State integration forced on Rojava

Posted on January 23, 2026 by Julius Gavroche

From Freedom News (20/01/2026)

Islamist attacks and great-power manoeuvres place the revolution in existential threat

Blade Runner

Recent weeks’ clashes between Syrian state forces and Kurdish forces have developed into a multi-front assault on Rojava, threatening open war as a means of forcing it to integrate into an Islamist state structure. Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are resisting sustained attacks using drones and heavy weapons by Damascus-affiliated militias in Hasakeh and Raqqa, including near two prisons housing thousands of Islamic State (ISIS) fighters. SDF confirmed that repeated assaults on al-Shaddadi prison were initially repelled at heavy cost before the facility ultimately fell with thousands of ISIS fighters escaping, despite its proximity to a US-led coalition base that did not intervene.

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For Daniel Colson (1943-2026)

Posted on January 18, 2026 by Julius Gavroche

From Freedom News, an obituary for the anarchist Daniel Colson (11/01/2026) by David Berry, followed by a translation of a lecture by him entitled, “Proudhon and the contemporary relevance of anarchism”.

A singular and generous thinker of anarchism, his work traced living lines of revolt and creation

Daniel Colson, anarchist theorist and labour historian, died on 9 January in Lyon. He was 82.

Colson was an active member of the anarchist movement in Lyon from the early 1970s, a member of the collective that ran the city’s anarchist bookshop ‘La Gryffe’ from its creation in 1978, and a member of the editorial collective that has produced the anarchist review Réfractions since 1997. A professor of sociology at the University of Saint-Etienne, he published extensively on labour history, revolutionary syndicalism, anarchism and, latterly, philosophy.

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Parham Shahrjerdi – Iran: Woman, Life, Freedom — and nothing else

Posted on January 12, 2026 by Julius Gavroche

From lundimatin #504, 12/01/2026

These lines are being written while the internet has been down for three days throughout Iran.
Telephone lines are cut.
Electricity is also cut, so the darkness of this period reaches its peak.
It is Sunday, 11 January 2026. It is 8 p.m.

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Iran: An Uprising Besieged from Within and Without

Posted on January 12, 2026 by Julius Gavroche

From the CrimethInc. collective (07/01/2026)

Three Perspectives

Starting on December 28, 2025, a new wave of protest broke out across Iran, triggered by economic distress and escalating to call for the toppling of the government. This is at least the fifth such movement in a decade, drawing on previous waves of labor unrest and feminist resistance. Yet within this uprising, the grassroots movement contends with reactionary monarchists, largely based outside Iran, who seek to win the backing of the United States and Israel to seize power.

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Minneapolis Murder – Cops ICE Good

Posted on January 11, 2026 by Julius Gavroche

From AnarCom Network (08/01/2026)

Renee Nicole Good’s State murder by US Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (ICE), and its slanderous cover up, show what they would really like to do to if they could get away with it. In fact, what they would do in any case if push came to shove.

In Minneapolis, the city of the George Floyd’s police murder in 2020 during Trumps first presidency, in the resistance to the assault on migrant workers, push has again become shove.

According to the Guardian newspaper (04/01/26), ICE is responsible for 32 deaths in custody in the last year. Another dozen also estimated being killed since they were sent to occupy the heartlands of what Trump perceives his opposition. 

These primarily being the liberal opposition centres of democrat held governorships and mayoralties such as Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and of course in Minneapolis.

ICE, uniformed, masked, without numbers or other ID resemble Putin’s ‘little green men’ from the occupation of Crimea.  They silently occupy, block, snatch and bring fear.

This is their job, yet these goons of the state have the nerve to claim they were being ‘stalked’ by legal witness Renee Good whilst on intimidation duty.

She had just witnessed them repeatedly pulling to the ground and spraying pepper spray into the faces of a peaceful picket of residents and neighbours protesting the occupation.

4 armed masked men allege ‘fear for their lives’ as they surrounded Renee’s car stuck in the ice before shooting unarmed 37-year-old mother of 3 at point blank range. 

Collapsing at the wheel, her car is seen sliding forward and crashing into another a few yards away as stunned onlookers try to intervene.  Despite ICE agents dragging her out into the snow, their cars prevented access for ambulances for a further 15 minutes.

Renee Good is accused of ‘domestic terrorism’ ostensibly for blocking the road in her attempts to monitor ICE brutality, though in reality for inconveniently dying in plain sight.

