Huliaipol, Zaporozhye oblast, Ukraine in 2022. Nestor Makhno sits behind sandbags holding the blue-and-yellow flag of Ukraine, while soldiers take selfies with him.
Not the man, but a concrete statue and, as with most things in Ukraine, the statue has suffered in the war. Russian shelling decapitated it in May 2024.[2] Even with the strained resources of war, and in a city whose population shrunk from 19,000 to – by one estimate – 500, it was repaired, returned and reinforced. Ukrainian, and Ukrainian-aligned soldiers have posed beside it, some carrying flags or wearing patches inspired by Makhno and his Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine.
An anarchist who fought against states standing guard over one.
Financial crises and waves of refugees, social inequality and ecological catastrophes, terrorism and wars… Western civilization is like a bullet train accelerating toward a wall. And at the controls are governments that are not only incapable of solving people’s problems, but whose very existence is a problem.
Projekt A [2024] is a documentary that contradicts typical clichés about anarchism and makes one thing clear: another world is possible. It does so through numerous interviews with anarchist activists in different parts of Europe: at a refugee center in the Exarchia district of Athens; in the forests where protests against nuclear energy took place in Germany; at the headquarters of the CGT, the world’s largest anarcho-syndicalist organization, in Spain; and at the projects of the Catalan cooperative CIC and the Kartoffelkombinat group in Munich, also organized as a cooperative.
After neighbors took care of neighbors during the COVID-19 pandemic, the concept of mutual aid suddenly catapulted into the national spotlight. The speed and nimbleness with which mutual aid projects emerged was a strength, but it also meant many participants did not have preexisting relationships, trust, or shared political commitments.
What has happened to the mutual aid movement since then? Maroon and Cassa, longtime organizers with Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, are well-positioned to tackle this difficult question. They are co-directors of a new four-part docuseries, The Elements of Mutual Aid. After conducting more than 60 interviews for the series and embarking on an ongoing six-month speaking tour, they’ve taken the time to reflect on what they’ve learned.
In the conversation that follows, they discuss the mutual aid movement’s trajectory in recent years, strategies for tackling burnout, and offer their theory of change for transcending capitalism and the state.
The following article was published anonymously on August 11, 2026. It aims to articulate a position, at once ethical and strategic, in response to the mass sabotage of a construction site in Italy’s Susa Valley on July 25. The mobilization was among the most ferocious in the history of the No-TAV movement, in its decadeslong struggle against the proposed Turin-Lyon high speed train line.
It was Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe who conceived and popularised “left-wing populism”, which now serves as a strategy for La France Insoumise after having won over the hearts and minds of other European political movements such as Podemos and Syriza. Whilst the concept has been widely discussed and criticised because it appears, historically speaking, to be an oxymoron, Erwan Sommerer suggests here that its inventors did not dare to take it through to its logical conclusions: “to conceive of the people as rupture and as negativity, to acknowledge the intensity of living violence of which it is the site, to recall that the very condition of its existence is the decisionist endeavour to abolish the state and capitalism”.
“Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.” – “Where they make a desert [a solitude between people], they call that peace.”[1] Tacitus’s oft-quoted phrase, rarely examined in all its radicality, is neither a moral condemnation nor a mere historical observation. It denotes a structure. It states that, within the Western imperial tradition, peace is never the opposite of violence, but rather its stabilised, enduring and institutionalised form. In other words, the Pax is neither a ceasefire, nor a temporary suspension, nor a moment of harmony, but war transformed, frozen into a lasting structure—an environment in which violence is not abolished but concealed, normalised and brought into order.
