The Cheat Sheet

Anarchism is wide river with many streams and tributaries so you will find many differing answers but essentially (and in my opinion) it is a collapsing down of unjust hierarchical structures into a heterarchy (a system of organization where the elements of the organization are unranked) and a philosophical challenging of power & authority mechanisms with the dismantling or replacement of those that fail to meet that challenge.

Anarcho-communism, also known as anarchist communism, is a political philosophy and anarchist school of thought which advocates the abolition of the state, capitalism, wage labour, social hierarchies and private property (while retaining respect for personal property, along with collectively-owned items, goods and services) in favor of common ownership of the means of production and direct democracy as well as a horizontal network of workers’ councils with production and consumption based on the guiding principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. Some forms of anarcho-communism such as insurrectionary anarchism are strongly influenced by egoism and radical individualism, believing anarcho-communism to be the best social system for the realization of individual freedom. Most anarcho-communists view anarcho-communism as a way of reconciling the opposition between the individual and society.

Anarcho-communism developed out of radical socialist currents after the French Revolution, but it was first formulated as such in the Italian section of the First International. The theoretical work of Peter Kropotkin took importance later as it expanded and developed pro-organizationalist and insurrectionary anti-organizationalist sections. To date, the best-known examples of an anarcho-communist society (i.e. established around the ideas as they exist today and achieving worldwide attention and knowledge in the historical canon) are the anarchist territories during the Spanish Revolution and the Free Territory during the Russian Revolution, where anarchists such as Nestor Makhno worked to create and defend anarcho-communism through the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine from 1918 before being conquered by the Bolsheviks in 1921.

During the Russian Civil War, anarchists in Ukraine rose up against both the Red and White army establishing the Free Territory, with the main ideology being anarcho-communism and anarcho-collectivism based of Peter Kropotkin works establishing an autonomous zone over most of Ukraine. In 1929, anarcho-communism was achieved in Korea by the Korean Anarchist Federation in Manchuria (KAFM) and the Korean Anarcho-Communist Federation (KACF), with help from anarchist general and independence activist Kim Chwa-chin, lasting until 1931, when Imperial Japan assassinated Kim and invaded from the south, while the Chinese Nationalists invaded from the north, resulting in the creation of Manchukuo, a puppet state of the Empire of Japan. Through the efforts and influence of the Spanish anarchists during the Spanish Revolution within the Spanish Civil War starting in 1936, anarcho-communism existed in most of Aragon, parts of the Levante and Andalusia as well as in the stronghold of anarchist Catalonia before being crushed in 1939 by the combined forces of the Francoist Nationalists (the regime that won the war), Nationalist allies such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and even Spanish Communist Party repression (backed by the Soviet Union) as well as economic and armaments blockades from the capitalist states and the Spanish Republic itself governed by the Republicans.

Communism (from Latin communis, ‘common, universal’) is a philosophical, social, political and economic ideology and movement whose ultimate goal is the establishment of a communist society, namely a socioeconomic order structured upon the ideas of common ownership of the means of production and the absence of social classes, money and the state.

Communism includes a variety of schools of thought which broadly include Marxism and anarcho-communism as well as the political ideologies grouped around both, all of which share the analysis that the current order of society stems from capitalism, its economic system and mode of production, namely that in this system there are two major social classes, conflict between these two classes is the root of all problems in society and this situation can only ultimately be resolved through a social revolution.

The two classes are the proletariat (the working class), who make up the majority of the population within society and must work to survive; and the bourgeoisie (the capitalist class), a small minority who derives profit from employing the working class through private ownership of the means of production. According to this analysis, revolution would put the working class in power and in turn establish social ownership of the means of production which is the primary element in the transformation of society towards communism.

Post-anarchism isn’t “after” anarchism the way post-punk is “after” punk. It’s anarchism run through the blender of post-structuralism, and the name gets misread constantly.

Thinkers like Saul Newman, Todd May, Lewis Call, and Andrew Koch started pulling on a thread in the 1990s: classical anarchism (Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman) rested on a picture of human nature as fundamentally cooperative and only corrupted by the state. Knock out the state and the cooperation comes roaring back. Beautiful theory. But post-anarchists asked a harder question… what if power isn’t just a thing states have? What if, as Foucault laid out, power is a diffuse mesh that runs through every relationship, every institution, every conversation, every body?

Then just abolishing the state doesn’t do the job. You have to keep interrogating power wherever it shows up, including inside the movement.

The upside: post-anarchism is one of the best tools we have for catching ourselves when we reproduce hierarchy inside our own circles. It’s why we don’t accept “he’s one of the good ones” as a defense when a comrade acts a fool.

The critique: it can drift into graduate seminar territory fast. There’s a version of post-anarchism that never leaves the library and never organizes anything. That’s not anarchism, that’s a book club.

My take: post-anarchism is a scalpel, not a replacement. Classical anarchism still does most of the structural work. Post-anarchism is how you make sure the movement you’re building doesn’t reproduce the thing you’re trying to dismantle.

Post-left anarchism is the rejection of the anarchist left’s organizational inheritance. Think Bob Black, Hakim Bey, Wolfi Landstreicher, Feral Faun. Their argument is roughly: the left, including its anarchist wing, has spent a century building replicas of the thing it claims to oppose. Parties, unions, manifestos, platforms, central committees, programs, ideologies. All of it smells like the apparatus.

Post-leftists say: strip it out. No more “the movement.” No more waiting for the right conditions. No more deferring to the experts. Autonomous individuals, affinity groups, insurrectionary moments, temporary autonomous zones.

The strong version of this critique is devastating. When Bob Black writes “The Abolition of Work,” he is not wrong that the left has swallowed a version of work-as-salvation that was never ours. Hakim Bey’s TAZ concept (Temporary Autonomous Zone) is still one of the most portable ideas in modern praxis… you don’t have to seize the state to build the world you want, you just have to make a room where it’s real for a weekend.

The weak version is where it gets messy. Post-leftism at its worst slides into contrarian individualism dressed up in black, sneering at actual organizing while somebody else does the dishes. You can critique unions all you want but somebody has to stop the boss from firing the workers on Monday. The insurrection isn’t coming next Tuesday, and the people who said it was in 1999 had to pay rent in 2000 just like everyone else.

My take: take the critique seriously, use what’s useful (especially the TAZ, especially the skepticism of movement orthodoxy), and don’t let it become an excuse to not show up.

Post-structuralism is the literary and philosophical work that both builds upon and rejects ideas within structuralism, the intellectual project that preceded it. Though post-structuralists all present different critiques of structuralism, common themes among them include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of structuralism, as well as an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute its structures. Accordingly, post-structuralism discards the idea of interpreting media (or the world) within pre-established, socially-constructed structures.

Structuralism proposes that one may understand human culture by means of a structure modeled on language. This understanding differs from concrete reality and from abstract ideas, instead as “third order” that mediates between the two. Building upon structuralist conceptions of reality mediated by the interrelationship between signs, a post-structuralist critique might suggest that to build meaning out of such an interpretation one must (falsely) assume that the definitions of these signs are both valid and fixed, and that the author employing structuralist theory is somehow above and apart from these structures they are describing so as to be able to wholly appreciate them. The rigidity, tendency to categorize, and intimation of universal truths found in structuralist thinking is then a common target of post-structuralist thought.

Writers whose works are often characterised as post-structuralist include: Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler, Jean Baudrillard and Julia Kristeva, although many theorists who have been called “post-structuralist” have rejected the label.

Socialism is a political, social and economic philosophy encompassing a range of economic and social systems characterized by social ownership and democratic control of the means of production. It includes the political theories and movements associated with such systems. Social ownership can be public, collective (cooperative), or of equity. While no single definition encapsulates many types of socialism, social ownership is the one common element shared among its various forms.

Socialist economic systems are divided into market and non-market forms. Non-market socialism substitutes factor markets and money with integrated economic planning and engineering or technical criteria based on calculation performed in-kind, thereby producing a different economic mechanism that functions according to different economic laws and dynamics than those of capitalism. A non-market socialist system aims to eliminate the inefficiencies and crises traditionally associated with capital accumulation and the profit system in capitalism. The socialist calculation debate, originated by the economic calculation problem, concerns the feasibility and methods of resource allocation for a planned socialist system. By contrast, market socialism retains the use of monetary prices, factor markets and, in some cases, the profit motive with respect to the operation of socially owned enterprises and the allocation of capital goods between them. Profits generated by these firms would be controlled directly by the workforce of each firm or accrue to society at large in the form of a social dividend. Economic democracy proposes a sort of market socialism, with more democratic control of companies, currencies, investments and natural resources.

In sociology, anthropology, and linguistics, structuralism is a general theory of culture and methodology that implies that elements of human culture must be understood by way of their relationship to a broader system. It works to uncover the structures that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel.

Alternatively, as summarized by philosopher Simon Blackburn, structuralism is:

[T]he belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations. These relations constitute a structure, and behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract structure.

The term syndicalism has French origins. In French, a syndicat is a trade union, usually a local union.

Syndicalism is a radical current in the labour movement that was most active in the early 20th century. Its main idea is the establishment of local worker-based organizations and the advancement of the demands and rights of workers through strikes. According to the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, it was predominant in the revolutionary left in the decade which preceded the outbreak of World War I because orthodox Marxism was mostly reformist at that time.

Major syndicalist organizations included the General Confederation of Labor in France, the National Confederation of Labour in Spain, the Italian Syndicalist Union, the Free Workers’ Union of Germany, and the Argentine Regional Workers’ Federation. Although they did not regard themselves as syndicalists, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union and the Canadian One Big Union are considered by most historians to belong to this current.

A number of syndicalist organizations were and still are to this day linked in the International Workers’ Association, but some of its member organizations left for the International Confederation of Labor, formed in 2018.

Short answer: long-term yes. Short-term no.

The long-term anarchist vision is a society without states, which means a society without the machinery taxation is part of. In that society what we now call “public goods” (schools, roads, care for the sick, care for the old) get organized the same way everything else does: federated associations of the people doing the work, pooling the surplus, distributing it by collective agreement. That isn’t “tax.” That’s just the pool.

Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid makes the case better than I can: cooperative pooling is already how most of the useful work in human society gets done when you look closely. The CNT-FAI shipyard wage funds in 1930s Catalonia. The IWW strike fund. Mondragón’s profit pool. Every volunteer fire department in rural America. Every neighborhood hurricane relief fund the week after landfall. None of those are “taxation” in the sense we mean it, because there is no private-public split for the money to bridge. It’s just the commons, working.

That’s the long game. Right now, in the actual world, taxation funds the only thing standing between a lot of people and medical bankruptcy, starvation, or dying outside. Defending the welfare state against the libertarian wrecking crew is not a betrayal of anarchist principles. It’s triage. You do not let people die because your politics are still loading.

The practical move is to push for expanded public provision now while building the parallel structures that eventually won’t need a state to pool the surplus. The welfare state is scaffolding. You build the house underneath it, and you do not let anyone kick the scaffolding out before the house is up.

The deeper point, which shows up everywhere from Proudhon through contemporary writers like the authors of An Anarchist FAQ: “tax” only makes sense if there is a separation between a “public” sphere that has to be funded and a “private” sphere that has to be taxed. That separation is a feature of capitalism, not a law of nature. Kill the separation and the concept goes with it.

First thing that matters: “crime” is a category defined by the state. Not by harm, not by suffering, not by anyone’s material well-being. It’s whatever the state has decided to prosecute this week.

So when somebody asks “what do anarchists do about crime,” the honest answer is a question back: which crime? The executive who ordered a hospital to deny a kid a heart transplant because her insurance card was the wrong color? The landlord who raised rent until three families had to sleep in one apartment? The cop who broke an old man’s arm at a protest last week? Or are you asking about somebody stealing a pack of cigarettes at the 7-Eleven.

Harm is the real category. And harm has better answers than the carceral ones we’ve been told are the only answers.

Transformative justice and restorative justice frameworks have been doing this work for decades. Organizations like Common Justice, Creative Interventions, and the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective have shown that community-led accountability processes produce lower recidivism than prison, more healing for survivors, and none of the state violence that comes packaged with a court date. It’s slower. It’s harder. It demands that the community actually show up for each other instead of outsourcing the problem to people with guns and a uniform. That’s the point.

The abolitionist position isn’t “nothing happens when somebody gets hurt.” It’s “the state is not, and has never been, a good-faith intervener in harm.” Look at rape conviction rates. Look at how the cops treat the people who call them. Look at who ends up in a cage for who. If your intervention for harm is a system that reliably compounds harm, that’s not an intervention. That’s a ritual.

So: what do we do about crime? Build the thing that actually addresses harm. The system we’ve got is a failure on its own terms.

Here’s the tension. “Human rights” as a framework has done real good in the world. It’s been the language asylum seekers have used, the language survivors of state torture have used, the language families of the disappeared have used to tell the world what was done to them. I’m not trashing any of that. When an organizer in Gaza invokes the Fourth Geneva Convention they’re reaching for a tool that has occasionally saved lives.

But the anarchist position has to sit with a harder question underneath: if a state grants rights, a state can take them away. And states do, all the time, usually the moment it becomes convenient. The right to protest is subject to permit. The right to speak is subject to platform terms of service. The right not to be shot by a cop is subject to the cop’s mood and the county prosecutor’s calendar. Anything your “rights” depend on the state’s permission for is not really yours.

Worse, the international human rights regime has been one of the most effective vehicles for imperialism we have on record. “Humanitarian intervention” has buried more people than most wars. Human rights as a discourse tends to arrive right around the same time as the bombers.

The anarchist move isn’t to throw the framework out, it’s to relocate its foundation. Rights aren’t gifts from power. They’re what we defend in practice, together, with our bodies and our networks, for each other. A mutual aid network that keeps people fed is protecting the right to food. A sanctuary network that hides people from ICE is protecting the right to move. A picket line is protecting the right to organize. We build the rights by enforcing them, not by petitioning someone else to enforce them for us.

