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→
The origin of modern science in the 16th and 17th centuries corresponds with the origins of modern capitalism and the industrial system. From the beginning, the worldview and methods of science have fit in perfectly with the need of the capitalist social system to dominate nature and the vast majority of human beings. Francis Bacon made it clear that science was not an attempt to understand nature as it is, but to dominate it in order to twist it to the ends of humanity — in this case meaning the current rulers of the social order. In this light, science must necessarily be subjected to social analysis by anyone claiming to call the present social reality into question. Continue reading A Balanced Account of the World: A Critical Look at the Scientific World View→
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)→
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→
So the anarchist individualist as I mean it has nothing to wait for […] I already considered myself an anarchist and could not wait for the collective revolution to rebel myself or for communism to obtain my freedom.
— Renzo Novatore
I conceive of anarchism from the side of destruction. This is what its aristocratic logic consists of. Destruction! here is the real beauty of anarchism. I want to destroy all the things that enslave me, enervate me, and repress my desires, I want to leave them all behind me as corpses. Remorse, scruples, conscience are things that my iconoclastic spirit destroyed […] Yes, iconoclastic negation is most practical. Continue reading A Critique, Not a Program: For a Non-Primitivist Anti-Civilization Critique→
Fin dai tempi in cui per la prima volta si è definito movimento radicale autonomo, l’anarchismo è stato associato alla sinistra. Un’associazione il più delle volte problematica. I militanti di sinistra con un incarico di potere (compresi quelli anarchici, come i capi della C.N.T. e della F.A.I. nella Spagna del 1936-37) hanno sempre considerato d’ostacolo ai propri programmi politici il fine anarchico della trasformazione totale della vita — e il conseguente principio secondo cui i fini dovrebbero essere già insiti nei mezzi di lotta impiegati. L’insorgenza reale è sempre scoppiata altrove rispetto a qualsivoglia programma politico e gli anarchici più coerenti hanno intravisto la possibilità di realizzare i loro sogni proprio in un luogo sconosciuto ed altro. Tuttavia, a più riprese, quando i fuochi dell’insurrezione si raffreddavano (e talvolta perfino mentre bruciavano ancora ardentemente, come nel 1936-37), i leader anarchici hanno finito coll’assumere il ruolo di «coscienza della sinistra». Continue reading Dalla Politica alla Vita – Wolfi Landstreicher→
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)→