Her murder coincides with the closure of a city school after ICE goons went in using force and chemical sprays to disperse high school students at the end of the school day according to local news outlet MPS News.

A school official is quoted as saying: “They don’t care. They’re just animals…I’ve never seen people behave like this.”   The state has both motive and capacity to be violent anywhere, everywhere all at once.

This is less a sign of the times than the times themselves as capitalism unravels in a social decomposition as a result of austerity and its relentless drive to generalised war for profit. 

Peace and War are increasingly indistinguishable as the latter offers annihilation, while the former is a bloody occupation driving us towards it. 

Resistance to the occupation is growing at this time of writing.  All resistance to the state and capitalism at war or peace is more urgent now than ever before.

Article by Dreyfus

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“A World Governed by Force”

Posted on January 11, 2026 by Julius Gavroche

From the CrimethInc. collective (01/06/2026)

The Attack on Venezuela and the Conflicts to Come

“We live in a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Stephen Miller told CNN host Jake Tapper, on January 5, 2026, spelling out the fascist program as he justified seizing Greenland by force. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Early in the morning of January 3, the Trump administration carried out a made-for-TV raid on Venezuela, bombing at least seven targets in Caracas and kidnapping president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Celia Flores. This was the culmination of a year-long pressure campaign during which the administration designated Venezuelan immigrants in the US as “narco-terrorists,” attempted to employ the Alien Enemies Act, bombed alleged “drug boats,” seized oil tankers, and deployed the US navy to blockade Venezuela.

The Trump regime initially accused Maduro of heading “Cartel de los Soles,” a construct as concocted as “antifa.” Though they revised this accusation yesterday in order to formulate a less tenuous legal case, it is typical of their method that they begin with a false narrative and seek the means to impose it on reality. One of Donald Trump’s chief objectives was to post a photograph of Nicolás Maduro in chains, echoing the photographs that federal agencies have circulated of people abducted by ICE. Rather than offering improvements in anyone’s economic conditions, Trump offers his supporters the vicarious thrill of identifying with jailers and torturers. His goal is to dehumanize his adversaries and desensitize everyone to the kind of violence that will be required to sustain his reign and capitalism itself in an era of declining profits.

Corporate media is performing its classic role of loyal opposition, raising questions about the legality of the action while demonizing Maduro and lionizing his right-wing opponent, María Corina Machado. For anarchists and others who aim to oppose imperialism, it’s necessary to situate the attack on Venezuela in a larger context, reflect on what effective opposition could look like, and identify how we can take action in response.

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Giorgio Agamben: The mystery of power

Posted on January 9, 2026 by Julius Gavroche
Luca Signorelli, The Preaching of the Antichrist, 1500-1504

Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians can be read as a prophecy concerning the current situation in the West. The apostle evokes here “a mystery of anomia”, of “lawlessness”, which is already at work, but which will not be consummated with the second coming of Jesus Christ unless “the man of lawlessness (ho anthropos tes anomias), is revealed [first], the man doomed to destruction. He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.” However, there is a power that restrains this revelation (Paul simply calls it, without further definition, “that or the one that withholds”, “the restrainer – the katechon”). It is therefore necessary for this power to be removed, for it is only then that “the lawless one (anomo) will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming.”

Theological-political tradition has identified this “restraining power” with the Roman Empire (as in Jerome and, later, in Carl Schmitt) or with the Church itself (in Tychone and Augustine). In any case, it is clear that the power that restrains is identified with the institutions that sustain and govern human societies. That is why its elimination coincides with the advent of the anomos, a “lawless one” who takes the place of God and, “with signs and false wonders”, leads to perdition “those who have renounced the love of truth”.

It is possible to see in the mystery of anomie not so much a supratemporal arcane, whose sole meaning would be to put an end to history, but rather a historical drama (mysterion in Greek means “dramatic action”), which corresponds perfectly to what we are experiencing today.

The dominant institutions seem to have lost their meaning and are literally falling apart, giving way to an anomia, an absence of law that purports, so to speak, to be legal, but which has in fact abdicated all legitimacy. The State (the principle that restrains) and the “lawless one” are in reality two sides of the same mystery: the mystery of power. As the United States is demonstrating today without any scruples, the “man of anomie”, the “lawless” one, designates the figure of state power which, abandoning the constitutional and ethical principles that traditionally limited it and, with them, “the love of truth”, entrusts itself to the “signs and false wonders” of weapons and technology. This confusion of anarchy and legality in a state of emergency that has become permanent is what we must unmask and render inoperative in all areas.

