Back again...

Another year and in many ways it feels like another movement.

Sure you’ve got the same old internecine and personal squabbles, but there is
a change in the wind, you can feel it. People are angry and they are starting to
once again actually do something about it. The next few years will see a boom
in radical action - £50. An entire generation has come of age with nothing but
venom for the bastards and there isn’t some damb squib in red to passify the rage.
WELCOME TO BOOKFAIR

Labour are doing their best to try and secure a vote, sure.They’ve veered to
the right once again, desperately grasping at the center as the Tory scum,
sat upon the corposes, spew fascist rhetoric in a desperate appeal to the
entrenched right. Xenophobic, Transphobic, Traditionalist & Conservatist.
Fuck the lot of them.

The next fight is upon us.

The tools already in our hands.
Put the shit behind you and let your fire rage.

To the revolution now.

Peter Ó Máille
 Anarchists are doers first and foremost. We demonstrate the logic of our
position through action. Where the city council will not feed or house its own
citizens, we provide food and shelter — no questions asked. When “common
sense” might recommend calling the police, we resolve conflicts directly and
with empathy. Anarchists are squatting buildings and fighting fascism; they’re
defending forests and fighting Cop City at this very moment. We prefigure
the world we want to create by building it now, not later. It is a task made
existentially urgent in an era of unprecedented climate sabotage.

Then there are those of us who spend our time just typing away, spinning
To Achieve What is Greater

out chapters, articles and books about anarchist history and theory. We’re not
out on the streets. We’re not even out of our houses most of the time. Too
many of us, and I put myself squarely in this camp, are tucked away in our
rooms endlessly writing articles like this one. Unlike our friends on the front
lines, it isn’t clear what we’re doing to stop ecological collapse or protect the
marginalized from violence.

Some of us are genuinely unable to get physically involved in struggle. We

may have caring responsibilities, we might be disabled, or we might find the
social barrier to personal interaction too difficult overcome. We might work
multiple jobs. Others have precarious immigration status and worry about the
consequences of visible resistance. For folks in these situations, writing and social
media are often the only option available. That’s not a shame — it’s something
to be celebrated. Online activism, as so many disability activists emphasize, is a
unique and powerful arena for effecting change in the modern age.

On the other side, consider those who cannot choose to delegate their struggle
to someone else: rough sleepers, sex workers, trans activists, and other groups
facing the brunt of violence from state and capital. Every day is a battle for
them. Like those who are only able to participate virtually, circumstance has
made the decision for those trapped on the front line.

But for those of us who aren’t bound to our role by disability or other life
circumstances, we choose to live in the past and in prose, discussing arcane
figures and their ideas with no concrete plans to put those ideas into practice.
We get into squabbles online, we debunk articles from the liberal press, we
interview one another. But I often wonder: to what end? It’s all very well for
me to write about how we can rebuild society on principles of mutual aid, yet I find it
difficult to imagine how such a piece actuallymakes anyone’s life better — especially if
I’m not putting it into practice myself.

This is perhaps an odd article to release at a book fair. Events like these are vibrant
hubs of exchange for the written word. But I’m preparing this piece between Rosh
Hashanah and Yom Kippur, a time for introspection. It’s hard not to ask ourselves to
do more when we have fascism knocking at our door and the future of humanity in
question. In that vein, I am impelled to ask what writing about anarchism actually does
in material terms when the need for action is so immediate.

I brought this struggle to some brilliant friends at The Commoner. I expressed

disappointment and frustration at having relegated myself to editing and writing
rather than picketing and community activism. But they quickly set me straight. This
wasn’t the right way to think about it, they said. It isn’t about preferencing one type of
activism over another — it’s about finding the part you can play. That
might be working as a street medic; it might be coordinating a community kitchen.
And, yes, it might indeed be writing.

Among those of us who choose a life of writing, there is a temptation — even coming
from within ourselves — to dismiss us as radical tourists unwilling to put skin in the
game. It is true that there is a privilege associated with choosing not to get involved.
And yet, even in the privilege of that choice, it is still important that we recognize
where everyone’s strengths lie. For some anarchists, writing is not just a refuge, but
the place where they excel. That is the best use of their skills. They are not fighters or
builders, but thinkers and communicators. They are recorders of history, promoters
of causes, and speech givers. They are argument makers. This has enormous value in
anarchism and always has, dating back to its genesis.