Keep the language when it’s useful. Don’t confuse it for the work.

Okay, this one comes up every single time and it’s the first thing worth getting clear about… because it’s the thing the right has deliberately confused for about fifty years to make us all sound ridiculous.

Anarchists are not talking about your toothbrush. We are not talking about your shoes. We are not talking about your bedroom, your art supplies, the book you’re holding, your wedding ring, or the bike you ride to work. Your possessions that you actively use are yours. Keep them.

The distinction we care about is personal property versus private property.

Personal property is what you use. Your apartment, your kitchen, your tools, your record collection, your laptop. The stuff that’s part of your life.

Private property, in the anarchist sense, means productive assets owned by one party and worked by another for the owner’s profit. The factory you don’t work in but somehow own. The apartment building you don’t live in but somehow collect rent from. The mine, the server farm, the warehouse. The means of production. The means of extracting rent from someone else’s labor.

Proudhon’s famous “property is theft” was never about your toothbrush. He made the distinction explicitly. Property is theft when property is the legal right to take what someone else made. Owning a chair you sit in is not that. Owning the chair factory where other people work for you is.

The anarchist position on private property is roughly: occupancy and use. You live there, it’s yours. You work there, you have a stake in it. Absentee ownership as a mechanism for rent-extraction is what we reject, because that’s the engine hierarchy runs on.

When somebody says “under anarchism you couldn’t have anything!” they’re either arguing in bad faith or they’ve been had. Point at a toothbrush. Ask them what they think.

Credit to Eamon McKeever for assembling a large portion of this list with due credit to the Co-Op fandom and some assembling, editing and writing by Kai.

Free Territory

From 1918 to 1921, the Free Territory was an anarchist state set up in Ukraine by Nestor Makhno. The Free Territory has the distinction of being one of the few states based entirely on anarchist ideology and has probably the coolest flag of any nation to ever exist—a picture of a skull with the words, “Death to all who stand in the way of freedom for working people!”

With an organized voluntary militia of 100,000 men, known as the Black Army, Makhno took over the southeastern section of Ukraine and implemented an anarchist society. The society was structured by establishing worker and peasant soviets (organizations) where the members voted on specific issues in committees.

Makhno opposed a central government of any kind and instead called together congresses of soviets to discuss national issues that needed debate. In the end, the Red Army invaded the Free Territory and was able to finally defeat the Black Army in 1921. Ironically, Trotsky had written in his memoirs that he and Lenin had given serious consideration to establishing a separate anarchist society as a means of experimenting with the idea of a stateless society.

The Makhnovists aimed for a true social revolution in which the working classes (both urban and rural) could actively manage their own affairs and society. As such, their social program reflected the fact that oppression has its roots in both political and economic power and so aimed at eliminating both the state and private property. At the core of their social ideas was the simple principle of working-class autonomy, the idea that the liberation of working-class people must be the task of the working-class people themselves. This vision is at the heart of anarchism and was expressed most elegantly by Makhno:

Conquer or die - such is the dilemma that faces the Ukrainian peasants and workers at this historic moment…But we will not conquer in order to repeat the errors of the past years, the error of putting our fate into the hands of new masters; we will conquer in order to take our destinies into our own hands, to conduct our lives according to our own will and our own conception of the truth. [quoted by Peter Arshinov, The History of the Makhnovist Movement, p. 58].

Freetown Christiania

Created in 1971. Remarkably, it has managed to remain mostly autonomous for over 40 years. The town was founded by squatters in Copenhagen, Denmark, in an abandoned military area. They promptly claimed the area and declared it a free city. As a result of this status, the squatters currently living there do not have to pay taxes and are able to sell marijuana openly.

Christiania always has had an anarchist, communal spirit. As such, the community discourages private property and also have a developed set of societal rules/norms: which include the prohibition of cars, stealing, guns, bulletproof vests and hard drugs. Cameras are not allowed, and locals will wave their hands and shout “No photo!” if they see a picture being taken. Famous for its main drag, known as “Pusher Street” as hash was sold openly from permanent stands until 2004. Such commerce is controversial, but cannot be removed without complete community consensus. For years the legal status of the region was in limbo, as the Danish government attempted, without success, to remove the squatters.

In 2012, when the government offered to sell the occupied government land to the residents, the residents took the deal. They bought the land by setting up a foundation which ensured that the land would be owned by the community.

Hungarian Revolution

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 can be seen as an excellent example of a functioning anarchy. From October 22, 1956, Hungarian workers refused to obey their managers or their government, in the face of authoritarian soviet rule. Claiming sovereignty for their own workers’ councils they organized economic, military and social production on an increasing scale. An example of the anarchic social organization was that vast sums of money were freely donated for injured revolutionary fighters, and that this money was left unattended in the street for days at a time. Peasants supplied the workers with food on a voluntary basis. Between October 22 and December 14 Hungary’s economy and society was governed by the democratic opinion of workers councils and voluntary associations.

These councils constantly increased in scope and depth, eventually forming a Central Workers Council of Greater Budapest (CWC-GB), with intellectual and student associations affiliated to the body. The attempts to form a national Workers Council were crushed by Soviet military violence. The workers councils fought off one invasion by the Soviet Union between October 23 and 28, and fought a second invasion to an armistice of exhaustion between November 3 and November 10. After this time the Soviet Union negotiated directly with the Workers Councils. However, arrests of the primary and reserve leaderships of the CWC-GB, and massive reprisal executions and deportations of Hungarian revolutionaries lead to voluntary dissolution of the CWC-GB as it was no longer able to uphold its aims and ideals. Sporadic resistance by Hungarian revolutionaries and workers continued until mid 1957. Only one self-proclaimed anarchist, the playwright Julius Hay (Hay Gyula), was involved in organizing the revolution. Most revolutionary Hungarians adopted their own “anarchist” way of organizing spontaneously.

Paris Commune

In 1871, the Paris Commune came about as a reaction to the Franco-Prussian War and is often considered the first example of the working class seizing power. After being defeated by the Germans, the French army tried to take back the cannons they had left in the city of Paris. The National Guard of Paris, which was separate from the army, sided with the citizens, and free elections were held to determine who would govern the city.

The commune implemented anarchist policies such as turning workplaces into cooperatives. In the words of Mikhail Bakunin, a famous communist at the time, it was a “clearly formulated negation of the state.” Some anarchists, however, believed that the commune didn’t go far enough because it kept in place the ideas of representative government.

Later, the commune also established a Committee of Public Safety to use terror to protect the ideals of the revolution, which the anarchists later opposed. On May 28, the government of France finally defeated the commune and reestablished its hold on the city.

Puerto Real

Since the time of the transition from dictatorship under Francisco Franco to democracy and a constitutional monarchy form of government (1975–1980), Puerto Real has remained to the left of the political spectrum. Leftist parties, sometimes in coalition with centrists, have dominated the local and provincial organs of democracy.

The anarcho-syndicalist union C.N.T. has helped to create mass assemblies after a dispute between shipyard workers and their bosses. Since then, the assemblies have focused on the issues such as health, taxes, economic issues, the environment and cultural preservation. This method has been praised as a method of anarchist community organizing.

Revolutionary Catalonia

As a result of the Spanish coup in July 1936 when the Fascists were trying to gain control of Spain, the Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo-Federacion Anarquista Iberica (CNT-FAI), an anarchist party within Catalonia, led a popular uprising by organizing militias against the Nationalist forces.

Overall, these militias were made up of 18,000 workers (including George Orwell, who fought for the Catalonians). They were collectively able to defeat the Nationalist forces and gain independence for Catalonia. Each militia was led by elected delegates who met to decide on the individual militia’s course of action.

Although the CNT-FAI was criticized for joining the national government, which meant that it had to work with socialist groups such as the Unified Socialist Party, it did this to have a better chance of winning the war against Spain. It was also able to implement some of the policies it supported - namely, the collectivization of land and resources.

The government was able to encourage voluntary collectivization, where workers pooled resources and had general meetings of all its participants. Factories were also “confiscated and controlled by workmen’s committees, either term possessing for the owners’ almost equal significance,” said Burnett Bolloten in his book The Grand Camouflage. Eventually, the anarchist government fell to a large Nationalist offensive in 1938.

Rojava

Although not technically an anarchist society, Rojava (aka the Federation of Northern Syria) is a de facto autonomous zone which has been able to govern itself separately from the official Syrian government since Rojava declared autonomy in November 2013. Although the official political system of Rojava is described as libertarian socialism, the state is also influenced by anarchist principles.

Rojava has taken its ideals from Vermont philosopher Murray Bookchin who proposed that the ideal nation-state should enact “libertarian municipalism.” Essentially, this creates assemblies of people who vote for issues on a local level and execute them within their communities. Abdullah Ocalan, an influential member of the Kurdistan Workers Party, ordered his followers to create these municipal assemblies, eventually developing into the system that is currently followed.

Shinmin Autonomous Region

In 1924, the Korean Anarchist Communist Federation (KACF) began to foster the ongoing creation of anarchist labor unions and promoted anti-imperialist sentiment in China. Five years later, the KACF declared the Shinmin province to be independent from China and immediately sought to establish a decentralized form of control within the area.

Like other anarchist societies, the KACF adopted a loose association of councils that were created specifically for areas, districts, and villages. The decentralized, federative structure operated in a cooperative manner to deal with agriculture, education, finance and other vital issues. An Army to fight for the defense of Shinmin was also set up and spearheaded by the great Korean Anarchist Kim jwa-jin which had great successes against the Japanese and Stalinist Armies using hit-and-run guerrilla tactics.

KACF sections in China, Korea, Japan and elsewhere devoted all their energies towards the success of the Shinmin Rebellion, most of them actually relocating there. Dealing simultaneously with Stalinist Russia’s attempts to overthrow the Shinmin autonomous region and Japan’s imperialist attempts to claim the region for itself, the federation was finally overturned in 1931.

Strandzha Commune

The Strandzha Commune in Bulgaria was an anarchist society that was proclaimed on August 18, 1903, and led by Mihail Gerdzhikov, a guerilla commander in the Internal Macedonian Adrianople Revolutionary Organization. Gerdzhikov’s army, which only numbered around 2,000 strong, managed to establish a provisional government in the Strandzha Mountains while facing a Turkish opposition of 10,500 soldiers.

Within the commune, a communitarian system was established and resources were distributed evenly according to need. The short-lived commune was defeated by Ottoman forces only one month later on September 8, 1903.

Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities

The indigenous peoples of Southern Mexico rebelled in 1994, partially in response to the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), reclaiming their lands in what is called “a war against oblivion.” They established various municipalities which are, in practice, outside the realm of Mexican law.

Laws in the Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities are not passed by “leaders,” as such, but by “Good Government Councils” and by the will of the people (representatives in these councils are truly representative of their communities, rather than professional politicians). This is very similar to the delegate structure that many anarchists engage in with spokescouncils, or with unions. In many communities, general assemblies gather during the week to decide on various things facing the community. The assemblies are open to all, with no formal hierarchy. The decisions made by the communities are then passed to elected delegates whose only job is to give the decided upon information to a council of delegates. Like anarcho-syndicalist organizations, the delegates are recallable, and are also rotated. This way, massive numbers of people are able to decide things with no formal hierarchy, and without people speaking for them.

The assemblies and councils serve not as traditional governing bodies but as instruments of the people to provide medicine, education, food, and other essentials. The “laws” passed by the Good Government Councils are not enforced with policemen and prisons, but in a way that respects “criminals” as members of the community. For example, it was decided to ban alcohol and drugsTemplate:Fact, due to their nefarious influence on Indians in the past (though alcohol/drug prohibition is considered in conflict with anarchist principles). Violation of this law is surprisingly rare; those who do may be required, for example, to help build something their community needs. Some anarchists believe this to be a decentralized, non-authoritarian style similar to what they advocate, having always loathed prisons, police power, and capital punishment.

Like anarchists, Zapatistas also believe in forming freely associated collectives to carry out various jobs and tasks. Zapatistas collectively work land, and plant and grow crops. The Zapatistas do not claim to be anarchists, but through their actions and words, have shown some similarities to self-proclaimed anarchists and have become a cause célebre of the global left and the “anti-globalization movement”. However, the Zapatistas, along with libertarian Marxism and traditional Zapatismo (which is almost identical to anarchism), have also been heavily influenced by the writings and actions of Ricardo Flores Magón, or “Magonism”, who was an anarcho-syndicalist during the Mexican Revolution.

Zomia

Stretching from the Vietnamese highlands and Tibetan plateau to Afghanistan, Zomia is a geographical region with a population of 100 million people whose name was coined by Willem van Schendel of the University of Amsterdam in 2002. Zomia is seen by some political scientists, such as Yale political scientist James Scott, as a rejection of the modern-day state and an example of an anarchist society in action.

In this region of the world, states such as China and Vietnam do not have control of these “out-of-reach” areas, and as a result, they are left to largely govern themselves. These cultures tend to be fiercely nonhierarchical with rules such as the Wa’s that limit the amount of wealth and power one can display.

Scott also argues that this anarchist society was formed as a result of people fleeing from more traditional nation-state structures to gain more freedom. In one instance, he argues that the lack of written language within Zomia was a conscious choice by the natives because of the inherent bureaucracy that can arise from it.

Video Option:

Consensus 101: Basic Training in Consensus by Tim Hartnett

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m3yjrC23Fc

Consensus 101 is a training video of participants in Consensus Decision-Making. It explains the basics of consensus. After watching you can take a post-test and earn a certificate verfying that you are trained in consensus process.

Text Option:

Credit to Tree Bressen for the great write-up.

Consensus process is a powerful tool for bringing groups together to move forward with decisions that are inspired and effective. However, like many tools, using consensus requires learning a particular set of skills. Groups who try to apply it without learning those skills often end up frustrated, when what’s really needed is more training, knowledge and practice.

