A zine against “growing up”, politics and workerism.
Posts by Warzone Distro
Never Work!
Text from back cover:
“When Guy Debord of the Situationist International graffi tied the slogan “Never Work!” onto the walls of a Parisian street in 1953, he struck a blow in solidarity with the radical current of left communism which locates the wage-labour relation as the central pillar of capitalist relations and therefore the prime locus of attack. It is, of course, a banality that we need to work in order to produce for our basic needs. But what is at question here is the naure of that work, for whom, and to what end? Useful work? Or useless toil?”
No Hope, No Future: Let the Adventures Begin!
From back cover:
“But this reality, however dismal, motivates my desire to make my life, through fierce revolt, as joyful and fulfilling as possible! My hopelessness does not paralyze me with fear or depression; I celebrate it with hysterical laughter and ecstasy in spite of civilization’s death march. I arm my desires with the urgency to live… against the social order of monotony and peaceful enslavement, to sleep beneath the stars, to feel sunshine and a breeze with every hair on my body, to listen to the late-night conversations of the insects, to become wild…
Nihilist Anarchy, Insurrection, & Anti-Civilization
Text from back cover:
“The total liberation that I am speaking about could be nothing less than aggressive and in total conflict with the existent. The earth and the nonhuman animals as well as the human animals are parts of chaos. I am a nihilist and I see myself as an individuality inside the entire physical environment away from anthropocentric societies as the cities. Cities are prisons made by society and normality and must be torn down. Without the physical environment there would be no life. But without the cities there would still be life besides the changes this might involve that will occur, and i reject all views that state life is only viable within cities and civilization. So we should connect the struggle for liberation of our ego from every chain, with total liberation which goes beyond the destruction of the state and delves deep into the search of the destruction of anthropocentrism and civilization as two well hidden major ghosts, chains and ideologies.”
Non-Western Anarchisms: Re-Thinking the Global Context
Text from the zine:
“The purpose of this paper is to help anarchist / anti-authoritarian movements active today to reconceptualise the history and theory of first-wave anarchism on the global level, and to reconsider its relevance to the continuing anarchist project. In order to truly understand the full complexity and interconnectedness of anarchism as a worldwide movement however, a specific focus on the uniqueness and agency of movements amongst the “people without history” is a deeply needed change. This is because the historiography of anarchism has focused almost entirely on these movements as they have pertained to the peoples of the West and the North, while movements amongst the peoples of the East and the South have been widely neglected. As a result, the appearance has been that anarchist movements have arisen primarily within the context of the more privileged countries. Ironically, the truth is that anarchism has primarily been a movement of the most exploited regions and peoples of the world. That most available anarchist literature does not tell this history speaks not to a necessarily malicious disregard of non-Western anarchist movements but rather to the fact that even in the context of radical publishing, centuries of engrained eurocentrism has not really been overcome. This has been changing to an extent however, as there here have been several attempts in just the past decade to re-examine this history in detail in specific non-Western countries and regions, with works such as Arif Dirlik’s Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution, Sam Mbah’s African Anarchism and Frank Fernandez’ Cuban Anarchism. It is within the footsteps of this recent tradition that this paper treads further into the relatively new ground of systematically assessing, comparing and synthesizing the findings of all of these studies combined with original investigation in order to develop a more wholly global understanding of anarchism and its history.”
Off The Leash
Text from back cover:
“Feeling the need for revolt in their bodies, those of an individualist nihilistic bent never needed to justify their insurrection in terms of ‘the Will of the People’, ‘History’ or ‘Justice’; and have always been quite prepared to forego optimism in favour of honesty and pragmatism in favour of dignity. Amid the catastrophe of history, these individuals were free in the only way anyone can be free, by seizing their lives for themselves.”
On the poverty of “Joyful Militancy”
From back cover:
““Their notion of “troubled joy” that they implicitly allude to in such roundabout ways, comes off sounding somewhat like a ruined orgasm (but not in a kinky way), cut short by thoughts of white guilt and internalized Christianity roaming the back of its head. This truncated notion of joy, though carefully detailed as to be allinclusive, is felt as if manicured to trim off any palpable trace of lust, wrath, or any of the remaining “deadly sins”. Though they reproduce criticism of a Catholic moralism that warns against excesses, one comes off with the impression that if ever playing “fuck, marry, kill” they would only ever choose “marry”, under the Church no less, lest anyone think they are of ill repute.
Perhaps they should have titled the book “Sad Militancy” since it deals mainly with that, as a problem. Not daring so much to propose much less embody a concrete way out of that impasse, while also seemingly still being held hostage by its affects. One wonders how they thought they could ever overcome “rigid radicalism”, while paralyzed by the rigor mortis of academia that was so palpable to me during my intercourse with this text.”
Old Habits Die Hard: At Daggers Drawn with “Inhabit”
From back:
“They speak of collective power; no power can support itself without the voluntary servitude of those it dominates. Power is a social relationship, a social hierarchical organization model, a way of lifemanagement. Reformism acts on detail, quantitatively. It mobilizes vast numbers of people in order to change a few isolated aspects of power.
“Inhabit” is the sugarcoating of decentralized D.I.Y. biopolitics.
Security, territory, population. They encourage the reader to target an area with the logic of occupation.
Building hubs is an act of bordering, delimiting a zone of exclusion. An intimate act of social cohesion producing productive subjectivities, set apart from external superfluous strangers. The opposite of rewilding; recivilizing pockets of wildness…
…The time to attack is now.
There is nothing and no one to wait for. To act now, with determined projectuality where our
destructive tension is the defining factor in our lives, not something that is built upon by following a 9step program or a 5year plan.”
Overcoming The Psychology of High School
Text from back cover:
“It is selfevident that high school – as one of the institutions of capital – seeks to transform individuals into productive automatons. How it does this isn’t quite as clear. Sure, the same manipulative techniques are used as elsewhere in the spectacle, but what does this look like exactly and how does it feel? The high school student’s desire to explore and experiment with the world of knowledge – if it has survived years of previous schooling – is brutally perverted to serve the interests of industrial society. High school falsely satisfies this desire by offering a clockworklike sequence of curricular consumption and measured performance with the ostensible purpose of education and development.”
Post-Left Anarchy: Leaving the Left Behind
Text from back cover:
“Post-left anarchists reject all ideologies in favor of the individual and communal construction of self-theory. Individual self-theory is theory in which the integral individual in context (in all her or his relationships, with all her or his history, desires, and projects, etc.) is always the subjective center of perception, understanding and action. Communal self- theory is similarly based on the group as subject, but always with an underlying awareness of the individuals (and their own self-theories) which make up the group or organization. Non-ideological, anarchist organizations (or informal groups) are always explicitly based upon the autonomy of the individuals who construct them, quite unlike leftist organizations which require the surrender of personal autonomy as a prerequisite for membership.”
Post-Left Anarchy (Short Intro)
Text from the zine:
“Why has there been such a long history of conflict and enmity between anarchists and the left? It is because there are two fundamentally different visions of social change embodied in the range of their respective critiques and practices (although any particular group or movement always includes contradictory elements). At its simplest, anarchists especially anarchists who identify least with the left-commonly engage in a practice which refuses to set itself up as a political leadership apart from society, refuses the inevitable hierarchy and manipulation involved in building mass organizations, and refuses the hegemony of hand, has most commonly engaged in a substitutive, representational practice in which mass organizations are subjected to an elitist leadership of intellectual ideologues and opportunistic politicians. In this practice the party substitutes itself for the mass movement, and the party leadership substitutes itself for the party.”
“In reality, the primary function of the left has historically been to recuperate every social struggle capable of confronting capital and state directly, such that at best only an ersatz representation of victory has ever been achieved, always concealing the public secret of continuing capital accumulation, continuing wage-slavexy, and continuing hierarchical, statist politics as usual, but under an insubstantial rhetoric of resistance and revolution, freedom and social justice.”
Prison Break: An Anarchist Blueprint for Hedonism
From back cover:
“Love and support to those who dropped out of school and faced life with nothing more than a lockpick set and a backpack. Love and support to those who riot within the prisons of asylums and “correctional” facilities. Love and support to those who weaponized their lives, taking rebellion to their graves in choosing death over imprisonment. A howl to the lifestylist ex-workers who found fierce joy in the materialized anarchy of their wildest
dreams.”
