The tale of Palestine from beginning until today is a simple story of colonialism and dispossession, yet the world treats it as a multifaceted and complex story—hard to understand and even harder to solve.

It has now been one year since Hamas’ attack on Israeli civilians; one year of watching the most well-documented genocide in history broadcasted in real time on TikTok, one year of reading the last verse of poets and seeing the last thyme sprout of gardeners on Twitter accounts that go silent, one year of hearing Israeli politicians blast openly genocidal rhetoric on Instagram, one year of Germans setting up posh workshops to righteously denounce the supposed “antisemitism on the Left”—a tradition still ongoing as I speak, one year of German autonomists denouncing the “authoritarianism” of war refugees who wear a Palestinian flag before the police drags them away for using the word “genocide”, one year of German “antifascists” whitewashing fascism as long as it’s targeting brown people, one year of German anarchists too afraid of cancellation to speak up. I have no intention to talk here about the grotesque absurdity of the German gentile Zionists who kick Jews out of their safer spaces for “anti-semitism”—for more discussion on that, please check on the recommended reading.[1] Today I want to address rather a longstanding trend on anarchist circles: “both sides are bad because they’re nationalists and I’m against nationalism, dang I am the most ethical”. I want to address a certain softening of the white antifa movement, parts of which are starting to find it hard to keep covering the cracks in the German pro-Zionist narrative with the duct tape of “but Hamas tho”, when they have to do that under the silent stare of 14000+ dead children—more dead children per day and per metre than any other modern conflict. These parts of the movement that have for better or worse commited to “anti-militarism” and now have to cope with their beloved Israel initiating attacks on Lebanon, Iran, Syria and who knows where next.

The current development, the latest in Germanic power-whitewashing, is as follows: That the State of Israel has a “right to exist” and a “right to self-defense”, but, (said nervously, as all these ghosts stare at us), “we cannot condone the actions of the right-wing Netahanyu government”.

No. Fuck that. That isn’t nearly enough. The problem isn’t the “actions” of the settler-colonial ethnostate of Israel. The problem isn’t the “right-wingness” of the current government of the settler-colonial ethnostate of Israel. The problem is the existence of settler-colonial ethnostates.

The cause of this genocide isn’t the attack of Hamas, the antisemitism of Islamofascists, the patriarchy in Gaza, the fascism of Netahanyu, or the individual culpability of every warmonger who called for the blood of entire populations, of every soldier who shot a civilian for the thrill of power. Those are consequences. The cause of this genocide certainly isn’t the imaginary “thousand years of tribal religious vendettas” that Europeans project in their fantasies of the Middle East, contradicting the history of peaceful coexistence of Jews, Christians and Muslims in the area for centuries and in Palestine up to the point in the 20th century where the powers of Europe chose to ruin it. The cause of this genocide is 76 years of violent colonial occupation. The cause of this genocide is 800000 inhabitants forcibly displaced from their homes, it’s a system of segregation laws that makes Jim Crow look tame and gives apartheid advocates jealousy, it’s massacre after massacre for decades without end all funded with European and USA artillery. The cause of this genocide is Balfour declaring in 1917 that “Zionism, right or wrong, is of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land”. The cause of this genocide is Theodor Herzl writing in The Jewish State that “We should therefore form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism”. The cause of this genocide is Churchill writing on Palestine, “I do not admit for instance that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, though he may have lain there for a very long time.” These words aren’t just words; the Marxists are wrong, the superstructure determines the base. These words are barrels of gunpowder being laid under the homes of a population, when Europe needed a scapegoat for the horrors of their own anti-semitism. These 76 years have been just sparks on that fundamental gunpowder.

The cause of this genocide isn’t “Islamism” and it isn’t “the Jews”, either. Jewish people from all over the world have vocally opposed from the start, and continue to oppose today, the settler-colonial project. To assume Jewish folk must be pro-Israel is like saying all atheists must be pro-URSS. The cause of the genocide is colonialism, and the cause of colonialism are the colonialists; no more and no less.

What is not clear to the German Left is what’s painfully, tragicomedically obvious to all of us from the colonial South: The excuses are the exact same. The settler is allowed to take the land because the indigenous inhabitants are: barbaric; primitive; violent; unethical; a danger to women; groomers of their children; believers of an evil religion; unproductive in their use of land; and, due to some mysterious unexplainable bigotry, they hate the settlers, smh. “We have to kill the Indian/Arabness to save the man.” “Sure, all this blood and horror is unfortunate, but such is the burden of progress that we must carry to bring them to civilisation.” The more massacres they suffer, the more the indigenous resort to their own violent retaliations, their own massacres, tortures, their own killings of the innocent. Every time this happens, the settler-colonial project renews the righteousness of its land-grabbing; every time, the settler-colonial project feels more justified in ethnic cleansing. The colonist doing an ethnic cleansing is merely tragic, but the indigenous attacking a settler village is proof of bad blood. Where I come from, we call this the long night of 500 years. Palestine is like watching the 500 years on a speedrun, and it’s downright chilling to hear, in person, so-called antifascists of European privilege, who have never stared at the wrong end of a gun in their lives, comfortably repeating verbatim the arguments we all know from letters to the Spanish Crown.

And no, German anarchists, the fact that the politics of the average Palestinian don’t live up to your enlightened standards doesn’t mean that you get to perch on the fence, high on moral purity, and wash your hands of the whole issue, not when your inaction is part of why the German State gets to finance Israeli weapons. Consider the path that brought you to your politics, and now think if you would have developed your proud ideological sensibilities, had you been born behind that wall and under those bombs. Whatever nationalism, sexism, or other -ism that Palestinians may have doesn’t give Israel the right to take their homes, wall them off, control their institutions and decide when they should die. Palestinians having Bad Takes doesn’t mean that they’re as wrong as Israelis in the so-called “conflict” and you get to feel superior to both. What the fuck. What kind of argument is even that. If a man is beating his wife and she says that he’s going to Hell because he’s a Protestant, I don’t take the time to point out that yes she may have a black eye but she’s showing Catholic bigotry so she’s in the wrong too, I initiate a fucking intervention to stop the beatings. The Black Panthers had serious problems with misogyny and homophobia but none of us question that the cause of Black liberation was the right side. When countries in Latin America prop up fascist dictators, nobody says that this means it’s OK for USA and Norway companies to blow up our forests to mine metals. Most of you are able to understand that you don’t have to support NATO policies or the right-wing Ukraine administration to oppose the horror that is Russian imperialism. Why is it that only in the case of Palestine, suddenly you cannot oppose blatant ethnic genocide without having to say “but they voted for Hamas so they were basically asking for it”? Is it just because you’re afraid of being associated in any way with scary bearded Muslim barbarians, so that you must disavow them at every turn? Is it because you still see Israel as the outpost of European civilisation; is it because you still see the Arab body as fundamentally patriarchal, authoritarian, tribalist, retrograde—the dog in the manger?

The Israeli ethnostate is a colonial enterprise no matter which “wing” of government it props up. Putting a “leftist” government in Israel might give us a much-needed ceasefire but it wouldn’t stop the genocide, any more than the “progressive” governments of Canada stopped their indigenous genocide. The only path to justice and peaceful coexistence in Palestine is the same as in any settler colony: land back, reparations, right of return, and institutional equality, i.e. the end of the Israeli settlement project. Nor would an Arab ethnostate or Iran-style theocracy be a solution in any way, as we know from the bloody history of national liberation. The correct number of states in Palestine is zero,[2] hailing back to before the European colonial project, when inhabitants lived concerned with their own immediate, material communities rather than abstract borders; for example through a program like democratic confederalism, which is born out of Middle Eastern struggles and has proven itself in Syria more than able to bring peace and dignity to diverse communities of multiple ethnicities, religions and identities sharing space in equal standing.[3] Peace and safety for the Jewish and Arab folk alike (as well as the many other, frequently erased identities and religions in the area) will only be achieved in a system like this, where no type of supremacy is enshrined into law and order. To call for the end of States isn’t utopic; rather, the current reality is dystopic. If Northeastern Syria could do it, why couldn’t Palestine? Or, for that matter, you?

As for the Israeli State, it has no rights whatsoever. People have rights, communities have rights, cultures have rights, individuals who rebel against their cultures have rights; but the only right that a State has is the right to be abolished. Abolish all States, and abolish the settler-colonial ethnostates first.

Recommended reading:

• [1] “German Anti-antisemitism and Zionism”: https://en.scrappycapydistro.info/zines/german-anti-antisemitism-and-zionism
• “How the German left failed to understand the 7 October attack” https://black-stork.writeas.com/how-the-german-left-failed-to-understand-the-7-october-attack
• [2] “The No State Solution” https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mohammed-bamyeh-uri-gordon-the-no-state-solution
• [3] “Democratic confederalism best option for Palestinians” https://medyanews.net/democratic-confederalism-best-option-for-palestinians-pkks-duran-kalkan/

My father said that war was evil, but if it came he would revel in it like sand in a storm.

war is here, in your house,
war walks with you
on the way to work,
when you stop to smoke
war too stops, and stays by,
war is interested in you, you see,
and walks with you to work,
war sits on your sofa to observe
which series will you select,
& when, sorrowful and insomniac,
you wrestle with your worries,
war stands and stares
with motherly intimacy,
by your bed, bidding time
til dawn starts the day
& you wake up, & war walks
with you, war walks together
in red, red leather.

After you clock a few more encounters with violence, you start feeling like you live in that faraway world, the world of history book wars, of pop media’s violent imaginary. The boundaries of reality thin; the people from your life are the ones that seem faraway now, living in some distant land where you can sit on a restaurant without choosing a table with a view to the door. Where you can get off a bus and not wait on the stop until everyone left and you’re sure no one is following you. Where you don’t jump when a lover touches you from the back.

You can’t talk about this, not meaningfully. If your community is a queer community it is easy to find people to talk about sex and gender, computers, anime. If your community is a leftist community it is easy to talk to people about the finer points of various theories and what type of anarchist you are and what behaviour is inappropriate from male comrades. It’s hard to talk about how it feels to have experienced a murder attempt or three or four. It is very hard to talk about how it feels to have learned to mobilise violence within yourself. It is hard to talk about how to defend oneself in concrete, let’s-do-it ways. Ask in a political group who wants to do a protest about the latest political outrage, who wants to do a zine about carework in anarchist assemblies etc.: it is easy to mobilise people this way. Try to ask who’s willing to come to fight with you in case the boots come knock: uncomfortable, guilty silence.

In USA movies, war veterans go to veteran bars where they recognise the presence of this silent ghost hanging around one another’s souls. But the type of violence we experience, as targeted, marginalised communities in times of rising fascism, is a violence that marginalises us further. You know that there must be other people who are coping with the same things, but they are staying very quiet, for safety reasons. There is no bar for the bashed.