Cooperation is the basis of community. Consensus is a thoroughly cooperative form of decision-making. While not appropriate for all situations - it’s not generally recommended for a quick fix to a crisis or deciding what color to paint the barn - for groups that have a shared purpose, explicit values, some level of trust and openness to each other, and enough time to work with material in depth, the consensus process can be immensely rewarding. In contrast with the separations of majority voting, consensus bonds people together.

The search for consensus agreement relies on every person in the circle bringing their best self forward to seek unity. The group need not all think the same, have the same opinion, or support the same proposal in a unanimous vote. Rather, what is being earnestly sought is a “sense of the meeting.” This is the essence of what the group agrees on, the common ground, the shared understanding or desire.

Steps of the Process

Typically, a member brings forward a topic for discussion. It may be in the form of a question, a statement of a problem, or an idea for implementation. Once the item is framed by the presenter, there is time for clarifying questions. Often people in a meeting start to evaluate and form responses to an idea before the sponsor is even half finished stating it; setting aside explicit time for questions first allows everyone to understand the idea and its context before jumping into the fray.

The next phase is usually open discussion. The facilitator keeps track of time and calls on people in turn. Participants may ask more questions, pose hypothetical examples, list concerns, say why they like an idea, make suggestions, etc. A natural, free-flowing discussion can build energy, but if the pace gets too fast then less assertive members will likely feel excluded. The facilitator may suggest varying general discussion with other methods such as brainstorms or small groups. People need to monitor their pace and pay attention to each other’s needs. Finding the balance comes with practice and feedback.

As participants’ comments are integrated by the facilitator, some sense of the group’s direction emerges. As the facilitator attempts to name this and reflect it back to the group, it also becomes clear where there is not yet alignment with that direction. This is where the main challenge in using consensus lies. If an environment where everyone’s piece of the truth is welcome can be created, the inherent wisdom and creativity of the group comes through. Once substantial airing of the issues has taken place and every member has made a good faith effort to find solutions and common ground, there are three structural responses available to each participant: agreement, standing aside, or standing in the way (blocking).

Agreement does not necessarily indicate high enthusiasm or that the proposal fulfills one’s personal preference. It means that maybe you love it or maybe you just think it’s okay, but you see how it benefits the group and you can live with it.

The second possibility is standing aside. One may choose to stand aside due to personal conscience or strongly differing individual opinion; either way, one owes it to the group to explain one’s reasons. In the Quaker tradition, standing aside means that you would not be called upon to be an active implementer of a decision, though you would still be bound by it. Even though you may vehemently disagree, you honor the group’s need or desire to move in that direction. If more than one or two people are standing aside, it is a signal that the group is not yet in alignment.

The third option is standing in the way of a decision, also known as blocking. It is the ability to prevent the will of the rest of the group that gives consensus its special power, and it’s also what many people are most scared of. Blocking is never to be undertaken lightly. It is the responsibility of any participant with concerns to bring them up as early in the process as possible, and normally the ideas and feelings of every member are naturally woven in as the discussion moves along. In a well-functioning consensus group, the frequency of blocks ranges from nonexistent to extremely rare.

However, occasionally in the course of years, it may happen that a member perceives a proposal as representing a disastrous direction for the group. Not a big risk or a decision that they personally don’t like, but an action that would contradict the group’s purpose, mission, or values, irrevocably injuring the organization or its members. It takes significant ego to presume that you have more wisdom than the rest of the group; yet paradoxically, one must never block from an egotistical place or from personal preference.

When the alternative is catastrophe, it becomes a member’s responsibility to serve the group by stopping it from moving forward. Anyone considering blocking a decision is obligated to thoroughly explain the reasons and make every effort to find a workable solution. Caroline Estes of Alpha Farm, a respected consensus teacher, says that if you have blocked an emerging consensus half a dozen times, you’ve used up your lifetime quota.

Making a Plan

I lived at Acorn Community in rural Virginia for over four years. When i first arrived, the standard procedure at meetings was for the group to gather around the breakfast table, eating and chatting until someone picked up the clipboard with the list of meeting topics and suggested one for the group to start with. When that topic was finished, we’d move on to another one, until at some point a gardener would complain that the day was moving on and it was time to get to work outside. Discussion would be wrapped up, perhaps by agreeing in a bit of a rush to whatever was proposed most insistently, and the clipboard would be hung on a hook until the next meeting.

Some months later, Formal Consensus teacher CT Butler came through and suggested we consider planning our agendas in advance. “Huh?” “What’s that?” “Wouldn’t that take too much time?” He suggested that our meetings would move along so much more efficiently that it would be worth the time.

We decided to try it as an experiment. Three of us formed a committee and drew up a form for each meeting. We worked out in advance which items would be discussed when. We clarified which community member would present each item, for how long, and who would facilitate each week. We tried to give the harder items to more experienced facilitators, and used team facilitation for newcomers to learn skills. All the roles were rotated among willing volunteers, and we made sure no one tried to present an item at the same time as they facilitated or took notes. We reserved a few minutes at the end of every meeting for brief evaluations, so we could give ourselves feedback on what worked well and what could be improved.

In order to deal with the concern that we not lose out on any of our precious meeting time, we started adding an “overflow” item to the plan too, so that if we finished all the other items faster than we expected, we’d be ready to go with something to fill in the rest of the time.

Once we saw how much more effective we could be, there was no turning back. Factors that influenced the agenda included who was home that week to sponsor or participate in the discussion, urgency of action needed, balancing heavy and light items at each meeting, which items had been waiting longest for attention, and so on. The agenda planners posted clearly whether the item would be an introduction, discussion, or possible decision. While at the beginning it could take two hours of person-time to work it all out, later we became so accustomed to juggling the different factors that one person could plan a week’s agendas in twenty minutes.

Delegate, Delegate

Acorn’s approach to agenda planning illustrates an important principle for making consensus process work. How many times have you seen a meeting bog down in details to the point of exhaustion? Learning to distinguish when an item is small enough to fit in the box of a committee or manager’s domain can save everyone countless hours of frustration and boredom.

Committees fall into two categories: standing and ad hoc. Standing committees perform ongoing tasks for an organization. Typical examples for a community might include Membership, Finance, or Road Maintenance. Ad hoc committees are formed for a one-time task, such as planning a party or doing legal research on land zoning.

When a committee is set up, it’s important to be clear about the extent of their power. What is the purpose of the committee? Are they doing research only and reporting back? Making recommendations for the larger group to implement? Making decisions and following through themselves? Committees need a mandate from the larger group and a timeline. Even if the committee’s work isn’t finished for a while, reporting back in a timely manner keeps the committee and the larger group in touch with each other.

The most functional size for a committee is usually three to five people. A balanced committee includes representatives of the breadth of opinion on a subject, as well as depth of expertise. You probably need people who are energetic initiators, thorough on follow-up, skilled at writing, smooth interpersonal communicators, linear thinkers and gestalt thinkers—luckily each person does not need to have all of these qualities, so long as they are represented in the group! One person should be designated as the convenor, who sets up the first meeting.

If the committee is open to it, posting when and where its meetings will take place so that others may observe can help defuse possible tensions. Once trust is built and the relationship is established, the larger group will naturally send items to the committee for seasoning and input. When the committee returns its ideas to the larger group for final decisions, a sense of wider ownership and participation is created.

Minutes

Have members of your group ever sat around arguing or scratching their heads, wondering just what it was you decided about that guideline eight months ago? Figuring it out can take ten minutes or three hours or be impossible. Minutes make all the difference. They serve as the memory of the group and create a common record that everyone has access to.

The notetaker’s goal is not to record who said what when. Rather, the information readers will likely want to know is:

• date of the meeting
• who was present
• title of each item clearly labeled
• main points of discussion
  • questions answered
  • range of opinion
  • concerns raised
    • whether each concern was resolved or not
  • “sense of the meeting”
  • new ideas
• agreements and decisions
  • reasons and intentions for a decision
• name and reason of anyone standing aside
• next steps

If that’s all too much to cover, then just go for the core: if there is a proposal, and especially if there is a consensus decision, that needs to be stated clearly and explicitly. During the meeting, if the group is nearing consensus, the facilitator should state the sense of the meeting and then have the notetaker read out the proposed minute, because it’s the minute that will actually serve as the record of what was agreed to.

Finally, minutes will be most useful when the information is clearly organized. Acorn found it useful to index them by both subject and date. If no one is enthused at the prospect of taking on this task, you may consider hiring the services of a professional indexer.

The Role of the Facilitator

As Caroline Estes has previously written, the role of the facilitator cannot be over-emphasized. The facilitator is responsible for keeping the meeting on track. Yet every member is also responsible for each other and the group, and every person can engage in facilitative behaviors such as soliciting input from quieter members, bringing the discussion back to the main topic, and summarizing what’s been said.

Facilitation is an art and a skill, a science and an intuition; every facilitator has room for growth. If your group is inexperienced in facilitation, consider bringing in someone to give a workshop or sending a few people off for more training, who can then teach others when they return. There are also books and other resources listed at the end of this article.

Rotating everyone through the role helps minimize power differences in the group. If the least skilled members get more practice, it brings the level of the whole group up a notch. Being thrust into the facilitator role makes people better meeting participants too. However, it makes sense to call upon more skilled facilitators for more challenging or controversial topics.

The facilitator is the servant of the group. They must never push their own agenda. While everyone has biases, for the duration of the meeting it is the facilitator’s job to leave their attachments aside in order to be a clear channel for what the group needs. Neutrality and objectivity are essential. If you are in the facilitator role, a few minutes before you start, clear your mind of worries and fatigue; breathe and center; ground yourself. All your attention will be needed for the task at hand.

As the facilitator, you carry an attitude of group success. For every group, in every situation, there is common ground that can be discerned—your job is to see that and reflect it back, over and over. As each person speaks, listen carefully, and every few minutes step in to weave together what’s been said. Look for the reasons behind the positions. If someone’s contribution is hard for others to take, search for what’s underneath that others will be able to relate to and name it. If someone becomes frustrated, look for what’s not being heard. Unity is present, waiting to be discovered. Have faith.

Energy, tone and body language will tell you at least as much as the words spoken. Don’t be afraid to name openly what you see happening, yet be gentle and concentrate on the positive. Some groups employ a vibes-watcher to pay special attention to this. The vibes-watcher may suggest a break, or a moment of silence. Silence is a powerful tool. Sometimes a moment to think is all that’s needed to break a tension. Seek the path forward, but don’t be afraid of conflict; it’s a natural experience and it shows that people care enough to put energy in. Highly skilled facilitators are able to take that energy and use it to help the group.

If someone proffers a premature block, you can work with the substance of their objection in the moment, or you can acknowledge the seriousness of their concern and ask them to hold it and listen with an open mind to more discussion. If you come to a stuck point, remember that you have options. An item can be laid over for future discussion. You or someone else can talk one-on-one with an individual during a break. Items can be sent to a committee for further consideration. The group can request help from an outside facilitator. With patience and effort, agreements can nearly always be reached.

Conclusion

Facilitator Paul DeLapa sees consensus as a creative route to collective discovery. More than a decision-making method, “Consensus is a process that leads to agreements that people are unified on,” he says. “It requires a different mind-set . . . to create and build out of what’s present.” All our lives we’re taught that we’ll be rewarded for delivering the “right” answer—suddenly there is no right answer. Instead, there is a cooperative search for elegant, creative solutions that meet everyone’s needs.

In a culture where we’re taught that every person must struggle for themselves and we can’t get ahead without stepping on others, consensus is a radical, community-building alternative. Consensus teaches that no one can get ahead by themselves: our success with the method depends utterly on our ability to work with others. Competition is no longer the root of experience; instead, we honor and integrate the diverse life surrounding us. Consensus is interdependence made visible.

Tree Bressen, facilitator and teacher, has been assisting intentional communities, nonprofits, and other organizations with group process since 1994. Pages from her website are available for copying and distribution free of charge as long as you continue to include these credit lines and contact information.

Tree Bressen, Eugene, Oregon, 541-343-3855

Thesuesian Incrementalism (pronouced th-uh-soo-sh-ian) is a methodology for changing the entirety of the landscape of a society while maintaining the integrity of that society at the same time in order to avoid the negative consequences of a insurrectionary/revolutionary style of action that involvess the removal or collapse of major portions of a society.

The Thesuesian methodology was “created” by Kai when thinking about and discussing the Ship of Theseus thought experiment one day. The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment that raises the question of whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object. It is a very old western philosophical thought experiment in the metaphysics of identy dating back to at least Plato.

Now there are a number of proposed resolutions to the actual thought experiment but none of them actually matter in this discussion to be frank for it’s right about here that we actually part ways with the thought experiment proper.

What we concern ourselves with at this point is the concept of modular/compartmentalized replacement. Taken as a whole, changing the very fabric of society is a seemingly impossible task. It would not only require a mass education effort but engaging in countless protests, resistances, governmental type changes, truly a complete reorganization of society in order to swap from say neo-liberal hyper-capitalism to a more socially beneficial system.

If we were to undertake such a “revolutionary” (the quotes are there to represent the recognition of the form of momentary revolution that, particularly the left, has become enamoured with post-French 1794 revolution) overhaul of Western-style (expecially American) nation-states then it would be akin to committing genoicde given the global, interconnected, electronic age we live in. Medical, food and countless life saving supply lines would likely be broken as a knock-on effect of such an action.

This is where stepping back and thinking about revolution as a different process takes hold. First free yourself of the fictionalized meta-narrative that has permeated or global consciousness; revolution is not a singular event but a protracted timeline of events that can span generations that is puncuated by periods of heightened activity. Second, begin to see society comprising of components rather than as some impenetrable monolith. Then you start to see how the Thesuesian methodology works. You organize in such a way, your collective political activities that takes into account the modular nature of society, taking care not to undermine the critical structure but instead “hot-swapping” peices of it as you go along.

The end-goal of such a process being that as this collective action is taken, slowly but surely the very nature of the society as a whole begins to morph under the weight of this activity.

“Marx is an authoritarian and centralising communist. He wants what we want, the complete triumph of economic and social quality, but he wants it in the State and through the State power, through the dictatorship of a very strong and, so to say, despotic provisional government, that is by the negation of liberty. His economic ideal is the State as sole owner of the land and of all kinds of capital, cultivating the land under the management of State engineers, and controlling all industrial and commercial associations with State capital. We want the same triumph of economic and social equality through the abolition of the State and of all that passes by the name of law (which, in our view, is the permanent negation of human rights). We want the reconstruction of society and the unification of mankind to be achieved, not from above downwards by any sort of authority, nor by socialist officials, engineers, and other accredited men of learning - but from below upwards, by the free federation of all kinds of workers’ associations liberated from the yoke of the State.” - Mikhail Bakunin

“An anarchist is someone who rejects the domination of one person or class of people over another. Anarchism is a very broad umbrella term for a group of political philosophies that are based on the idea that we can live as anarchists. We anarchists want a world without nations, governments, capitalism, racism, sexism, homophobia… without any of the numerous, intersecting systems of domination the world bears the weight of today. - There is no single perfect expression of anarchism, because anarchism is a network of ideas instead of a single dogmatic philosophy. And we quite prefer it that way.” - Emma Goldman

Short version: American libertarians are not anarchists and anarcho-capitalism is not a thing. It’s a marketing campaign.

Long version, because this comes up constantly:

Anarchism is a political tradition that originated in the 19th century European left (Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, the First International) and has been, for all of its history, explicitly anti-capitalist. Every major anarchist thinker, every major anarchist movement, every major anarchist publication until the 1970s understood “no gods no masters” to include the boss. You cannot dismantle hierarchy and keep a wage relationship intact. Those are the same fight.

American libertarianism, on the other hand, is a mid-20th-century project that took the word “liberty” and pointed it entirely at property rights and taxes. It emerged from the US right (Rothbard, Rand, the Mises Institute) as a way to dress up laissez-faire capitalism in anti-authoritarian costume. Its actual function has been to provide intellectual cover for deregulation, union-busting, and the dismantling of the welfare state.

The “anarcho-capitalist” label specifically was coined by Murray Rothbard in the 1950s and 60s. No established anarchist tradition recognizes it. It’s a peculiarly American fringe phenomenon with almost zero purchase anywhere else in the world where “anarchism” retains its actual meaning. Bookchin spent decades explaining why a hierarchy of wealth is still a hierarchy. If your “stateless society” has billionaires and the working poor, the billionaires are the state. They just outsourced the cops.

A useful litmus test: ask the person if hierarchy itself is the problem, or just the government’s hierarchy. If they say just the government’s, you’re not talking to an anarchist. You’re talking to someone who wants to keep the boss.

In “Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State” (1884), one of the fathers of communism, Friedrich Engels, spoke of the degradation of men in ancient Greece, stating that “they fell into the abominable practice of sodomy.”

In Soviet prisons, homosexuals suffered all kinds of humiliations. The homosexual prisoners were forced to sleep next to the latrines, to perform the worst tasks of the prison, to eat separately from the other prisoners, and to offer sexual favors to other prisoners or guards to avoid beatings and rapes. As Nicolás Márquez points out in “The Black Book of the New Left” (2016), “between 1934 and 1980, close to fifty thousand homosexuals were condemned” to the Gulag, the Soviet network of concentration camps.

The Communist Maxim Gorky, one of the leading ideologues of the USSR, wrote the following in the article “Proletarian Humanism”, published in the Soviet communist newspapers Pravda and Izvestia on May 23, 1934: “On the land where the proletariat rules bravely and with success, homosexuality, with its corrupting effect on young people, is considered a social crime punishable under the law. In contrast, in the ‘cultivated land’ of the great philosophers, scholars and musicians, it is practiced freely and with impunity. There is already a sarcastic saying: ‘Destroy homosexuality and fascism will disappear’”.

In its 1952 edition, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia stated: “The origin of homosexuality is linked to everyday social conditions; for the overwhelming majority of people who indulge in homosexuality, these perversions stop as soon as the person is in a favorable social environment … In Soviet society with its healthy customs, homosexuality as a sexual perversion is considered shameful and criminal. Soviet criminal legislation considers homosexuality punishable, with the exception of those cases in which homosexuality is a manifestation of a marked psychic disorder.”

In his “Dictionary of Homophobia” (2015), Louis-George Tin explains that in the Chinese version of the Soviet Gulag, called Laogai, “tens of thousands of homosexuals were detained, often assimilated to other categories suspected of betrayal (foreigners, the mestizos, the Catholics, the Westernized intellectuals) and always treated very harshly.” The Chinese-French writer Jean Pasqualini, a survivor of the Laogai, recounted in his book “Prisonnier de Mao” (1974) the execution of two homosexual prisoners in the field of Qinghe in 1960, killed by a shot in the head, for maintaining relations among them. The treatment of homosexual prisoners in Chinese Laogai was similar to or even worse than in Soviet prisons.

One of the best known leaders of the Cuban communist dictatorship, Che Guevara, showed a special hatred for homosexuals, whom he considered “sexual perverts.” In 1960, Guevara founded the Guanahacabibes labor camp, aimed at “re-educating” groups that the communist dictatorship considered contrary to their “revolutionary ethics”, among them homosexuals, who suffered abuse, violations and even executions in that area, presided by a large sign that – in the style of Auschwitz – affirmed: Work will make you men”.

In 1965, in an interview granted to the American reporter Lee Lockwood, the Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro said: “We have never believed that a homosexual can personify the conditions and requirements of conduct that allow us to consider him a true revolutionary. A deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a communist militant should be.” In 1984, two former supporters of that dictatorship, Néstor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez Lea, produced a documentary entitled “Improper Conduct” on the repression of homosexuals in Cuba, in which they collected the testimonies of dozens of people who were confined in confinement camps on that island because of their sexual orientation.

In January 2016, the Stalinist Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF, Russian partner of the Communist Party of Spain) called for fines for homosexual behavior and to punish anyone who confesses his homosexuality in public. One of the CPRF deputies, Ivan Nikitchuk, labeled homosexuals as “sick and crazy” people.

Lenin’s idea was that workers couldn’t reach revolutionary consciousness on their own, so a disciplined party of professional revolutionaries had to lead them there. The party would seize the state, use it to suppress the bourgeoisie, and then (this is the part that’s supposed to happen and never does) wither away.

Look at where every single Leninist revolution ended up. The party did not wither. The party calcified into the new ruling class. The state did not dissolve. It hardened. The bureaucracy that was supposed to be transitional became a permanent caste with its own interests, its own privileges, and its own internal security apparatus to protect them.

This is not a quirk of Russia in 1917 or China in 1949 or Cuba in 1959. This is the pattern. Every time. You cannot hand a revolutionary vanguard a state apparatus and expect them to give it back. The apparatus does one job, and that job is sustaining itself.

Anarchists read this pattern early. Bakunin called it in the 1870s, writing that Marx’s scheme would produce “a new aristocracy of clerks” sitting on top of the working class. He got thrown out of the First International for saying it. He was also right.

In March 1921 the sailors of the Kronstadt naval base, who had been among the most militant supporters of the October Revolution four years earlier, demanded new soviet elections, freedom of speech for left groups, and release of imprisoned anarchists and left SRs. The Bolshevik response was Trotsky and Tukhachevsky leading a Red Army force across the ice to crush them. Thousands dead. The survivors shipped to camps.

Trotsky spent the rest of his life defending the decision. Every Leninist tradition since has done the same. The logic has to be: if you admit Kronstadt was the state massacring its own revolutionary base because they wanted democracy, the entire “dictatorship of the proletariat” frame collapses. So they don’t admit it.

Kronstadt is the one that gets the name, but the pattern repeats: Makhno’s Black Army in Ukraine in that same period, the suppression of the CNT-FAI by the Communist Party of Spain in 1937, the liquidation of the Korean anarchist movement at Shinmin, the purging of the POUM. Every actually-existing communist movement, the first thing it does once it consolidates power is kill the anarchists on its left flank.

If your theory requires you to kill the anarchists to preserve the revolution, the thing you are preserving is not the revolution.

Workers did not own the factory in the Soviet Union. The state owned the factory. The state was controlled by the party. The party was controlled, in practice, by a few dozen people in the Politburo. What the workers had was a different set of bosses with different rhetoric.

The USSR, the PRC, the DPRK, Cuba: in all of them, the means of production were concentrated in a ruling body that extracted surplus from the workers’ labor and directed it according to the ruling body’s strategic priorities. That is the definition of capitalism. It is “state capitalism” because the capitalist wears a party uniform, but the extraction relationship is identical.

Anarcho-communists (Kropotkin, Malatesta, Goldman after her Soviet tour) were making this critique while the ink on the 1917 decrees was still wet. Goldman’s My Disillusionment in Russia (1923) is the canonical read and it still slaps.

The test that actually matters is not “who legally owns this?” It is “who decides what this produces, how the surplus gets distributed, and what happens to the worker who refuses?” If the answer to all three is “the party,” it’s capitalism. Just with a red coat of paint.

Campism is the habit of reflexively defending any regime that has bad relations with the US State Department. Russia, China, Iran, the DPRK, pre-2011 Assad. The logic is: these states oppose American empire, therefore supporting them is anti-imperialism.

It is not. It is picking a different imperialism. Russia’s imperial project in Ukraine is not meaningfully different, at the level of ordinary people being killed, from the American imperial project in Iraq. The Chinese state’s treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang is not neutralized by the fact that Pompeo also complained about it. Assad’s chemical weapons on civilians did not become acceptable because some US think tank also disapproved.

Anarchism is opposed to all states. The position is simple and consistent. We don’t cheer for any of them. We stand with the people getting run over by all of them.

The tankie version of anti-imperialism produces, every single time, a worldview where ordinary people living under authoritarian regimes get told by Western leftists that their suffering is actually Western propaganda. That is a bad look. It is also bad politics. The people living under those regimes can tell you what their life is like, and it is not the business of an internationalist left to tell them they’re wrong about it.

The tankie move on race, gender, sexuality, disability, colonization is to file it all under “secondary contradictions” that will resolve once the class contradiction gets solved. Revolution first, identity later.

The problem: it has never worked that way. The USSR suppressed queer people, Central Asian Muslims, Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars. The PRC has been running a re-education campaign on Uyghurs for a decade. Cuba ran conversion labor camps for gay men into the 1980s. The “actually existing” versions of class-first politics have a consistent track record of reproducing every oppression they claimed would melt away under socialism.

Because oppressions are not just downstream of class. They have their own mechanisms, their own histories, their own material bases. Patriarchy predates capitalism. White supremacy predates industrial capitalism and adapts to survive every economic formation that follows. Queerphobia had a long religious career before the factory system existed.

You can’t abolish any of them by abolishing only the one Marx knew best. The anarchist tradition, from Emma Goldman through bell hooks and Angela Davis, got this. “No one is free until everyone is free” is not a slogan, it’s a load-bearing structural claim.

Aleksandr Dugin is a fascist philosopher whose audience includes the Kremlin’s inner circle and a nontrivial chunk of the English-speaking “dirtbag left.” Caleb Maupin, a self-described Marxist-Leninist, appears on Tucker Carlson. National-Bolshevism is a real thing with a real history (Strasserism, the NBP, the LaRouche orbit). These are not isolated freaks.

The horseshoe theory is usually garbage when applied to ordinary social democrats and ordinary libertarians. It is not garbage when applied to authoritarian leftists and the authoritarian right, because they actually share the operative belief: a strong centralized state run by the right hands fixes everything. They just disagree on whose hands.

Anarchists reject the premise. A strong centralized state in any hands reproduces the structure of domination we’re trying to abolish. That’s what makes us different from the tankies, and it’s why when the chips are down in any actual political moment, anarchists end up with antifascists in the street and not with campist “leftists” running cover for Putin.

If someone’s “left” politics routes them into defending the Kremlin, defending the Chinese security state, or minimizing Assad’s body count, they are not on your side. Check the trajectory.

Capitalism acutally drives down innovation through a number of mechanisms. A study by Nicholas Bloom, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen, and Michael Webb.

“We present evidence from various industries, products, and firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply.”

“Economic growth arises from people creating ideas. As a matter of accounting, we can decompose the long-run growth rate into the product of two terms: the effective number of researchers and their research productivity. We present a wide range of empirical evidence showing that in many contexts and at various levels of disaggregation, research effort is rising substantially, while research productivity is declining sharply.”

“We document qualitatively similar results throughout the US economy, providing detailed microeconomic evidence on idea production functions. In addition to Moore’s Law, our case studies include agricultural productivity (corn, soybeans, cotton, and wheat) and medical innovations. Research productivity for seed yields declines at about 5 percent per year. We find a similar rate of decline when studying the mortality improvements associated with cancer and heart disease. Finally, we examine two sources of firm-level panel data, Compustat and the US Census of Manufacturing. While the data quality from these samples is coarser than our case studies, the case studies suffer from possibly not being representative. We find substantial heterogeneity across firms, but research productivity declines at a rate of around 10 percent per year in Compustat and 8 percent per year in the Census.”

https://kaisthings.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IdeaPF.pdf

Look at how a community actually behaves in a crisis. A wildfire on the California coast, a tornado in Kentucky, the week after Hurricane Katrina. Volunteer firefighters show up without being paid. Neighbors with chainsaws start clearing downed trees. Someone with a working kitchen starts cooking for the block. The distribution is by need, the coordination is by conversation, and nobody is filing a claim or sending an invoice.

About two-thirds of active firefighters in the United States are volunteers. Rural America does not run on markets. It runs on the neighbor with the tractor and the uncle with the EMT cert.

