An insurrectionary anarchist periodical which provides essays and clandestine actions, critical of leftism and formal organizing.
INSURGENCY: An Anarchist Journal of Total Destruction
This (long awaited) zine contains a few action reports and a collection of essays written from a post-left anarchist perspective. Topics include insurrectionary anarchy, queer nihilism, veganism, individualism, nihilist anarchy and anti-civilization.
Leftism 101
This zine collects two excellent essays by Lawrence Jarach: “Leftism 101” from Back to Basics: The Problem of the Left put out by the Green Anarchy collective and “Anarchists, Don’t let the Left(overs) Ruin your Appetite” from Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed #48.
The first essay looks at the origins of Leftist thought and anarchism’s relationship to it. The second essay provides a brief overview of anarchists’ historical relationship with “the Left,” concluding that there is no point in engaging with it.
Let’s Become Dangerous: For the Diffusion of the Black International by Conspiracy of Cells of Fire
Text from the zine:
“No, our burned banks are not a way of protest or a token of friendship and solidarity with the “poor person” who does nothing and sits on his couch. It is a way to express our “I”. An “I”, that wants to stand out from the herd of slaves, an “I” that does not bow the head down, an “I” not waiting for the crowd to revolt, an “I”, which claims his own name, his own “acronym” and does not hide behind anonymity. The meeting time of the revolted ‘Egos’ takes up the name that we give to it. Its name is FAI and it is our “we”. A collective “we”, armed with razors against our enemies.”
Liberation, Not Organization
From back cover:
“I desire liberation , not organization. While most leftists would claim that the two go hand-in-hand , or at least that the second is necessary to achieve the first ( and for some the second might even “ wither away ” sometime after “ The Revolution ”), to me , the two seem contradictory. I am not fighting for a world which is run better ( more efficiently and more fairly ), I am fighting for a world which doesn’t need running ( one which is radically decentralized ) . Here lies the contradiction between the Left , and those fighting for autonomy and anarchy.”
Lone Wolves Are Not Alone
From back cover:
“It is all those conspiratorial anarchists illegalists who made the anarchist insurrection their only home land. It is those who chose to stay away from the glory of the dead ideologies and bureaucracy of the social anarchism which awaits the masses in order to begin its insurrection. Lone and unique they armed their desires, put aside the pathetic rot of the mob and went on to the storming of heaven.
Their star fills our eyes, the fire floods our thoughts, the vendetta of revenge beats in our hearts and, our hands embrace the guns and dynamite which they inherited to us. We live for an endless explosion of actions, thoughts, feelings, desires, which reaches the edge of the world.
There is no nostalgia, there is only today, while tomorrow is already late. Today is our turn, our life, our time.”
Mapping the Fire: International Words of Solidarity with the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire
Text from the zine:
“The following texts were translated and edited by the imprisoned members of the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire and by the comrades of Contra Info. We warmly thank them therefore, as well as the comrades A,M and E who contributed decisively in the handling of this attempt. Finally we greet the Chilean comrades from Entropia Ediciones for the version in Chile, and the comrades of Actforfreedomnow, boubour(A)s and 325 for the version in English.”
“They might have imprisoned our bodies but not our ideas, beliefs and values, which will continue to escape through various projects of insubordination. One of these projects is the creation of “Black International” editions, which are supported by us, the imprisoned members of the Anarchist Revolutionary Organization Conspiracy of Cells of Fire, and from certain comrades who every day, every moment, embody practically the value of SOLIDARITY.”
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?”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
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 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.”
Together: Booklet to Form Affinity Groups
Booklet that discusses affinity groups. Put together by anarchists in Germany.
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.”
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 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!”
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.”