The worst part is that this is how things should be. Much as this wall of realities isolating you from everyone increases the weight of trauma, I can’t exactly wish that more people around me understood what I’m talking about. Sadly I think more people will, soon, regardless of what I wish or don’t wish.

The first was during the protests for the police murder of 16-year-old Black boy Mouhamed D. in 2022. The people organising the protest asked for a peaceful, nonescalative demo because they were afraid of police retaliation; particularly the family of the boy, who wasn’t from the activist milieu. I disagree with this attitude—if the police wants to be violent they’ll be violent no matter what, cf. the Lützerath eviction—but it wasn’t my protest and I was there to show support, not to start a debate club; so instead of the standard black bloc outfit I decided to dress fem, and went on latex pants, a pink leotard, white fluffy jacket on top.

A girl I had recently met at an antifa group wanted to march with us, but ditched us on the spot. She turned out to be a swerf, and thought it was grossly innapropriate of me to dress up like a whore during a Black protest (n.b. girl is German and white). She also critisised my penchant for posting sexy selfies online “without any class or niveau” (exact quote). Surely this was antifeminist, sexualising myself for the sake of men (n.b. I’m into girls). This woman wasn’t a terf or a tankie, she was a transgender anarchist.

Anecdote the second, a certain anarchist group puts me in the unenviable position of defending Die Partei.

To make it clear, I’m not a fan, and most of their humour smells like cis dude and falls flat to me, though they have their moments (I like “Nazis töten”, always brings a smile to my face). But in this case, they were being denounced on moral grounds. The joke was a faux police advertisement with the slogan: “Here the shooter, too, is just a human being: Dortmund police”, riffing on an old PR campaign about how the police are “just human beings”. Again, not exactly the height of political satire, but this isn’t evil humour, it’s still punching up. The joke is “police bad”.

And here, too, white Germans took upon themselves to heroically defend hypothetical Black people who, they figured, would be hypothetically offended at this, by publically denouncing how innapropriate it is for Die Partei to joke or laugh in such a traumatic situation. This prompted me to harper again about my one pet peeve, this Protestant attitude that Germans bring to activism—this misconception that you have to frown and look worried the whole 2-hour plenum and the less fun you have the more successful your politics will be. I compared it to my experiences with Latin American and Kurdish political circles (where you leave the political meetings feeling energised, rather than depressed), and how even the people at the height of tragedy use humour to cope. The person then replied that sure, the victims can use humour to cope, but if you’re not in the affected demographic you’re not allowed levity of any kind; at which point I could have continued, going on about intersectionality and vicarious trauma and self-martyrdom as a dysfunctional coping mechanism that suppresses and disarms a shared rage which could lead to communality and blabla—but I’ve been at this long enough to know when a duel of words is being fought purely to have the last word, and when it’s best to drop it and go hug girls and kiss trees.

One thing stuck with me, though: They said that even if the ethics of the joke are good, the joke was still bad because it was “in bad taste”.

Class. Niveau. Taste. Think a bit about what those concepts imply.

In the beginning there was naught but Kháos, the primordial abyss, and Nyx, the starless black night, who manifested Eros, desire, and Heaven and Earth, from whose incestous love a myriad ancestral beings sprung, including Prometheus who always perceived things beforehand, Epimetheus who always perceived things too late, Marx who was always wrong when debating Bakunin, and Bakunin who was always right when debating Marx.

From the start, one of the distinctive traits of Marxism when compared to the correct political position (anarchism) was an Eurocentric industrial-progressivism which embodies uncritically the imperalist undertones of the Enlightenment (it’s not by accident or circumstance that the great Marxist powers such as the USSR or China reproduced colonial ethnocide down to a T). This has had many tragic consequences, one of which is the palpable revulsion for, in Marx’ words, the “social scum”:

…ruined roués [sexual people] with questionable means of support and of dubious origin, degenerate and adventurous scions of the bourgeoisie, vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged convicts, runaway galley slaves, swindlers, charlatans, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, procurers, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, rag-pickers, knife-grinders, tinkers, beggars; in short, the entirely undefined, disintegrating mass, thrown hither and yon, which the French call la bohème.

Anarchists look at this list and think: friends. Bakunin thought that revolution couldn’t come from wage labourers with stable income, too invested on their status as workers to rock the boat, but from

free Cossacks, our innumerable saintly and not so saintly tramps (brodiagi), pilgrims, members of ‘beguny’ sects, thieves, and brigands – this whole wide and numerous underground world which from time immemorial has protested against the state and statism.

Bakunin recognised in the underclass, in the no-class, in the have-nothings rather than the have-littles, that wild and chaotic passion for destruction which to this day we all appreciate; and recognised that revolution requires “extensive destruction, a fecund and renovating destruction” to a much deeper, much more radical level than merely seizing the means of being a cop. Marxists by contrast see the “Lumpenproletariat” as orcs, too corrupted to ever make a good, productive Socialist worker:

The lumpenproletariat is the passive decaying matter of the lowest layers of the old society. It is, here and there, thrust into the progressive movement by a proletarian revolution; however, in accordance with its whole way of life, it is more likely to sell out to reactionary intrigues.

One can taste the specifically queerphobic, slutshaming implications of the “whole way of life” in Marx’ notions of degeneracy. This has never stopped, either, it goes way beyond the queer persecution of every Communist state; the same visceral distaste for whores, bums and faggots underlies every Marxbro who tries to reduce every discussion to “no war but class war”. The CPUSA gives the game away when they say the lumpen are “un-organizable and more likely to act as paid agents than to have any progressive role in class struggle”. By “un-organisable” here they mean impossible for the vanguard leadership to herd.

Wanna know a little secret? The Zapatista insurrection has Marxist roots. The FLN was a Marxist guerrila organisation, inspired by Cuba, by Che, by Maoism, trying to pull off something similar in Mexico. The chairman figure, Germán, to this day is complaining about how the EZLN bleached out the Marxism out of it. People of the cadre were outsiders, including Marcos, who had an academic background. They found out they couldn’t sell Marxism, this Marxist theory that postulates indigenous politics to be “primitive”, to indigenous folk. Nobody wanted to cosplay Soviet aesthetics and die for another Fidel. The EZLN achieved success when accomplices stopped trying to fit human beings into their theories, and listened.

marxists.org also defines the lumpen with this lumping-together of examples, “I know one when I see one”-style:

…beggars, prostitutes, gangsters, racketeers, swindlers, petty criminals, tramps, chronic unemployed or unemployables, persons who have been cast out by industry, and all sorts of declassed, degraded or degenerated elements.

Ever since I started dressing out in an overtly sexualised, anarchopunk style, people from these categories approach me (white immigrant ascended to middle-class) without fear, talk to me assuming I’m going to talk back, that I’m going to respect them as human beings. This is a testament to what our ancestors have achieved: that beggars think punks are good marks/mates is the greatest endorsement the punk movement could ever have. At our best, anarchists have been the political organisation willing to sit down with and learn from and show solidarity to bums, whores, scammers, the disabled, the addicted. At our best, we recognised the millenia of indigenous resistance to the State as bravery and commitment to be honoured, rather than an infantilised Other. At our best, at least.

Which brings me to my grievances with the policing of sex and laughter and joy in German leftist circles.

I often see First World leftists deriding, say, Donald Trump’s mansion as without class, in bad taste. Or the problematic materialism of rap lyrics, the bling. I think most of you understand that if you mock Donald Trump for being fat, you don’t hurt Donald Trump, you marginalise fat people. You know who else has bad taste? You know who else like gold and velvet and bling everywhere? Poor people. Me. Whores. Beggars. Thieves. You try growing up in the Third World, you try going through hunger and always having the worst version of everything, and see if you don’t develop an affection for shiny shiny gold. You try not wanting to look glamorous, when you’re spat upon on the streets.

“Bad taste” is by definition the taste of the lumpen. I’m not asking you people who grew up with access to books to partake in bad taste. I’m asking you to question where the revulsion comes from.

Picture a street pickpocket. Picture a transvestite homeless sex worker, picture a veteran swindler who’s been to knife fights, picture a bum who has lived 30 years on train-hopping and squats. If you’re an anarchist I don’t have to explain to you that these people have crucial sets of skills that we’re going to need desperately in the near future, and forever. I ask you to make a choice, are you going to be a fukken Marxist and kick all the scum out of your spaces, or are you going to bring them in? Because if you’re going to bring them in, you need to be willing to respect poor people’s needs, wants, and sensibilities. Like Subcomandante Marcos in 1983, you will need to listen. If you want to make the movement pop the student bubble, you need to be accomodating of poor people. And, as a rule, moralistic frowning upon gallows humour or sexy clothes or folk religion is not accomodating to poor people. As a rule, poor people are less interested in the niveau of the jokes in closed assemblies they feel too ugly and dumb to join, and more interested in whether you’re willing to mutually take care of children, open a place at your home for a stranger crash after an eviction, fund-raise for prisoners, provide a fake letter of recommendation for someone looking for a job, share medicines with the uninsured (n.b. lots of lumpens are uninsured in Germany). At the very least, open up for someone to bum a cig and talk.

