“‘Do it yourself.’ Don’t break up the global aspect of play by reducing it to roles. Defend your right to enjoy life. Obstruct capital’s death project. The latter can only enter the world of creativity and play by transforming who is playing into a “player’ the living creator into a dead person who cheats themselves into believing they are alive.”
Author: Χάος
Say You Want an Insurrection by Crimethinc. Ex-Workers’ Collective
So do we—a total break with domination and hierarchy in all their forms, involving an armed uprising if need be. Until that’s possible, we’ll settle for recurring clashes in which to develop our skills, find comrades, and emphasize the gulf between ourselves and our oppressors.
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Toward the Creative Nothing by Renzo Novatore
Toward the Creative Nothing is a combination of poetic literature, fiery manifesto, and individualist rant. This collection of writings from Renzo Novatore (1890-1922) turns the knife of criticism on religion, democracy, war, fascism, socialism, and, indeed, society.
It is difficult to find anarchist works in English that are at the same time “individualist” and explicitly revolutionary, that emphasize the centrality of the aim of individual self-determination to a revolution that will “communalize material wealth” as it will “individualize spiritual wealth”.
Written shortly after World War I, as a revolution was occurring in Russia and uprisings were happening in Germany and Italy, this poetic text responds to the upheaval of its time with a call for a revolution that could truly move the human race beyond the spiritual impoverishment, the equality in baseness that democracy and socialism offered. Bourgeois society seemed to have reached its dusk, and Novatore saw the hope for a new dawn only in such a revolution-one that went beyond the mere economic demands of the socialists and communists–a revolution moved by great ideas and great passions that would break with the low values of bourgeois democratic civilization.
Reclaim Your Mind: Manifesto
Maybe in the ruins of techno-industrial mass society a widespread healing will occur. For the time being, we aim to liberate ourselves from the cage we’ve been born into, alongside as many others as possible. This means overcoming the limiting constraints of our mental patterns and freeing ourselves from the self-fulfilling diagnoses of mental illness, to glory in our inscrutable uniqueness and our dysfunctionality – our refusal to be working, integrated components of the megamachine. We remember the suicides and drug abuse and say the deaths are murders by this dominator system. We are in an existential struggle and have declared revolutionary war to the end.
Critical Thinking as an Anarchist Weapon by Wolfi Landstreicher
The development of an anarchist practice that can act intelligently requires a capacity to analyze the situation in which we are struggling in terms of our desires and our principles. In other words it requires the practice of theory. In order to avoid the transformation of our theoretical endeavors into ideology — the reification of ideas into dominating concepts that control and direct our thinking — it is necessary to grasp certain tools, particularly those that allow us to think critically.
Critical thinking is the practice of examining a situation or an argument, assessing its strengths and weaknesses in order to be able to grasp it and turn it to one’s own ends. This involves the capacity for recognizing fallacious reasoning and methods of manipulating language, facts and emotions.
There has been a tendency in recent years among anarchists to belittle reasoning and intellectual activity. This has led to sloppy theorizing or a complete rejection of theoretical activity, and consequently an unanalyzed and incoherent practice that is often in contradiction with the ideas which one proclaims. A strong coherent anarchist practice must take up the weapon of critical thinking once again and use it to strike fiercely and precisely.
Read “Critical Thinking as an Anarchist Weapon” online
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An Anarchist Solution to Global Warming by Peter Gelderloos
Welcome to the future. No one ever knew global society would look like this. Its defining feature is heterogeneity. Some cities have been abandoned, trees are growing up through their avenues, rivers rush where asphalt had once covered the ground, and skyscrapers crumble while deer forage at their foundations.
Other cities are thriving, but they have changed beyond recognition. Rooftops, vacant lots, and sidewalks have turned into gardens. Fruit- and nut-bearing trees line every block. Roosters welcome every dawn.
Read “An Anarchist Solution to Global Warming” online
Download An Anarchist Solution to Global Warming by Peter Gelderloos
The Abolition of Work by Bob Black
No one should ever work.
Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.
That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a *ludic* conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child’s play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance.