You have more in common with the people of Iran than you do with anyone in this administration, any member of the technocracy, anyone who is profiting from this war, or any billionaire. When you see Iranians forming human chains outside key infrastructure sites, you should feel a sense of kinship.

When the nukes fly and civilization dies -- theirs, ours, everyone's -- will Trump voters realize with their last breath that it was a mistake? Or will they be content in the knowledge that they died a noble death for their dear leader?

Errico Malatesta: "We have always fought against patriotism, and we were proud of being internationalists. Now, the most atrocious consequences of capitalist and State domination should indicate, even to the blind, that we were in the right."

Millions of people come out to oppose the fascist regime in the single largest protest in US history, connecting mass opposition to authoritarianism, oligarchy, and war.

Some leftist cranks: "This is bad, actually."

It's perhaps a lot to ask, but I hope Trump voters who are shocked that he lied to them (i.e. by starting new wars) engage in some introspection. Yes, he lied. What is it about you that let you get suckered by an obvious conman who made "being a giant asshole" his entire schtick?

"The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again." 2/2

Mark Fisher: "The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. 1/2

📝 Anarchist Studies 34.1 is out now! This issue comprises 4 articles, 1 review essay and 5 book reviews:

The cover for this issue is by Gianluca Constantini and is discussed in the opening essay by Allan Antliff. (1/7)

bit.ly/41dZjYO

and especially so many young people, are ill? The 'mental health plague' in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently disfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high." 2/2

Mark Fisher: "Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast *privatization of stress* that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, 1/2

Kristin Ross: "Political struggle itself produces new conditions, modifies social relations, changes the participants in the event, and the way they think and speak—the struggle itself creates new political forms, ways of being, and new theoretical understanding of those ways and forms."

As they marched in protest of the US murder of hundreds of Iranian civilians, black-clad anarchists chanted “eat the rich, feed the poor” and “we don’t want your fucking war! We don’t want your fucking state! This time we retaliate”! 2/2

Photo of a newspaper spread with photos of police arresting people. Large text reads "Cops, rioters slug it out," "Day of Anarchy," and "Day of violence"

At the 1988 anarchist "Survival Gathering" in Toronto, a planned Day of Action took place the day after the US shot down an Iranian passenger jet, killing hundreds of people. Anarchists exploded in rage and took out their anger on a number of corporate and state targets. 1/2

Do college students really think we can't tell when they use AI, or do they just not care?

Howard Zinn: "There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."

The importance of reproductive autonomy/freedom is also explored in Spencer Beswick’s article ‘“To Repulse the State from Our Uteri”: Anarcha-feminism, Reproductive Freedom, and Dual Power.’ As with many of the contributions in this volume, Beswick’s article enriches the dominant historical narrative by focusing on an individual or collective whose contributions might otherwise be overlooked. In this case, the focus is on how USA anarcha-feminists ‘mobilized to defend abortion clinics from the Far Right and taught themselves how to perform reproductive care at the grassroots level’ in the 1990s (Beswick, 2024). In contrast to the liberal feminist approach of petitioning the state for reforms, anarcha-feminists understood abortion restrictions as ‘a form of state violence’ and ‘the state itself as the ultimate patriarchal institution and the source of much of the violence they faced’ (90- 91). While reading this article, I was struck by how contemporary feminist discourse is rightly moving to understand abortion access in these terms, and how it would benefit the movement to revisit some of the praxis Beswick outlines here. Alternative understandings of abortion care emerging from feminist praxis that are also worth engaging and that have some parallels with anarcha-feminism include work on acompañamiento and self-managed abortion by Madeleine Belfrage (2023), Lucía Berro Pizzarossa and Rishita Nandagiri (2021), Deirdre Duffy, Cordelia Freeman and Sandra Rodríguez Castaña (2023), and Julia McReynolds-Pérez, Katrina Kimport, Chiara Bercu, Carolina Cisternas, Emily Wilkinson Salamea, Ruth Zurbriggen, and Heidi Moseson (2023).

Great paragraph on my article "To Repulse the State from Our Uteri: Anarcha-feminism, Reproductive Freedom, and Dual Power," which explores how "anarcha-feminists mobilized to defend abortion clinics from the Far Right and taught themselves how to perform reproductive care at the grassroots level"

It "is an urgent and necessary contribution... [we] need critical scholarship to help us name and contest state violence, and to create alternative visions of the state, society, and the future... The collection also left me feeling hopeful – a rare feat for academic scholarship in dark times."

Great review of the special issue of @radhistreview.bsky.social on "Feminists Confront State Violence" by @resmyth.bsky.social, which includes my article "To Repulse the State from Our Uteri" (among many great pieces!). www.lectitopublishing.nl/Article/Deta...

Photo of two hippies at a protest in the 1960s holding a sign reading "bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity."

If Donald Trump is the "Peace President," it brings to mind the old slogan from the protests against the Vietnam war: "bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity."

Michael Parenti: "Fascism is a false revolution. It cultivates the appearance of popular politics and a revolutionary aura without offering a genuine revolutionary class content. It propagates a 'New Order' while serving the same old moneyed interests."

Yup, and it was much easier for many of them to pivot to supporting the invasion than to concede that Putin would do wrong and stupid things.

Before Russia invaded Ukraine four years ago, a coterie of voices on the left insisted that Putin would never invade because it would be wrong and stupid. For most, there has still been no reckoning with the core problems of their analysis that led to being so completely mistaken.

Cover of the pamphlet "Ned Ludd & Queen Mab: Machine-Breaking, Romanticism, and the Several Commons of 1811–12" by Peter Linebaugh

The Luddites were right and we've been lied to about them for over 200 years. Read the great historian Peter Linebaugh's account in "Ned Ludd & Queen Mab: Machine-Breaking, Romanticism, and the Several Commons of 1811–12" from @pmpress.bsky.social pmpress.org/index.php?l=...

Nietzsche: "To be sure, we need history . . . we need it for life and for action, not for the easy withdrawal from life and from action . . . We only wish to serve history to the extent that it serves life."

Marx: "If the product of labour does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an alien power, this can only be because it belongs to some *other man than the worker.* If the worker's activity is a torment to him, to another it must be *delight* and his life's joy."

Remember when One Battle After Another came out and conservatives scoffed at the Hollywood fantasy of federal troops violently occupying a city against a scrappy "woke" resistance defending undocumented immigrants? Well, *gestures broadly.*

"Antifa are the real fascists" they repeat, as they send masked paramilitary forces door to door to terrorize and ethnically cleanse the nation.

I hope the seven House Democrats who voted to fund ICE this week are haunted by the shame for the rest of their lives.

Conservatives, you don't have to support masked federal agents executing people in the streets and going door to door terrorizing people in their homes. You know in your hearts it isn't right, and it's time to say it. It's not too late.

In the 1960s, the right called MLK a race-baiting communist who hated white people. After he was killed, they spent a few decades pointing to him as a model of protesting "the right way." Now, they're moving back to branding him as a race-baiting communist who hated white people.