Os Cangaceiros was a group of delinquents with nothing but contempt for the self-sacrificial ideology practiced by “specialists in armed struggle”. This uncontrollable band of social rebels wreaked havoc on the French state by attacking the infrastructures of oppression, supporting popular revolts, stealing and releasing secret blueprints for high-tech prisons, raiding the offices of corporate collaborators, and creating their lives in complete opposition to the world based on work. This volume, translated by Wolfi Landstreicher, is the first collection of the writings of Os Cangaceiros in English. Continue reading A Crime Called Freedom: The Writings of Os Cangaceiros (Volume One)→
Due to the immensity of the current social order and the facelessness of the bureaucratic and technological systems through which it maintains its power, one can easily come to see it as inevitable, as a predetermined system of relationships in which we have no choice but to play our role. The aim of the state and the ruling class is total domination over all of existence, and here in the heart of this monster it can seem as though they have, indeed, achieved this aim. Aren’t we forced, day after day, to engage in activities and relationships not of our choosing? Continue reading On Dispossession and Individual Responsibility→
Introduction
The development of an anarchist practice that can act intelligently requires a capacity to analyze the situation in which we are struggling in terms of our desires and our principles. In other words it requires the practice of theory. In order to avoid the transformation of our theoretical endeavors into ideology — the reification of ideas into dominating concepts that control and direct our thinking — it is necessary to grasp certain tools, particularly those that allow us to think critically. Continue reading Critical Thinking as an Anarchist Weapon→
“From a certain point onward, there is no turning back. That is the point that must be reached.”
– Franz Kafka.
For us anarchists the questions of how to act and how to organise are intimately linked. And it is these two questions, not the question of the desired form of a future society, that provide us with the most useful method for understanding the various forms of anarchism that exist. Continue reading Insurrectionary Anarchy→
Submission to domination is enforced not solely, nor even most significantly, through blatant repression, but rather through subtle manipulations worked into the fabric of everyday social relationships.
These manipulations — ingrained in the social fabric not because domination is everywhere and nowhere, but because the institutions of domination create rules, laws, mores and customs that enforce such manipulations — create a logic of submission, an often unconscious tendency to justify resignation and subservience in one’s everyday relations in the world. For this reason, it is necessary for those who are serious about developing an anarchist insurrectional project to confront this tendency wherever it appears — in their lives, their relationships and the ideas and practices of the struggles in which they participate. Such a confrontation is not a matter of therapy, which itself partakes of the logic of submission, but of defiant refusal. It requires a subversion of the existent, a development of different ways of relating to ourselves, each other, the world and our struggles, ways that clear reflect our determination to refuse all domination and to reappropriate our lives here and now. I am talking here of a real revolution of everyday life as the necessary basis for a social revolution against this civilization founded on domination and exploitation. Continue reading Against the Logic of Submission by Wolfi Landstreicher→
It seems to have become a given among many anti-authoritarians that radical theory is an academic pursuit. On the one hand, there are the ideological activists who accuse anyone who attempts to critically analyze society or their own activities in a way that goes beyond the latest hip anarchist sloganeering of being armchair intellectuals or academics. On the other hand, there are those who supplement the income of their academic/intellectual professions by writing tracts criticizing society, the left or even their own professions, but in such abstract and insubstantial terms as to be meaningless in relation to their lives. These intellectual “radicals” and anti-intellectual activists remain equally enslaved to society’s discourse. Radical theory is elsewhere. Continue reading A Wrecking Ball for Ivory Towers by Feral Faun→
Nel giro di pochi mesi dalla loro ascesa al potere in Germania, i nazisti avevano di fatto distrutto quella che veniva percepita come una delle meglio organizzate classi lavoratrici del mondo. Il Partito Comunista e quello Socialista con i loro sindacati, milizie e organizzazioni sociali erano stati messi al bando; gli attivisti erano stati giustiziati, imprigionati, esiliati o costretti alla clandestinità. I quartieri proletari erano isolati e soggiogati dal terrore dei rastrellamenti e delle perquisizioni casa per casa.
“…the absence of imagination needs models; it swears by them and lives only through them.”
It is easy to claim that there is no anarchist movement in North America. This claim frees one from having to examine the nature of that movement and what one’s role is in it. But a network of publications, bookstores, anarchist households, squats and correspondence connecting those with anti-statist perspectives most certainly does exist. It has crystallized into a subculture with its mores, rituals and symbols of “rebellion.” But can a subculture create free individuals capable of making the lives they desire? The anarchist subculture certainly hasn’t. I hope to explore why in this article. Continue reading The anarchist subculture: A critique.→
Stirner’s Demolition of the Sacred
by Wolfi Landstreicher
“In crime the egoist has hitherto asserted himself and mocked at the sacred; the break with the sacred, or rather of the sacred, may become general. A revolution never returns, but an immense, reckless, shameless, conscienceless, proud—crime, doesn’t it rumble in the distant thunder, and don’t you see how the sky grows ominously silent and gloomy?”—Max Stirner Continue reading An Immense, Reckless, Shameless, Conscienceless, Proud Crime (en/gr)→
