Fragment: Violence

  • 2017/09/07 18:25

From back cover:

“Outside of the UK many of the comrades have a much closer relationship to “violence” and “criminality” through bank robberies, organising attacks, fierce demos, stealing, fraud, counterfeiting etc. and added to that possibility the experience of clandestinity or living underground. Illegalism is the bread of the insurrection. Many have gone to prison already and we can learn about their cases in many places. In the UK there is a widespread lack of experience concerning the organisation of the attack, the recognition of the ideas and relationships of the affinity groups to the “criminal acts”. Going beyond the law is part of developing the anarchist-insurrectional project and this is part of the reason why the civil anarchists despise and neglect the cases of the imprisoned and fugitive comrades- because they reject their actions, the tendencies of attack and the global discourse of anarchists of praxis. Individual acts of violence/negation which are not approved by their group-think are regarded as part of the “criminal” or “terrorist” sphere and smeared as provocations. In this way, the civil anarchists become part of the discourse of power and compose themselves as a sector of repression.”

Fragment_Violence pdf

In Defense of Smoke and Fire

  • 2017/09/07 18:11

Originally published in Wild Fire no. 4, an anarchist prison solidarity newsletter. This essay is part of an ongoing conversation between anarchist prisoners on tactics.

wildfire.noblogs.org

Sean Swain is an anarchist held captive in the Ohio prison system. For more information, check out his support site. seanswain.org

In Defense of Fire and Smoke pdf

From Politics to Life: Ridding Anarchy of the Leftist Millstone

  • 2017/09/07 18:07

Text from the zine:

“From the time anarchism was first defined as a distinct radical movement it has been associated with the left, but the association has always been uneasy. Leftists who were in a position of authority (including those who called themselves anarchists, like the leaders of the CNT and the FAI in Spain in 1936–37) found the anarchist aim of the total transformation of life and the consequent principle that the ends should already exist in the means of struggle to be a hindrance to their political programs. Real insurgence always burst far beyond any political program, and the most coherent anarchists saw the realization of their dreams precisely in this unknown place beyond. Yet, time after time, when the fi res of insurrection cooled (and even occasionally, as in Spain in 1936–37, while they still burnt brightly), leading anarchists would take their place again as “the conscience of the left”. But if the expansiveness of anarchist dreams and the principles that it implies have been a hindrance to the political schemes of the left, these schemes have been a far greater millstone around the neck of the anarchist movement, weighing it down with the “realism” that cannot dream.”

From Politics to Life pdf

How To Form an Affinity Group

  • 2017/09/07 17:50

Another excellent zine on affinity groups, what they are and how to form one.

How To Form an Affinity Group pdf

I Am Also A Nihilist

  • 2017/09/07 17:46

Text from back cover:

“I don’t care whether it is Nordic or Oriental, nor whether or not is has a historical, political, practical tradition, or a theoretical, philosophical, spiritual, intellectual one. I call myself a nihilist because I know that nihilism means negation.

Negation of every society, of every cult, of every rule and of every religion. But I don’t yearn for Nirvana, any more than I long for Schopenhauer’s desperate and powerless pessimism, which is a worse thing than the violent renunciation of life itself. Mine is an
enthusiastic and dionysian pessimism, like a flame that sets my vital exuberance ablaze, that mocks at any theoretical, scientific or moral prison.

And if I call myself an individualist anarchist, an iconoclast and a nihilist, it is precisely because I believe that in these adjectives there is the highest and most complete expression of my willful and reckless individuality that, like an overflowing river,
wants to expand, impetuously sweeping away dikes and hedges, until it crashes into a granite boulder, shattering and breaking up in its turn. I do not renounce life. I exalt and sing it.”

I Am Also A Nihilist pdf

In Praise of Chaos

  • 2017/09/07 17:43

From back cover:

Anarchists are opposed to authority both from below and from above. They do not demand power for the masses, but seek to destroy all power and to decompose these masses into individuals who are masters of their own lives. Therefore anarchists are the most decisive enemies of all types of communism and those who profess to be communists or socialist cannot possibly be anarchists.

It is not by organizing into parties and syndicates that one struggles for anarchy, nor by mass action which, as has been shown, overthrows one barracks only to create another. It is by the revolt of individuals alone or in small groups, who oppose society, impede its functioning and cause its disintegration.

In Praise of Chaos pdf

Insurrection Anarchist Magazine Issue #4

  • 2017/09/07 17:33

An insurrectionary anarchist periodical which provides essays and clandestine actions, critical of leftism and formal organizing.

Insurrection Anarchist Magazine pdf

Insurgent Ferocity: The Playful Violence of Rebellion

  • 2017/09/07 17:32

From back cover:

“Rebellion is the aggressive, dangerous, playful attack by free­spirited individuals against society. Refusing a system of violence, refusing an organized, militarized form of armed struggle, allows the violence of insurgents to retain a high level of invisibility. It cannot be readily understood by the authorities and brought under their control. Its insurgent nature may even go undetected by the authorities as it eats away at the foundations of social control. From the rationalized perspective of authority, this playful violence will often appear utterly random, but actually is in harmony with the desires of the insurgent.”

Insurgent Ferocity_ The Playful Violence of Rebellion pdf

Leftism 101

  • 2017/09/07 17:27

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.

Leftism 101 pdf

Let’s Become Dangerous: For the Diffusion of the Black International by Conspiracy of Cells of Fire

  • 2017/09/07 17:23

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.”

