Editorial honoring the life of Cooper “Harris” Andrews, an anarchist from Cleveland, Ohio who was killed fighting in Ukraine against Russian invasion forces. (It’s going down, 04/05/2023)
On April 19th, 2023, Cooper (Harris) Andrews, 26, passed alongside three other anarchist internationalist volunteers in Ukraine. Comrades Dimitri Petrov of the Russian Anarchist Resistance, Finbar Kafferkey, a volunteer from Co. Cork, Ireland, and Cooper Andrews, a former Marine and an anarchist volunteer from Cleveland Ohio, were members of a unit of the international Resistance Committee (unit name withheld for security). They had chosen to take on the most dangerous assignment in Bakhmut, protecting “The Road of Life” humanitarian corridor, and were ambushed whilst defending evacuees. Cooper had been serving in Ukraine for almost a year, fighting in Kherson, outside Kyiv, and spending the last several months in Bakhmut. As soon as his application to volunteer was accepted, he flew to Ukraine and began with the Foreign Legion before joining up with the Resistance Committee later.
We share below a reflection by the russian anarchist Dmitry Petrov, recently killed fighting on the Bakhmut front against the russian invasion of ukraine, from July 2022. Its importance requires no comment from us, except to say that it raises fundamental question for anarchists today. (From libcom.org)
A member of an anti-authoritarian platoon in Ukraine reflects critically on the platoon’s activity, their relationship to the traditional armed forces, and the wider political significance of the experience.
This article was written in the first part of July. Now the anti-authoritarian platoon has moved forward. It transferred to the new unit, where it will recover trainings, recruitment, and, after the required preparation, it is promised that it will be moved to battle. This is the moment for conclusions after the first phase of the existence of the platoon—in the frame of territorial defense of Kiev oblast.
The [anti-authoritarian platoon](https://telegra.ph/A-little-bit-about-our-platoon-04-20) is the unofficial name for a unit in one of the brigades of the Territorial Defense Forces (TDF) of Ukraine in the Kiev oblast. It came into being when anarchists and leftists of different backgrounds and groups, including anti-fascists and football hooligans, came together during the earliest stages of the war to participate in a fight against the imperialist invasion carried out by Putin’s regime.
From the CrimethInc. collective (03/05/2023), we share an incomplete biography and translation of the anarchist Dmitry Petrov’s work.
On April 19, 2023, three anarchists were killed in battle near Bakhmut: an American named Cooper Andrews, an Irishman named Finbar Cafferkey, and a Russian named Dmitry Petrov, known to us until then as Ilya Leshy. People in our networks have shared undertakings with all three of these comrades over the years.
You can read about Cooper’s motivations in his own words here and consult a eulogy from his comrades here. You can learn about Finbar’s lifelong activism here, read an interview with him here, and listen to a song of his here. In the following eulogy, we explore the life of Dmitry Petrov, who also went by the noms de guerre Ilya Leshy and Fil Kuznetsov. For background, you should start by reading the statements from his comrades in the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization, the Resistance Committee, and Solidarity Collectives, as well as Dmitry’s statement from beyond the grave, all of which are available here.
A few weeks before the war began, Dmitry participated in an interview that we included in our coverage of the unfolding situation. On the first day of the Russian invasion, under what must have been challenging conditions, Dmitry took time to speak with us about how anarchists were responding. Throughout our exchanges over the following year, we were impressed by his humility, the earnestness with which he approached his efforts, and his sincere desire for critique.1
When Dmitry was killed, his comrades revealed that he had been involved in some of the most significant anarchist initiatives in 21st-century Russia, including co-founding the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization. Here, we will provide an overview of his efforts as a snapshot of the past two decades of struggle in the post-Soviet world, concluding with a translation of his text, The Mission of Anarchism in the Modern World.
No one in our collective believes that state militarism can bring about the world we desire to live in. We are internally divided over the issue of anarchists participating in military resistance to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Some of us believe that serving in a state military formation can never advance the anarchist cause. Others believe that the decision to do so can only be understood in view of the brutal autocracy that prevails in Russia, in which committed anarchists like Dmitry had tried virtually every other approach. If we reject state militarism, it is an open question how else to respond to imperialist invasions—and we will be better equipped to approach that question if we understand the life trajectory of Russian anarchists like Dmitry. For a discussion of the complexities of formulating an anarchist anti-war strategy that does not effectively cede the field to state militarism, you could begin here.
We formerly shared the archive of the writings of the argentine based Colectivo Situaciones, posted at the online website lobo suelto! The importance of this work for the understanding of events in argentina, and beyond, leads us this time to share a recent english language translation of a text by the Colectivo Situaciones – part of a larger print anthology – and published online by the Ill Will collective (02/05/2023).