Andrea Bonaiuto, portrait of Averroes in the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella, Florence, c. 1366
The issue of artificial intelligence, which is debated today not always with natural intelligence, has had a precursor in the history of Western philosophy — as we have already had occasion to demonstrate here —: the single, separate intellect of Latin Averroism. The analogy is so close — a single, separate intellect that thinks independently of individual human beings — that it may even coincide in the acronym used to express it: Artificial Intelligence – Agent Intellect (as the Averroists called the separate intellect). For medieval philosophers, who were more cautious in this regard than our contemporaries, the crucial problem was that of the manner in which the single, separate intellect unites (copulatur) with individual human beings, so that thought may be acquired (adeptus) by the individual and it may be said “hic homo intelligit“—”this man thinks”. The means by which this union is achieved was, for Averroes, the imagination, of which our contemporaries, by contrast, seem to be utterly deprived. In artificial intelligence, in fact, “hic homo non intellegit“—the individual renounces thinking and delegates the most precious of his faculties to a machine, which is supposed to think in his stead and better than he does. To follow the instructions of this inescapable master, the imagination is of no use whatsoever (although even to apply a rule, some form of imagination might be necessary). Perhaps the real problem with artificial intelligence is that it has been made possible by a general loss of the faculty of imagination, almost as if its advent had been preceded by the establishment of an omnipresent artificial imagination. A humanity that had lost its imagination was ready to deprive itself of thought as well (which, moreover, as Aristotle already taught, is simply not possible without imagination).
The first thing we must do to combat the dominance of AI is, therefore, a patient, meticulous and methodical search for our lost imagination. And since thought is nothing other than the fulfilled form of imagination, there will then no longer be any need for artificial intelligence.
The following speech, “Follow the Principles that Won My Freedom,” was delivered by Sostre in 1976 shortly after his release from prison and offers a message of revolutionary optimism about how collective action can succeed—as it did for him—in freeing political prisoners and building a new egalitarian society. It is a message that feels as urgent today as it did then… “Follow the Same Principles that Won My Freedom” by Martin Sostre is excerpted from I Cannot Submit to Injustices: Collected Works of Martin Sostre, edited by Garrett Felber and published by AK Press, reproduced with permission of Felber and AK Press.
It is a great pleasure to be here after being in prison for nine years. I was the victim of a frame-up because I fought for human rights and because I had the only bookstore in Buffalo, New York, that was disseminating socialist and political literature—literature dealing with the struggle for Black liberation here in this country, the struggle for Puerto Rican independence, literature against the war in Vietnam, and all progressive literature. That bookstore in Buffalo became a center for persons of conscience, for youths who were seeking guidance, for college students.
“Nothing I’m doing makes any sense if the house is on fire.” Yet even when the house is on fire it is necessary to continue as before, to do everything with care and precision, perhaps even more so than before—even if no one notices. Perhaps life itself will disappear from the face of the earth, perhaps no memory whatsoever will remain of what has been done, for better or for worse. But you continue as before, it is too late to change, there is no time anymore.
“What’s happening around you / is no longer your business”. Like the geography of a country that you must leave behind forever. Yet how does it still affect you? Precisely now that it is no longer your business, now that everything seems over, everything and every place now appears in its truest guise, somehow they all touch you even more intimately—just as they are: splendor and poverty.
Solidarity Without Submission: Nestor, Ulysses, Ukraine and the Glory of Heroes
How can anarchists fight for national resistance without condoning nationalism?
by Roderick McMillan
Greek epics make us all Cassandras, the scenes are set in divine prophecy, but their acts are only understood in hindsight, the most human tragedy.
Huliaipol, Zaporozhye oblast, Ukraine in 2022. Nestor Makhno sits behind sandbags holding the blue-and-yellow flag of Ukraine, while soldiers take selfies with him.
Not the man, but a concrete statue and, as with most things in Ukraine, the statue has suffered in the war. Russian shelling decapitated it in May 2024.[2] Even with the strained resources of war, and in a city whose population shrunk from 19,000 to – by one estimate – 500, it was repaired, returned and reinforced. Ukrainian, and Ukrainian-aligned soldiers have posed beside it, some carrying flags or wearing patches inspired by Makhno and his Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine.
An anarchist who fought against states standing guard over one.
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