Lets Become Dangerous pdf

Liberation, Not Organization

  • 2017/09/07 17:22

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.”

Liberation Not Organization pdf

Lone Wolves Are Not Alone

  • 2017/09/07 17:21

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.”

Lone Wolves Are Not Alone pdf

Manifesto Against Schools by Armeanio Lewis

  • 2017/09/07 17:19

From back cover:

“After being expelled I rushed home to write this essay. I didn’t think, I just wrote. I wrote how I was feeling, what I was thinking. I was nothing but a pure-being of anger and hatred. Arguably, I still am, but for this essay to really make sense, you must know this information. It may seem like the ramblings of an angry teenager, and technically it is. However, this essay caused a ruckus. Shortly after the publishing of this essay, 15 ARMATARK Trucks, the company that supplies school lunches and prison lunches, were sabotaged. Their tires slashed, and bleach poured into their engines. No news reported this, other than a communique found around schools in Portland. Shortly after that, an entire condo complex was burned to the ground. This fire was the biggest fire seen in Portland, and everything was torched. A claim was made, by Students For Insurrection (SFI for short). They declared they would not stop, and they didn’t.”

Manifesto Against Schools pdf

Mapping the Fire: International Words of Solidarity with the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire

  • 2017/09/07 17:19

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.”

mapping-the-fire_black-international pdf

My Iconoclastic Individualism

  • 2017/09/07 17:18

From back cover:

“But when we are condemned to hear socialists more or less theorizing in order to impudently and ignorantly state that there is no incompatibility between Individualist and collectivist ideas…when we hear someone try to make an invincible and unsurpassable iconoclast like Max Stirner out to be some tool for the use of frantic proponents of communism, then we may certainly have an ironic smirk on our lips. But then it is necessary to resolutely rise up to defend ourselves and to attack, since anyone who feels that he is truly individualist in principle, means and ends cannot tolerate being at all confused with the unconscious mobs of a morbid, bleating flock.”

My Iconoclastic Individualism pdf

Negate Politics, Affirm Cuteness

  • 2017/09/07 09:49

A zine against “growing up”, politics and workerism.

Negate Politics pdf

Never Work!

  • 2017/09/07 09:45

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?”

Never Work pdf

No Hope, No Future: Let the Adventures Begin!

  • 2017/09/07 09:45

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…

No-Hope-No-Future_-Let-the-Adventures-Begin pdf

Nihilist Anarchy, Insurrection, & Anti-Civilization

  • 2017/09/07 09:44

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.”

Nihilist Anarchy, Insurrection and Anti-Civilization pdf

Off The Leash

  • 2017/09/07 09:37

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.”

OFF THE LEASH pdf

Overcoming The Psychology of High School

  • 2017/09/07 09:30

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.”

Overcoming the Psychology of High School pdf

Post-Left Anarchy: Leaving the Left Behind

  • 2017/09/07 09:16

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_Leaving the Left Behind pdf

Post-Left Anarchy (Short Intro)

  • 2017/09/07 09:10

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.”

Post-left anarchy short pdf

Prison Break: An Anarchist Blueprint for Hedonism

  • 2017/09/07 09:06

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.”

Prison Break_An Anarchist Blueprint for Hedonism pdf

Questioning (the authority of) Psychiatry

  • 2017/09/07 09:04

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

Questioning Psychiatry pdf

Really Though, Not All “Black” People Give A Fuck About “White” Dreads

  • 2017/09/07 08:16

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

  • 2017/09/07 08:14

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.”

Reclaim Your Mind pdf

Revolutionary Solidarity: A Critical Reader for Accomplices

  • 2017/09/07 08:08

A collection of essays that thoroughly critique identity politics, ally politics and other forms of liberalism found in anarchist circles.

Revolutionary Solidarity pdf

Sabotage As One of the Fine Arts

  • 2017/09/07 08:07

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.”

Sabotage_As_One_of_the_Fine_Arts pdf

Scandalous Thoughts: A Few Notes On Civil Anarchism

  • 2017/09/07 08:02

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.”

Scandalous Thoughts_A Few Notes on Civil Anarchism pdf

Smashing the Petri Dish: Abbreviated Inquiry Into Abandoning the Concept of Culture

  • 2017/09/07 07:58

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.”

Smashing The Petri Dish pdf

Some Notes on Insurrectionary Anarchism

  • 2017/09/07 07:54

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.

Some Notes on Insurrectionary Anarchism pdf

Total Destroy #3 A Milwaukee Anarchist Periodical

  • 2017/09/07 07:48

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.”

Total Destroy #3 Milwaukee Anarchist Periodical pdf

Tearing Down the Prison of Civilization

  • 2017/09/07 07:47

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.”

Tearing Down The Prison of Civilization pdf

Terror Incognita

  • 2017/09/07 07:33

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.

Terror_Incognita pdf

The Abolition of Work

  • 2017/09/07 07:26

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 Abolition Of Work pdf

The Cops in Our Heads: Some Thoughts on Anarchy and Morality

  • 2017/09/07 07:25

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

Together: Booklet to Form Affinity Groups

  • 2017/09/07 01:13


Booklet that discusses affinity groups. Put together by anarchists in Germany.

Together Booklet on Forming Affinity Groups pdf

Towards the Destruction of Schooling

  • 2017/09/07 01:06

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.”

Toward the destruction of schooling pdf

Towards An Indigenous Egoism

  • 2017/09/07 01:05

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.”

Towards an Indigenous Egoism pdf