A collection of essays that thoroughly critique identity politics, ally politics and other forms of liberalism found in anarchist circles.
Posts by Warzone Distro
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.”
Security Culture: a handbook for activists
Text from the zine:
“This handbook (created in 2001) is the third edition of what we has been an evolving and growing document dealing with security issues and canadian activism. We would like to say a big thanks to the Collective Opposing Police Brutality in Montreal for editing some of the text of the original pamphlet and adding so many great examples to the Informants and Infiltrators section. We have replicated many of their changes in this edition.Thanks also goes out to Eric Drooker whose artwork we used throughout this pamphlet.”
Tech Tools for Activism
Text from the zine:
Slightly out-of-date but excellent reference point for computer security and activity.
Together: Booklet to Form Affinity Groups
Booklet that discusses affinity groups. Put together by anarchists in Germany.
The Tiniest Monstrosities: Nanotechnology and Social Control
Text from back cover:
“Nanotechnology creates the tiniest monstrosities capable of the greatest horrors, because they are capable of carrying the systems of social control directly into our bodies. We cannot even pretend that there is any room for dialogue here any longer. This is a blatant display by the rulers of this world that the maintenance of social peace is an act of war against all the exploited and dispossessed. It is necessary for those of us who desire the freedom to create our lives on our terms, who desire to remain human individuals capable of any sort of autonomous action, to act destructively against the entire system of social control, the totality of this civilization in which machines ride people and people slowly transform into machines. Here and now.”
The Tiniest Monstrosities Nanotechnology and Social Control pdf
Towards the Destruction of Schooling
Text from back cover:
“As students go hazily from class to class, box to box, schooling as a technique of social control perpetuates itself. And as leftists drone on about better education for the people, for the masses of people, they are unaware of what an important role they play in reproducing existent social and economic formations.”
Towards An Indigenous Egoism
From back cover:
“The idea of individualism that the European explorers and colonizers failed to realize was its rejection to duty, devotion and submission. I recognize no authority figure over me, nor do I aspire to any particular ideology. I am not swayed by duty because I owe nothing to anyone. I am devoted to nothing but myself. I subscribe to no civilized standards or set of morals because I recognize no God or religion. No amount of pressure, judgment, or force should cause me to restrain myself from that which I desire. Egoist anarchists have declared war on society, war on civilization.”
Unbridled Anarchy Writings by Enzo Martucci
From back cover:
“Consequently, anarchy, which is the natural liberty of the individual freed from the odious yoke of spiritual and material rulers, is not the construction of a new and suffocating society. It is a decisive fight against all societies — christian, democratic, socialist, communist, etc., etc. Anarchism is the eternal struggle of a small minority of aristocratic outsiders against all societies which follow one another on the stage of history.”
Voting vs Direct Action
A very basic introduction to why direct action is more effective than voting.
War Against the Information Age: A Future of Mass Social Control
From back cover:
Anarchistic and nihilist ideas are anathema to the information-age, they are the glitch in the database society which escapes classification and control. The imagination walking; dangerous and capable of unforeseen actions and moments of interconnection.
The future of civilisation is an increasing merger of state and corporate power, with the new sciences as an essential ally. With war and crisis always as a pretext, the elite have declared dominion over every free individual, animal, plant and wilderness. Emerging as the omnipresent machine intelligence that forms human beings to its whims, it damages and manipulates entire continents of beings. Reflecting our emptiness and our loss, the prison-society must be fought, because the logic which it operates on is a system of closure of parameters that work by exclusion of vast amounts of alternative possibilities andpotentials. It is self-referential and non-creative; it pursues a model of progress that is the abolition of personal individuality and freedom.
Our struggle pushes forward into the future, let’s strike against the concepts and mechanisms of their control.
War on the American Government: Insurrectionary Anarchy in the Early 20th Century
This zine gives a brief history of the insurrectionary anarchists and their actions in the early 20th century.
Text from back cover:
“War, Class war, and you were the first to wage it under the cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws. There will have to be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder: we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions.”
War on the American Government Insurrectionary Anarchy in the Early 20th Century pdf
War Against The Machines! By Gianluca Iacovacci
Gianluca Iacovacci is an eco-anarchist, who served 4 years for a string of sabotages.
Text from back:
“The technological race is financed by hitech companies such as Amazon, Apple, Samsung, Sony etc., which unscrupulously feed the market with computers, biocomputers and devices, all useless stuff producing imbecility, good for mass control and statistics, responsible for the polluting extraction of minerals used in the fabrication of circuits; the very circuits that at a later stage and in an absurd consumerist cycle will be dismantled with bare hands and the help of acids in China, Ghana, Vietnam and India; even by children whose little hands are particularly fit for the purposes. Is it worth having smartphones, tablets, Iphones and other weird devices?
Thanks to various international trade treaties and the support of banks, the IMF, the WTO and the like, multinationals move their tentacles to control the global market. Some examples: intensive food production and onecrop plantations (Monsanto, Nestlé, Bayer, Novartis, genetically modified seeds); the pharmaceutical industry and the production and testing of medicines, psychotropic drugs and vaccines (on humans and animals); the
meat industry which causes mass extermination and the spreading of viral diseases, consumes tons of water, thousands of hectares of forest and soil for the production of animal feed destined to fatten segregated animals; a third of those cereals would be enough to feed half of the human population, but it must be clear that the transformation of animals into ‘products’ is due to consumer demand.