Anarchist theory, upon which so much ink is spilled, is important to understand so

we don’t rehash the same internecine conflicts ad infinitum. For example, the unity of
means and ends is the bread and butter of anarchist thought and praxis: we don’t need
to reinvent that wheel, and we forget these first principles at our own peril. Crucially,
by talking about theory, we can promote its evolution and thus ensure its continued
relevance. Essential critiques like those levied by Black anarchists at white-centered
anarchism for the past five decades have changed the movement for the better, even if
we still have a long way to go. Stagnant anarchism is dead anarchism.
We also benefit from a careful consideration of anarchist history, even with the caveat
that every anarchist before us faced unique material conditions. Every historical
episode is a body of evidence which we can use to better understand our path forward.
What worked? What didn’t? Asking these questions can help us avoid pitfalls in
the future. This is where the writers and communicators are invaluable. We share
these records with modern readers and, simultaneously, keep track of history as it is
being made today. Through these services, we can provide future anarchists with the
information necessary to work more efficiently toward a world free from domination
and exploitation.

And let us not forget that writing itself can be activism, whether it be letter writing
in prisoner solidarity campaigns or by providing a platform to revolutionary causes.
Through these activities, the line between direct action and writing become blurred
to the point of meaninglessness. A community organizer might write a piece about
challenging the State by providing aid to migrants living in precarity, for example.
Capturing their experiences may induce others to join their organization or inspire
others to start similar programs. Internally, the author may find the process of writing
about their work helps articulate certain ideas they had long felt but not taken a step
back to evaluate. This could provide them with new tools to ensure that their project
remains focused and resilient moving forward.These interwoven relationships between
direct action and support work become not just mutually reinforcing but costabilizing.
Without one, the other withers away.

Instead of wistfully pining for some romantic notion of what every anarchist should
be doing, we should instead think about how we — writers, communicators, thinkers
— can provide meaningful assistance to those engaged in direct action. This may
take the form of hands-on activism, but what will likely serve us better is to make
use of our skills with pen and paper. Consider that in many countries in the heyday
of anarchist thought, workers and peasants were often illiterate. To get around this,
anarchists would read out articles to these groups in factories and community centers.
The anarchists would also tap into existing organizing efforts to organically meet
these populations where they were at. They threw events like dances, picnics, and
festivals where anyone was welcome. At these events, live readings and distribution of
periodicals and pamphlets were all commonplace. Anarchist communication joined
direct action toward a common purpose, both made more effective for the presence
of the other.
This paradigm brings to mind a classic Talmudic story. In this tale, two rabbis, Tarfon
and Akiva, debate which is more valuable: study or action. Tarfon argues action is
more important, while Akiva supports study as the greater good because it leads to
action. My instinct is to support Tarfon; after all, what good is sitting around reading
books and writing down your thoughts all day if you never actually do anything? So
I was left confused when I learned that, apparently, it was Akiva who ultimately won
the argument. It wasn’t until my own rabbi elaborated that I came to agree: Akiva says
study is greater exclusively on the condition that it leads to action. His revelation was
that without follow-through, it is meaningless.

This story reflects my own frustrations over the utility of pamphlet writing. If our
written words never lead to action, our work is indeed futile. We cannot merely shout
into the wind. Moreover, our theory and our arguments must be based on real-world
input lest they become completely irrelevant. It was Peter Kropotkin who once said,
“If what is posited by theory doesn’t work in practice that means that the theory is not
complete; it hasn’t expressed the conditions under which the principle it has affirmed
is true.” That’s why we have to work arm-in-arm with our friends on the front lines
growing sustainable gardens, building alternatives to policing, and putting their bodies
on the line to stop fossil fuel extraction and nuclear proliferation. It is only in tandem
that we can achieve what is truly greater.