• * (symbol): See „Sternchen“.
• -i (suffix): A German affectionate diminutive; also the standard diminutive in many dialects. Felt to be softer, cuter, and more childlike than the Hochdeutsch standard -chen. Popular in leftist jargon; cf. Lauti, Transpi. Expect more -i coinages to pop up. Often used to affectionately denote autonomous zones: The Hambacher Forest occupation → Hambi, the Lützerath occupation → Lützi, the one in the Dannenröder → Danni, etc. Compare the English affectionate diminutive, as in grandma → grannie, Barbara → Barbie etc.
• Anti-Deutsche: A subculture within German antifa which focus on the ancestral white guilt of Germans. To the antideutsche, the Shoah is a unique singularity of evil in history, and the weight of descending from Holocaust perpetrators gives Germans a privileged, special understanding of the nature of evil in general, and of anti-semitism in particular. In my experience with German antifascists, the antideutsche are a sizeable minority and a distinct sub-scene, with their own symbology, music, slogans („Nie wieder Deutschland“ „Gegen jeden Antisemitismus“ (which see)), etc. The subculture has a reputation for rowdiness and alcohol/drug use, even for antifa standards. The rest of the leftist scene keeps a safe distance from the antideutsche due to their support for US, British and Israeli foreign policy, in particular when it comes to attacks on Arabic and Muslim folk; if you ever see antifa flying the USA flag or defending George W. Bush, now you know. The antideutsche position of “unconditional support for Israel”, in particular, has nursed latent tensions which recently exploded into hard splits after the 2023 Hamas war crimes and retaliatory IDF war crimes. The term now sees use as a general derogatory for German leftists who are gentile Zionists. See https://scrappycapydistro.info/en/publications/german-anti-antisemitism-and-zionism .
• Apo: Kurmancî for „uncle“, and in political scenes, the follower’s term for Abdullah Öcalan, the “Leader Uncle” (Rêber Apo). Committed adherents of Öcalan’s political philosophy, Democratic Confederalism, call themselves Apoists. In terms of political structure, democratic confederalism is anti-State, openly critical of Marxism, and much closer to anarchism than state communism; however, in practice Apoist activists often organise in lines similar to traditional Marxist parties, and probably because of that, tend to be close to local leftist parties and statist-communist cadres. At the same time, Apoist theory explicitly calls for solidarity with anarchists, and they are generally very motivated, fearless accomplices for action.
• autonomist: A longstanding tradition for independent action groups. Rooted in New Left intersectionalism and anarchist concepts like the affinity group and propaganda of the deed, but often divorced from anarchist theory and more devoted to punctual causes. A group professing to be “autonome” is declaring independence from parties, and rejecting centralised chains of command. See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonome .
• BeVöKü, Bevölkerungsküche: Same as KüFa.
• CSD: “Christopher Street Day”. Pride parades and associated events. Named after the street where the Stonewall riots took place. The actual day is June 28, but CSD events typically will be spread all over June and later, even months afterwards.
• Danni: Affectionate diminutive (see -i) for the Dannenröder forest, threatened by the Autobahn 49, and the forest occupation which protected it until the brutal eviction of 2020.
• Demo: Short for “demonstration”. A street protest, typically a peaceful march with slogans and posters. German scene demos are typically registered („angemeldet“) in advance with the police, but can also be unregistered for civil disobedience, often called „Sponti“ (for “spontaneous”).
• FLINTA, FLINTA*: Frauen, Lesben, intersexuelle, nicht-binäre, trans, und agender (women, lesbians, inter, non-binary, trans, and agender). A catch-all term trying to be basically “not cis dudes”. This term comes from a place of trying to include marginalised genders in spaces that were traditionally “women’s spaces”, but many non-binary/agender folk take issue with it, because it can often be used to erase the non-womanhood of other genders—it in practice becomes like “women and women lite”. It is nonetheless very common as of 2023. For the form with an asterisk see „Sternchen“.
• EA, EA Nummer: Short for Ermittlungsausschuss, “investigative commitee”. An anti-repression hotline provided for Demos and other forms of mobilisation. If you get detained or otherwise criminalised, you call the EA line, do not say what you or anyone did (since the cops will 100% be listening), but say where you are and that you need help. The cops will deny people their phones and personal belongings, so people will typically write the EA number on their bodies before Demos with a permanent marker (or, like some girlfriends taught me, with waterproof eyeliner).
• „Gegen jeden Antisemitismus“: “Against every antisemitism”. A laudable slogan, taken literally; especially given the persistent problem of anti-semitism within the left scene. This particular slogan is however strongly associated with the Antideutsche scene (which see), who uses it with the implication that any opposition to the Israeli state is a form of antisemitism.
• Gendersternchen: See „Sternchen“.
• „Hoch die internationale [antinationale] Solidarität“: “Uphold international solidarity”. A laudable sentiment, taken literally; and many people use it in the simple, literal meaning. However, this slogan is associated with the authoritarian communist scene, who uses it to mean the capital-I International—as in, the centralised, hierarchical command structure supposed to direct capital-C Communist Revolutions worldwide—and carry with it a meaning of Communist parties aiding one another to seize power. Because of this, you’ll notice anarchists, autonomists, and anti-authoritarians staying silent during this call in demos, or substituting „antinationale“. Authcom allies of the Apoist scene use this slogan a lot.
• Internationalist: In a literal sense, anyone who supports transnational cooperation between revolutionary tendencies. It is however often used in the same authcom nuance described in “Hoch die internationale Solidarität“ above. The “Internationalist Bloc” in a demo will typically be a mix of Apoists, Palestinian activists, immigrants from various Middle Eastern countries, and their white supporters from major Communist parties.
• Kapas: Kapazitäten, as in, “we don’t have the 〜”. One of several office bureaucracy jargon words that mysteriously pop up in the interminable leftist Plena, I wonder why 🤔
• KüFa: Küche für alle, “cooking for all”. Community kitchens. An event where volunteers offer free meals to all interested; or a structure dedicated to such events.
• Hambi: Affectionate diminutive (see -i) for Hambacher forest, beautiful woods in the Köln area threatened by coal mining, and the longstanding forest occupation that protects it since 2012.
• Lauti: Affectionate diminutive (see -i) for „Lautsprecherwagen“, “loudspeaker cart”, at the front of a Demo pumping music, slogans etc. Can degrade into a lowkey command structure, centralising away the spontaneity of autonomous action.
• Lützi: Affectionate diminutive (see -i) for Lützerath, a thousand-year-old village destroyed by coal mining, and the autonomous zone and occupation that protected it for two years before the brutal eviction of 2023.
• Macker: Macho guy; man who hasn’t overcome toxic masculinity.
• Mate: Yerba mate—not the original hot drink brewed from the ground herb, but as a fizzy, caffeinated soft drink product. Misteriously ubiquitous in the left scene.
• Mobi: Affectionate diminutive (see -i) for “mobilisation”, i.e. the thing the German scene confuses too much with “organisation”.
• OAT: Offenes Antifa Treffen, “open antifa meetings”. Events for the (usually secretive) antifa to interact with the public and recruit new blood.
• Plenum: “Plenary”. An assembly; a group meeting to plan and discuss actions. Often formalised, emotionless and exhausting.
• Querdenker: “Independent thinker”. COVID denialists. A right-wing subculture formed in reaction to authoritarian public health measures, composed mainly of older middle-class white folk, many of which “crystal people” (involved with New Age-type beliefs, alternative medicine, and general scepticism of science and modernity). The querdenker scene was pretty much immediately zeroed in by nazis for recruitment, and all these Wutbürger*innen are now in indistinguishable continuum with Reichsbürger*innen and actual literal nazis.
• Reichsbürger: “Citizen of the Reich” (Empire). A reactionary subculture that denies the legitimacy of the current government, the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD), and claims independence from its laws, documents etc. Similar in spirit to conspiracy-theoretical tendencies like Qanon, sovereign citizens, the Queen of Canada and the like, and indeed in a sort of paralell-reality diplomatic alliance with them. Though in theory allegiance to monarchism would make them incompatible with National-Socialism, in practice neonazis are the same scene and the same people. Often fly the Reichsflagge; sometimes also the current (BRD) flag with a banana on it, symbolising contempt for the „Bananarepublik Deutschland“. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichsbürger_movement
• Reichsflagge: The previous flag of Germany, coloured black-white-red rather than black-red-gold. Used by Reichsbürger*inen, and, very often, literal Hitlerist nazis (to evade the ban on the swastika). if you see someone flying this flag, 100% it’s a nazi and you should do violence to them.
• Repro: “reproductive labour”, i.e. work not to create products, but to keep things running (to “reproduce” conditions rather than “produce” things). The type of work traditionally undervalued, and left for women and servants: Cleaning, cooking, carework, daily planning… “These Macker talk big about communism but no one offers for repro.”
• Sternchen: “little star”, i.e. the asterisk * sign. It is used politically in two ways: one is a general all-inclusive suffix, for example „Frauen*“ (“women and other marginalised genders”) or „jin*, jiyan, azadî“ (“women+, life, freedom”). The other is as a neogrammar to write gender-neutral words in German. The problem addressed is that the personal suffixes are binary: -er (masc.), -in (fem. sing.), -innen (fem. pl.). The convention for gender-neutral is then to use the feminine suffix preceded by the star: Schüler (m.), Schülerinnen (f.pl.), Schüler*innen (unspecified genders, pl.). The star is either unpronounced, or pronounced as a glottal stop [ʔ] („Gender-Pause“). As one might expect, fascists absolutely hate all of this.
• TOPs: Tagesordnungspunkte, agenda items, as in, an ordered list of what you’re supposed to discuss in a Plenum and what people will beat you in the head with when you want to discuss something that actually matters (“yes but people have to work tomorrow and there’s still five TOPs, moving on…”).
• Transpi: Affectionate diminutive (see -i) for „Transparent“, which actually means “banner”, as in protest signs at Demos. I imagine the etymology must have to do with the old transparent slides for projectors, but Transpis aren’t actually transparent.
• VoKü, Volxküche: Same as KüFa.
• Wutbürger: “Angry citizen”. A leftist derogatory for the affluent white middle-class, when they hold bourgeois conservative sentiment. “Oh yeah sure I won’t show kink on CSD parades, let’s all appease the Wutbürger*innen”. Comparable to English sarcastic use of “concerned citizen”, or even more closely, Brazilian “cidadão de bem”.

Content warnings: discussions of violence; paraphrases of fascist rhetoric; fashion and other girly things; Discourse.

1. Should the antifa movement even exist?

The obvious criticism of the antifa movement is that it’s incomplete: “anti” the “fa”, but for what? Polish antifa have done wonderful theoretical work on positive antifascism (see e.g. Majewska, Feminist Antifascism: Counterpublics of the Common), but the German antifa movement, on the one hand so large, on the other has remained parasitic on external political movements: either liberal-democratic, connected to parties like the Greens; or authoritarian-communist, connected to parties like the MLPD and the DKP; or autonomist, be it explicitly anarchist, or single-issue antifa squads.

May 8, 2022. Dortmund antifa call for a march to celebrate the defeat of the Nazis, and demand that the date be made a holiday. I hate working, and an extra holiday to rub their loss on the faces of the fashos sounds fun, so why not? We mask up and march, shouting slogans in a properly registered, peaceful protest—you know, the average German antifaschistische Aktion. Mid-walk, we pause for the talks, and the whole march is revealed to be an entryst operation of the DKP; only then, huge hammer-and-sickle flags are opened up, to the eternal exclusion of the Eastern European immigrants who walk with me; party flags start waving; some cadre starts discoursing that without the Soviet Union, who never did anything wrong, we’d all be living under Nazi rule by now, vote for us. I got distracted by anger and when I realise it all the anarchists and other cool people have bolted, leaving only a mass of red-scarves around me. I can’t go home alone, it’s Dortmund and nazis are snooping around—we stumble on one in the park, it’s fun to terrify the bastard—but I am forced to march under the DKP flags or become an easy target.

The antifa flag is made of a black flag and a red one, hoisted together; we unite to survive the common enemy. However, the DKP is my enemy too—or would be if it ever succeeded, which it won’t. But in a fantasy world where the DKP took power, they would immediately sicc the cops on my friends like all governments necessarily do, whether red or brown or green *cof* Lützerath *cof*; and we would molotov their cops and burn down their prisons, like we do all cops and all prisons. Given that the liberals and the authoritarians both fight for different goals than us, given that our projects conflict, then what’s the point of uniting under the antifa banner? Shouldn’t we anarchists fight fascism with anarchist squads, and let the tankies make their tankie hierarchies and the Greens set up some youth antifa organisation to try to make us forget they’re still selling out for coal? Nothing stops us from running a counterdemo under the anarchist no-flag; the MLPD can raise all the red flags they want on the next block away from me. And then you wouldn’t have a purely reactive movement like antifas, but a complete ideology, with a long-term strategy and constructive goals.