Primitive Toothcare: A DIY Guide to Uncivilized Oral Hygiene
Text from the zine:
“The omnipresence of cavities wherever the heinous putrefaction of Western Civ has reached has given rise to the dental profession. Dentistry is fucked up for too many reasons to list here. It has all the problems and inconsistencies inherent in every trade that requires intense specialization and professional schooling. Like every medical profession, it is disempowering in its attitude toward and treatment of the uneducated, the impoverished, and the unprofessional. It is unforgivably wasteful, and thrives on and upholds this throw-away culture. Also like every other medical profession, dentistry acts as a pimp to a whole catalog of nefarious industrial products manufactured by the big corporations that control the dental world.”
Pure Black: An Emerging Consensus Among Some Comrades?
“The term “black” anarchist has been thrown around recently in a number of
international milieux and journals. Indeed during the last few years of my
travels throughout North and South America and Europe I have noted repeated
attempts to define, through action and theory, the ideas associated with black
anarchy. Following is a brief, incomplete outline of some of the more common
aspects of what black anarchists think and do. These tendencies are numbered
for convenience, and not to show priority or importance.”
Questioning (the authority of) Psychiatry
In 1961, a young psychiatrist by the name of Thomas S. Szasz initiated a one-man insurgency against his own profession. After years of being a practicing psychiatrist, he became an outspoken dissident, hell-bent on dynamiting the foundations of psychiatry.
“Why is self-control, autonomy, such a threat to authority? Because the person who controls himself, who is his own master, has no need for an authority to be his master. This, then, renders authority unemployed. What is he to do if he cannot control others? To be sure, he could mind his own business. But this is a fatuous answer, for those who are satisfied to mind their own business do not aspire to become authorities.” -Thomas S. Szasz
Really Though, Not All “Black” People Give A Fuck About “White” Dreads
Text from back cover:
“Just ‘cus people share the same institutionalized form(s) of oppression don’t automatically mean they share the same visions and objectives on how to destroy it. These are important differences that shouldn’t be flattened. While these groups continue their mind-numbing attempts to create a new system of race essentialism within the shell of the old, some of us are having fun destroying all the systems. My anarchy is an existential expansion of individuality beyond the limitations of racial (and gendered) social constructs.”
Really though, not all black people give a fuck about white dreads pdf
Reclaim Your Mind
Text from back cover:
“As far as we know, we only have one life on this planet. Why should we waste it trying to adapt ourselves to the always more demanding expectations of this insane society when there is so much to live, explore, experience and discover? Changes always come from below and the old structures of oppression will inexorably fall when we stop relying on them.”
The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement
This zine highlights the history of the Deacons for Defense, an armed and determined group of black people in the heart of white supremacist terror.
Revolutionary Solidarity: A Critical Reader for Accomplices
A collection of essays that thoroughly critique identity politics, ally politics and other forms of liberalism found in anarchist circles.
Sabotage As One of the Fine Arts
Text from back cover:
“Sabotage is thus an action that serves as a propellant against the unreality that oppresses us. A practice that has not gone unnoticed by ideological recuperation, which has transformed it into “terrorism” (the professionalization of sabotage that has done no more than reinforce the system, due to its centralist, hierarchical and militarist character). Today, what is proposed is not the creation of an armed organization of this type, but widespread attack by small affinity groups, uncontrollable by any higher organization, that come together and dissolve like the lunar tides. The tides that are born of the awareness of how bad things are and of the worsening that awaits us due to events.”
Safety is an Illusion: Reflections on Accountability
Text from back cover:
“People in relation to each other create healthy or unhealthy exchanges. There is no absolute for “fucked up,” “healed,” or “safe” it changes with time, life circumstance, and each new love affair. It is with feelings of unease that I have observed the slippery slope of “emotional” abuse become a common reason to initiate an accountability process…Here is the problem with using this model for emotional abuse: it’s an unhealthy dynamic between two people. So who gets to call it? Who gets to wield that power in the community? (And let’s all be honest that there is power in calling someone to an accountability process.) People in unhealthy relationships need a way to get out of them without it getting turned into a community judgement against whoever was unlucky enough to not realize a bad dynamic or call it abuse first…These processes frequently exacerbate mutually unhealthy power plays between hurt parties. People are encouraged to pick sides and yet no direct conflict brings these kinds of entanglements to any kind of resolve.”