Wikipedia is not a market product. It is a 60-million-article encyclopedia written for free by strangers, administered by a skeleton crew, running on donations, beating Encyclopædia Britannica like a drum on both coverage and recency. The public library is not a market product. It is a social technology several thousand years old for pooling knowledge and lending it out according to need.

Every single time capitalism’s ideologues insist nothing gets done without a profit motive, look at what actually keeps society from cracking apart on the days when it almost does. The volunteer firefighter. The neighbor. The nurse who stays past her shift. The community garden. The Little Free Library. The carpool. The church meal. This is already the world we say we want. It is just unevenly distributed and ruthlessly denied.

Linux is the operating system running most of the servers on Earth, including Google’s, Amazon’s, Meta’s, and the ones inside SpaceX rockets. It was written, and continues to be written, by thousands of people contributing for free. Apache, the web server software behind a huge fraction of the internet, is the same story. Python. PostgreSQL. Firefox. Signal. Tor. Debian. WordPress, which powers over 40 percent of all websites.

None of this was produced by the market. The market sat on top of it and collected rent. Google and Amazon are not net contributors to most of the foundational code they depend on. They are the downstream beneficiaries of a gift economy that produced the platforms they then monetized.

“Free and open source” as a license isn’t just about price. It’s about the commons. The code is written in public, reviewed in public, improved in public, and cannot be walled off by any single actor. When Microsoft tried to “embrace, extend, extinguish” Linux in the 1990s, they lost. The commons survived. Now they sell Linux themselves, because they couldn’t beat it.

This is actually-existing anarchism at planetary scale. Voluntary federated production, no central authority, no wage relation, distribution by need (anyone can download it), coordinated across hundreds of thousands of people who have never met. Every person who tells you voluntary cooperation cannot produce complex goods is typing that claim on a browser that runs on the thing they say cannot exist.

“Externality” is the economist’s polite word for “the part of the cost we don’t pay.” Pollution. Climate damage. Lead poisoning. Burnout. Depression. The ecology we killed to get the coltan out of the Congo for your phone. All of that sits outside the price on the receipt, and the company is structurally required, by its shareholders, not to price it in. If they priced it in they would lose to the competitor who didn’t.

This is not a bug in capitalism. This is the engine. Profit is what’s left over after you subtract the costs you actually paid. Lower the costs you actually paid (by externalizing as many as possible onto workers, onto neighbors, onto the atmosphere, onto the next generation) and profit goes up. The whole incentive structure rewards pushing cost out of the balance sheet and into someone else’s lungs.

There is a reason the largest carbon emitters, the biggest polluters, and the most aggressive labor-exploiters are also usually the most profitable companies in their sector. They are not the exception. They are the curriculum.

Insulin costs about three dollars to manufacture. In the US it sells for roughly three hundred. There are more empty apartments in New York City than there are homeless people sleeping on its sidewalks. The food waste in American grocery stores every year would feed the country’s food-insecure population many times over. There is no physical shortage of any of these things. There is a pricing shortage.

Capitalism, running correctly, produces scarcity where abundance would be possible, because abundance destroys the price. Patents and copyright are tools for manufacturing it (make the cure illegal to copy). Real estate speculation is a tool for manufacturing it (hold units off the market while rents climb). Crop dumping to prop up commodity prices is a tool for manufacturing it.

A system that converts abundance into scarcity so the scarcity can be sold back to you is not an economy. It is a protection racket with a marketing department.

About half the useful work done in any society is not paid. Cooking dinner. Raising a child. Sitting with the dying. Teaching a toddler to read. Keeping a relationship from falling apart. Feeding the elderly neighbor who lives alone. None of this shows up in GDP. All of it is load-bearing.

Silvia Federici and the Wages for Housework movement in the 1970s made this explicit: the “paid economy” is the visible tip of an iceberg of unpaid reproductive labor, and that labor is overwhelmingly performed by women, disproportionately by women of color, and increasingly by immigrant women working in other women’s houses for room, board, and what their employers feel like handing over. The whole edifice of waged capitalism sits on top of it.

Capitalism can’t price care work because if it did, the price of everything else would reveal itself as a lie. So it pretends the work isn’t happening. It relies on the work being culturally obligatory, gendered, and unpaid. Then it calls itself “efficient.”

Federici’s Caliban and the Witch traces this back to the European witch hunts as the violent ground-laying for this exact division of labor. It’s the single best book I’ve read on where the current arrangement came from and why it’s so hard to undo.

Every property line is a claim about where the cops will show up. “Free market” is shorthand for a market freely backed by a state monopoly on violence. When you owe the landlord and the landlord calls the sheriff, the sheriff comes. When the company town dockworkers tried to organize, the Pinkertons came. When the CIA’s interests and the United Fruit Company’s interests happened to coincide in Guatemala, the US government invaded Guatemala.

Libertarians like to pretend the market is what’s left when the state steps back. This is backward. The market is what the state props up with its guns. Enclosure of the English commons required soldiers. The transatlantic slave trade required navies. The colonization of the Americas required cavalry. The pipeline through Standing Rock required armed federal agents and tear gas. Contemporary platform capitalism requires copyright enforcement, which requires courts, which require jailers.

Any anarchist analysis of capitalism that stops at “bosses bad” misses half the picture. Bosses are backed by cops. The cops are the thing keeping the whole construct upright. That’s why “abolish the police” is a materially serious demand, not a slogan. Pull the enforcement layer out and the ownership claims underneath it start to look like what they are: one person saying a thing belongs to them and everyone else being asked to politely agree.

Every time the mainstream media says humans are destroying the planet, I want to ask which humans exactly. Because the answer is not “all of us.” The answer is a very specific subset of us, and it has a name.

Just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of all industrial greenhouse gas emissions since 1988 (Carbon Majors Report, 2017). The richest 1% of the global population produces twice the carbon emissions of the poorest 50%. The US military alone is a larger institutional producer of CO2 than most countries on Earth.

This isn’t a species problem. It’s a class problem. It’s a structural problem. It’s a problem baked into an economic system that requires infinite growth on a finite planet and treats externalities (a cute economist word for “the parts that kill people”) as someone else’s accounting.

Capitalism needs extraction. It needs labor and materials cheap and disposable. It needs new markets faster than the old ones can be exhausted. That is not compatible with a livable biosphere. Those are opposing engines and they are on a collision course.

Anarchist analysis starts here: you cannot solve climate change inside the logic that created it.

The term “personal carbon footprint” was popularized by British Petroleum in 2004 through an ad campaign developed by Ogilvy & Mather. I wish I were kidding. Go look it up.

It is a deliberate framework shift invented by one of the five largest carbon emitters on Earth to move the conversation from their behavior to yours. It worked. It worked so well that you can still watch people in 2026 pass on straws and eat at home and feel like they’re doing the thing, while a dozen pipeline extensions cross treaty lands two time zones away.

Eat less meat if you want to. Buy less stuff if you want to. Those are fine choices. But a single cargo ship burns more sulfur dioxide in a voyage than fifty million cars do in a year. Your footprint is not the crime scene. The crime scene is the boardroom where the cargo ship gets dispatched.

Refuse the frame.

Carbon markets, carbon offsets, ESG funds, “sustainable growth,” electric vehicles built with cobalt mined by children in the DRC. Every single one of these is a proposed solution that leaves the extraction engine running and just re-labels the exhaust.

Carbon credits let polluters pay for the right to keep polluting, while the “offset” forests get cut down three years later or were never planted in the first place (ProPublica and The Guardian have both documented this extensively). ESG funds have turned out to mean whatever the fund manager wants them to mean. Electric vehicles solve the tailpipe problem and leave the lithium-mining problem and the grid-source problem and the 1.5-ton-SUV-weight-of-a-car problem.

The market does not have the answer. The market is the problem.

A real climate response requires collapsing production that doesn’t need to exist, redistributing the production that does, and ending the extractive relationships that made the crisis in the first place. You cannot buy your way out of a mess you shopped your way into.

The phrase “climate apartheid” was formalized by UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston in a 2019 report. The point is sharp. The wealthy will adapt. They will buy their way to the high ground, the cool ground, the fresh ground. Everyone else will be left with the floods, the fires, the smoke, the heat domes, the collapsed fisheries, and the border walls going up faster every year to keep the displaced from reaching the places that caused the displacement.

Inside the US, this looks like Cancer Alley in Louisiana. It looks like Flint. It looks like the Navajo Nation still fighting the leftovers of uranium mining eight decades later. It looks like South Phoenix cooking ten degrees hotter than North Phoenix because the rich neighborhoods got trees and the poor ones got asphalt.

Environmental racism is not a side-effect of climate change. It’s the shape of climate change, in every polity, on every continent.

Frontline communities, overwhelmingly Black, Brown, Indigenous, and working-class, have been saying this for fifty years and the mainstream environmental movement is finally catching up. Listen to them. Fund them. Back them up.

When people ask me what effective climate action looks like, I don’t point at the UN. I point at Standing Rock. I point at Line 3. I point at the water protectors at Fairy Creek and the land defenders at Mauna Kea and the Indigenous-led campaigns that have, according to the Indigenous Environmental Network’s own analysis, stopped or delayed carbon emissions equivalent to roughly a quarter of annual US and Canadian output.

That is not symbolism. That is material climate action, done by communities who have been fighting extractive industry long before “climate” was a headline word.

The mainstream environmental movement has, historically, a bad habit of showing up for the photo op and leaving once the cameras are gone. Don’t be that.

If you want to be useful: find the frontline struggle closest to you, go ask what they need, and do that. Show up consistently, not heroically. The work is long.

Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine mapped this out two decades ago and it reads more accurate every year. When the disaster hits (hurricane, flood, fire, pandemic, collapse), the state arrives late and the market arrives first, and the market’s job is to use the chaos to finish whatever privatization project it had on the shelf. Post-Katrina New Orleans was the laboratory. Every major disaster since has followed the same grammar.

The counter-grammar is mutual aid.

Common Ground Collective fed and housed people in New Orleans when the state had written them off. Occupy Sandy ran circles around FEMA on the Rockaways in 2012. During Covid, grassroots networks delivered groceries, medications, and rent assistance on timescales the federal government could not match. During the 2020 fire season, mutual aid networks in the Pacific Northwest coordinated evacuations, smoke filters, and housing that government agencies simply did not provide.

This is what climate response actually looks like at the neighborhood scale. Not a carbon credit. A phone tree.

Build the tree now, while it’s quiet.

• Military Order 50 limits access to information sources in the West Bank
• Military Order 348 states a special council has final say on property litigation in the West Bank
• Military Order 107 bans publications including Arabic grammar, Arab nationalism and the history of the crusade.
• Military Order 998 requires Palestinians military permission to withdraw funds from their bank accounts.
• All Palestinians in the West Bank and Occupied Territories are subject to Israeli military law, and processed through Israeli military courts. While Israelis living in the Occupied Territories are meant to be tried through the military courts, since the 1980s they have been processed through Israeli civilian courts under orders from the Israeli Attorney General.

The following organizations/reports have found Israel to operate a system of apartheid:

• UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine in a report to the ICJ (2007)
• Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (2009)
• Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 (2014)
• United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia Report (2017)
• Yesh Din of Israel (2020)
• B’Tselem of Israel (2021)
• International Federation for Human Rights (2021)
• Human Rights Watch (2021)
• Amnesty International (2022)
• International Commission of Jurists (2022)
• Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories report to the UN Human Rights Council (2022)
• Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People report (2022)
• United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories report (2022)

What is genocide?

Genocide is violence that targets individuals because of their membership of a group and aims at the destruction of a people in whole or in part.

History of Oppression and Atrocities

Nakba (1948)

Nakba (Catastrophe) 1948. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs through violent displacement and dispossession of property, and belongings.

• 750,000 people displaced (80% of the population)*
• 15,000 dead
• Poisoning of water wells
• Over 500 Arab majority towns depopulated
• Constitutes a war crime (collective punishment)
• Considered genocide by John Docker and Martin Shaw

Naksa (1967) (setback)

• The displacement of 280,000 to 325,000 Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, when the territories were captured in the Six Day War
• Palestinian villages were destroyed by the Israeli military
• Constitutes a war crime (collective punishment)

Settlements

There are 144 illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, 100 outposts, and over 450,000 settlers

Starving the population

• Israeli settlers burn Palestinian olive trees in the WB
• Military Order 1252 restricts the transport of any good in the WB
• The Israeli military authorities consolidated complete power over all water resources in Palestine under Military Orders 58, 92 and 158
• Active denial of relief organizations to provide aid.
• Bombing of food aid trucks and aid organization facilities
• Israeli militants blockading food aid trucks

Gaza 2005-2023

• Gaza has been subject to a blockade since 2005.
• The blockade was further tightened in 2007 after Hamas expunged Fatah from Gaza.
• This blockade has been called genocidal by specialist historians and genocide experts such as Pappé and Üngör.
• Israel has invaded Gaza and waged war on Gaza in: 2008-2009, 2012, 2014
• These wars have been labeled genocidal by a multitude of people, including specialist historians, genocide experts, international law specialists, and holocaust survivors.
• During this period 5,360 Gazans were killed as a direct result of Israeli military actions, 1,007 Palestinians were also killed in the West Bank, and 37 in Israel. In this same period 308 Israelis were killed by Palestinian military actions.