Antifas will usually reply that the point of the antifa movement, qua antifa, is self-defence: antifas are the firefighters, the paramedics, the tourniquet on the bleeding wound, the stopgap measure to an urgent, immediate existential need. Nazis are attacking us right now, and antifas are a protective shield. But are we, though?

March 2023: the Islamofascist-neonazi (?) gang in Dortmund invades a leftist occupation in Bochum, the Haldi, throwing stones and insults, marking territory with graffiti. The antifas post sternly worded tweets, share Instagram stories full of solidarity, thoughts and prayers. A few mates try to offer our bodies to gang up in case of more attacks, we offer to join the community defense force, or more. There doesn’t seem to be anything like that, though; everything is symbolic solidarity and ground-level confusion, nothing is organised, no one knows who to point us to. Unable to break into the cliques, we leave our contacts in case anything happens. Within the week Haldi is attacked again; the emboldened nazis break inside this time, blast pepper spray, draw a gun to people’s heads, terrorise, humiliate. No one calls us, nor call anyone else. After that violent attack, the antifas at last organise some self-defence. But it is too late now; the nazis don’t repeat the attack. They already won.

The antifa retaliation is… a demo.

Couple months before the attack, the Dortmund immigrant nazis (?) had posted on Twitter: “German antifa love to paste stickers, ‘antifa area’, do they think they can change reality with stickers? If I paste the flag of Morocco does Germany become Morocco?” Now don’t get me wrong, the graffiti wars are important and meaningful, but the fascists have reason to mock us on this one. “Antifa area” is borrowing the language of gangs, but no one fears German antifa the way they fear the Bandidos. The graffiti wars are meaningful, but the aggressive talk of antifas have become a subject of mockery at this point, all bark no bite. Antifa symbolism is battle-symbolism; as such, it is emptied of meaning if nobody is willing to risk their bodies to actually, well, fight the battles. Not metaphorically “fight” a symbolic “fascism”, but fight these fascists, fight Serkan Bergamo and Nick Herpich, fight Matthias Fischer and Hannes Loth, fight materially, tangibly, territorially.

2. Antifa macht Spaß

The very suggestion of a struggle beyond the symbolic will chill the air of the plenum (which isn’t so bad—at least if you do that something happens in a plenum, at least there’s some emotion, some life). Everyone will assume that either you’re a police infiltrator, or you’re so bad at opsec that you’re to dangerous to even talk to, like a leper.

(Anarchist ancestor Louise Michel: “tbh my favourite comrades are the agent provocateurs; they suggest the most interesting actions.”)

The thing about that military jargon so piously reproduced—“opsec”—is that a “sec” without any “op” is just an excuse to not risk your privileges. If all that your proud security culture achieves is complete paralysis and burnout, well, that’s you doing the State job for them, the cops don’t even need to start drama if your paranoia will start it spontaneously. (This is literally in the counter-insurgency manual, go read it; the fear and distrust is the point of the repression, it deliberately weaponises trauma). What exactly has the antifa movement achieved with its “blac block as tactic” the last couple years? Decades?

The thing about “tactic” is that it’s an empty word without strategy. The German antifa movement badly lacks direction, goal, structure: if the goal is to act as a shield against the nazis, then who do I contact to request community defence? When a worker asks me: “I get that the police is bad but if something happens who should I call?”, which phone number do I give? A dozen antifa organisations in the Ruhrgebiet, how come no one was there to fight for Haldi? It’s curious that there’s no federation of antifa bands à la FAU; the reason, I believe, is that no one saw a reason to set up organisation at a larger scale, because no one is willing to entertain the thought of what we would do with such an org.

If we organised we would be powerful. If we organised we could materially, territorially, tangibly fight off the nazis. The antifa are afraid to consider what that implies.

The elephant in the room is that German antifa are largely unwilling to risk violence or prison. This isn’t due to any personal failings of individual Germans, but to material, sociological reasons: the movement is largely dominated by middle-class white students, as a class not equipped to deal with the situation of violence, at all. The movement is a weekend movement, a “I have to work tomorrow” movement, because the academic or professional careers are sacrosanct, life without them seems unimaginable. I say this not to guilt-trip anyone, a social problem demands a social answer: How do we equip German antifas to handle violence? How do we find meaning in life beyond study-work-consume? How to be steadfast? Well, look at any group able to put their bodies under fire, able to face repression without breaking rank; from the Kurds and the EZLN to gangs and ultras, what do you see common to all combative groups? Group cohesion, communal values, meaning-building, a sense of the enemy, shared and clear goals. A distinctive way to dress, distinctive battle songs, rites, folklore, martyrs. A lifestyle.

Oh but that’s scary! That’s like a gang, a cult, we will devolve into hooligans! It’s toxic masculinity! (Sister if punching and guns are to be the province of boys, if good girls cannot use violence, consider where this line of thought will leave the women and femmes.) “My dad says that left-extremists are just the same as right-extremists, that we just want to have fun with vandalism and fights, I can never convince my dad, we have to improve our image”. Comrade you will never convince your dad, your dad is not the target audience for antifa, not yet. Trying to appease to the centre by watering down the antifascist mythos is a losing strategy. The AfD is currently the biggest rising power in the country, and they didn’t get there by trying to be moderate and reasonable; they got there by doubling down then quadrupling down and spewing Trumpian-level rhetoric about monstrous transgender groomers and barbaric Muslim rapists and 5G vaccines. Trump got elected against all odds, by blabbering about Mexican rapists and grabbing pussies. Bolsonaro got elected by promising to kill 30 thousand. We do not live in a “looking moderate” kind of age. If there’s a purpose for the antifa banner at all, it is to shift the Overton window in the other direction. We want the banner to be there for the people who saw the AfD polls and thought, “oh fuck, I have to do something”, for the people who are one smile and a wink away from being radicalised. For the average worker with liberal values you should instead work within the wider leftist political movements, with the union, with common causes.

And yes I know, there is a point in siamo tutti antifascisti; there is a powerful narrative in all the mockups of the antifa flag: the barista antifascista, the hacker antifascista, the Küfa antifascista… there is a point in advancing the fact that carework is antifascism, repro is antifascism, empathy and softness and art and love is antifascism; this is the path to positive antifascism, to a constructive politics able to provide alternatives to fascism. But this argument draws it power from the bite of the antifa movement. If the antifa flag isn’t fundamentally radical, the point implodes, and all these fun mockup logos fail the landing at what they suggest.

“Barista barista antifascista” only works insofar as there are antifas who punch nazis.

The biggest potential of the German antifa movement lies exactly in the parts where it loathes itself: The subculture, the music, the fashion, the romanticism, the longing for adventure, for breaking with the routine of a domesticated subservient life. If the antifas are to become an actually effective shield, if we are to stop shitposting on twitter and start actually winning, actually stopping the fascists on their tracks, we need much more of a #squad lifestyle, not less. Because the biggest difficulty of German movements, by far, is that nobody has “energy” to do anything, any proposal is met with tired sighs and shifty eyes, afraid to commit. Well if nobody has energy, then the Spaß, the hype, the gang feel, is the missing charger. The most effective antifa action in the area is Mob Action.

German leftists worry so much about their public image, about the centrist criticism that antifas are “only on it because es macht Spaß”. You should instead consider why is it that „Spaß“ automatically discredits a movement in your eyes; why do you believe joy is a sin.

The Zapatistas have announced themselves to México and to the world with the Declarations of the Lacandona Jungle, originally by pirate radio. And look, I don’t have anything against spectres haunting Europe, but if you think the Communist Manifesto is poetic you ain’t seem nothing on Mayan political communiqués. So today, I want to share with you some of my favourite passages of the Fourth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle, in a translation that tends to the music and the dance of the words.

Cuarta Declaración de La Selva Lacandona

There won’t be death for the flower which is the word.
There may be death for the masked face of those who today name it, but the word, this word born from the depths of land and history, cannot be rooted off anymore by the arrogance of power.

We are all born of the night. In the night we live, and in her we shall die. But this light will prove to be the morning for all others, for those who today cry the night, for those to whom the day is denied, for those to whom death herself is a consolation, for those who were forbidden life.
For everyone: the light.
For everyone: everything.

For us: the pain and the anguish. For us: the joy of rebellion. For us: our future torn apart. For us: the dignity of insurrection.
For us: nothing.

The ambition of the powerful has been our silence. Being quiet, we died. Without the word, we didn’t exist.
We fight, to raise our voices against oblivion. We fight, against death, for memory, for life. We fight, for we fear dying the death which is being forgotten.

They kill us for fighting back—but this is how we build a world where we all fit together, a world where everyone can live, without the death of the word. They take our land, so that our stride finds nothing to step on. They take our history, so that our word dies in its oblivion. They do not want us indigenous. They want us dead.

The arrogant wants to put down a rebellion which, in their ignorance, they place at the dawn of 1994. But the rebellion which now comes with the brown face of the land, with the language of the land, is not born today. It was spoken before in other languages, in other lands. In countless mountains and countless histories has it walked, the rebellion against injustice. It spoke Náhuatl, Paipai, Kiliwa, Cúcapa, Cochimi, Kumiai, Yuma, Seri, Chontal, Chinanteco, Pame, Chichimeca, Otomí, Mazahua, Matlazinca, Ocuilteco, Zapoteco, Solteco, Chatino, Papabuco, Mixteco, Cuicateco, Triqui, Amuzgo, Mazateco, Chocho, Izcateco, Huave, Tlapaneco, Totonaca, Tepehua, Popoluca, Mixe, Zoque, Huasteco, Lacandón, Maya, Chol, Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Tojol-ab’al, Mame, Teco, Ixil, Aguacateco, Motocintleco, Chicomucelteco, Kanjobal, Jacalteco, Quiché, Cakchiquel, Ketchi, Pima, Tepehuán, Tarahumara, Mayo, Yaqui, Cahíta, Ópata, Cora, Huichol, Purépecha and Kikapú. It spoke, and speaks, the Castillan language [“Spanish”].
For rebellion is not a thing of language; it is a thing of dignity, a thing of being human.

A society which is plural, accepting, inclusive, democratic, fair, free: such a society will only be possible as a wholly new system. And it won’t be power to build it. For power today is only the salesforce of ruins, of countries destroyed by the real subversives, the real desabilising force: the rulers.

The projects of independent opposition are lacking something, that is, more than ever, crucial. We all oppose the agenda of a system that destroys itself, but we need a concrete proposal for a new society, a model of what to build as we rebuild.
The Zapatista Army of National Liberation, the EZLN, is part of this proposal; it is not the whole of it, nor its “vanguard”. It has been, and continues to be, part of the effort of a transition to self-rule.

