#ias #perspectives

A women overcome with emotion raises a clenched fist in solidarity with protestors while a women next to her applauds.

Sustain the Riot: From “Defund the Police” to Revolutionary Abolitionism after the George Floyd Uprisings

By Justin A. Lang

“Fascism has temporarily succeeded under the guise of reform. The only way we can destroy it is to refuse to compromise with the enemy state and its ruling class.” — George Jackson, Blood in My Eye “A politics of abolition could never finally be … Read more

Mutual Aid Top 5s

What Kept Us Going This Year?

What are your top five things that have brought you comfort and/or joy during the past year? It can be anything: foods, movies, people, animals, thoughts, books, records, yoga positions, a particular hike, a new pen,  an old friend, whatever! Sam Smith Perspectives copy … Read more

Interview with a Comrade from Iran

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

Organizing Disruption: Fiction that Calls Us to Action

by Dylan Patrick Delos Santos Clymer

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

Silence in Perpetual Noise

by Alayne Ballantine

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

by Chris Carlsson

“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

by Tauno Biltsted

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

by Spencer Beswick

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

From “Trotsky in Tijuana” to “Chernobyl”: Caution & Reason

by Javier Sethness Castro

The promise of historical and speculative fiction is the reconstruction of the past in the present, or of the present in the past, and the contemplation of what might have been, or of what might still be. As the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud wrote, creative writers … Read more

Demodernizing Anarchism

by Jesse Cohn

I should begin by acknowledging my positioning: I am writing as a white settler anarchist on land stolen from the Neshnabé (Potawatomi) in so-called Northwest Indiana, and I intend here to address mainly other settler anarchists of North America/Turtle Island. I feel that we are … Read more