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For Béla Tarr (1955-2026)

Posted on January 9, 2026 by Julius Gavroche

“I still consider myself an anarchist. But there’s an old saying, that goes, “If you’re not a communist by 30, you have no heart. But if you’re a communist after 30, you have no brain.” This is quite an old maxim, with which I don’t always agree with, because I think that social sensitivity is a really important aspect. You can’t be cynical, you can’t be cold-hearted. You can’t do anything without empathy. And it’s obvious that one has to side with the poor, the disgraced and the tormented. This is a moral duty, and not a question of profession, nor a question of your social status. This is simply a question of honour.”

Béla Tarr, “Kozmikus a szar” | életútinterjú Tarr Bélával [interview with English subtitles with Béla Tarr], Partizán, 24 March 2023, (via YouTube).

“My slogan is very, very simple: no education – just liberation!”

Béla Tarr, The Guardian, 19/07/2024

If Béla Tarr’s “slogan” is first a reference to his hope for young filmmakers, that they break away from the weight of cinematographic traditions and find their own forms of expression, it may be taken more broadly as a call to break away from something more profound: from stories with a “perceptive centre”, for “the filmmaker is not there to make himself the center that arranges the visible and its sense.” (Jacques Rancière, The Time After, 2011)

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Wishes for the new year

Posted on January 2, 2026 by Julius Gavroche
Eneko las Heras

So, certainly, things have changed. And there is a lot to do. The next century is right on us. Policemen need to give up their guns. Society needs to dismantle all our prisons. If we need to detain people, a local jail should be sufficient. We need many more doctors; we need many more social workers; we need lots more teachers. And, yes, a lawyer or two to keep the stew honest. We need to be proud of the taxes we pay. We need to tax the wealthy dead at 100 percent. It’s an abomination that the dead rich control ‘their’ money while the living must suffer. We need a new definition of neighbourhood, community, society. We need to make white America tell us why they hate and fear and hoard. We need a new definition of life so that we can find a truer definition of death. We all need a definition of responsibility. And I don’t think there is any one key or easy answer. There are some clearer answers and some difficult decisions but our first decision must be to change from the rather hateful, selfish species we are into something a bit better. I hope there are aliens out there and I hope they come to Earth. We need another perspective on the possibilities. Civil Rights have to somehow be tied to civilized humans. So that is the question: What is a civil human?

From a “Civil Rights Journey”, by Nikki Giovanni, Blues: For All the Changes (1999)

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Edward Abbey: Theory of Anarchy

Posted on December 30, 2025 by Julius Gavroche

Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.

Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness, (1989)

To write of Edward Abbey or to share his writing – as we do below -, invites criticism; the criticism that we are providing a forum to a writer, however influential and important, who openly expressed sexist and racist ideas.

And to this, we plead guilty, for Abbey did express such ideas. However, it would be equally important to try to see these ideas in a broader critical context, that is, to see them not just as a reflection of Abbey’s time, but as pointing to deeper issues around anarcho-primitivism, biocentrism and Malthusianism. To pursue these issues though would call for more than what we propose here.

We would suggest the same when addressing the antisemitism of two central figures in the history of anarchism: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Michael Bakunin.

It is not to diminish the significance of these intellectual and moral failings, but to understand them. And to understand them not only as a sign of their times, but as potentially symptomatic of more profound shortcomings in their thought and actions.

The persons from which we learn are not sacrosanct; they are as fragile and as susceptible to tragic error as we are.

For us then, Abbey’s work is also a tireless and serious – as well as eloquent and playful – defence of life lived on a “human” scale; on a scale that places us as equals with other species in the biosphere. Against this, stands property, wealth, power, unrestrained resource extraction for “economic growth”, the destruction of life.

All men are brothers, we like to say, half-wishing sometimes in secret it were not true. But perhaps it is true. And is the evolutionary line from protozoan to Spinoza any less certain? That also may be true. We are obliged, therefore, to spread the news, painful and bitter though it may be for some to hear, that all living things on earth are kindred.

Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (1968)

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