The world we want is a world where countless worlds fit in. The country we build is a country where all the peoples fit in, where all the languages are spoken. May all paths walk her, may everyone laugh her, may everyone dawn her.
We talk unity even when we are silent. In murmur we rain the words, to find one another together in history, to ward off the danger that confronts and destroys us: the danger of being forgotten.

There won’t be death for the flower which is the word, even if our strides stride in silence. For in silence the seed of the word is sown. Because so that it may flower, the word screams itself into silence;
So that it may live, the word dies, sown into the womb of the land;
“So that they see us, we mask our own faces;
So that they name us, we deny our own names;
We risk our present, so that we have a future,
And so that we live, we die.”

Our word, our song and scream, is here to stop the dead from dying. We fight so that they live. We sing, so that they live.
And the word is alive.
The cry of “Enough!” is alive.
The night that makes of itself a dawn is alive.
Our proud stride, side-by-side with all those who cry, is alive.
We fight to destroy the clockwork of death, wound up by the powerful.
We fight for a new era: A time of life.

Aquí estamos. No nos rendimos. Zapata vive y, a pesar de todo, la lucha sigue.
Desde las montañas del Sureste Mexicano, / Comité Clandestino Revolucionario Indígena, Comandancia General del Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional. México, enero de 1996.

Excessively verbose translation notes

The night is the “long night of 500 years”, the arrival of colonialism and its procession of horrors: dominion, capitalism, industrialism, neoliberalism. We are all born of it: indigenous folk in Latinoamérica have had ‘the Indian beaten out to save the man’, their own lifeworlds have been taken. The indigenous, too, had to learn to rewild. The word, language itself, culture, myth, society, politics, is what the powerful tried to silence: cultural genocide. The Fourth Declaration asserts that the deeper the word is buried, the more it flowers. Thus the beauty and importance of listing all the languages they took from us (so many in that tiny corner of México alone!), invoking the name of each people like Homer’s Catalogue of Ships.

Like anyone who tells a story, I am biased. I cannot avoid an anarchist lens; but zapatismo is neither anarchist nor communist, it is zapatista. The original declaration is highly local to time and place: the selling out of México to the USA via neoliberal trade agreements in the 90s. I’ve chosen words so as to make it more timeless; I was faithful to the movement—motion and direction—more than the moment. This movement is grounded on oral history and personal relationships, not holy texts from chairmen. Besides, there’s already a more literal translation to serve historical purposes; this one aims to capture the music of the words in Castillian.

The part quoted as “so that we see us…” isn’t from the Fourth Declaration, it’s from the Sixth. I recognised the seed of that little poem in the lines of the Fourth and took the liberty to transplant the later words back into this ground, because I think it looks good here (doesn’t it?). I’m far from the only one struck by the poetry of the Fourth, parts of it have been sang by Manu Chao (in EZLN… Para Tod@s and elsewhere in the Clandestino album), and more recently Adiós Gota in La Alegre Rebeldía; Pedro Guerra set that Sixth passage to music, in Chiapas.

1. We don’t do demos.
We prioritise organisation over mobilisation. Most of our political energy goes to building autonomy from an injust world, not in perpetual reaction to punctual injustices.

2. We help one another.
Our core work is mutual aid. Our politics is the tangible, material, bodily politics of the every day. Our politics is to help one another with food, a job, a place to stay, emotional support, collective defence, access to hormones, abortions, handling bureaucracies, childcare, elder care, sickcare, we care.

3. We will not cancel us.
We reject all police, including the cop in our heads. We are calm and confident in our collective power to protect and heal the targets of harm while transforming the patterns of harm in the doer. We build this trust in our power by constant study and practice of transformative justice. We practice how to handle conflict, harm and abuse before they happen. We do not kick people out of our group only for them to go harm other people, less equipped to deal with it. We handle our own messes, because we are strong enough to take collective responsibility.

4. We stay together.
We are comrades. We know who is the enemy, and we distinguish internal conflict from the enemy. We strive to make every comrade feel seen, welcome, and treasured. Our bond is the metal of identity and ethics and shared dreams; our bond is tempered by the fire of the struggle and the pressure of oppression; our bond is stronger than nation, stronger than family, stronger than individual relationships. Our community survives heartbreak.

5. We build meaning.
We remind one another of how our lived experiences are part of a larger struggle. We talk of our ancestors and our goals so that we can find ourselves here, between past and future, carrying the torch of rebellion. We look at one another, and we stan.

6. We are visible.
When we spot our symbols in another body we feel calmer and safer, we drop the tension of our jaws and breathe with relief, for we know we found someone we can count on. When our enemies see our symbols they tremble, for they know that harm to one will mobilise all.

7. We occupy territory.
We do not stay hidden in our concrete cages but take to the streets, we meet visibly in public hangout spots, and in doing so make the public spaces ours. Our allies know they are safer in our territory; our enemies shiver and hide their emblems of oppression.

8. We empower.
Our meetings do not drain energy; they energise. Our meetings are abundant: they abound with fun and joy, with music and laughter, with crying and mourning, our voices lilt with emotion, with belief, with life. Our meetings reject the logic of capitalism, of work culture, our politics is not a second job, our politics is a feast and a party and a rage and a hug in the long night. We hype.

9. We call upon our ancestors.
We learn the stories of those who came before us in the struggle, those who carried us to where we are. In remembering the dead we bring them to life in our bodies, we live the lives that they fought to let us have. We remember our dead in mourning, yes, but also in celebration and power, we do not remember them merely for the tragedy of their oppression, but for the joy and freedom of their lives in defiance, fully aware that there are no heroes and that their glory is our glory, that we today in our bodies are nothing but power and glory.

10. We are reliable.
Our meetings happen regularly and we can trust ourselves to show up. We know we will show up, because we want to show up, we look forward to showing up, because our meetings build up, rather than grind down. We understand the power of ritual, of regularity, of rhythm, because it is in rhythm that we can dance.

11. We do not take these rules too seriously.
We will not forget that the human spirit cannot be predicted in words, theories, and systems. We bow to no authority, least of all the authority of the dead letter. We will never let an ideology trample a human heart. We are big kids and we can question ourselves.

Inspirations for this text / recommended reading (on a Tor browser)

• Malatesta, Let Us Be Of Good Cheer!
• The group formerly know as “Bash Back”, I Don’t Bash Back I Shoot First: On Queer Gangs
• Institute For The Study of Insurgent Warfare, Nine Theses On Insurgency
• Mia Mingus’ concept of pod mapping
• Basically every communiqué from the EZLN but see especially the Fourth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle
• adrienne maree brown, We Will Not Cancel Us ; and Pleasure Activism
• Aragorn!, Toward a non European Anarchism or Why a movement is the last thing that people of color need
• Margaret Killjoy, (podcast) Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff: Gay Resistance to Nazis, 2022-05-30 and 2022-06-01
• Kaneko Fumiko, A Work of My Own! (in: The Prison Memoirs of a Japanese Woman )
• Sylvia Rivera & Marsha P. Johnson’s interviews, quoted in the zine Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries: Survival, Revolt, and Queer Antagonist Struggle

Young Alexander conquered India.
All by himself then?
Caesar defeated the Gauls.
Did he bring along a cook at least?
Felipe de España, el Prudente, cried when his Armada
sunk into the sea.  And nobody else cried that day?
In the Seven Years' War, Federico Secondo grasped
victory.  Who else grasped it with him?

All these pages, all these conquests.
All those feasts—who did the dishes?
Every ten years a new Great Man.
Who covered the budget?

So many headlines.
So many questions.

1. Life

It is physically painful for me to watch the baggers—those giant skeleton ships from hell, made of steel and death—literally eating away the Earth, chunk by chunk, when I know of the rich diversity of insect life who thrives on the wildflower patch activists maintain; when I spot the holes for bird nests in the clay; when comrade hare darts in the floodlights between our barricades and the cops, jumping back and forth for reasons of her own; when the trees who so loved us are fallen, one by one, sending the larks flying into the night.

I look at reddit and the top voted comment says that people are too emotional about Lützerath and we should look at facts and logic and that the coal is necessary in case of emergencies and that the ‘empty’ village is purely symbolic and that the activists shouldn’t hurt themselves or others because the land is, and I quote, not worth it.

I would gladly saw off my own arm to stop this senseless murder. Alas, the option is not given.

We once found a crashed crow in Lützerath. I thought he was dead, but upon covering him with a soft blanket, his head moved very slowly. We ran across the camping fields to ask help from the other squatters; a bunch of masked antifa girls told us that they’d call for specialists but first let him drink water, a lot of birds are collapsing out of heat exhaustion. By the time we made it back to our shack, someone had put birdseed and water next to the blanket, and the crow had flown away.

Earthworms are down in the UK 33% this year. I feel like people are underestimating what this means, what the soil life means for plants and, consequently, us. The ocean has never been that hot, reaching another record on the week of the eviction. Lützi has enough coal under it to blow over Germany’s 1,5°C commitment six times over, and it is “purely symbolic”.

The first time I ever stepped in Lützerath, the first thing I saw was ladybugs mating on the leaf of lavender. I wrote on a barrier:

This land belongs to meadowbees
wildflowers trees
the crow
nameless little bugs birds
butterflies

For all the good that my writing did. I watched my friends murdered before my eyes. I cried, again and again facing the police, and not due to the torture holds.

I haven’t seen a single mainstream media talk of non-human lives in Lützerath. The hare doesn’t get a vote on coal mining, the earthworms are not accounted for in the spreadsheets. You killed my friends and I will never forget this.

2. People

I became an anarchist from books, from studying politics and history and realising that only in an anarchist society would a weird queer like me be safe and allowed to thrive. I was already convinced of this, by the historical example of, well, literally any government ever, including the so-called ‘communist’ ones (especially those ones). But Lützerath brought the fire of anarchy to life, seared the experience into my flesh & bones.

Everyone who lived in Lützi, however briefly, will talk to you about it with a spark in their eyes, struggle for words, ‘you had to be there’, ‘it was something special’. A few hundred people and we built a working collective kitchen churning out 3 delicious meals a day; a pirate radio; 24/7 vigils before the baggers; a restoration for a mysterious ancient shrine in the woods, maintained daily; periodic large-scale events and festivals and protests, bringing ecological defenders from Mexico, from Africa, South America; fields of vegetables and healing herbs; a vigil of plushies; the fucking heroic Shit Brigade maintaining the best separation toilets I’ve ever had the pleasure to use; an anti-racist library; permanent workshops of all sorts of practical skills—many people have described life in Lützi as something like what a university should be, we learned so much in so little time; awareness groups and safe spaces for neurodiverse people, BIPoC, queer, women, accommodations for wheelchair occupiers; a skilled medic team; a savvy media team; an antifa skateboarding training hall which is probably the raddest thing I’ve ever seen; collective housing of all sorts, from camping hills to tree houses to wooden cabins to large, abandoned industrial buildings turned into beautiful queerfeminist spaces, filled with life and art and joy——

All for free. Everything for everyone.