This month Minor Compositions is releasing the first English translation of Hypothesis 891: Beyond the Roadblocks, a book length collaboration between the Argentine militant research collective Colectivo Situaciones and the Unemployed Workers’ Movement of Solano (MTD Solano). That English speakers had to wait over two decades to read this work testifies to the difficulties that autonomous thought has faced in leaping over what the Bolivian anarcho-feminist theorist Sylvia Rivera Cusicanqui refers to as the “colonial breach.” It was in an effort to subvert this breach that Ill Will launched Weavings, a series that aims to make available in English a wide range of theoretical and strategic texts from Latin America’s new emancipatory tradition.
This zine is dedicated to the memories of Yury Samoilenko, Sergey Petrovich, Igor Volohov, Finbar Cafferkey, Tisha, Dmitry ‘Ilya’ Petrov, and Andrew Cooper, may they all rest in power!
On 24 February 2022, one man, acting for his own domestic political purposes, launched what he had hoped would be a quick and easy war. With a barrage of missiles to apartment buildings, power stations, and hospitals, an iron fist of brutality attacked a land that had over the past 200 years been the scene of so much bloodshed and destruction. The Crimean War, World War I, the wars of the late 1910s and early 1920s, Stalin’s artificial famines (the Holodomor) of the 1930s and the terror and purges that followed, World War II – especially the Holocaust, and the first Russian Invasion in 2014.
Serge Duteuil-Graziani came out of a coma, a month after being seriously injured during the demonstration against mega-reservoir in Sainte-Soline on March 25, 2023. But his prognosis remains critical.
We begin with a press release of April 26, from his parents. This is followed by an important critical reflection on the events in Sainte-Soline by one of the collectives directly involved in the protests of March 25, Les Soulèvements de la Terre, and translated from the french by Scott Branson for the Ill Will collective (24/04/2023).
Statement from Serge’s parents
One month after the grenade shot that seriously injured our son Serge in the head on March 25, 2023, during the demonstration against the “megabasins” in Sainte-Soline, uncertainty remains about his future.
According to purely clinical medical criteria, Serge has come out of a coma. This means that he half-opens his eyes, but not that he is awake.
The treatment he has received since his arrival at the hospital has been aimed at controlling various injuries and infections. These were caused by the grenade attack he suffered, but also by the conditions in which he received first aid at the demonstration site: the security forces did not allow the fire brigade or ambulances access to the wounded to serve them.
This treatment contributed to the fact that Serge’s condition, which is still “extremely fragile”, did not deteriorate further. This gives hope that he will regain consciousness, but that is still not the case.
To date, it is impossible to know if Serge will regain his senses and the use of his body (his limbs and senses, his ability to breathe and speak) or to assess the aftermath of his injury, and there are still fears of a relapse of infection.
Therefore, his vital prognosis continues to be in danger. That is why we denounce any use that can be made of the fact that he has come out of a coma: Serge is, unfortunately, far from out of danger. To claim otherwise would be a pure lie.
Every year, since 1974, the portuguese state, through its politicians and institutional “nobility”, commemorates the 24 of April, as the birthday of the country’s democracy. Ignored, forgotten, brushed away, is the “revolution” occasioned by the military coup d’état of that day: factory and land occupations, appropriation of housing estates, the proliferation of “grassroots” artistic-cultural expressions, the refusal of the colonial war, in sum, a sustained and fracturing insurrection against the old, fascist regime, that created and generated experiments of freedom that would only be closed down by another coup, on November 25th of 1975.
Today, it is the revolution that is pushed aside, because among those who hold power, there is fear; the day has even been transformed officially into “Freedom Day”!
However, preceding the events of 1974-75, there was a long and rich tradition of not only anti-fascism, but a much older and radical revolutionary anti-capitalism expressed in the country’s anarchist and revolutionary anarcho-syndicalist movement, a moveemnt that emerged towards the end the 19th century and that found expression above all in the Confederação Geral do Trabalho – CGT.
We share below an excellent testimonial-documentary dedicated to the history of anarchism and syndicalism in portugal, from 1886 to 1975. What we share below however is without subtitles, but a version with english language subtitles can be found here.
And, so as to in some manner contextualise this all too often forgotten history, we begin with the words of the anarchist, Christian Ferrer.
… man must refuse to be his role, and revolution must attack all roles. In other words … revolution acts not only against organizations, institutions, systems, and structures, but also, and concurrently, against each member of this society, his behavior, and his beliefs. Acting at the same time against and for him—to release him from his myths of money, of the nation, of work, of the state, or of socialism—from the chains he worships (gilded perhaps, but still chains).
Jacques Ellul, Autopsy of Revolution (1969)
Anarchists are prone to political idol worship. Though by no means exclusive to anarchists, their/our susceptibility to them does ill. The agitation of a demonstration that develops into a riot; isolated individual and/or collective gestures of rebellion; the riot or the insurrection that promises revolution; the missing philosophy or ideological expression that will make sense of it all; the revelation of the absent revolutionary subject; the creation of the properly radical organisation; revolutions past: each carries a power of seduction and each taken as privileged renders us blind to the uncertainty and contingency of events.
