Thanks to my partners, and to anok, autumn leaf cascade, enkidu, ingrate, rice boy, and taigarun, all long-term and thoughtful contributors to anarchy101.org. Thanks also to the others on that site (including many anonymous questionners). I truly appreciate getting to have provocative conversations about things I care about with people who I don’t even know.
And thanks to Jessica, the excellent beginner.
I hope I have done justice to us all.
In the following pages you will meet
AnarchicSaint: ast
Anok: ank
Apio: api
Asker: asr
Aragorn: a!
Aragorn23: a23
Autumn Leaf Cascade: alc
Blacque: blq
Dot: dot
Enkidu: enk
Fren (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Introduction
Perhaps you thought we were gone? Two years feels like an eternity in these fast-too-fast times when epic conflicts have a full arc over a weekend, 140 characters creates volumes of commentary and opinion, a day seems like forever when you are refreshing a screen over and over. This project is the opposite of this spirit. Herein we hope to share themes that are fuller in scope, that merit reflection and contemplation. We intend to plant seeds and to care for them as they flower, mature, and decay. The half lives of our pleasures, concerns, and conflicts should be measured in decades and not in the blink of someones eyes or even the length of time the average radical stays active.
Welcome to issue five of Black See... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Editorial
This issue of Black Seed, the seventh in five years, represents yet another editorial group change and yet another optimistic push for the project. We can now say that the project is indigenous-led, for what that’s worth. We intended for this issue to be filled with manifestos about what that means, but perhaps these fragments say as much as we can in manifesto-language
Black Seed is a publication of an indigenous anarchy. Two words that mean a million or, to put it another way, we are here, from this place, and we are free from the rules that have come before us, from the ideologies of Empire and Colony. This ridiculous assertion is possible because whatever hope or vision we have for the future begins with th... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Caveat: these words are occasionally used by people in good faith. Most of the time though, they are used by people who are looking to win arguments and perhaps to bond along certain simplistic lines — not to understand things better or to have different kinds of conversations. Be particularly wary when you hear (or use!) two or more of these words in close proximity to each other.
These terms can be categorized into three themes — action (vs. theory), safety and identity. In practice these themes are closely connected because of the underlying assumptions of the people who most commonly use them. These assumptions are that answers are clear (therefore don’t require particularly deep thought or especially complicate... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Poke an anarchist whose project involves an exchange of money for goods, and chances are you will have to duck to avoid the stream of sticky, apologetic defensiveness.
“If we don’t charge, how do you expect us to provide you with this stuff and still sustain ourselves?”
“What should we do?”
“It’s classist to think that people can do this for free...”
And so on.
While the apologies and excuses do acknowledge that something contradictory and complicated is happening, the rationales tend to fall back into the same old purity reasoning, not much more engaged than disingenuous complaints about Zerzan’s use of a typewriter.
These simplistic responses d... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Many people have been heartened by the December events in Greece, which, along with France, seems like one of the few remaining places where passion has not died in the hearts of resisters, where people will still back up their outrage with fire and bricks. Anarchists around the country responded variously but positively, some going far enough out of their way to add their name to an open letter or a blog entry, while others took to the streets in support.
So imagine the shock, then, when a mere two weeks after anarchists had warmed themselves with pictures of fires in Greece, that there are such very different responses to a riot in Oakland, California.
In the early hours of January 1st, a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) caveat: Both feminists and anarchists come in wildly divergent flavors (some mutually exclusive), and yet those labels remain useful. I do not continually say “this kind of anarchist” or “my kind of feminist,” so please understand that I’m biased and referring to the anarchist and feminist ideas that are most interesting to me.
Feminism is meaningful as a perspective on what humans need, and what “human” means. This is qualitatively different from feminism being merely about defining “woman” more expansively. Feminists believe that both men and women are constrained by gender/sex roles in this culture (and most cultures that have survived under the current paradigm). We beli... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) acknowledgments
Most of the material in this book has been written by anonymous anarchists and posted to the Internet. Anarchists write anonymously because they don't believe in singular authorship. They write anonymously because in many contexts what they are saying is illegal.
We write anonymously because we are conspiring to take apart everything in this world.
Occupy has been as energizing of a moment for anarchists in North America as we have had since the events in Quebec City in 2001 and Seattle in 1999. This book is about this moment in the context of past anarchist occupations and of future anarchist actions. It is an expression of anarchist hope, anger and energy.
This book would not have been possible ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) This article is a critique. Criticism is a topic and a practice that requires a lot more thought and concern than it generally gets.
All activists, organizers, all people who are interested in social change, we are all critics. Leftism is a tendency of a particular kind of criticism, with a history of a particular kind of action and analysis.
Criticism usually isn‘t done well. It is easier to say that something is wrong than to say how to do something right.
Usually criticism is an exercise in pointing fingers — you’re not doing this right, what is wrong with you for not knowing how to do it better; I would never do it that way — that is more about shaming than it is about really trying to figure... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Passion Fruit
Passion Fruit: Anti-Authoritarian (Con)sensuous Games
PO Box 63232
St. Louis, MO 63163
83 pages; $4
This zine describes physical, sexual and flirtatious games people can play with each other that are creative and as safe as seems reasonable. It discusses issues of consent, communication, and disease. It tries to be fun and responsible.
I have a soft spot in my heart for the thinking behind this zine. I grew up in the time before AIDS, when the shots from the Sexual Revolution were still reverberating (including the ones of penicillin). My early feminist years were spent thinking and reading about how breaking the corporate, button-down affect, getting in touch with our bodies, refusing to ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Science is Capital
Revolution can no longer be taken to mean just the destruction of all that is old and conservative, because capital has accomplished this itself. Rather it will appear as a return to something (a revolution in the mathematical sense of the term), a return to community though not in any form that has existed previously. Revolution will make itself felt in the destruction of all that is most “modern” and “progressive” because science is capital.
— Jacques Camatte [1]
Science is a system of knowledge acquisition that is based on empiricism, experimentation, atomization, rationalizing causality, and methodological naturalism and that is aimed at finding the truth. The... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) More faults are committed while we are trying to oblige than while we are giving offense.
— Tacitus
As people who reject the status quo, we are all critics. But most of us have learned how to critique badly, and so we either are, or are perceived to be, judgmental, dogmatic, sloppy, and ideological, as opposed to helpful, contextual and interesting.
Anarchist culture, to the extent that it operates on middle class white (protestant) values, is a culture of interpersonal niceness, with a mythology that tells us that people respond better to support and that support always looks like calm voices and careful communication, that good intent on everyone’s part is not only essential but is always apparent. (If... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)