At any moment in time you (whoever ‘you’ might be) could join in by simply walking into the woods. No rent, no fees. Stop by the watch for (free) hot coffee, walk by the trees towards the infopoint; there’s a board with the days’ activities, always full. 18:00 is the on-boarding. You have time to kill so you wander by, there’s a small kitchen with (free) bread and (free) vegan spreads, you help yourself. As you eat you meet three activists from Spain, they’re staying long-term, you discuss political projects and somehow it seems that here it matters, that something is happening. Someone comes running from the road, shouts: ‘mic check!’ Everyone within hearing distance echoes in full voice: ‘mic check!’ ‘The collective kitchen needs’, the messenger continues, and everyone repeats, amplifying their voice: ‘The collective kitchen needs’, ‘3 people’, ‘3 people’, ‘to help carry boxes’, ‘to help carry boxes’. You find yourself going there.

No one ever tells you what to do, no one tries to coerce, manipulate or guilt-trip you into being a productive worker, no one conditions your shelter or sustenance on labour, everybody talks things over together in assemblies, and together we build a good place to live in, a life worth living. Lützerath was a pearl of the German autonomist tradition.

And then you walk across the dirt road and it’s the baggers and the coal mine, a literal crater on Earth, a wound extending as far as you can see, giant machines digging away towards you and your friends. Lützerath wasn’t purely symbolic, but it was one hell of a symbol. What a contrast. What a world that we could have and a world they impose onto us. If this was a movie it’d be called melodramatic, unrealistic. In Lützerath you could watch the global ecocide in a metonimic diorama of itself. I would often go to Skywalk, the observation platform, and watch the baggers. Just stay there, watching the destruction. I felt like someone should bear witness to death if nothing else. Others felt like me. I was never lonely in Lützerath.

I cry for Lützerath, not just because of my dead friends from the Earth, not just because of the sadness of my human friends, not just because this coal will kill many more, but because I selfishly wanted to live there forever because that place was the closest I ever got to experience community, which in the 21st century felt like utopia, and now I’m thrown back into capitalism and nothing you can do in capitalism will buy me that.

Everyone who’s ever been in Lützi and made it what it is, thank you. When you watch the scenes of the cops putting down our buildings, when you watch their glee, their mockery when they seize and make use of our spaces and structures, keep this in mind: The reason they hate you is that you have proved cops to be unnecessary. For two beautiful years we lived with no rulers and no enforcers, no elected representatives and no ‘community leaders’, and we lived better without them than we ever did under them. You have found the one weird secret that parties and authorities don’t want you to know; you have tasted the secret of freedom, and the taste lingers in your mouth.

I will quote what a zapatista insurrectionary told us in the forest once:

‘The enemy would all the time invade with their helicopters and tanks and they would blow up our schools, our houses, our headquarters, and the media would say, Zapatistas defeated! The Zapatista rebellion is over!’ —and I want you to imagine him saying this and meaning every word, standing in the dark woods, voice trembling with emotion: ‘But every time we would go back into the pueblos and hide with the people and then we would come back again, because la rebelión is not in the buildings. La rebelión is in our hearts.’

3. Politics

Lützerath represents for me the complete failure of the politics of activism.

Two years of the most organised campaign I’ve ever seen. Large-scale demonstrations were routine, we had 35 thousand in the counter-eviction demo, Greta Thunberg came along. International media, statements of support from every continent. Scientist Rebellion on our side, a petition by 700 specialists on how this coal is neither desirable nor necessary, detailed studies on the topic all agreeing. All the diversity of tactics you can imagine, lock-ins and glue-ons, people in tripods and monopods staying awake day and night with police lights blasting on their face, people hiding in tunnels, arm-by-arm-blockades, an ex-cop quoting to cops on how to be a conscientious objector, elderly people, wheelchair users trying to reason, sabotage of pumps, barricades deep into the earth and covering every road. Greenpeace, Last Generation, Ende Gelände, Fridays for Future, XR, anarchists, communists, antifas, random libs, old hippies, pacifists, militants, Hambi veterans, preteens concerned about the future and retired couples concerned about their grandkids. Frankly masterful design work, large outdoor signs detailing the ecological situation with maps and infographs and citations, an iconic, memorable and self-explanatory visual language (that yellow X barrier can be made into an outfit in 10 seconds with adhesive tape), propaganda movies with high production values, with humour and empathy and vibrant with energy. The Christians restored the mysterious forest shrine, maintained it daily, brought up a cross styled in the yellow X of the movement (blessed by the Pope, carried in pilgrimage), an elderly Christian lady slept outdoors at the shrine on the day of the eviction (sub-zero temperatures, winter rain, windstorm). A cause that enjoys more popular support than anarchism or socialism. A particularly egregious example of that cause—there is no reason to burn this brown coal, none, nothing, it isn’t even profitable anymore, it’s the worst type of lignite that will cost millions and take a long time to even purify into something usable, at a huge pollution collateral, with investments that would generate more money on fucking wind power, let alone the mass death it causes, a senseless destruction of villages dating from the 1100s along with the biosphere of the entire planet for no other reason than sunken costs of a few shareholders, very obviously nothing more than that. A legalist argument was dug up—turns out the company doesn’t even own all the land yet, they have failed to coerce some farmers into selling even now, the digging is technically illegal. Highly motivated activists ready for anything, my mates chained arms with me, spitting at the surrender offers from the cops, making improv privacy walls with safety blankets to piss in buckets, dragged one by one with torture holds and blows to the head and chokes and pepper spray, everyone chanting revolutionary songs softly. And the Green Party in power, elected enthusiastically by voters who did it specifically to stop the burning of coal.

All that, and the cops sent by the Green Party government steamrolled right through us, breaking bones as casually as the baggers break the soil food web. To protect the profits. Of a private company. By digging the land to mine brown coal.

There is a particular kind of gaslighting nausea when your joints are still aching from what the cops did to you, and you read social media comments praising the cops for their professional behaviour and restraint. The destruction of Lützerath is as blatantly evil as evil gets, and it nonetheless got polarised instantly, like everything does these days. Lützi people being randomly bashed in the head by cops have shown downright heroic commitment to passive resistance, yet we were being called violent rioter extremists who should be gassed and executed due to our… burning barricades.

Do not make the mistake of believing that if you play by the rules you won’t be oppressed, criminalised, or beaten. They will change the rules to get you if they have to. The people who will hate you if you break the rules, already hate you no matter what you do. And the enforcers of the rules don’t have to play by the rules.

Many people tried to reason with the cops. We’re doing this for your children! Your mother is ashamed of you! You can stop, you know there’s a system to reject participation in operations you deem unethical? I’m a 65-year-old teacher, I had to take vacations from school to be here, look at which side you’re on!

The cops could not be reasoned with.

The cops took selfies relaxing in our structures, posing with everything they stole from us or smashed to pieces, pointedly lampshading their glee. “Don’t you have a family?”, someone shouted while being dragged away, and exceptionally, a cop actually answered, right after shoving her to the ground:
“No.”

I usually stand at the frontline, and at one point I tried looking a riot cop straight into the eye. It was impossible. His eyes flickered constantly, moving into all directions, trying to take it all in, one hand on his gun another hand on his big stick. He wore in his face panic, or fury, or both. All he saw was enemies, a whole horizon swarming with enemies, all he waited for was a pretext.

We got messages of support from our comrades in Chiapas, in Rojava, in Ukraine, in the Amazon. But I cannot help but feel like we’re playing games here. In Chiapas, in Rojava, in Ukraine, in the Amazon people are defending territory against the enemy. Here we deliberately put our bodies in vulnerable positions before our enemies, hoping that, hoping that what? someone, somewhere does something? The government takes a stand against the obscenely wealthy company who owns the whole lobbyst sector? The Board of Directors is moved by the scenes of bravery and, touched deep in their hearts, calls off the baggers?

We lie down before our bullies like toddlers in a tantrum, point fingers, call out: This is bad! They’re breaking everything! They’re hurting us! But we’re long past the point where calling out will do anything.

I don’t know how to organise active resistance here in the EU, in the heart of the beast, to protect the patches of nature that are left. I don’t know what shape of resistance would be tactical here. But to those who think that the armies of rich countries are unbeatable, I will remind that the Taliban defeated the U.S. army and are we really less committed to justice than the Taliban is to patriarchy? I do not know what shape of resistance would be tactical here, but I know it will involve things like in Chiapas, like in Rojava, like in Ukraine, like in the Amazon. To quote the Institute For The Study of Insurgent Warfare:

An activist’s enemies then are the particular set of abstract bad things they endeavour to set aright and their opponents are fellows who merely happen to be on the wrong side of the issue. By comparison, an insurgent’s enemies are never abstract, but rather discrete entities of flesh, stone, or steel, from bodies to buildings, which at a specific time and place obstruct their interests.

Which is to say, the people who are doing this to the land and to us are physical people of flesh and blood, who have names and addresses.

But it gets a little bit heavy, so here’s the content warnings. (Softly:) Content warning: Feminist theory. (Increasingly loudly:) Content warning: Academia. Content warning: Terfs. Content warning: Europeans. (Screaming towards the university hall): Content warning: The definition of woman. Content Warning: ANTI-TRANSGENDER HATE. Content warning: ANTI-TRANSGENDER VIOLENCE. CONTENT WARNING: ANTI-TRANSGENDER GENOCIDE.

(Happily warmly again): I have three things to tell you: one about the terfs, one about the fascists, and one about you.

1. Terre des Femmes

On their Facebook event, Terre des Femmes says:

Die Polizei ist informiert und vor Ort. Der Weg INS Haus wird durch die Polizei gesichert, so dass sich unsere Gäste keine Gedanken machen müssen.

You can tell a lot about what kind of woman a supposed “feminist” is protecting, when they assure their folk they can feel safer because many cops will be around.

Terre des Femmes advocates for a legislative ban on Muslim head gear. In other words, these white German supposed “feminists” advocate giving white German cops the right to violently enforce State power over immigrant bodies. It never fails: Scratch a terf, find a racist.

(increasingly angrily:) On her analysis of Terre’s colonialist rhetoric about the “Muslima in Deutschland”, Saskia Metz leverages the theoretical work of the great Indian feminist Chandra Talpade Mohanty re: the category “oppressed Third World Women”, which flattens our individuality and our intersectional struggles under a single binary equation, male=penis=oppressor, female=vagina=victim, so that any of us with a lifestory which challenges their binary theory get denied our own consent, our autonomy, our voice, our personhood itself: So that it doesn’t matter if the woman wants to wear a hijab, or do sex work, or go out in a short skirt, or transition; the enlightened First World feminist vanguard knows our oppression better than us. (Metz 2020, “Eine Analyse der Rhethorik von Terre des Femmes e.V. zum Kopftuchverbot”, (screaming ever louder) i s s n two one nINE TWO DASH FIVE TWO——

(silence.)

