements and the black radical tradition in the country? I believe, the answer lies in Especifismo and its particular brand of anarchist praxis, including social insertion.

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

Especifismo emphasizes

  1. The need for a specific anarchist organisation built around a unity of ideas and praxis
  2. The use of said organisation, to theorize and develop political and organising work
  3. An active involvement in and building of autonomous and popular social movements.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you.

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

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

Posted on 02/05/2025 - 05/05/2025 by muntjac

Part of Muntjac Issue 2: Insurgency & Counter Insurgency

Principles for the coming Yankee invasion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Principios para la invasion gringa que se viene

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on 02/05/2025 - 05/05/2025 by muntjac

Part of Muntjac Issue 2: Insurgency & Counter Insurgency

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

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

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

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

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

Stolen from:

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

Muntjac Collective – Protect Yourself

Posted on 02/05/2025 - 05/05/2025 by muntjac

Part of Muntjac Issue 2: Insurgency & Counter Insurgency

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

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

  1. No Trace Project [www.notrace.how]
  2. AnarSec [www.anarsec.guide]

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

No Trace Project 

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

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

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

AnarSec

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

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

Anon – Alexa, take me to Prison!

Posted on 02/05/2025 - 05/05/2025 by muntjac

Part of Muntjac Issue 2: Insurgency & Counter Insurgency 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Further Reading:

Signal Fails

Beyond the Screen, the Stars

What the Corona Virus Pandemic Can Teach Us About Security Culture

Mobile Phone Security: For Activists and Agitators

Kill the Cop In Your Pocket (anarsec)

In Defense of Smashing Streamer’s Cameras

Some Thoughts on The Limits of Surveillance

Haraami – Follow the Fires: Insurgency Against Identity

Posted on 02/05/2025 - 05/05/2025 by muntjac

Part of Muntjac Issue 2: Insurgency & Counter Insurgency 

Stolen from: https://livingandfighting.net/Follow-the-Fires

The following essay was adapted from a talk that has been given in slightly different forms at three gatherings in three different regions of the U.S. in the last six months. It emerges from the broader efforts of some nonwhite revolutionaries based in and around the Southwest who are using talks, workshops, and discussions in an attempt to combat liberal and otherwise counter-revolutionary forms of identity politics which present themselves as militant and anarchist.

Here, Haraami offers a diagnosis of how counter-insurgent forms of identity politics leverage scenes and milieus as incubators of insular and fickle social competition and calls upon revolutionaries to focus instead on fidelity to uprisings and practical questions of revolution. You can download a zine version of this article here.

“Unlearn the identity and ally politics you learned at colleges and non-profits, or from people who work at colleges and nonprofits. They are tools of counterinsurgency and make you really fucking annoying.” —Wendy Trevino
1.

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

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

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

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

 

2.

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

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

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

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

 

3.


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

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

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

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

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

 

4.


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

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

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

 

5.


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

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

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

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

 

6.


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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 


Dis-Orienting Ourselves

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

 

a. 

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

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

 

b. 

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

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

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

 

c.


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

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

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

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

 

Photos: Anonymous, Tucson, Arizona


Readings, Inspirations, Influences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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