This interview was conducted on October 16th, 2022 and was slightly edited for clarity. Paul Messersmith-Glavin: Tell us about yourself: where you’re from, and your relations with family and friends in Iran. Comrade: I was born in Tehran. And I still have a lot of … Read more
Bibliophilia & Anarchism in Star Trek: Picard
Following up on our previous analysis of the political and philosophical affinities between Mikhail Bakunin and Richard Wagner, in which we discussed social ideologies such as feminism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and anarchist revolutionism in the epic opera The Ring (1874), we turn now to an examination … Read more
Organizing Disruption: Fiction that Calls Us to Action
Review: Kung Li Sun, Begin the World Over (AK Press, 2022) & Robert Evans, After the Revolution (AK Press, 2022) Javier Sethness Castro, author of “From ‘Trotsky in Tijuana’ to ‘Chernobyl’: Caution & Reason” said, “[t]he promise of historical and speculative fiction is the reconstruction of the past … Read more
The Quarantine Commune
We call ourselves the Moth Mother Collective to honor our kitchen’s many winged inhabitants. Even before coronavirus, we strove to live our lives in common. Six days of communal meals each week, a rotating chore wheel, a garden, workspace, and collective care for the needs … Read more
This is How We Heal
This essay was written collaboratively by two Portland protest community members, Susan Anglada Bartley and Lexy Kahn, and is the result of conversations after participating in protests, both as frontline protestors and as writers and journalists. Throughout the article, we switch italicized and non-italicized fonts (Lexy in … Read more
Jewish Anarchism
A Review of No Masters But God, by Hayyim Rothman, (Manchester University Press, 2021) If anarchists know Jewish history at all, it is likely the role of Jewish radicalism in the political battles of the early 20th century. Jews made up huge portions of the anarchist … Read more
Silence in Perpetual Noise
Prison creates a different picture in the minds of those who have been there and those who send people there. We are indoctrinated to believe the prison system was created to keep our friends and neighbors safe. That prisons exist to help rehabilitate those criminals … Read more
Who’s Processing Whom? Digital Commons, Digital Blinders, and a Fraught Social Future
“Are You Doing the Processing, or Are You Being Processed?” —Processed World, #1 (1981) This … signals the metamorphosis of the digital infrastructure from a thing we have to a thing that has us. —Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Almost four decades ago I … Read more
Black Sheep of all Classes: Fifty Years of Consensus Politics in Christiania
Anyone who has been involved in a group project that strives for consensus knows that working shit out together is hard. It’s challenging to collectively do the work of assessing options, making decisions, and executing plans that sometimes carry real individual and collective risks, even … Read more
Living Communism: Theory & Practice of Autonomy & Attack
May Day, 1987: thousands of black-clad Autonomen (“those who are autonomous”) riot in West Berlin. After a decade spent honing their street-fighting tactics, they stage an offensive against state repression by blocking streets, occupying buildings, and fighting a low-intensity urban war against the police. The … Read more
