From It’s going down, 13/06/2025
Over the past week, tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets of Los Angeles, fighting to defend their neighborhoods and family members from ICE, facing off with the National Guard to demand those imprisoned by DHS be released, and fiercely pushing back against the brutality of the LAPD. This bravery has been inspiring, especially in the face of bloodthirsty attacks by the state.
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Agustín García Calvo, poet, dramaturgist, essayist, linguist, philosopher is sadly very little known in the English speaking world. And as an “anarchist”, who would refuse the term, his contributions to “anarchism”, or to a way of thinking describable as anarchistic, are significant. In the essay that we share below, by the philosopher Jordi Carmona Hurtado, we follow García Calvo’s rejection of abstract, theoretical elaborations of anarchism – that would push it into the hands of academicians -, without thereby falling into a blind and reflex activism. What García Calvo endeavoured to do was to trace a path where thought itself is conceived as a form of action that shatters categorical identities (abstract ideas, institutions, traditions, etc.), that leads not their mere negation, but that opens up the infinity-indefinite of the unlimited, of that which is without limit; what the Presocratic philosopher Anaximander called the apeiron; what we might call “anarchism” as a sort of via negativa.
From Redes Libertarias, 18/02/2025
In an important recent book, Au voleur! Anarchisme et philosophie (PUF, 2022)/Stop Thief! Anarchism and Philosophy (Polity, 2024), Cathérine Malabou has argued that some of the most significant thinkers in contemporary philosophy have “stolen” impulses, orientations and concepts from anarchism, in order to develop a critique of domination or a logic of government, without at the same time acknowledging their origin, and without ever recognising themselves as anarchists. Thus, anarchism or anarchist social thought would be the unconfessed source of the thought of philosophers such as Schürmann, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Agamben or Rancière, who at the same time have always dissociated themselves from the label. There would thus be a persistent denial of anarchism, in a contemporary thought that at the same time draws heavily from it; as if the relationship between philosophers and anarchist literature were hiden up the sleeve and clandestine, as something a little shameful, practised but not declared; an anarchism that is first plundered by philosophy, and later disguised in sublimated conceptual expressions. However, this is beginning to change nowadays, with what has been called an “anarchist turn” in theory, in which various thinkers, one might say, are beginning to come out of the closet. This is what happens with Malabou in philosophy, when she develops a properly anarchist philosophical concept, that of the “ungovernable”. And something similar happens in other branches of research and creation, such as with the anthropologist David Graeber, or with the ?ction author Ursula K. Le Guin. So it seems that anarchism today tends to become more presentable in the worthy debates of academic culture.
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From Lundi matin #479, 10/06/2025
In the rubble of Gaza, a white patch for a white coat…
Safiya means “pure” in Arabic, as in the image of the world that remains “pure” when only the shadows of of the shadows of humans remain.
A man walks alone on the ruins of Gaza. Around him, no hospital rubble, no buried bodies, no lingering ghosts are discernible. There is only the idea of a greyness that brings the earth back to the earth through the hubris that makes the elevation and the urge to destroy it necessary. A white patch lost in an abstraction of rubble, the silence of corpses on which it feeds. The abstract has the power to devour the anonymous bodies that suffered to facilitate its construction, until they dissolve into the senselessness of a variation, that of the same colour, the same drama: the ashen waves carry the ochre of the world to the soot of its ruin.
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From the CrimethInc. collective (06/06/2025)
Revisiting the Difference Between Mutual Aid and Charity
Much has been made of the distinction between charity and mutual aid. Charity is top-down and unidirectional, while mutual aid is supposed to be horizontal, reciprocal, and participatory. In practice, however, the majority of today’s self-described mutual aid projects remain more or less unidirectional efforts to provide goods and services to those in need.
This has contributed to a situation in which conventional non-profit organizations are rebranding themselves with the language of “mutual aid,” while some anarchists have given up on the concept entirely, fed up with a rhetoric that some say amounts to “mutual aid being good and radical, and charity being bad and conservative.”
Is there more to the distinction than this? How could we unlock the revolutionary potential of mutual aid?
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From Ill Will (18/04/2025)
The aim of AI is not so much to replace man with the machine but to make it so that man behaves, acts like a machine, that society as a whole technicizes through a subtle play, by turns, of normalization and imitation. AI intensifies the underlying process of technical representation of our society, where man tends to enter himself as a digital quantity (and where, consequently, he no longer has any importance).
While much criticism of artificial intelligence still circles around fantasies of robot competitors rising up against man, the following essay aims to turn the problem around: the real concern with AI research, Azaïs argues, lies not in humanlike robots but in the impoverished image of humanity to which it condemns us by its reduction of human intelligence to the level of technics or calculation. By breaking down and translating human reasoning, communication, and decision into the computerized language of tasks, computation does not replace man with the machine but ensures that man “behaves and acts like a machine, that society as a whole technicizes through a subtle play, by turns, of normalization and imitation.”