War of October 2023

• 43,000 Palestinians confirmed dead as of November 2024
• Among them, 14,200 minors and 3,700 elderly
• Over 85,500 injuries
• 17 out of 36 hospitals remain functional in Gaza
• 260,000 people facing crisis level food insecurity
• 1.1 million for facing catastrophic level
• 96% of women and children aged 6-23 months not meeting their daily nutritional requirements
• 160,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women in need of nutritional supplements
• Over 50,000 children estimated to need treatment for acute malnutrition
• 95% of the population has no access to clean water
• 7,000 unaccompanied or separated children
• 273 aid workers and 151 journalists killed
• At least 986 medical workers killed
• 10,000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, over 33% without trial or charge
• 75,000+ tonnes of explosives dropped on Gaza
• 87% of educational institutions destroyed, and over 750 teachers and educational staff killed
• 206 recognized archaeological and heritage sites destroyed
• 3 churches destroyed, including some of the oldest in the world, and one where over 500 people were sheltering
• Israel has conducted airstrikes on designated refugee safe-zones at least 25 times
• All of these numbers are underestimations

33 countries have declared the war on Gaza a genocide (4 other vow to respect the ICJ outcome)

• Christian aid
• Center for Constitutional Rights
• Amnesty International
• Human Rights Watch
• OXFAM
• International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network
• Israeli committee against house demolition
• Israelis against Apartheid
• Jewish voice for peace
• Nelson Mandela Foundation
• National Lawyer Guild
• Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
• Lemkin Institute for the Prevention of Genocide

What is civil asset forfeiture?

Civil asset forfeiture is a legal tool that allows law enforcement officials to seize property that they assert has been involved in certain criminal activity. In fact, the owner of the property doesn’t even need to be guilty of a crime: Civil asset forfeiture proceedings charge the property itself with involvement in a crime. This means that police can seize your car, home, money, or valuables without ever having to charge you with a crime. There are many, many stories of innocent people being stripped of their money and property by law enforcement.

Why would we ever do this?

Today, civil forfeiture is intended to give law enforcement a tool they can use to go after organized crime, including drug dealers and their organizations. While its roots in the common law are deep, modern civil forfeiture is justified primarily on the grounds that it allows law enforcement to seize the assets and ill-gotten gains of these criminals, using the property and proceeds to fight against other alleged criminals. Unfortunately, civil asset forfeiture is also used by law enforcement as a way to generate revenue, and many of its targets are innocent members of the public.

But don’t police target only criminals?

Unfortunately, no. There are many stories of innocent people having their property seized. For example, between 2006 and 2008, law enforcement agents in Tenaha, Texas, engaged in a systematic practice of seizing cash and property from innocent drivers with absolutely no evidence of wrongdoing. In Philadelphia, police seized the home of two sisters whose brother, who did not live there, showed up while trying to evade the cops. In Detroit, cops seized over a hundred cars owned by patrons of an art institute event—because the institute had failed to get a liquor license. You can be totally innocent and still be unable to stop the government from seizing your property.

What if I’m innocent? Surely, innocent people can’t have their property taken.

Being innocent does not mean that a state has to return your property. The Supreme Court of the United States has held that the “innocent owner” defense is not constitutionally required. Furthermore, even in states where you do have an innocent owner defense, the burden is typically on you. Your property is presumed to be guilty until you prove that you are innocent and that your property therefore should not be forfeited. In other words, you must prove (1) that you were not involved in criminal activity and (2) that you either had no knowledge that your property was being used to facilitate the commission of a crime or that you took every reasonable step under the circumstances to terminate such use. And all the while, the police retain your property. To cap it all off, the success rate for winning back property is low. Pragmatic property owners, however innocent, may reason that it is best to cut their losses rather than challenge the forfeiture in court.

That’s crazy!!! This can’t happen in my state.

It might be crazy, but civil asset forfeiture happens in every state in the union. Even if the state has laws that limit it, state and local law enforcement authorities can still seize property by partnering with federal law enforcement officials in a system called “equitable sharing,” and payouts to state and local agencies have increased nearly 250% over a 12-year period.

But everybody at least gets their day in court, right?

No. In fact, the majority of federal civil forfeitures end administratively, meaning that the property is automatically forfeited after a certain period of time because the owner of the property did not challenge the seizure. Forfeiture proceedings might be barred because of waivers procured by law enforcement officials who pressure property owners to renounce ownership of their cars, homes, or money in order to avoid facing (often bogus) criminal charges. This quid pro quo raises serious fundamental questions about the fairness of the process. And if a property owner holds out and goes to court, he or she will face an uphill, costly, and lengthy battle.

My state has good forfeiture laws on the books, so none of this is a problem, right?

Not necessarily. Federal law can do an end run around good state law. A process called equitable sharing allows local law enforcement officials to team up with federal law enforcement agents to seize property under federal forfeiture law that could not be seized under applicable state forfeiture law. Through equitable sharing, local law enforcement agencies pocket a portion of the proceeds from the seizure and the feds keep the rest. This is a way for local law enforcement to circumvent state law and continue to profit from civil asset forfeitures.

Credit to Jason Snead

States Without the Death Penalty Have Better Record on Homicide Rates

Statistics Provided by FBI Uniform Crime Reports

A study by Professor Michael Radelet and Traci Lacock of the University of Colorado found that 88% of the nation’s leading criminologists do not believe the death penalty is an effective deterrent to crime. The study, Do Executions Lower Homicide Rates? The Views of Leading Criminologists, published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Crimonology, concluded, “There is overwhelming consensus among America’s top criminologists that the empirical research conducted on the deterrence question fails to support the threat or use of the death penalty.” A previous study in 1996 had come to similar conclusions.

The criminologists surveyed included - 1) Fellows in the American Society of Criminology (ASC), (2) Winners of the ASC’s Sutherland Award, the highest award given by that organization for contributions to criminological theory, or (3) Presidents of the ASC between 1997 and the present. Those presidents before 1997 had been included in the prior survey. Respondents were asked to base their answers on existing empirical research, not their views on capital punishment.

Nearly 78% of those surveyed said that having the death penalty in a state does not lower the murder rate. In addition, 91% of respondents said politicians support the death penalty in order to appear tough on crime – and 75% said that it distracts legislatures on the state and national level from focusing on real solutions to crime problems. Over all, 94% agreed that there was little emperical evidence to support the deterrent effect of the death penalty. And 90% said the death penalty had little effect overall on the committing of murder. Additionally, 91.6% said that increasing the frequency of executions would not add a deterrent effect, and 87.6% said that speeding up executions wouldn’t work either.

Some heavy hitters in the Death Penalty: China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Somalia, Libya, Iraq, North Korea

The War on Drugs

• Every 25 seconds, someone in America is arrested for drug possession. (source)
• The number of Americans arrested for possession has tripled since 1980, reaching 1.3 million arrests per year in 2015—six times the number of arrests for drug sales. (source)
• One-fifth of the incarcerated population—or 456,000 individuals—is serving time for a drug charge. (source)
• Every 25 seconds, someone in America is arrested for drug possession. (source)
• Incarcerating people for drug-related offenses has been shown to have little impact on substance misuse rates. (source)
• Instead, incarceration is linked with increased mortality from overdose. In the first two weeks after their release from prison, individuals are almost 13 times more likely to die than the general population. (source)
• The leading cause of death among recently released individuals is overdose. (source)
• During that period, individuals are at a 129 percent greater risk of dying from an overdose than the general public. (source)
• Incarceration has a negligible effect on public safety. Crime rates have trended downward since 1990, and researchers attribute 75 to 100 percent of these reductions to factors other than incarceration.. (source)

Racial Disparities

• Black Americans are four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana charges than their white peers. (source)
• In fact, black Americans make up nearly 30 percent of all drug-related arrests, despite accounting for only 12.5 percent of all substance users. (source)
• Black Americans are nearly six times more likely to be incarcerated for drug-related offenses than their white counterparts, despite equal substance usage rates. (source)
• Almost 80 percent of people serving time for a federal drug offense are black or Latino. (source)
• In state prisons, people of color make up 60 percent of those serving time for drug charges. (source)
• In the federal system, the average black defendant convicted of a drug offense will serve nearly the same amount of time (58.7 months) as a white defendant would for a violent crime (61.7 months). (source)
• People of color account for 70 percent of all defendants convicted of charges with a mandatory minimum sentence. Prosecutors are twice as likely to pursue a mandatory minimum sentence for a black defendant than a white defendant charged with the same offense,16 and black defendants are less likely to receive relief from mandatory minimums. (source)
• On average, defendants subject to mandatory minimums spend five times longer in prison than those convicted of other offenses. (source)

Economic impact

• Since 1971 to 2015, the war on drugs has cost the United States an estimated $1 trillion. In 2015, the federal government spent an estimated $9.2 million every day to incarcerate people charged with drug-related offenses—that’s more than $3.3 billion annually. (source)
• State governments spent another $7 billion in 2015 to incarcerate individuals for drug-related charges. (source)
• In contrast, marijuana legalization would save roughly $7.7 billion per year in averted enforcement costs and would yield an additional $6 billion in tax revenue. The net total—$13.7 billion—could send more than 650,000 students to public universities every year. (source)

Harm Reduction

• Many jurisdictions are reducing fatalities by expanding the availability of naloxone, an opioid overdose reversal drug. Every month, first responders in New York City save 180 lives by administering naloxone. (source)
• A Massachusetts program reduced opioid-related deaths by 11 percent by distributing naloxone to individuals at risk of overdose, as well as to their family, friends, and service providers. (source)
• Syringe access programs provide people with clean injection equipment to prevent syringe sharing, resulting in significant reductions in the incidence of blood-borne diseases. After implementing syringe access services, Washington state documented an 80 percent drop in new diagnoses of hepatitis B and hepatitis C. (source)
• And in the District of Columbia, syringe access programs were credited with a 70 percent decrease in new HIV infections over two years, saving $44.3 million in lifetime health care costs. (source)
• Nationally, researchers estimate that syringe access programs yield a return on investment of $7.58 for every dollar spent. (source)
• More than 60 international cities now operate supervised injection facilities (SIFs). (source)
• SIFs are safe, hygienic places where individuals can inject preobtained drugs under medical supervision. These facilities have proven successful in connecting individuals with treatment and social services, as well as reducing overdose fatalities and blood-borne illnesses. Over the course of two years, a safe injection site in Vancouver, British Columbia, for example, was associated with a 35 percent reduction in overdose fatalities in its immediate vicinity. (source)
• Safe injection sites also increased connections to substance use services. In the year after establishing the facility, Vancouver saw a 30 percent increase in entry into treatment among safe injection users, compared to the year before the site opened. (source)
• A number of American cities—including Philadelphia, Seattle, and New York—are working to implement SIFs. Philadelphia estimated that SIFs would save up to 76 lives every year and avert up to 18 cases of HIV and 213 cases of hepatitis C. (source)
• In New York, research found that SIFs would prevent an estimated 130 overdoses and save up to $7 million in health care costs annually. (source)

The Effects of Portugal’s Drug Decriminalization Model

Aspects of Portugal’s model have been used to either support or critique decriminalization as an answer to various social problems. While many of these statistics can be difficult to measure and interpret, it would appear that it’s had had both positive and negative impacts. Let’s look at a few.

Disease Prevention

Portugal has seen significant positive change in the realm of disease prevention, with nationwide HIV rates decreasing dramatically since decriminalization. In 2014, only 40 intravenous drug users tested positive for HIV, down from 1,482 in 2000. The good news doesn’t stop there–after a decade and a half of battling Hepatitis C with lackluster results, the Portuguese government committed to 100% coverage of the disease. Since then, 96% of those who finished treatment have been effectively cured.

Drug Use Rates

Many proponents of decriminalization claim that Portugal managed to decrease overall drug use, but it really depends on how we choose to interpret the statistics. Lifetime drug users (defined as people who have tried any drug, even once) actually rose from 8% to 12% between 2001-2007, then declined once more to 9.5% in 2014. ‘Problem’ drug users–those who have come into contact with the police or rehabilitation facilities due to their drug habit–seem to have decreased by more than 10%. Past month and year drug use has remained steadily low, with only 5% of 18-24 year olds, for example, having used cannabis in the past month.

Lack of information makes it difficult to plot usage of ‘harder’ drugs over time. Comparing Portugal to its neighbors, however, puts it in a generally favorable light. For instance, as of 2012, Portugal’s lifetime cocaine use per capita was about one-tenth that of Spain’s and one-fifth that of France’s.

Crime Rates

Though we’ve seen some positive benefits, it should come as no surprise that large, sweeping changes to the legal system have also resulted in some negative repercussions. Arguably, the most glaring issue is the rise in homicides, which climbed by about 60% from 2001-2007. They have evened out since, though, and currently sit at a little more than 10% more than they were pre-decriminalization.

Incarcerations

The criminal landscape has certainly changed, but it doesn’t seem to be growing smaller. Incarcerations have risen slightly from 2001 to 2012 despite the fact that fewer than half as many people are now incarcerated for drug crimes. Those who are pro-decriminalization often point to this statistic as a sign that police are now unburdened from their duties in persecuting small drug offenses, and are now able to tackle more substantial crime. Others argue that lax drug laws have led to more crime, and back up their claim by referencing the growing underground population reported by undercover agents interviewed in the study What Can We Learn From the Portuguese Decriminalization of Illicit Drugs?

The anarchist position on sex work is short, direct, and unpopular in a lot of rooms: sex workers are workers. Full decriminalization is the baseline. Workers decide what workers need.

This is going to piss off both the carceral right (who want it criminalized entirely) and a certain strain of carceral feminism that calls itself abolitionist but means “abolish the workers” rather than “abolish the conditions that exploit them.” Neither position listens to the people doing the work. Both positions get people killed.

Let’s lay out the actual frameworks on the table:

Criminalization (the US status quo): makes sex workers criminals, pushes the work deeper underground, concentrates power with pimps and cops, makes it impossible to screen clients, impossible to report violence, impossible to organize. The people this hurts most are the most vulnerable (trans women, women of color, migrants). This is the model the police prefer because it gives them leverage.

The “Nordic model” (or “end demand”): criminalizes the purchase but not the sale. Sounds progressive. Sex workers consistently report that it makes things worse. Clients who are now criminals want to meet in more isolated spots. Screening time drops. Violence goes up. The people who push this model are usually not the people doing the work. Look at where the funding comes from.

Legalization (Germany, Netherlands): the state regulates the industry. Creates a two-tier system where “legal” workers are papered, policed, and taxed, and everyone who can’t or won’t register gets pushed into the same underground as full criminalization. Migrants and trans workers end up worse off.