It’s hard to even care, isn’t it?

You, like me, are still in deep grief. We are grieving for our dead murdered in our day of grieving, we aren’t even allowed to grieve, like we aren’t allowed our own names in our tombstones. One of my partners said this: “The worst part is I’m not even phased. With all that the U.S. fascists have been saying, with all that the U.K. TERFs have been saying, it was so obviously a matter of time. I feel like the most cynical Cassandra, here looking at my watch, sipping coffee asking, ‘did it happen yet?’”

And the shitty racist Islamophic cop-loving white-ass First-World Fortress Europe regressive pseudofeminists from Terre des Femmes have the gall, the the gall, the GALL, to come here today of all days agitate for the Bundesrepublik Deutschland government to impose on us which gender we really are.

Now Terre des Femmes says:

“Was ist eine Frau? Die Veranstaltung wird das Thema Auswirkungen des geplanten Selbstbestimmungsgesetzes auf Frauenrechte konstruktiv reflektieren. Ein ~respektvoller~ Umgang miteinander ist zu jeder Zeit unabdingbare Voraussetzung.”

FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU Terre des Femmes, you want respect? While we’re walking in DEATH as death surrounds us, in the pit of our grief, in the abyss of our collective trauma, you come tell the cops and the nazis that we trannies are abusers and predators, in the city of the Frontline Skinheads and the Fortress Europe nazi demos, after a 15-year-old girl gets lynched on the streets then misgendered by police, you come demand respect?? I’ll tell you was ist eine Frau, eine Frau ist meu pau is what it is. A woman is my DICK.

“Ah here we see the phallic rape culture enactment of the violent trans-identifie—” FUCK. YOU. I am DONE.

You, First-World colonial supremacists gorging on the wealth you plundered from my country and a hundred others, you who cannot hide your DISGUST for our body and our desire so you dress it up as supposed “feminism”, you who call my sisters “sex traffick victims” so that you can deport them back to Hell, just so that you don’t have ever to look at the proudly exposed trans body of the Latina travesti, like you don’t want to look at the proudly covered body of the Islamic feminist, because our existence doesn’t fit your shitty self-serving malformed theory. I have no time to argue with you, I am too busy teaching my queer kids how to stop bleedings from gunshot wounds. I have nothing to argue with you, from the valley of death I spit on you, in the name of the travesti amapô I curse you: tonight our dead will haunt your nightmares.

2. The danger of terfs, the irrelevance of terfs

Those of you who were here with me humiliating the Nazis on 1st of May: Those of you who defined the Versammlungsgesetz and the illusion of safety of the liberal order to mask up and face the enemy up close, you will remember: We didn’t just have the NPD and Die Rechte and the III. Weg and the local Hammerskins, we also had the Légió Hungária, the Bulgarski Nationalen Sajuz, Les Nationalistes and the Polish reactionaries and the Italian brotherhood—real internationale solidarität they have, European fascists. That Nazi influencer, remember her? The nazi Twitter girlfriend? announced a Fortress Europe alliance at that day.

The Colorado shooter, as you heard, is the grandson of a MAGA Republican lawmaker. Another Republican, Arthur Jay Finkelstein, spent decades consulting for European fascists from Austria, Hungary, Czech, Ukraine, all over. Ordo Iuris, a Polish Catholic fascist organisation, has hosted Brazilian fascists, has received help from U.S. fascists to pass anti-abortion legislation, the Bolsonaro family is working with the Trump clan, UK terfs are now using anti-LGBT symbolism from Eastern European fascists, only switching the rainbow flag for the pink-white-blue.

Do you get it, the scale of this? It’s the work of years. We are under attack, it’s not just random shootings, there’s no Einzelfälle, American politicians are openly calling for genocide now, the day after the shooting. We cannot fight this with just demos. We cannot / fight this / with just / demos.

Are terfs even relevant at this point? Yes, they enable and empower the rise of fascism, but if they all stopped tomorrow little would change, because trans-exclusionary “feminism” is self-defeating. The same power they ceded for Republicans to oppress us trans people, was immediately used to overturn Roe Vs. Wade. Terfs are so eager to kick us out of women’s spaces, they are so disgusted by our bodies, so desperate to build walls to leave us out, that they don’t even look at who’s handing them all those bricks. Terfs think that their walls keep us out, but they’re walling themselves with the men inside Gilead.

The rotting trans bodies hanging from those walls will prove to be poor consolation for them.

3. Juicy gossip bitterness

No, it’s not to them that I came to talk today, it’s to you. My siblings. All of you my folk, all of you queer, interestingly gendered anarchists, actually feminist feminists.

I’m Brazilian. Most trans folk killed last year are from my country. By a large margin. For the 13th time in a row.

Police kills an average of 17 people per day in my country. If I dress like this outside in my country, there’s a very high chance I’ll be beaten to death; half the time the murderers will be in police uniform.

When I watch the rise of fascism, the rise of anti-queer violence here inside the progressive walls of Fortress Europe, I, like all my immigrant friends, have a very specific kind of chill: That I am being thrown back into that, terrified of ever looking too fem, too sexual, too myself. And I cannot—I will not go back to that. I would rather die lynched on the streets than live in hiding again.

I’m not a citizen. Any crime, however how minor, can get me deported, back to that. Antifa action might get me deported back to that. Having, quote, “extremist political beliefs”, endquote, is grounds to get my citizenship denied.

I’ve spent Trans Day Of Remembrance being slut-shamed online by some swerf who thought me, a Latina travesti, going to an anti-police demo with this outfit, yes this glorious outfit you see me in right now, was grossly inappropriate. The kicker? The swerf in question wasn’t a cis terf. She was a trans anarchist. While the shooting victims were still bleeding she was trash-talking me to my partner on how me posting my boobs online is me being a whore, without tact or niveau, without class, for submission to men.

Sister I WISH I was a whore! I’m not ALLOWED be a whore, because women like THEM (points to terf meeting) as well as like YOU will sicc the cops on me if I even try. So I have to sell my body to other, significantly worse forms of wage slavery, working for capitalists rather than myself.

I prepared a speech for this Trans Day of Remembrance; I put a lot of blood and tears into it. Do you know who gave me space, who wanted to listen to my speech, who thanked me for it? Pride Rebellion. For those who don’t know, Pride Rebellion is not an anarchist org. They’re close to Apoists, they have people who wear the hammer-and-sickle. Theoretically, not my politics. They’re closer to second-wavey forms of feminism; their theory, unlike our queer theory, has little allowance for slut pride. In traditional Jineologî there’s no discussion on trans people, yet do you know how many times the Kurdish heval have given me problems over my gender? Never. Do you know how often my outfits have been policed by these revolutionaries whose theories could justify that? Never.

Do you know why that is? How come the hevals will unconditionally gang up with me, even when my positions don’t fit the ideology? Because as we speak the Kurds are being bombarded by Turkish airplanes, in a renewed genocide, aided and abetted by NATO and by the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, with next to no notice on mainstream media. When my existence doesn’t fit their theories, the Kurds open space for me, because we are under attack, and unlike white German activists, the Kurds have a sense of the enemy. The Zapatistas have a sense of the enemy. BLM has a sense of the enemy. We are under attack, and insurrectionaries know we won’t solve this with demos. The first time I talked to a Kurdish activist—the first time!—she offered to take care of my queer kids, should anything happen. I want you to think how many queer anarchist comrades you can trust to have that kind of commitment. Which of your comrades would offer you, spontaneously and unconditionally, long-term childcare? Who would offer you shelter and food and cover fire, even if someone has a shitty take, even if there’s a relationship conflict, even if the positioning differs or the theory doesn’t fit?

My heval’s theory doesn’t cover my nonbinary kid’s gender identity, but she will put my kid above her theory, because we are comrades and the enemy wants us both dead. This isn’t hyperbole, this isn’t me being dramatic, they literally wants us all dead, dead, and unlike the terfs in here, we can’t count on the cops to keep us safe. Who keeps us safe? Who keep us safe?

Compared to the Kurds, the German left is severely limited in action by their investment in the fake security they think they have. All I hear is attempts to dissuade me to do anything that could get me in trouble, to go help with the struggle in safer ways, maybe do a Küfa (if you get the Ordnungsamt permission for one, natürlich). The very first antifa demo I did in Germany was against the Versammlungsgesetz, summer 2021, you know how that went: We were kesseled on the asphalt til midnight, detained, profiled, photographed, catalogued in all shitty government databases as potential terrorists. It was a legal demo! I followed all the rules! I was profiled for holding a sign that said „Antifaschismus ist kein Verbrechen“! And all the good-opsec Germans in black masks and North Face windbreakers were minutely profiled right along with me. When the boots come for you, your crypto apps won’t save you. I’m presenting this with my face exposed, which is nice cos you get to see my new haircut, but I actually came here masked! (lifts pink mask theatrically from the ground) You saw me going Karen at the cops before, they forced us to unmask!

I’m borrowing from the civil rights movement here when I say: mobilisation won’t save us, we need true organisation, we need to provide our siblings with shelter, with food, hormones, safety, we need fucking guns. The terfs are a lost cause but you are my people, the fascists are coming for all of us, we’re the sacrificial goat. Half of you thinks me having ten girlfriends is #problematic, that my sexuality is Inappropriate in Public Spaces I should tone it down. And the other half thinks my aggressiveness is too overt, my violence too proudly worn, I’m better off cancelled by security culture. For the third half, the small half that doesn’t want to tone down ANYTHING for the sake of cis sensibilities: Are we going to wait until the fascists take power? Are we going to keep shitposting about antifaschistische aktion, or are we going to actually do it? Crew up. Bash back. Bash first.

My lovely siblings, I’m so sorry my voice is hard to hear. The police took our microphones. Today, you see, is not only TDoR but also Totensonntag, which is a mandatory silent observance. The cops make our dead speak softly, so as not to bother the Christian dead.

I will not speak softly.

Razor-thin, the newspaper says,
the electoral victory was razor-thin,
vote for bombs and petrol pumps
or else the fascists win,
51%, 49%, thin as a razor
this blade that stands between us
and concentration camps.

A razor is the weapon of the travesti
and all sex workers,
a razor tucks into a bra
or a harness or a sock,
for bad johns, you see,
cos the latina travesti knows she’ll be working the streets
whether we get the 51%, or the 49%,
the latina travesti remembers her sisters
murdered by police also when the Worker’s Party
was in power;
the travesti learns on her skin that anyone in power
wants that skin buried, burned, behind bars, or—worst of all:—
covered,
for the body of the travesti is of Nature,
like Nature it is generous, abundant,
impossible to own;
the queer body is a challenge to all power because
it exists.
So the travesti knows without words
that the kick on your ribs
hurts the same
if they paint
the boots
red.

My country is number 1! [beat]
in murdering trans people,
I read this poem every year, it’s always true,
every year I hear Germans speak Portuguese
for a single day,
reciting the names of our dead.