Taking his cue from French philosopher Jacques Ellul, Azaïs argues that such ostensibly scientific aspects of “AI technology” are inextricable from a Promethean myth that is not only necessary to its functioning, but also works to conceal the alienation it itself produces. Fictions such as “artificial general intelligence” and the “singularity” not only bind together an otherwise motley jumble of techniques and applications with no connection or foundation, they also reinforce a magical belief in the omnipotence of technology. This sacralized image of technics, embodied in the paradoxical quest to produce an autonomous and all-powerful demiurgic creature, inverts and distorts the truth of the technological system on which it relies. In reality, the efficacy of AI depends precisely on the integration of human life into a technicized social system, a “cybernetic utopia” in which human decision, right, and law have been replaced by the technical fact of algorithmic governmentality. Millenarian myths about the “future of AI” are therefore ultimately nothing but mystified personifications of the oppressive heteronomy of our present condition. In them, the very source of our alienation — a technical system that invisibilizes, denatures, and destroys all that eludes its single-minded rationality — is transformed into a supernatural sci-fi fantasy whose “autonomy” is merely an inverted reflection of our current passivity.
As techno-feudalist dystopias continue to engulf the American ruling class, the effort to combat them cannot content itself with a narrowly political opposition, but must simultaneously incorporate strategies to desacralize technics. The profanation of techniques, as Ellul and Azaïs remind us, forms a precondition for any effort at genuine liberation.
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From Redes libertarias (17/12/2024)
I am asked to reflect on the constraints imposed by state frameworks – borders, languages, national idiosyncrasies – when building relations on a global scale. Such a reflection cannot be carried out in the abstract, but rather on the basis of a given situation at a given time. Let’s say we are in Europe today, when, without thinking too much about it, a social movement with libertarian characteristics, originating in local struggles, considers linking up with other similar movements in other states. One might think that the movement in question should be sufficiently consolidated and enlightened to set itself more ambitious goals, beyond the local sphere in which it was circumscribed. We would then deduce that a cumulative process of experience would have culminated and that the degree of development achieved would allow the “globalisation” of the movement. The overcoming of the state framework would therefore necessarily take place from the inside out. However, there are historical examples to the contrary. The International Workers’ Association was not first constituted in spaces delimited by the state. A local committee convened a congress attended by various delegates with different levels of representativeness; the idea caught on and soon “regional” organisations were formed and further congresses were held. State frameworks were not an obstacle. A general atmosphere was in the air in the various social scenes of the capitalist world prior to the emergence of the IWA. The local was at the same time universal. The proletarian condition extended to all corners of the planet in the same way, so that any worker could feel the most geographically distant struggles as his own. Contrary to the struggles of the bourgeoisie, which pursued the constitution of national states, proletarian struggles transcended any state barrier: they were internationalist by nature. Moreover, the First International saw itself as the bearer of the seeds of the future society. Such a society would result from the universalisation of the organisation of the International. Only the bridge between reality and the future would have to be built either through the parliamentary action of strong political parties, according to the Marxist current, or through “a powerful but always invisible revolutionary collectivity preparing the revolution and leading it”, according to the Bakuninist current.
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We publish below an article by Siraj Izhar on the “Mandate” granted to Britain by the League of Nations in 1922. The “Mandate” would serve as a legal-political instrument for the control of the Palestinian population of the territory, in turn, rendering possible the Zionist colonial project and framing the current Israeli politics of Palestinian erasure.
We thank Siraj for generously sharing the article with us.
The word Mandate here refers to the arrangement by which the fate of the people in Palestine was handed to European colonial powers a century ago. A rereading of the Mandate at this time becomes a necessary act. Towards that, I distinguish between a Mandate 1.0 and a Mandate 2.0; a Mandate 1.0 in the 1920s by which European powers sought a foothold in Palestine, and a Mandate 2.0 in the 2020s with fundamentally different aims to preserve yet supersede Mandate 1.0.
Periodisation of historical continuity is contentious, but the differentiation is to reinstate the Mandate in the present, as a subject of agency. For the conundrum of the Mandate always lay in how it could be fulfilled, the answer to which lay in a process of revisions towards fulfilment. What we see today in Gaza can be understood within that process; thus this is a rereading structured on a process of revisions. It offers a revisiting of the practices the Mandate instituted through the revisions, in particular to draw out its use of the law. Moreover, in the same process, through the Mandate we come to know the formulation of international law and universal rights by imperial interests that morphed into a ‘rules-based order’; and through the Mandate we understand why that same order now comes to fail the powers that produced it.
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From Lobo suelto! (15/03/2025)
About the Soulèvements de la terre
We are waiting. Day and night. Events follow one after the other, and we swallow them with little protest. The Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the genocide in Palestine, natural disasters ravaging the Earth… We swallow everything they throw at us, unable to vomit, chained to a powerlessness we can’t shake off. The possible distracts for a few moments and, in the end, it always suffocates. The impossible is nothing more than this despotic reality that, little by little, has imposed itself. We are waiting. We place an absurd hope in a final collapse. We sink into a night tinged with melancholy. The world has closed in on itself, and we tenants of the house know each other very well. The neo-fascist puppets have closed the exit door, as they rush to divide the earth into zones of influence.
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From Freedom News (09/05/2025)
Their work in supporting anti-authoritarian armed resistance against Russian occupation has spilled over to directing aid to civilians living on the front
Josie Ó Súileabháin
“If people are tired of this war, tell them to come and join the fight. People are fighting and struggling here, and people need help. This is not a video game”.—Joy (Marcy–Yusef)
In a darkness demanded for survival, an old man speaks to volunteers in Kupyansk, Kharkiv Oblast following the retreat of the Russian army. “They attacked here, first with airstrikes, bombing the area”, he says. “They dropped bombs here—I still have some in my garden”.
“And did the animals survive?” the volunteers ask. “You see you were putting yourself at risk…”
“I let them go when the Russians forced me to evacuate at gun point… a missile hit the yard, and the garage and the barn burnt down. The ducklings burnt to death… but the chickens managed to survive… people left everything behind. Many people lost their legs because of the ‘Lepestok’ mines”.
“Clearing the gardens of mines?” he is asked.
“Sometimes by accident”, he replies. “Most of them lost their legs and a lot of de-miners blown themselves up here”.
The ‘Lepestok’ (PFM) mine is a scatterable munition that is identifiable by its green, petal shape and timed to explode. Ukraine has inherited millions of these small mines from the Soviet Union and destroyed at least half of them under efforts lead by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. During the full-scale invasion, the Russian occupation has been documented using them around hospitals and in residential areas.
“I remember these petals scattered all over the hospital”, a medical worker at Izyum Central Hospital told Human Rights Watch (HRW). During the Russian occupation of Izyum, the Russian army set up a field hospital in the basement within the central hospital to treat their own wounded. At one point, there were only seven members of staff for Ukrainian patients.
“I heard a slam in the sky”, a neighbour to the hospital reported to HRW. “Previously I knew that if a cluster munition explodes above our heads, the submunitions would go over us because of inertia. Because of where they were, I understood they would fall on us. So I told my wife and we went to hide in the basement”.
“But there was no explosion. And our neighbour said: ‘Have a look, a petal on the ground.’”
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Fire and Ice: Lessons from the Battle of Los Angeles
An anonymous text, published at Ill Will (14/06/2025)
A printable zine version can be downloaded here.
I think I’ll stay on this earthquake fault near this still-active volcano in this armed fortress facing a dying ocean & covered w/dirt while the streets burn up & the rocks fly & pepper gas lays us out cause that’s where my friends are, you bastards, not that you know what that means. —Diane Di Prima, “Revolutionary Letter #52”
Momentum in the movement against mass deportations had been building for weeks. From San Diego to Martha’s Vineyard, spontaneous confrontations with ICE agents were already happening. Alongside that, there had been coordinated actions of activists and rapid response networks, including efforts to blockade ICE vans in downtown Manhattan.
Everyone knew it was about to explode. Then, in Los Angeles, it finally happened. Crowds gathered in response to ICE raids in several neighborhoods. This was followed by protests night after night outside of the Metropolitan Detention Center, where arrested migrants were being held.
Efforts to blockade ICE raids and the detention center led to clashes with the police. Crowds spread throughout downtown and other neighborhoods. Protesters blocked streets and highways, fought police with stones and fireworks, built barricades, and set several cars on fire. On Sunday night, the chief of police announced that the LAPD was overwhelmed. Trump had already decided to send in the National Guard and, soon after, the Marines.
The explosion was always going to begin in Los Angeles. But now that the fire has started, it is beginning to expand. Protests have spread to dozens of cities across the country. Upwards of a thousand arrests, and counting. Texas and Missouri have deployed the National Guard.
Unrest has now spread inside immigrant detention centers. A riot inside of Delaney Hall Detention Facility in Newark, New Jersey led to several migrants tearing down a wall and escaping. The detention center, which has just reopened, might close.
What follows are some lessons from the battle of Los Angeles that could prove useful today, as the movement to stop the deportation machine begins to spread and deepen.
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