This is the spirit I would like to bring forward into the new year. I’d love to get involved
in local direct action and mutual aid projects, but I don’t want to downplay the genuine
contribution of writing and editing, either. We are more of a global movement than
ever before with better ideas than at any point in anarchist history. Writing and
communicating via the internet allows us to connect and collaborate across continents
and oceans, reaching sympathetic parties in unprecedented ways. It’s how we sound
the alarm about the climate; it’s how we drive home the troubling rise of neofascism.
It is through study, in conjunction with action, that we help connect the oppressions of
State and capital to our increasingly perilous lived realities. Making our ideas accessible
to a broad audience isn’t some ivory tower lark. On the contrary: it is a critical aspect of
the anarchist project without which I fear we may not survive.

Søren Hough
Søren is a queer Jewish anarchist, molecular biologist, and film nerd. He believes in the self-
liberation of all peoples of the world from kyriarchy, exploitation, and domination. You can find
his work at The Commoner (www.thecommoner.org.uk), where he also serves as an editor.
 How best do we eliminate the violence that Racialized Capitalism,
Patriarchy, and the State have enforced on us through violence and other
means? What does it mean to survive in this world? In order to survive
consistently, we reinforce State violence in our lives daily. We have been
led to believe the myths that only certain actions and structures will save
us. That the party will save us, the church will save us, the community
will save us. We encounter a myriad of saviors but salvation never arrives.
The Ways In Which We Survive

We must contend that there are no saviors. Following that conclusion,

radicals of all stripes want to emphasize that more militant actions must
be taken to confront our oppressions. Militant action, however, is not
simply throwing a molotov cocktail at a state building. Care is militancy
too! Care starts first with those in your community. This however poses
the question, What use is community for those of us whose Father,
Brother, Lover serves just as much of a threat to us as a cop. Most will
have you separating Militant Action from Care, we often hear from
some Black Panthers on how the Party was emphasized and personal life
took a back burner, I want us to counter these things, we must not leave
our politics at the doorstep of the homes of our lives. We must realize
Revolution happens every day.

What if every time someone was evicted we treated it as the World

ending crisis that it is. Political Survival is not just something that we
have to endure from the State but also from our family, our friends and
our community. Survival has us living paycheck to paycheck. Survival
forces us to choose between food and being. Bear in mind this is not a
call for a complete disregard of circumstances. I understand we all must
eat, have somewhere to sleep and put clothes on our back. Rather this
is a critique of the ways we have to survive in a World of Antiblackness,
Capitalism, Colonialism whereby we often reproduce the very State
and Capital we seek to destroy. We must understand that the State and
Capital expands and consumes everything around it because that world
wants to survive as well. Survival has us thinking that we aren’t trapped
in Crisis. We are just worried about how to pay our rent, how to survive
the terrain that is set before us. This is Political. The unmaking of our
World is not just about attacking the State apparatus on the outside but
on the inside as well. One must start at home.
In times of Crisis we think first of how we must survive. Crisis manages us to
the point of tying our hands behind our backs and driving us to say “See its a
recession right now we must wait.” We must understand that there is no waiting
for the perfect time. The State manages Crises to have us forever in a state of
Survival. Why worry about revolution when you can’t feed your kids? Militant
Care, that is approaching care with the same seriousness we attribute to militant
actions, is the way forward. We must actually think of ways to care for each other
during times of crisis. How best do we get fed, How do we show up for those
around us during Climate Crisis. Often times I see “Leftist” look for ways to
make themselves “Safe” In these times and by all means ARM YOURSELVES
but I often think of the white man who murdered Jordan Neely on the subway
by putting him in a chokehold. Jordan had been yelling he was hungry and
ready to die. His pain and suffering was seen as a threat by Daniel Penny and
the surrounding passengers. Neely was not only a threat to the one who put
him in a chokehold but to the man who held him down. Daniel Penny the man
who put the chokehold on Jordan stated that he has no remorse because he felt
unsafe. Daniel Penny’s so called survival depended on Antiblackness, This has
also happened in “Leftist spaces” When in CHAZ an “Autonomous Zone” that
went up during the George Floyd rebellion two teenage Black children were
shot. In the “Leftist” Org Black Hammer a 18 year old was kidnapped and later
was found with a “self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.” These are times
where our lack of care can be transformed into Cults, if we aren’t Militant about
Care, Fascism can seep into our ideology, our movements, and our lives. Who
are we if we don’t actually care for one another. Destroying the World takes an
ultimate act of care. One of love and one of hate but we must have both.