Full decriminalization (New Zealand/Aotearoa 2003): remove all criminal statutes targeting the work itself, let standard labor/health/safety/contract law apply, let workers organize like any other trade. The data is clear. Violence drops. Health outcomes improve. Worker power goes up. New Zealand’s own government reviews have confirmed this.

The anarchist take starts from listening to sex workers’ organizations (SWOP-USA, Red Umbrella Fund, Desiree Alliance, St. James Infirmary) rather than to people speaking about them. Solidarity not rescue. Worker power not saviorism. Full decrim is what sex workers overwhelmingly ask for. Give them that, and then get out of the way.

Medicare for All would boost wages, expand workers’ options, and likely create jobs.

https://www.epi.org/press/medicare-for-all-would-boost-wages-expand-workers-options-and-likely-create-jobs/

https://www.epi.org/publication/medicare-for-all-would-help-the-labor-market/

“We present evidence from various industries, products, and firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply.”

Specifically, it could:

• Boost wages and salaries by allowing employers to redirect money they are spending on health care costs to their workers’ wages.
• Increase job quality by ensuring that every job now comes bundled with a guarantee of health care—with the boost to job quality even greater among women workers, who are less likely to have employer-sponsored health care.
• Lessen the stress and economic shock of losing a job or moving between jobs by eliminating the loss of health care that now accompanies job losses and transitions.
• Support self-employment and small business development—which is currently super low in the U.S. relative to other rich countries—by eliminating the daunting loss of/cost of health care from startup costs.
• Inject new dynamism and adaptability into the overall economy by reducing “job lock” - with workers going where their skills and preferences best fit the job, not just to workplaces (usually large ones) that have affordable health plans.
• Produce a net increase in jobs as public spending boosts aggregate demand, with job losses in health insurance and billing administration being outweighed by job gains in provision of health care, including the expansion of long-term care.

Projected costs of single-payer healthcare financing in the United States: A systematic review of economic analyses

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1003013

“Christopher Cai and colleagues at three University of California campuses examined 22 studies on the projected cost impact for single-payer health insurance in the United States and reported their findings in a recent paper in PLOS Medicine. Every single study predicted that it would yield net savings over several years. In fact, it’s the only way to rein in health care spending significantly in the U.S.

All of the studies, regardless of ideological orientation, showed that long-term cost savings were likely. Even the Mercatus Center, a right-wing think tank, recently found about $2 trillion in net savings over 10 years from a single-payer Medicare for All system. Most importantly, everyone in America would have high-quality health care coverage.”

Feels like a big ole giant question doesn’t it? The truth of the matter is that it really isn’t terribly difficult to put a very large dent in the problem using a few known methods. The first change I’d recommend is a way of looking at houselessness; star looking at it as Finland does: “as a housing problem and a violation of fundamental rights, both solvable, and not as an inevitable social problem resulting from personal issues”. The second is advocate for programs to recetify the problem and the associated problems such as mental health and substance abused disorders. Below you can find examples of such.

Excerpts taken from Coalition for the Homeless

Housing FIRST

A proven solution used in New York City (and elsewhere globally such as Finland) and replicated nationwide is the “housing first” approach to street houselessness, which builds on the success of permanent supportive housing. The “housing first” approach involves moving long-term street houseless individuals - the majority of whom are living with mental illness, substance abuse disorders and other serious health problems - directly into subsidized housing and then linking them to support services, either on-site or in the community. Research studies have found that the majority of long-term street houseless people moved into “housing first” apartments remain stably housed and experience significant improvements in their health problems. Much like permanent supportive housing, the “housing first” approach is far less costly than emergency and institutional care, such as shelters, hospitals and correctional facilities.

Permanent Supportive Housing

Pioneered in New York City in the 1980s, permanent supportive housing has now proven to be a successful and cost-effective solution to the houselessness crisis. The supportive housing model combines affordable housing assistance with vital support services for individuals living with mental illness, HIV/AIDS or other serious health problems. Moreover, numerous research studies have shown that permanent supportive housing costs less than other forms of emergency and institutional care. The landmark 1990 City-State “New York/New York Agreement,” which has been renewed twice, is the premier example of a permanent supportive housing initiative that successfully reduced houselessness in New York City and saved taxpayer dollars that would otherwise have been spent on costly shelters and hospitalizations.

Federal Housing Assistance

Federal housing programs are one of the most successful housing-based solutions to reduce houselessness. The two largest federal housing programs are public housing and federal housing vouchers, known as Housing Choice Vouchers or Section 8 vouchers. Housing vouchers allow low-income households to rent modest market-rate housing of their choice and provide a flexible subsidy that adjusts with the family’s income over time. Studies show that public housing and federal housing vouchers are highly successful at reducing family houselessness and in ensuring that these families remain stably housed out of the shelter system.

Excerpts taken from: https://homelessadvice.com/why-are-there-so-many-homeless-in-california/

Great Weather

California is known worldwide for having some of the most excellent weather in the United States. Although it can get very cold (it snows in some areas) and extremely hot (California has deserts), the weather is still very mild in most areas throughout the year and it doesn’t rain as often as in other areas of the country.

Also, many large cities in California are located in valleys. Valleys in California with large populations include Silicon, Sacramento, Central, San Joaquin, San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys. These valleys often serve as a minor form of protection from rain as it normally does rain less in areas surrounded by mountains, even smaller ones.

This is a perfect situation for houseless people who need to sleep outside because even on the coldest days, most people can still keep warm if they have a tent and a blanket. This is completely different than in many northern states where people can actually freeze to death trying to camp outside in a tent or where the ground is constantly damp from precipitation.

The reasons that houseless people would choose to sleep outside can vary, from not wanting to deal with rules in shelters to simply not having the money to pay shelters after the initial free period of stay.

More Social Programs

People often refer to California as a “nanny state” because it’s well-known for providing many social services to people who are poor or struggling. This reputation is somewhat deserved, although the term nanny state is usually used in a negative way to describe California. If you’re homeless in the United States, there’s probably no better place to be so than in the golden state of the west.

Some social programs that are offered federally have even more options and benefits in California than they do in other states. A perfect example is EBT (food stamps), which can be used to purchase warm food at many fast food places in some California cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco. Outside of California, very few states allow EBT to be used in this way and instead it must be used to purchase cold or packaged food.

In addition to the usual federal programs available for the poor, sick, or struggling in other states, such as EBT (food stamps) and Medicare, there’s many other programs as well that are somewhat exclusive to California.

So as much as people talk negatively about so-called “nanny states” and the social welfare programs available in them. If it weren’t for programs like this in California, many people might actually die before they’re able to get progressing diseases looked at by a doctor. Getting it taken care of meant that they could stay alive and eventually get back on their feet, which meant they could be “productive” in society again.

More Shelters

California has the largest population in the U.S. and the largest economy as well. That means that there’s many more shelters there than in any other state. It’s for this reason that many homeless people migrate to California or choose to stay there when they do become homeless. This leads to a larger homeless population and sometimes this influx leads to shelters having no vacancies.

However, homeless people don’t have to travel as far to find other shelters as they would in other states with less shelters. If one shelter is full in Los Angeles or San Francisco, there’s plenty more in the local area to choose from. In some states, there may only be a few shelters available, even in some of the larger cities.

So if a few of them are full, a person may have no choice but to travel hours on a bus to the next city in hopes that they still have a vacancy there. However, sometimes it can also be difficult finding a place in California cities during winter time, since this is when more people living on the streets prefer to sleep inside.

When it gets cold outside, the local city and county governments in California often open other structures or places for the homeless to sleep at night. Normally, these would be the armories in different counties where the homeless people can go when the temperatures drop below a certain point.

More Flow of Money

A big reason for there being many more shelters and more social programs, aside from the state allowing more funding from tax revenues towards these, is because there’s a larger population and more money flowing throughout the state than in smaller states with less people and less cash flow.

This means more more resources and more opportunities for homeless people to get back on their feet. Someone who is homeless in a desolate area in another state might have a harder time getting back on their feet without the help. While non-profits often receive funding on the state and federal level, a lot of times they receive private donations and food from nearby businesses.

Interconnectedness & More Transportation Options

California is somewhat unique when compared to other states in the USA in the way that many of it’s largest cities are interconnected. There’s not even many places in other countries that are similar to this.

If you look at the Bay Area in California, there are three major cities with huge populations that are all within close proximity to each other. San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose all have large homeless populations and much of this might have to do with the fact that all three of these urban locations are easily accessible from one another.

If you’re a homeless person and you need county or city resources and networking with other people to survive, you’re going to want to be in highly populated areas where much of these things can be found. By placing themselves in any of these three cities, they are giving themselves more than one option if things in their current city don’t work out for whatever reason.

Someone who is denied benefits or having problem finding work in San Jose might then go to Oakland or San Francisco instead. Oakland and San Francisco are less than a 5-minute bus ride from each other but belong to two completely different counties. San Jose is a bit further but still very easy to travel to from the others when using the local BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train system. The same could be said about Southern California, such as Los Angeles, where there’s many nearby counties and cities as well.

In most other states, the large cities have much more distance (hours of traveling) between each other in most cases. So California is set up in a way that makes it easy for people to travel between large populations and to seek assistance in multiple places.

In California, there’s public transportation routes almost everywhere. The state definitely has it’s own rural areas that are isolated and desolate, but the urban and suburbia areas have more transportation options than most other states in the USA can offer.

As was mentioned already, the Bay Area has the BART system, but that’s not the only system like it in the state. There’s buses, trains, light rails, and subways spread throughout the state that not only allow easy transport within each city, but also an easy way to get across the entire state.

For example, a homeless person who is stranded in Southern California can get all the way to Northern California quite quickly and cheaply. Say, for instance, that they’re stuck in Inglewood or somewhere in Los Angeles or Orange County and need to get to downtown LA’s Greyhound bus station. They can do so by taking the metro city buses, the local subway system, or even the light rail system in some areas of the city.

Often, riders will use a combination of these to get places based on routes. Once at the Greyhound station, a bus ticket all the way to San Francisco can cost as little as $15 depending on the day. There’s also other, more smaller companies that sometimes make the journey, though less frequently, and may be as cheap as $10.

Once at the Greyhound station in San Francisco, they can get to local shelters or anywhere around the city by riding the local Muni buses, BART, cable cars or streetcars (which are actually different from each other). While Greyhound buses may have similar pricing to travel throughout other states, the options of other connecting forms of public transportation are normally very limited.

Varied Terrain

Lastly, when people think of California, they often imagine the large cities that exist there and that’s the side of California that most homeless people see. However, much of the state’s geography is national parks, mountainous terrain, and wilderness, and this geography often lures many transients, survival types, camping enthusiasts, and vagrants to the state as well.

There’s more options in California than in most other states as far as terrain, because it’s one of the few places on earth where you can be in a city one moment and then be in a national park just minutes away. While the people who travel there may eventually end up in the more urban areas, many of these people initially go to California with hopes of camping out and living off the land there. They might start out in RV’s or campers, and eventually end up on cardboard mats or in tents after struggling a bit more.

Many camp out overnight in national parks by sleeping in their cars or by traditionally camping using tents at campsites. The national parks can be expensive to camp in, but there’s many forests and even BLM lands in California where they either legally or illegally camp.

BLM land (Bureau of Land Management) is land where people can legally camp for a number of days or weeks legally and for free. However, it’s normally in the most remote areas of the state and difficult to get to. But as I mentioned, forests are often an attractive place to camp for many homeless people.

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Acts 2:44–45

All who believed were together and had all things in common. They would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need

Acts 4:32

Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.

Acts 4:34–35

There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.

Luke 1:52–53

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.

Luke 6:20–21, 24–25

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled but woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.

Luke 18:18–25

A certain ruler asked him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone.” You know the commandments: ‘You shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, honor your father and mother.’”

“All these I have kept since I was a boy,” he said.

When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

When he heard this, he became very sad, because he was very wealthy.

Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

Matthew 6:24

No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.

Matthew 7:21-23

“Not everyone who calls me Lord will enter God’s kingdom, but only those who do the will of my Father in heaven. On the Last Day many will call me Lord. They will say, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not testify in your name? And did we not, in your name, exorcise demons and perform many miracles?’ Truly I will say to them, ‘I never knew you. Get away from me, you evildoers.’”

Matthew 15:7-9

“Hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied: ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship is false, teaching as doctrine the commandments of men.’”

1 John 4:20

If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.

James 1:26

Those who consider themselves religious and yet do not keep a tight rein on their tongues deceive themselves, and their religion is worthless.

1 John 2:3-6

Whoever says “I know him,” but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in that person. But if anyone obeys his word, love for God is truly made complete in them. This is how we know we are in him: Whoever claims to live in him must live as Jesus did.

Exodus 22:21

“You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien; for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.”

Deuteronomy 24:14-15

You shall not oppress a hired worker who is poor and needy, whether he is one of your brothers or a foreigner residing in your cities. You will pay his wages on that day, before the sun sets (for he is poor and needs the money), lest he cry out against you to the Lord, and you are guilty of sin.

Deuteronomy 1:16

Give the members of your community a fair hearing, and judge rightly between one person and another, whether citizen or resident alien.

Leviticus 19:34

The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the foreigner as yourself, for you were foreign in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

Deuteronomy 27:19

Cursed is anyone who withholds justice from the foreigner, the fatherless, or the widow.

Zechariah 7:9-11

This is what the Lord Almighty said: “Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. Do not plot evil against each other.”

Galatians 3:28

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Matthew 19:12

For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.

Isaiah 56:4-5

To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose what pleases me and hold fast to my covenant; to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will endure forever.

Updated 2026. The old version of this section aged poorly, because the tools did, so here’s the whole thing from scratch.

