Text from the zine:
“We want to create the possibilities of acting with people who feel stifled in the social cages imposed on them by authority and want to rebel… Our joy is great in any such new meeting with new comrades who bear the sign of complicity. No matter their numbers… What is important is that the effort is worth it…”
From back cover:
“Caught in this schismatic abyss, I find myself compelled towards a practice of individualism. Why individualism, rather than collectivism? My body is often found within the machinery of Leviathan which is that collective known as society. The ultraleft collectivists and supporters of communisation would whisper in my ear that I am duty bound to the means-of-production of Leviathan and would seek to draw me into their economic-politics. But I’d say that projects, such as Tiqqun and others, which seek to synthesis communisation theory with anarchist praxis, are little more than bad
faith preachers, as they locate freedom exclusively within the domain of society and deny the immediate power and freedom of their flesh.”
Text from back cover:
“The collectivist message of The Coming Insurrection has little in common with insurrectional anarchy: the revolutionary theory flowing from the individual’s passionate uprising to appropriate the fullness of life for themselves, attacking all that controls and exploits, finding commonalities and affinities with others from which spring the real commune – the friends and accomplices of the guerrilla war against the totality of authoritarian society. Their insurrection may be coming, mine has come, it is an individual revolt. With no sovereign systems of morality, theory, principles or social abstractions standing above the singular individual, the nihilist anarchist attacks all systems, including identity and ideology systems, as obstacles to our self realisation. The struggle is against not only the domination of controlling social organisation and widespread tranquilisation, but also against inherited repressive programming and the force of daily life, and so our struggle is a constant tension where what we must destroy and transcend is much more obvious than where we might end up.”
Text from back cover:
“Anarchy, however, demands the organization of the new anarchist urban guerrilla, if we don’t want it to degenerate into a meaningless poetic chatter, doomed to be followed by the alternative integration in the system. Concepts that are not armed, like anarchist individualism, nihilism end up being harmless words in the mouths of even more harmless individuals who confuse anarcho-nihilism with the subculture of “antisocial lifestyle”. Anarcho-nihilism combines the propaganda of words with the propaganda of shootings, fire, dynamite. Its dynamic is forged on the anvil of actions where consciousness and experience meet in a never ending dance and not in the keyboards of the digital world of nothing.”
A well-written, thorough critique of identity and a proposal for its total abandonment.
From back cover:
““The strategy of creating a mass society or system of order is a strategy of discouraging individuality, chaos, and uniqueness. This strategy includes presenting a one-dimensional view of individualism that is defined by capitalism. But for individualism to be unique and
chaotic, it can not be limited by the confines of formal organizations or socialized constructs.”
“I want to weaponize chaos as an individualized attack on all governance and social order. I envision anarchy as a wildfire that blackens the civilized, domesticated kingdom of institutional and social domination. Getting free is more than just attacking capital and the state. At least for me, it also means creating your self every single day beyond society’s attempts to define you as a static being.”
From back cover:
“Like all governments, presidents, and authority, psychiatry never gave me freedom. Assigned psychiatric labels didn’t help me – they only filled me with an internalized sense of victimhood and inferiority. Medication didn’t ‘cure’ or ‘fix’ me – only damaged me, numbing me to my own senses in order to create an emotional void between me and the fuckery of civilized life. So instead, with nihilist celebration I descend into madness, taking aim at social order and civilization. With armed animalism I realize now that there was nothing to fix my natural contempt for domestication and social control reminds me that I was never ‘broken’ to begin with.”
Descending into Madness_An Anarchist-Nihilist Diary of Anti-Psychiatry pdf
Text from back cover:
“My freedom is not a promise for the future, but a way to continuously confront the world where I exist now, taking possession of my life with all my might, in conflict with everything that stands in my way. This ongoing conflict (which will not end simply because we somehow manage to eradicate the entire institutional framework of authority) is what makes the essential destructive, negating aspects of anarchist practice one with the creative aspects. Consciously creating our lives as our own means destroying every chain that holds as back, smashing through every barrier that gets in our way. Thus, there is no use in waiting for some condition to hand us our freedom. We need to act now for our own sakes and on our own terms, not for any cause nor on terms set by those who want to maintain the ruling order.”
From back cover:
“Every attempt to free humanity en masse is bound to fail because collective self-determination is a contradiction in terms. There is no such thing as the common good, for there is no good that is common to all. Society, collective, and public are only convenient terms to designate individuals in the aggregate; they are not entities — they have no bodies, minds, interests, or real existence: A collective has no self, and is but a collection of selves who have waived their individual powers and will to self-determination, for what is claimed to be the interests of the majority. The price paid for collective unity is always the subordination of the member units, which is the antithesis of anarchy…”
“Anarchy is freedom, and this most assuredly includes the freedom not to be a socialist or to live like one, and the freedom not to limit one’s identity to any social role — especially that of worker. It’s the freedom not to participate in communal activities or to share communal goals, or to pray before the idol of Solidarity. It’s freedom not only from the rule of the State but also from that of the tribe, village, commune, or production syndicate. It’s the freedom to choose one’s own path to one’s own goals, to map out one’s own campaign against Authority, and, if desired, to go it alone.”
Text from the zine:
“Essentialism is the idea that there exists some detectible and objective core quality of particular groups of people that is inherent, eternal, and unalterable; groupings can be categorized according to these qualities of essence, which are based on such problematic criteria as gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, and class. These external qualities are almost always marked by visual cues, making the categories more obvious and/or easier to notice. These qualities contain social and — more importantly from an antiauthoritarian perspective — hierarchical signi cance to those marking the cues and those marked by the cues: sexism, in the case of gender; racism in the case of skin tone; the unwanted attention of authorities in the case of any and all different looking/acting people. Racism, sexism, classism, and most other forms of historical oppression are ideologies and policies maintained and justified by essentialism.”
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.”
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 back cover:
“Rather than adhering to these strict rules, we felt free to communicate our individual desires…
…My friends of all different socially constructed identities – by race, gender, sex, etc – could behave as they wished, without being concerned that they were fulfilling stereotypes or betraying their identities.
It’s far from utopian, but as leftism continues to demonstrate, utopia is impossible without authoritarianism.”
From Identity to Individuality_ A Nihilist’s History in Leftism pdf
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.”
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.
An insurrectionary anarchist periodical which provides essays and clandestine actions, critical of leftism and formal organizing.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
From back cover:
“I have no need for the herd philosophy of the self-deceiving and self-sacrificing fantasy of communization and its inner leftism. I am opposed to its collectivist conformist cult of the worker, which dissolves the individual into the permanent roles of producer and consumer. When I work, I do so because I am forced and blackmailed to. So I refuse the slave role of “worker”. I want to see work abolished as a concept. I want to see the means of production and distribution reduced to ashes, blown up, turned down, destroyed and replaced with vast food forests and lush colorful gardens grown on top of the rubble.”
Max Stirner_Individualist Anarchy_ And a Critical Look at Egoist Communism pdf
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.”
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.”
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.”
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?”
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…
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
“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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