Every revolt engenders a response from the state; every state reform in response to demands for justice risks reinforcing the state and its utilitarian, economic logic; every planned and institutionalised revolution threatens the betrayal of insurrection. This is the tragedy that inescapably haunts all rebellious politics.
Let us take for granted, let us assume, that what characterises anarchy is the refusal of command and the insistence that we are all equal and singular in our capacity to decide how we live together. Any violation of this is a betrayal to the anarchist, whether in the guise of an established society or in that of a “revolutionary means”. This may imply, as Jacques Ellul wrote, that an “anarchist society” is impossible:
The true anarchist thinks that an anarchist society — with no state, no organization, no hierarchy, and no authorities — is possible, livable, and practicable. But I do not. In other words, I believe that the anarchist fight, the struggle for an anarchist society, is essential, but I also think that the realizing of such a society is impossible. (Anarchy and Christianity, 1988)
But whether it is or not – for who can tell, when no one is entirely sure what it would look like -, what fundamentally should, must, characterise the anarchist, as a way of being in the world, is to be a conscientious objector to everything that tramples on our freedom and equality, with lucidity and wisdom.
Those who say that a global revolution is needed if we are not simply to change the government are right.
But does that mean that we are not to act at all? This is what we constantly hear when we advance a radical thesis. As if the only mode of action were political! I believe that anarchy first implies conscientious objection — to everything that constitutes our capitalist (or degenerate socialist) and imperialistic society (whether it be bourgeois, communist, white, yellow, or black). Conscientious objection is objection not merely to military service but to all the demands and obligations imposed by our society … . (Anarchy and Christianity, 1988)
We share below an essay on Jacques Ellul’s work; a work that we are tempted to describe as urgent.
We share a historical-political essay on the war in Ukraine, by Wayne Price, from the latest edition of the Black Flag Anarchist Review.
Lessons for Anarchists About the Ukraine War from Past Revolutions
Wayne Price (BlackFlag Anarchist Review Volume 3 Number 1 – Spring 2023)
The Ukraine-Russia war is shaking the world. Dealing with it, anarchists and other far-left radicals can learn much from contrasting it to previous conflicts. I chose to contrast it to two major wars, the Spanish revolution (because of its importance in anarchist history) and the Vietnam-U.S. war (because I participated in the movement against the war).
Revolutionaries study revolutions. For example, the anarchist Peter Kropotkin wrote a history of the French Revolution. Yet I have seen little discussion of the present-day Ukrainian-Russian war which relates it to past revolutionary wars. (For the purpose of this essay, I am lumping together revolutions, civil wars, and wars of national liberation.)
The Ukrainian conflict is not an internal revolution or civil war – it is a war of national liberation, of an oppressed people against an imperialist invasion. But revolutionary anarchists and other anti-authoritarian radicals need a strategy to deal with it. They need to relate their activities in the war to their goal of an international revolution of the working class and all oppressed, winning a world of freedom, self-determination, and cooperation. This is a matter of general strategy, programme and principles, not of immediate tactics and slogans. Those depend on the specific time and place and only Ukrainians can determine them. Yet general strategies, as developed in reaction to past revolutions, may be relevant to today’s conflicts.
On April 15th, 2011, a popular uprising began in Cherán, involving a process of wagering on a system based on community self-government, communal goods and autonomy; no political parties, no police and no organized crime.
What follows (in text and film) are the reflections of Pedro Chávez, school teacher, revolutionary, indigenous Purépecha and participant in the process of building autonomy in Cherán.
Dmitry Petrov: Four Months in an Anti-Authoritarian Platoon in Ukraine
We share below a reflection by the russian anarchist Dmitry Petrov, recently killed fighting on the Bakhmut front against the russian invasion of ukraine, from July 2022. Its importance requires no comment from us, except to say that it raises fundamental question for anarchists today. (From libcom.org)
A member of an anti-authoritarian platoon in Ukraine reflects critically on the platoon’s activity, their relationship to the traditional armed forces, and the wider political significance of the experience.
This article was written in the first part of July. Now the anti-authoritarian platoon has moved forward. It transferred to the new unit, where it will recover trainings, recruitment, and, after the required preparation, it is promised that it will be moved to battle. This is the moment for conclusions after the first phase of the existence of the platoon—in the frame of territorial defense of Kiev oblast.
The [anti-authoritarian platoon](https://telegra.ph/A-little-bit-about-our-platoon-04-20) is the unofficial name for a unit in one of the brigades of the Territorial Defense Forces (TDF) of Ukraine in the Kiev oblast. It came into being when anarchists and leftists of different backgrounds and groups, including anti-fascists and football hooligans, came together during the earliest stages of the war to participate in a fight against the imperialist invasion carried out by Putin’s regime.
Continue reading →