And so it is that when I see the stickers
with red-white-black and defaced rainbows
and 1933s and 1488s,
I know on my skin that the life we carved here
is being taken,
& I cannot go back to that life,
afraid of holding hands,
afraid of speaking the language of my body,
afraid of having anything on me
the colour of pink.
I’ve been to where we’re headed.

And so it is that when I pass
by some wanker wearing iron crosses and
cargo pants clashing with shitty Burzum hoodies,
and totally démodé Wehrmacht T-shirts,
I am taken by the distinctly feminine urge of
Violence.

Violence is often not tactical,
  the way sex is not tactical.
Violence is counter-productive,
  like shouting back at a catcall is counterproductive.
[Venomously:] Violence is anti-strategic, like
  refusing to pass as cis is anti-strategic.
[Escalating to shouting:] Violence is hopeless, like
  kissing your friends at a bar when you know you’ll be thrown out is,
hopeless.

I am so tired of being productive.

The violence is me is like my femininity,
it asserts itself, it resists theorising,
it won’t be denied.
The Nazi is bigger, and younger, and
better armed, and
protected by police,
and I could be killed or deported or raped tortured—
[shaking head dismissively:] doesn’t matter, there is only body,
wordthoughts only exist later,
after the violence has asserted itself and the Nazi is running
away.

The violence in me is irresistible,
unconcerned with justification,
whole in itself:
it is, in a word,
holy.

[Sweetly:] See, only after I could finally be the woman I was,
only after I could open my heart,
only after transition I could get in touch with my emotions.
[Bluntly:] Turns out rage is an emotion.

The Kurds call it the fire in the heart.
The fire calls to us, because
there’s a lot that needs burning.

And someone tell me that violence is toxic masculinity.
Sister, masculinity was lack of agency,
masculine is what they wanted me to be,
what they beat me for,
only by rejecting masculinity I could fight back,
sister if weapons are a boy thing
consider where that line of thinking will leave
the femmes,
I cannot resist it but sister even if I could sister I don’t want to,
sister I burn, I burn.

A razor is the weapon of the travesti,
Maria Navalha, the pombagira protector, has 7 razors,
(don’t mess with her, she’s never alone),
in the 50s the police wrote with fear
of our ancestor Cintura Fina,
her body crisscrossed by razor-lines
and beatings,
[In one breath:] because she was a travesti in the 50s and she would never accept an insult and I get it,
this isn’t self-destruction it’s the opposite, each line on the skin
is a lifeline,
it’s either a body covered in scars or the closet,
resistance is life, resistance is life and to be tame
in the face of oppression
is death
before death.

This is my call:
Either people are scared of wearing swastikas
or they are scared of holding hands.
It’s one or the other. You can’t have both.
Fascists should feel uncomfortable coming out as fascists.

Someone has to do the, uncomforting.

In my noncitizen standing, should I be here making this call? When I can be deported by words, by a social media “like” on river and sea, shouldn’t I submit an anonymous indymedia communiqué, shouldn’t I stay home and leave the work for the First World black bloc, shouldn’t I hide my identity better?

[Continuing to speak while undressing from hoodie and windbreaker and jacket and cardi, letting go of tactical bags and waterproof gloves on the wet floor, until striped down to pink lacy lingerie, shaking in the November rain and the wind, though not of cold:]

O.P.sec [beat] is -sec for an O.P. It’s not a morality, it only makes sense as a tactic for a given goal. Look, honey, I’m not built for baggy gender-neutral clothes I was made to pour glittery goo over my bouncy tits, I lived in hiding for 30 years to protect myself from repression and every one of those years was Hell, I look too hot in a Mob Action #ootd not to be on camera, what’s even the point of a safety that effaces the body I built with my blood and my life when I come here to tell you: “don’t let them normalise this, don’t just swallow this, don’t wait for them to take power, don’t wait for anybody else to come solve this, it’s on us, crew up, bash back, bash first”——

This right here [contours her exposed curves with her hands] is my O.P., my propaganda of the thicc.

There’s a type of queer who saw the enemy and understood there is no peace with fascists without victory. For everyone else all I can say is, look at these hashtag-TDoR numbers, look around, wander the cruise spots at night ask how it’s going: You might be not interested in violence, but violence is interested in you.

(Performed 20 Nov 2022. Immediately after presenting this speech, news hit of the anti-queer right-wing attack in Colorado TDoR, killing 5 people in a nightclub and injuring 25. The shooter was only stopped because clubbers fought back and subdued the enemy.)

Since 2012, an area in northeastern Syria is self-managed without a State or centralised government, with a novel form of bottom-up coordination called ‘democratic confederalism’.

People there reorganised society into communes of 100~250 families each (the medium-term goal is even smaller communes). Most decisions that directly affect a commune are done locally by assemblies and committees, via discussion and voting and consensus.

2. Federation for scale

Larger-scale decisions are done through elected officials, representing the interests of the commune in similar assemblies with other representatives (the cantons), small enough that everybody can participate in discussion. The system could be further scaled up more levels; but it’s weighted to favour the bottom-level, informal, everyday community consensus.

Theoretically at least, representatives have no coercive power, and can’t order their commune to do something they don’t want to.

3. Transformative values

Because so much is decided through discussion, a shared ethical commitment is as important as political formalism/laws. The core values advanced in this revolution are: democracy, ecology and feminism.

This isn’t just lip service, but woven at all levels of organisation, e.g. by giving women and ethnic/religious minorities guaranteed representation in every decision. (Also rifles.) There’s been cases, for example, of men who wanted to have patriarchal forms of polygamy, and eventually left the communes, because no one would enable that.

4. White leftists theorise; these folk went and did it

In political theory terms, democratic confederalism is mainly a development of Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism, which in turn is based on horizontal forms of popular self-rule, including the Paris Commune and anarchist theory.

It also draws from local indigenous experience of communal life without and around the State, mainly from the Kurdish, who started the revolution. (Compare the role of Mayan communal values in the Zapatista revolution.)

5. How to stop the ecological catastrophe

Bookchin’s social ecology informs the revolution’s take on environmentalism:

The force that destroy the world isn’t just capitalism materially, but the culture of domination that started with the patriarchal State, leading to the objectification of humans as well as other natural beings.
Sustainable living needs therefore a social revolution, in the material economy via communal resources, yes, but also in a culture of strong community as the basis of (effective, not just nominal) freedom and dignity for all.

6. Against genocide, for multiculturalism

The initiators of this revolution are the Kurds, an ethnic group related to Persians. Like other minorities in the area, they have been targeted for assimilation, cultural genocide, linguistic genocide, and like literal murderous genocide by the States that control their homelands: Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria—States propped up by European colonisers. Grievously violent assimilation, erasure and mass murder projects were met by fierce resistance and refusal to submit. Faced with assimilation as ‘mountain Turks’, having their language forbidden and villages bombed, the Kurdish folk took to arms rather than disappearing.

Nonetheless, when it manage to secure its own territory, the Kurdish revolution has made of itself a safe haven for all sorts of minority groups in the area, including the Assyrians, Armenians and Yazidi, as well as Arabic and Turkish allies, and goes at great lengths to validate their languages, cultures and traditions, plus get them involved in the decision process while avoiding tyranny-of-majority pitfalls.  The community doesn’t even actually call itself ‘Rojava’ anymore, but the AANES (Autonomous Administration of Northeastern Syria), specifically to avoid centring the Kurdish language.

7. Beyond Marxism-Leninism, beyond the State

In Turkey, the sheer scale of the genocide led to the Kurdish resistance coalescing in the 80s as a Marxist-nationalist guerrilla insurrection, the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), seeking the liberation of Kurdistan, the State that was promised then withdrew by the colonisers. However, despite the legitimacy of a struggle against ethnic oppression, the PKK as well as the wider Kurdish movement have since grown to reject all of Marxism-Leninism, nation-states, and ethnic separatism.  And the revolution in Rojava has proved that this ideological shift isn’t just theoretical.  The revolution in Rojava is not the PKK, but both movements, plus various other Kurdish/Yazidi groups and allies, are united in advancing post-State democratic confederalism, as proposed by the imprisoned PKK leader, Abdullah Öcalan. (In essence, a Marxist leader read Bookchin and got better.)

8. A case study in real-world difficulties

Despite his theory and praxis of decentralising power, the figure of Öcalan is still very much that of the Marxist People’s Leader, and will strike many as a personality cult.  Even though Öcalan himself has denounced the nation-state, much of the Kurdish side of the revolution maintains nationalist feelings around the ideal of Kurdistan (understandably, as a reaction to the specifically ethnic genocide they face, but a point of contradiction).  There have been countless struggles in implementing federated democracy: Old clan leaders expect to be respected as authorities; men raised in patriarchy can get resentful of women’s empowerment; cultural conservatism is slow to dismantle; rich people try to keep their riches. Participation in the assemblies isn’t always high; their autonomy can be less than ideal.

9. Nonetheless, already successful

Even acknowledging all contradictions, reports from independent observers (and like talking to ppl) reveals experiences of autonomy, participation and freedom far above civic life in rich liberal-capitalist States. Rather than trending towards central autocracy like ML, the revolutionary process has maintained a positive direction; there’s no purges of dissidents or executions against the wall, no secret police, surveillance or torture apparatuses. Before the AKP invasion, participation rate in the assemblies was consistently increasing and reaching close to 100% involvement in some cantons.  That they came this far in conditions of extreme embargos, poverty, international isolation, and constant bombardment from 4 simultaneous fascist forces is downright heroic.

Also this people’s insurrection is the one who defeated ISIS—at a huge cost in revolutionary lives; and even after facing the worst that humanity has to offer, the revolution still doesn’t do executions, not even of captured ISIS militants.

10. The one weird system that mainstream media doesn’t want you to know!

Western media refuses to acknowledge the revolutionary project of democratic confederalism.  They will happily showcase beautiful photos of the feminist warrior ladies fighting ISIS, and not even mention that they’re fighting for a political system of communalist democracy. The genocidal invasion led by the AKP, when mentioned at all, is presented as a Turkish vs. Kurdish ethnic conflict, not as theocratic racial-supremacist fascism vs. bottom-up multicultural democracy.  The PKK is still classed as ‘terrorist’ in most of Europe (except in places that bothered to actually look it up). Leftist movements are being repressed throughout Europe, but none nearly as intensely as Kurdish activists and their allies. (see previous post)

11. Not just for Syria, yo

Yes Erdoǧan bad, but this isn’t about white-saviouring the poor oppressed Kurds. If the public knew more about the revolution—about the real, existing, positive experiences of dual power structures, confederated decision-making, communal autonomy—about how, even with limited implementation, in extreme war and poverty conditions—how it has already given people a better, more meaningful, fair and free life right now, a life sustainable and desirable in the 21s century, with no State or capitalist powers controlling us,

maybe people would start having ideas.