Now we can discuss if antitechnology resistance is paranoid. But I think that some will share what I believe in and which made me end up in jail, and will decide autonomously how to act. Of course, in the face of these forces one could give in to cowardice, cunning and ignorance of the facts, and pretend nothing is wrong, wait for a divine sign, take refuge in one of the few uncontaminated places and live like hermits. But human nature possesses an animal instinct of conservation and defence of their habitat and the elements that give Life.”
We Refuse To Be Invisible: Black and Brown Vegan Power
Text from the zine:
“The purpose of this pamphlet is to create a platform for black and brown radical vegans to illustrate their experiences which not only negate settler-colonial white supremacy, but also institutional and cultural speciesism. While this pamphlet can not include the words of every black and brown vegan anarchist/anti-authoritarian, it is considered a good starting point in creating much needed dialog on speciesism, white supremacy and anarchy/anti authoritarianism. Unfortunately, veganism is still predominately associated with the Westernized stereotype of a white, classist privileged diet – marginalizing low-income radical vegans of color.”
What Savages We Must Be: Vegans Without Morality
From back cover:
“It is not a morality that governs my actions, but rather an individualist desire to wage war upon all systems, moral or not, that attempt to subjugate me and destroy the earth I require to survive. My decision to become vegan did not come from a vegan morality or a new law prohibiting me from consuming flesh and secretions. It came from ungoverned free thought which helped me view society in a critical way, discovering pragmatic ways of enacting my own project of liberation. My vegan anarchist praxis is a shared affinity with the nonhumans who fight against the constraints and torture devices of modern technology, slaughterhouses, and the humanmade hell of industrial society. There is no God, government, or morality to save us. Only our individual selves, the decisions we make and the actions we take.”
Why Anti-Civilization?
Text from the zine::
“We are often told that our dreams are unrealistic, our demands impossible, that we are basically out of our fuckin’ minds to even propose such a ridiculous concept as the “destruction of civilization”. So, we hope this brief statement may shed some light on why we will settle for nothing less then a completely different reality then what is forced upon us today. We believe that the infinite possibilities of the human experience extends both
forwards and backwards. We wish to collapse the discord between these realities. We strive for a “future-primitive” reality, one which all of our ancestors once knew, and one we may come to know: a pre/post-technological, pre/post-industrial, pre/post-colonial, pre/ post-capitalist, pre/post-agricultural, and even pre/post-cultural reality — when we were once, and may again be, wild!”
Why Break Windows by Armeanio Lewis
From back cover:
“And this is where the anarchist reaction diverges from the simple reaction. As anarchist, we take things further. We are radical, rebellious, iconoclastic, nihilistic individuals who’s only goal is the destruction of which destroys us. Capitalism, White Supremacy, Patriarchy, all of these apparatuses of domination that aim to control us, that expect us to submit. They are not met by a simple proclamation of againstness but a swift and decisive action that not only proclaims but shocks those in power. From the simple smashing of windows to the placement of a bomb or the robbing of the bank our actions are heard and felt rather than ignored and treated as everyday life.”
What is Green Anarchy?
“The green anarchist perspective is diverse and open, yet it does contain some continuity and primary elements. It has been influenced by anarchists, primitivists, Luddites, insurrectionalists, Situationists, surrealists, queer and trans eco-defenders, nihilists, deep ecologists, bioregionalists, eco-feminists, various indigenous cultures, anti-colonial struggles, the feral, the wild, and the earth. Anarchists, obviously, contribute the anti-authoritarian push, which challenges all power on a fundamental level, striving for truly egalitarian relationships and promoting mutual-aid communities. Green anarchists, however, extend ideas of non-domination to all of life, not just human life, going beyond the traditional anarchist analysis.”
Youth Liberation: Burn the Schools and Destroy the Media!
From back cover:
I spent 13 years being educated in the public schools, I have watched loved ones waste decades working at them, and I have even spent several years as a wage slave in the school system myself. Based on this experience, I have decided that from an anarchist point of view, and especially a green anarchist viewpoint, there is almost nothing redeeming about the experience of schooling and the public school system. Any helpful ideas and emotional support that youth get from a stray iconoclastic teacher, tutor, or counselor are completely outweighed by the nature of the educational system as a whole: a mass bureaucratic Machine of increasingly militaristic and inherently prison-like institutions, whose admitted purpose is to mold humans from their natural wild state into the roles of good citizens and docile workers. For anyone who claims to oppose government, authoritarianism, or hierarchy (let alone civilization) to apologize for or support the public school system is sheer hypocrisy and back-stepping.
Wolf Hunt Sabotage
This comprehensive guide explains the how and why of hunt sabotage aimed at saving wolves. With an increasing number of states (including Michigan) allowing for the hunting of wolves, this zine outlines one response. From the inside: “Hunt sabs are an effective tactic at stopping, inhibiting or drawing attention to the massacre of wildlife. Hunt sabs most often include direct intervention and are meant to disrupt a hunt. Actions can take the form of a blockade comprised of dozens of people at the office where wolf hunting permits are sold, or along roadways where hunters are engaging in hunts. But it also includes powerful propaganda, such as flyering communities before a hunt, or sharing this manual at your local NRA meeting and outside permit offices.