Scandalous Thoughts: A Few Notes On Civil Anarchism
From back cover:
“To negate the role of individual action in favour of a vague conception of the “class struggle” of yesteryear is a dangerous fiction. Certainly, since it is also the project of the State to destroy the volition and value of the individual; it cannot be called revolutionary, except in the autocratic uber-political sense of being ruled by statist apparatus – none of which desire empowered individuals or likeminded groups of individuals who want freedom.”
Small Town Organizing for Anarchists
This zine contains a wealth of helpful suggestions for anarchists living in small towns who want to create anarchy. Topics covered include finding other anarchists, deciding on what projects to work on, figuring out how to relate to liberals, and doing a distro—this zine is full of good ideas and advice.
Not only for small towns, the authors of the zine state: “If you can count the active anarchists in your areas on your fingers, this guide is for you.”
Smashing the Petri Dish: Abbreviated Inquiry Into Abandoning the Concept of Culture
From back cover:
“For many, to abandon culture seems a project too daunting, shocking, and counter to what we may have always believed. But when we talk of undoing the entirety of civilization, are there questions too colossal to ask and material too compact to cut through? To dispute culture itself, and the physicality of its politicized manifestation, society, is to question civilization’s very premise, that we are controlled and manipulated by external forces that have an agenda ultimately incompatible with that of the individual, regardless of their desires (although there may be illusory moments of adaptability). Whether there are direct lines drawn to individuals or groups in power, or the rigid formation of patterns and textures over time, culture controls. It must, or it ceases to exist. Culture can be viewed as the summation of who we are as social beings, or the parameters we live within. Both are unsatisfactory for one attempting an uncivilized and unrestrained existence. If we are to live entirely different, than what seems foundational and what binds all of this (civilization) must be unglued. The imprint must be erased. The structures must be shattered, so as to open up the space for our unimpeded wild selves to roam.”
Some Notes on Insurrectionary Anarchism
This zine lays out the basic principles of insurrectionary anarchism: attack, autonomous self-organization, rejection of management, illegality, informality, the synthesis of individualism and communism, and immediacy.
Subversive Anarchy Past and Present
The illegalist current is an offshoot of individualist anarchism. Refusing to be exploited, forced to work for some rich tyrant, instead the illegalist chooses to rob them. It’s an anti-work ethic for individual autonomy to be realised in real life right away through Individual expropriation also known as individual reclamation.
Individual reclamation gained notoriety in France in the last decades of the 19th and early 20th century gave birth to what was to become known as illegalism.
This zine written by Renzo Connors highlights illegalist, individualist anarchy past and present.
Total Destroy #3 A Milwaukee Anarchist Periodical
Text from back cover:
“In a police report describing a black bloc at the Republican National Convention, one ever-so eloquent officer claimed that he observed a group of over one hundred anarchists “doing being totally out of control”. While we certainly are flattered by the sentiment, what the clever officer witnessed was neither doing nor being. It was not the performance of an act or even a state or quality of having existence. He bore witness not to us in a certain state of existing, nor embodying any stable identity. Dumbfounded, his inability to identify any particular mode is, in fact, illustrative of what he stumbled upon. He witnessed an opening of a space in the policed grid of desire and action – an invention of new trajectories, possible bodies and unheard of futures. He observed us mapping a new virtual landscape of otherworldly affects – a zone of indeterminacy, an autonomous zone, as it were. It was the actualization of our potential; a widening of the virtual-actual circuit tracing the flows between who we are and what we can be. He witnessed, but failed to really see, our bodies in a perpetual and intensifying dance of annihilation and genesis of our selves. He’d be wrong to say we were either doing or being. What he desperately termed our doing-being was in actuality a becoming – our becoming totally out of control.”
Tearing Down the Prison of Civilization
From back cover:
“Industrial civilization demolishes every form of life in its way, its activities spread mainly in the so called “underdeveloped” countries in which its creation will return under the form of tons of garbage. Deforestation, nitrates in seas and rivers and methane in the air are some things of which the meat industry grants to life. The mass imprisonment and murders of animals as much as biotechnology that experiments on them for the creation of more efficient organisms, verify the ultimate domination over living beings. The mining activities drain the Earth and pollute everything around them. On the other hand the endo-authoritative competition for control of energy presage the new bloodshed on the planet at the time when the resources will be increasingly depleted.
