In recent days, we have witnessed a renewed conflict in the Palestinian region and an attack by the Islamist group Hamas on the lands under the control of the Israeli government, which was unprecedented in the past years or even decades. This incident shows more than anything that the Palestinian issue, which everyone liked to consider a “dead” issue, is still alive and with no apparent end in sight, at least as long as the governments exist!

The ancient land of Palestine belongs, first of all, to the people of this land. The people who once had a peaceful and happy life are now being slaughtered for decades in the meat grinder of nationalist and Islamist ideologies and the temptation to form Jewish, Arab, and Islamic governments… Continue reading The issue of Palestine is the issue of statism’s bankruptcy! →

From Scenes

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Appelism is an informal strain of authoritarian communism that has been gaining traction on this continent over the past decade or so. Taking up elements of both the revolutionary party structure and insurrectionary anarchism, this tendency rebrands authoritarian communism as something that looks like informal networks but acts like a party.

Appelists generally do not present themselves as appelists. The term “appelist” refers to The Call (L’Appel in the original French) by the Invisible Committee, written by some of the same authors as the 1999 journal Tiqqun. This is why “appelists” are sometimes also called “tiqqunists.” Both are terms popularized by anarchists to counteract appelists’ claims that they do not have an ideology or established political network.

Appelists’ dishonesty around this is part of a larger strategy of trying to cease being visible as a distinct group or milieu (which they term “opacity”). They then seek to invisibly coordinate various aspects of everyday life towards a form of communism, with an emphasis on building and controlling infrastructure. This is accompanied by a push to intervene decisively in moments of social conflict such that those situations escalate, struggles gain territory, and people are drawn into their infrastructure. Appelists will typically identify themselves as partisans, autonomists, or communists, if at all, though in North America it is more common for them to also selectively call themselves anarchists. Continue reading Against the Party of Insurrection: A Look at Appelism in the U.S. →

Notes on September 26th: Reflections on looting, black liberation and anarchism

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On Monday August 14th 2023, Philadelphia police officer Mark Dial shot and killed Eddie Irizarry as he sat in his car. Police initially lied saying that Eddie attacked the cop with a knife, but video footage showed that Eddie was shot in mere seconds while seated in his car with the window up. Following this Dial was suspended for 30 days pending termination. In early September Dial was charged with a number of crimes including murder but the presiding judge would eventually dismiss his charges. The cops who attended the court date in uniform cheered and celebrated when the charges were dropped. On September 26th, that same day Eddie’s family and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (alongside Black leftist groups like Black Alliance for Peace and the W.E.B. DuBois Movement School) organized a peaceful march through Center City protesting the decision. That demonstration dispersed after a couple hours but was followed by looting, initially in Center City before spreading to West, North, and Northeast Philly as the night went on.

The Black liberation movement is alive! Those who say it’s dead are either racist or not in the street and these revolts are the proof. Although the number of people in the streets was smaller than in 2020, there was widespread revolt across Philadelphia. Police killed Eddie Irizarry, a non-Black Puerto Rican, and Black people responded with revolt. Similarly in 2020 in Kenosha, WI when Kyle Rittenhouse killed two white people in the midst of a riot against police and later had his charges dropped, Black people rioted in the Bay Area. These are both examples of a Black consciousness that recognizes anti-Black systems regardless of if they are targeting Black people in a specific instance.
Continue reading so-called United States: Notes on September 26th: Reflections on looting, black liberation and anarchism →

Around two years ago hundreds of us were trying to block a deportation flight in BER-Airport. It ended up with us watching as families were entering the plane and being forced back to Afghanistan. We were enough people to stop the flight, but we lacked the creativity, the anger and determination. How could we stand still in face of such racist cruelty?
Within the ongoing brutalization of the borders all over the world, the German state started to propagate the need for a particularly isolated deportation prison. This means an expansion of the existing one in Schönefeld with a capacity of 120 imprisoned people by 2025.

A budget of 315 million euros has been decided for 2023-24 to finance the planned deportation prison at BER Airport.
Under one roof,all the institutions will function accordingly to enable asylum procedures and deportations to be fast: whether in the airport asylum procedure, in transit detention or in exit detention, people are held and locked up in Schönefeld during the asylum processes or/and until been deported.

Continue reading Death is a master from Germany – Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland →

From Ungrateful Hyenas Editions

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“Nothing is boring if you are aware of it. It may be irritating but it is not boring. If it is pleasant the pleasure will not fail so long as you are aware of it. Being aware is the hardest work the soul can do, I think.” — Solitude by Ursula LeGuin

As technological expansion hurtles forward at an increasingly dizzying pace, the presence of smartphones threatens to become normalized across the anarchist space; in many places, this presence has already been normalized for a long time. Among anarchists in the US, critiques of adopting smartphones, or any other new tech gadget, have generally failed to escape the dead-end binaristic logic of moralistic lifestyle politics. Choosing to live without technology is reduced to a form of consumer activism — an arbitrary personal code that is irrelevant to the struggle, or even harmful in terms of redirecting hostility against the state into judgments of individual consumer choices.

The concept of ‘there’s no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism’ has, predictably, become a banner of the ‘radical’ social media consumption frenzy that has engulfed anarchist milieus in these territories and paved the way for the current state of things. Today it is nearly unheard of to live without a smartphone; when attending a meeting or event, one must assume there is a smartphone in each and every pocket, and any critique of this reality is largely viewed as the squawking of old-timer, out of touch wingnuts.

In some places anarchists have resisted this process of normalization and maintained a clear and consistent critique of the impact of smartphone adoption, warding off the incursion from taking hold in the first place. Everywhere that this is not the case however, including but not limited to the US, where any such critique has long since faded, is there any going back? What would it look like to propose that anarchists ditch the technologies we have become increasingly dependent on and addicted to for over a decade, that have come to mediate so much of our lives, relationships, and forms of struggle? Continue reading Beyond the Screen, the Stars →