Antiblackness, Capitalism, and the State would have us going from crisis to crisis
managing our survival while it slowly consumes us and eventually itself. Why
wait for Crisis to happen before we respond? What happens when, instead, we
end the World? While I love uprisings and rebellions, why wait for the Police and
the State to kill us? This is no easy task; this calls for everything. Survival would
have you asking for your “rights”, Survival has us asking to be made human. To
be human means to be designated certain attributes I don’t want i.e whiteness,
patriarchy, etc. It means that others have to not be human. Survival asks that we
work with the structures that we are given, that we work within the violence of
the state and in doing so inflict this violence on those around us. Survival would
have us waiting for a perfect plan. I don’t think we have to have all the answers to
I saw this the other day. Love it but lost who made it...
If you know send us a message!
have our liberation. I don’t think liberation is a end destination point where we
can loudly proclaim “We are done !” Liberation is continual but we can make the
first steps, the first mistakes. If everything is political, survival is too and can be
used against us to crush movements and moments of tension. This was seen in
2020 with the George Floyd Rebellion when people organized for Defunding
the Police. I didn’t see the problem at first but, quickly, it became clear that
this was a politic of Survival and was used to quash concerns and rebellion.
Defunding the Police as a slogan asked for something reasonable. It could be the
first step to lessening the economic violence the Police has over communities
and this was seen as a legitimate tool of survival.Instead, we saw funds for Police
departments increase like never before. An actual bill was introduced to increase
funds with George Floyds name on it. We must get past the thinking that there
are legitimate tools of Survival. We must see the Crisis as what it is.

Even tools like mutual aid and terms like community can be used as a means of
Political survival, I am not saying that we do away with these completely. Instead
I suggest that we ask ourselves what purpose they serve in moments where Crisis
is being used to consume us. What does the term “community” mean when we
have communities that hold abusers. Often times political survival is becoming
one with or protecting the one with power. Power over food, over bodies, over
our communities. This Power does not come from nowhere but is designated by
the State, patriarchy and whiteness.I often think about the Black Panthers and
how their survival programs were a threat against the State. The NGO’s have
made this impossible the State sees no threat in the use of crowdfunding for
survival. I think of such actions where Squatters will take buildings as a whole
or Tenants rise up and strike for rent. I also think of the underground actions
of the Jane Collective and those who are circulating abortion care to those that
need it across the USA. These are actions of Care and Militancy.

As Rev. Alvin Herring says “Fire is the great equalizer.” We must look for ways
outside of Political survival, we must become fire. Abolition always starts at
home, in our communities and in ourselves. Our levels of care and our levels
of love and revolution do not have to depend on managers of revolution or
the State. We must be antagonistic to survival, we must learn to fight what is
seemingly “inherent” to our “nature”. We must forge new ways forward. This
essay is not meant to be a prescription as not everyone’s so-called Liberation
looks the Same. We must engage in curiosity of ourselves and others, there are
many paths forward and but we must first come to the conclusion that the State
has coopted our very survival.

A starting point is within our daily lives, how we go to jobs and even our
imagination.. We must realize that we must use all of the tools that we have
been given and imagine new ones. We must not get stuck in ideologies, dogma
and the so-called Vanguard. I have seen Anarchists get caught in this too as if
there is one way to live or imagine or fight for our liberation. We must attack
every day, with everything that we have in our arsenal. We must not allow crises
to manage us or our communities. We must hold tension and be able to shift
and change with the ever evolving collapse of infrastructure. We must know
who our friends are but most importantly we must know who our enemies are.

O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed shall he be who repays

you with what you have done to us! Psalm 137:82

Saint
Saint is a Black anarchist from North Texas, trying to navigate this world closer
towards the Apocalypse. This essay will be featured in the next issue of haters magazine,
which can be found on haters.life
 Struggles Over Gender Today

Twenty years ago, we published a poster asking, “What would the

world look like without gender?” Since then, this question has become
even more urgent—and even more challenging to answer.

On the one hand, we’ve witnessed major shifts in cultural understandings

of gender. As Jacinta Bunnell put it, when our poster appeared, “There was
not a culturally unified language for talking about gender fluidity at this
point; so much of how we spoke of gender was still either/or.”
Today, nonbinary identities and gender-neutral pronouns
have emerged from trans/queer subcultures and online
Gender Subversion Today

communities into workplaces, schools, and public debates.