For us, chaos is the negation of every monolithic reality, every dogma, every exaltation. The monolithism of every standard imposes the classification of everything that surrounds it and its hetero-determination. The compass of chaos is this that leads to the infinite possibilities of life liberated from authoritative relations. Chaos and anarchy are inextricably connected inside the journey towards the unknown of possibilities, where each moment gestates its own surprise. The constant insurrection, the continuous polemic against every authority, tears down the idols and everything that attempts to occupy the throne of truth.”
Terror Incognita
Terror Incognita challenges conventional notions about consent, violence, sexuality, desire, and freedom, in hopes of pushing the discourse about these subjects far out of familiar territory.
The Abolition of Work
Text from the zine:
“No one should ever work. Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child’s play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn’t passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act.”
The Cops in Our Heads: Some Thoughts on Anarchy and Morality
From back cover:
“Anarchy is not the goal of revolution; it is the situation which makes the only type of revolution that interests me possible —an uprising of individuals to create their lives for themselves and destroy what stands in their way. It is a situation free of any moral implications, presenting to each of us the amoral challenge to live our lives without constraints.”
The Cops in Our Heads_ A Few Words on Anarchy and Morality pdf
The Phoenix Project: Initiatives of Combative Anarchy, 2013-2014
A collection of the first 14 communiqués of the Phoenix Project, an anarchist initiative of informal attacks against power.
Text from this zine:
“For us, there is no middle ground. They who declare openly their anarchist intentions are facing a decisive dilemma, to either act or give up anarchy forever. There can never be anarchy at the rear of coffee shops and gossiping… Either act or shut up…”
The Limits of Contemporary Anti-oppression Theory and Practice (A critique of Privilege Theory and Cultural Essentialism)
Text from back cover:
“Communities of color are not a single, homogenous bloc with identical political opinions. There is no single unified antiracist, feminist, and queer political program which white liberals can somehow become “allies” of, despite the fact that some individuals or groups of color may claim that they are in possession of such a program. This particular brand of white allyship both flattens political differences between whites and homogenizes the populations they claim to speak on behalf of. We believe that this politics remains fundamentally conservative, silencing, and coercive, especially for people of color who reject the analysis and field of action offered by privilege theory.”
The Limits of Contemporary Anti-Oppression Theory and Practice pdf
The Reproduction of Daily Life
Text from the zine:
“The everyday activity of slaves reproduces slavery. Through their daily activities, slaves do not merely reproduce themselves and their masters physically; they also reproduce the instruments with which the master represses them, and their own habits of submission to the master’s authority. To men who live in a slave society, the master-slave relation seems like a natural and eternal relation. However, men are not born masters or slaves. Slavery is a specific social form, and men submit to it only in very particular material and historical conditions.”
The Smart Phone Society
Text from zine:
“If you define a cyborg society as one in which human relationships are mediated and shaped by technology, then our society certainly seems to meet this criterion, and our phones play a starring role. But our relationships and rituals have long been mediated by technology. The rise of massive urban centers — hubs of connectivity and innovation — would not have been possible without railroads and cars.
Machines, technology, networks, and information do not drive or organize society —people
do. We make things and use things according to the existing web of social, economic, and political relationships and the balance of power. The smartphone, and the way it shapes and reflects existing social relations, is no more meta-physical than the Ford Rangers that once rolled off the assembly line in Edison, New Jersey.
The smartphone is both a machine and a commodity. Its production is a map of global power, logistics, and exploitation. Its use shapes and reflects the perpetual confrontation between the totalizing drives of capital and the resistance of the rest of us.”
The Sun Still Rises (Conspiracy of Cells of Fire)
Text from back cover:
“We believe that the concept of the anarchist urban guerrilla isn’t a separate identity one assumes only while engaging in armed attack. Rather, we feel it’s a matter of merging each person’s private and public life in the context of total liberation . We arnt only anarchists when we throw a Molotov at a riot police van, carry out expropriations, or plant an explosive device. We’re also anarchists when we talk to our friends, take care of our comrades, have fun, and fall in love . We aren’t enlisted soldiers whose duty is revolution. We are guerrillas of pleasure who view the connection between rebellion and life as a prerequisite for taking action.”