Before you buy a single thing or install a single app, answer this: what are you trying to protect, who are you trying to protect it from, and what happens if you fail? That’s threat modeling, and if you skip it you’ll end up doing either too much (expensive, unusable, abandoned) or too little (a hardware key protecting a Gmail account you log into from the same laptop you torrent on).

The threat model for a union organizer is not the threat model for a trans kid in Texas, which is not the threat model for a journalist with an SDF-adjacent source, which is not the threat model for a person who just doesn’t want their ISP selling their browsing history. Start there. Write it down if you have to.

One more thing up front. No tool on this page will save you from running your mouth. Technology is the easy part. Discipline is the hard part.

Tier 0: The baseline (everyone reading this)

This is the “you’re a human being living on the internet in 2026” floor. If you’re not doing these, start here before you buy a VPN.

Password manager. Use one. Use a real one. Stop reusing passwords, stop writing them on post-its, and stop letting your browser store them in plaintext.

• Bitwarden … FOSS, the free tier is plenty, self-hostable via Vaultwarden if you want your vault on your own server.
• KeePassXC … fully offline, a flat encrypted file you move yourself. The paranoid pick.
• Skip 1Password if you want open source. Skip LastPass full stop, they’ve been breached repeatedly and lied about the scope.

Two-factor authentication, but not by SMS. SIM swaps are a solved-problem attack for anyone serious. Use an authenticator app (Aegis on Android, 2FAS cross-platform, Bitwarden if you already pay for Premium), or better, a hardware key.

• YubiKey 5 or Nitrokey are physical FIDO2/U2F keys. Nitrokey is open hardware and European. Yubico is closed hardware and more widely supported. Buy two. Register both. Lose one, you still have one.

End-to-end encrypted messaging. The default messaging app on your phone is a surveillance channel. The gold standard is still Signal. Since 2024 it supports usernames, so you no longer have to hand out your phone number to reach people. Turn on disappearing messages by default.

• Signal is boring, correct, and extensively audited. Use it.
• SimpleX Chat has no user IDs at all, messages routed through SMP relays. Newer, promising, worth having as a backup channel.
• Session is decentralized, no phone number. Routing inherits Tor-style properties but the network is smaller, and security researchers have flagged some tradeoffs. Fine for movement coordination, not my first pick for a source.
• Do NOT use Telegram as “encrypted messaging.” Default chats are not end-to-end encrypted. Only one-on-one Secret Chats are, group chats never are, and the company has a long history of getting close to whoever’s in power. Treat it like Discord with Russian branding.

Browser hygiene. Your browser leaks more about you than anything else on your device.

• Firefox with uBlock Origin is the floor. Mullvad Browser (Firefox hardened by the Tor Project for non-Tor use) is better. Look into libreWolf, it’s a privacy focused, stripped down version of Firefox.
• Brave is cryptobro garbage. Don’t use it.
• Chrome is a surveillance platform with a browser wrapped around it. Stop. Edge is Chrome.

Disk encryption. Turn it on. It’s already built into every modern operating system. FileVault on macOS, BitLocker on Windows, LUKS on Linux, device encryption on iOS and Android. If your laptop gets grabbed at a protest, this is the difference between “inconvenience” and “full compromise.”

Tier 1: The activist floor (organized politics, doxxing risk)

You’re doing more than ambient internet hygiene. You have people you coordinate with, causes adversaries care about, and a name someone might want to attach to all of it.

A VPN, but stop reading old recommendations. I used to recommend PIA. I don’t anymore. PIA was acquired by Kape Technologies (née Crossrider, a company with a literal malware history) in 2019, along with ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, and ZenMate, and the same parent now owns most of the “best VPN” review sites telling you which to buy. Hard pass.

What to use instead, in rough order of how much I trust them:

• Mullvad is €5/month flat, no email required, you get a random 16-digit account number. They accept cash in an envelope through the mail. They have been raided and had nothing to hand over because they store nothing. This is the gold standard.
• IVPN has a similar no-email, privacy-first posture. Slightly pricier, slightly smaller network. Solid backup.
• Proton VPN is Swiss jurisdiction, FOSS clients, generous free tier. If you already use Proton Mail the bundle makes sense. Remember though, they’ve cooperated with states multiple times and turned over evidence.
• Riseup VPN is donation-funded and movement-aligned. Limited capacity, may be slower, but they’re comrades and that matters.
• Avoid anything Kape-owned (PIA, ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, ZenMate, Private Internet Access). Avoid NordVPN (2018 server breach they sat on for a year). Avoid anything that advertises on a YouTuber’s sponsor read.

A VPN does one thing well. It hides your traffic from your ISP, and it hides your home IP from the sites you visit. That’s it. It is not anonymity. The VPN can see everything your ISP used to see. You’re moving trust, not eliminating it.

Signal is not optional at this tier. Enable registration lock with a PIN. Enable usernames and give people those instead of your number. Turn on disappearing messages by default. Verify safety numbers with anyone who matters. If Signal breaks for you, fail over to SimpleX, not SMS.

Separate accounts, separate identities. The email, the phone number, the payment method, and the device you use for organizing should not be the same ones your mother has. This is compartmentalization, and it’s the single biggest lift at this tier.

• A dedicated email for movement work. Proton Mail, Tuta, or a Riseup account if you qualify. Not Gmail. Not the work inbox.
• A dedicated number for movement work. MySudo, JMP.chat, or a prepaid SIM bought in cash, activated from a coffee shop, never powered on at home. Do not port your real number into anything “burner.”
• Payment compartmentalization. Privacy.com generates single-use cards for US users. Cash gift cards work for Mullvad and a lot of other services. Monero is the only cryptocurrency with serious privacy properties. Bitcoin is a public ledger and will never not be.

Device separation. The laptop you draft a flyer on and the laptop you check bank statements on do not have to be the same laptop. Old ThinkPads are cheap. Give the organizing one to yourself as a gift.

Metadata is the point. Content is what you say. Metadata is who you said it to, when, for how long, from where, and how often. The state rarely needs content. It almost always has metadata. Assume that anything not end-to-end encrypted leaks metadata even when the content is fine. Call logs, SMS, emails, and DMs on any commercial platform … treat metadata as public.

Social media is not secure and never will be. Your group chat is not a secure channel. Your “private” Discord is not a secure channel. A locked Twitter account is not a secure channel. If the adversary can subpoena the platform or compromise one member’s device, the whole conversation is theirs. Act accordingly.

Tier 2: High-risk (targeted individuals, repeated state contact, border crossings)

At this tier you have reason to believe you’re a person of interest to somebody with subpoena power or worse. Gear matters more, behavior matters more, and some of this will feel inconvenient. It’s supposed to.

GrapheneOS on a Pixel. The most hardened consumer phone operating system available. FOSS, de-Googled, hardware-backed attestation, works on recent Google Pixels and nothing else. Not ideal, because you’re still buying a phone from Google, but it’s the best compromise between security and “actually usable as a phone.” grapheneos.org.

Tails for sensitive sessions. Tails is a live Linux that boots from a USB stick, routes all traffic through Tor, and forgets everything when you shut it down. No persistent trace on the underlying machine. If you have something to do that absolutely cannot come back to you, you do it from Tails on a laptop you don’t normally use, from an internet connection that isn’t yours.

Qubes OS for a daily driver. Qubes compartmentalizes by isolating work into separate virtual machines (“qubes”), so compromising your email VM doesn’t compromise your banking VM doesn’t compromise your organizing VM. Steep learning curve, genuinely better security model. Snowden’s reported daily driver, for whatever that’s worth.

Tor, directly. The Tor Browser is the right entry point for almost everyone. It’s pre-hardened and makes fingerprinting much harder. If your local network blocks Tor, request bridges or use a pluggable transport. Do not log into accounts tied to your real identity from Tor. Do not maximize the browser window. Do not install extensions. Do not open a PDF Tor just downloaded with your normal PDF reader.

A note on “Tor + VPN”. The Tor Project itself does not recommend it for most users. You probably do not need it, and it can hurt more than it helps if your VPN keeps logs. If you already have the threat model that makes you want both, use Tor on top of a VPN connection you trust (Mullvad), not the other way around. Tails handles this correctly out of the box. The older version of this page recommended routinely stacking VPN + Tor. I was wrong. Don’t.

OnionShare. onionshare.org lets you send a file, host a chat, or spin up a one-off site over a Tor hidden service, no account and no third party. The correct tool for dropping a sensitive document to someone without either of you touching a cloud.

Hardware keys, used properly. You have your YubiKeys. Register them on every account that supports FIDO2: email, password manager, code forge, financial institutions. Disable every weaker second factor on the same accounts. A FIDO2 key that coexists with SMS 2FA gives you the security of SMS 2FA.

Border crossings are a separate threat model. US Customs and Border Protection can, and will, demand access to your devices at the port of entry. Other countries have their own version. The only way to win that interaction is to not have the device with you.

• Travel with a blank laptop. A clean install, a disposable email signed in for show, nothing else.
• Put your data in an encrypted cloud vault (Cryptomator on top of any storage, or Proton Drive with client-side encryption) and pull it down after you cross.
• Power the device all the way off before you reach the checkpoint. Not asleep. Off. Encryption keys need to be evicted from memory.
• Non-citizens: be aware that refusing to unlock at a US border can get you denied entry. Citizens: you can refuse, at the cost of the device getting seized for forensics. Know which you are.

Tier 3: Whistleblowers, journalists, and sources

If you’re here, you should not be getting your OpSec exclusively from a blog post on an anarchist’s website. Get a lawyer. Get Freedom of the Press Foundation’s training materials. Talk to someone who does this for a living. Everything below is orientation, not operations.

Never use your normal infrastructure. Not your phone, not your laptop, not your accounts, not your home network, and not your home. Everything you touch becomes part of the investigation.

SecureDrop. securedrop.org is the open-source anonymous submission system run by major newsrooms (NYT, WaPo, The Guardian, The Intercept, ProPublica, and many more). Source submits via Tor, newsroom receives on an air-gapped system. If you have a story to leak, this is the channel. Find the outlet’s SecureDrop landing page from a device that isn’t yours.

OnionShare for direct source-to-journalist transfer. Same reasoning as above: no intermediary, no account, no persistent surface.

Air-gapped workflows. For the highest-sensitivity material, a cheap laptop that has never touched the internet and never will. Move files to it via a write-once optical disc or a brand-new USB drive that you then physically destroy. Yes, really. This is the “Snowden did this” tier, and it’s the tier because it’s the one that works.

Legal footing matters more than technology. Reporter’s shield laws, attorney-client privilege, the Whistleblower Protection Act, SEC whistleblower programs, the laws in your jurisdiction … know which of these apply to you before you do anything. A perfect technical setup does not protect you from a bad legal theory.

The adversary is patient and the story is not. Most leaks unwind because of something the source said to someone they trusted, not because of a failure of crypto. Limit who knows, limit what they know, and resist the very human urge to check in.

Anti-patterns: things that look like security and aren’t

• Telegram as “encrypted.” Default chats and group chats are not end-to-end encrypted. Only opt-in one-on-one Secret Chats are. If someone in your org insists on Telegram for sensitive coordination, they are either uninformed or a liability.
• SMS 2FA. SIM swaps are a service an adversary can purchase. If SMS is the only option offered, demand app-based or hardware second factor, or move off the platform.
• “VPN equals anonymous.” A VPN hides you from your ISP and the site. It does not hide you from the VPN. Pick one that proves it keeps no logs, via warrant canaries, court-tested audits, and open clients.
• Incognito mode. Does not hide you from your employer, ISP, school, DNS provider, the site you visited, or anyone else except the next person to sit at your laptop. Named accordingly.
• Rolling your own crypto. Don’t. Use boring, audited, well-understood tools. The exciting new chat app that came out last Tuesday is not one of them.
• “I have nothing to hide.” Yes you do. Your landlord, your employer, your ex, your mother, your health insurer, and the state all have reasons to know things about you you didn’t consent to share. Privacy is not secrecy, it’s consent over your own information.

The harder truths

• Metadata beats content, every time. They don’t need to read your messages if they can see who you messaged and when. Design for metadata first.
• Network OpSec beats individual OpSec. The weakest device in your org is the effective security level of the entire org. Training is infrastructure. Act like it.
• Crypto doesn’t defeat a subpoena. They can compel the provider. They can compel you. In the US, compelled decryption law is unsettled and jurisdiction-dependent. In the UK, RIPA explicitly compels it. The best crypto loses to a court order backed by a jail cell.
• Backdoors ship as “for the children.” Every generation gets a new push to break end-to-end encryption in the name of safety. Client-side scanning, “lawful access,” key escrow. It’s always the same proposal wearing different clothes. The correct answer to all of it is no.
• You will make mistakes. So will your comrades. So will your sources. Build systems that survive human error, because the humans aren’t changing.

When in doubt, ask a professional.

Electronic Frontier Foundation … Surveillance Self-Defense is free, maintained, and accurate. Security in a Box is translated into dozens of languages and written for activists in repressive contexts. Freedom of the Press Foundation is the right starting point for journalists and sources. The Tor Project’s documentation is written by the people who actually built the thing.

This page is a starting point. None of it is an excuse to stop thinking.

The liability shield in Section 230 is also embodied in Art. 19.17 of the USMCA—which is the free trade agreement with Canada and Mexico that the Trump administration negotiated to replace NAFTA. It went into effect on early 2020. Under the USMCA, any law that would make a digital platform liable for the content of users is invalid. Disputes over enactment of such law will be handled in an international forum—like the WTO - not in US courts, and that international forum can declare such a law invalid.

So basically Trump’s own insistence to replace NAFTA has all but ensured that the liability shield in Sec. 230 cannot be repealed.

Relevant language from Art. 19.17 of USMCA:

… no Party shall adopt or maintain measures that treat a supplier or user of an interactive computer service as an information content provider in determining liability for harms related to information stored, processed, transmitted, distributed, or made available by the service, except to the extent the supplier or user has, in whole or in part, created, or developed the information.