Trans communities have received unprecedented visibility.

On the other hand, what had been a rising wave of conservative

backlash has grown into a tsunami. It is no exaggeration to
describe the reactionary program as gender fascism. As the
popular saying goes, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you,
then they fight you, then you win.” The struggle for gender self-
determination has reached the “then they fight you” stage.

Today, access to abortion care has been severely restricted in large

regions of the US, while hundreds of proposed laws target trans people,
especially youth, with restrictions on medical care, participation in sports,
bathroom access, legal documentation, entertainment and culture, and
more. At the same time, heads of state are citing the preservation of
gender roles among their chief justifications for full-scale wars.

Yet at the same time that reactionaries are attempting to use

state power to crush gender non-conformity and eliminate
reproductive autonomy, the identity politics that emerged
from 20th century liberation struggles are experiencing a crisis.

We saw evidence of this crisis on the second day of Donald Trump’s

administration in 2017. The Women’s March protests in Washington,
DC and around the US were among the most widely attended
protests in a decade or more. But anarchists and other radicals largely focused
on other priorities, and the massive energy of the mobilization dissipated
quickly—in part because the category of “woman” does not suffice to
describe all those who suffer as a consequence of gender oppression.

The right-wing culture war offensive on the terrain of gender seeks to take
advantage of this crisis. While the breadth of support for abortion rights worries
Republican strategists who are concerned with their electoral prospects, the right
is gambling that it can target trans people with impunity, seeing them as a small
and politically less powerful demographic ripe for scapegoating. By framing their
attacks as “defense” against existential threats to children, the family, and the
gender order itself, they have inflamed their base with a sense of mission.

The same social changes that have uprooted fixed notions of gender and
enabled more expansive ways of being have also destabilized models of
organizing that relied on coherent notions of identity. We need new ways
of understanding ourselves to fight the forces that divide and oppress
us, new ways to conceptualize who we are and what we can become.

In the words of Alana Moraes,

“It is no longer possible to organize a collective action that still holds on to any fiction
about ‘being a woman’; it is not possible to ignore the complicities of white/bourgeois
feminism with colonial/racial power. The crisis of feminism is the vanguard of the
revolutionary political crisis: there is no longer a subject of history; the demand for
recognition/representativeness was swallowed up by neoliberal devices; there is no
identity politics that can unite us; really, we don’t want to be part of the same story,
we no longer want to organize our desires for a good and dignified life into a state
grammar that can govern our lives. The beauty of feminism’s implosion is that it lets us
see the hundreds of sharp shards we still have left. Feminism becomes a shattered place,
but a place of investigation into what political action can be within life, with life and
not outside it; what can make us dangerous again; how are we going to escape all these
gender and identity traps?”

These “gender and identity traps” loom all around us, and the stakes
are urgent. How do we resist the rising tide of gender fascism without
reverting to models of identity that no longer serve us?`
Abolition and Self-Determination

“What would the world look like without gender?”

One way to imagine our way towards this could be to propose gender
abolition. Inspired by the movements against the prison industrial
complex that propose not more comfortable cages but an end to caging
altogether, we could propose that gender itself is an oppressive system
that cannot be reformed. This is not the same as saying that “gender isn’t
real”—if it weren’t, there would be no need to abolish it!—but rather
to insist that just as it has been constructed, it can be deconstructed.

What is gender, after all? As we know it, gender divides a wide range of
human qualities and capabilities into mutually exclusive categories, such
as “masculine” and “feminine.” This artificial division requires a wide range
of forces—social pressures, policing, assorted mythologies, and a variety of
technologies from laser hair removal to steroids and Viagra—to uphold the
illusion that people come in two standard models rather than a wide spectrum
of possibilities. To abolish gender would mean dismantling the various systems
of coercion that force us into one of two narrow boxes while hierarchically
ranking them and punishing anyone who pushes their limits.

Unfortunately, some trans-exclusionary “radical feminists” have attempted to

appropriate the language of “gender abolition” to describe their own hateful
project. As contradictory as this may seem—given their efforts to gatekeep who
counts as a woman and their alliances with the anti-feminist extreme right—
they insist that gender, as a system of patriarchal social norms, perpetuates harm
against people of the female sex. By itself, this assertion sounds reasonable—
until they continue that, therefore, trans people are somehow uniquely
responsible for upholding gender and thus causing harm to “women.”

This cruel argument pits some victims of gender oppression against

others, blaming trans people for their efforts to survive in a system they
didn’t create. The supposed “abolition” that these transphobic activists
pay lip service to only reinforces the rigid essentialism of sex, further
stigmatizing efforts to shape our bodies and lives on our own terms.
In fact, it can only perpetuate gender as we know it, not abolish it.
In this context, we need to be clear about precisely what gender
abolition in the service of liberation could mean today.

As an alternative framework, we propose gender self-determination,

insisting on our autonomy to shape our bodies, presentations, and identities
according to our own needs and desires. As we argued in a previous essay:

“By shifting the discussion from the limits of rights to the horizon of self-
determination, we propose a radically different world, in which no authorities—
neither governments, religions, nuclear families, nor anything else—can confine us
within their narrow visions of who we should be and who we can become.”

What could this look like in practice? We’ve seen an explosion of creative
new forms of gender identification in recent years, with new language and
pronouns expanding far beyond binaries of male/female and cis/trans. These
are encouraging, but they may not suffice to dislodge the power of imposed
gender norms to shape the material circumstances of our everyday lives.
Self-determination must mean more than choice in a consumer framework,
a maximum of individual options for constructing our online profiles and
Amazon wish-lists. In an alienated consumer society in which we are constantly
being appraised and compelled to sell ourselves, defining ourselves with ever
more precise categories and hashtags will not be enough to get us free.

Others have argued that we can appropriate pharmaceutical and surgical

technologies to experiment with producing gender according to our own
preferences. That’s an important start—and necessary, even life-saving, for
some—and furious right-wing efforts to restrict our access to these methods
indicates the threat they pose to guardians of the gender order. Nonetheless,
so long as some gendered qualities and categories are valued while others are
not, seizing the biomedical means of production to give us more latitude to
construct our bodies and identities still will not serve undermine all the different
ways that the prevailing gender roles constrain and oppress people.

How might we approach the task of undoing gender, combining the best elements
of gender abolition and gender self-determination? We can propose some points of
departure by identifying four aspects of gender that should be abolished:
- Abolish gender segregation: Ensure that people of all genders have access
to the same opportunities, resources, social spaces, and forms of agency.

- Abolish fixed gender roles: Break the association between certain traits and certain
genders, demonstrating new constellations of the qualities and capabilities that are
currently associated with one gender or another.As the original poster suggests,you can
be strong without being a boy and sensitive without being a girl; while this sentiment
is increasingly accepted today, how much further can we go towards breaking free of
the fixed roles and binaries that organize our thinking about human beings?

- Abolish gender hierarchies: End practices that privilege one gender over another,
and those that value some qualities and capabilities over others because of the
gender they are associated with. Hillary Clinton becoming president would not
have served to qualify our society as feminist—if a person of any gender has to
outdo all other contenders in demonstrating traditionally masculine characteristics
in order to get a foothold in politics, and if all political institutions continue
functioning according to patriarchal priorities and protocols, gender oppression
remains in effect even if not everyone in a position of power is a man.

- Abolish gender gatekeeping: Do away with the boundaries that control who can
identify with any gender. Defending trans identity, gender nonconformity, and other
departures from fixed binary gender represents a step towards this goal.

Abolishing these dimensions of gender could create the space for the free flourishing
of all people outside of oppressive roles and identities. We can affirm both the
creative impulses that lead millions of people today to define themselves in gendered
terms outside of birth assignments and binaries, while also taking aim at the
structural conditions that constrain our lives regardless of how we identify.

As anarchists, we believe that we can only be free when all of us are free,
and that everything that expands the horizons of freedom for others
will benefit us, too. Nowhere is this plainer than on the terrain of gender.

CrimethInc.
Participants in the CrimethInc. collective adapted this from the text announcing a
new version of their classic gender poster. Visit crimethinc.com for more!
Full text at https://crimethinc.com/GenderPoster2023
 CrimethInc.
Saint
Søren Hough
To Achieve What Is Greater
The Ways In Which We Survive
Gender Subversion Today