Warning: this book will not save your life

Today there is a booming discontent industry, consisting of entrepreneurs who cash in on your misery by selling you products that describe and decry it. Thus the exchange economy finds a place even for its enemies: perpetuating both industry and discontent as we struggle to fight them, we keep the wheels turning by selling more merchandise. And as in every other aspect of your lives, your real desires to make something happen are channeled into consuming— and your own abilities and potential are displaced, projected onto the “revolutionary” items you purchase.

This book could be a part of that process. While we hope we are using our product to “sell” revolution, it might be that we are just using “revolution” to sell our product.{1} The best of intentions can’t protect us from this risk. But we’ve undertaken this project because we felt that, in addition to our other, less explicitly compromised activities, it might be worth giving the old experiment one more try: to see if a commodity can be created that gives more than it takes away.

For this book to have even the smallest chance of succeeding in that tall order, you can’t approach it passively, you can’t expect it to do the work. You have to regard it as a tool, nothing more. This book will not save your life; that, my friend, is up to you.

OK, that said, HERE WE GO!!!

Data from Climate Reanalyzer says that daily sea surface temperatures for January 2024 are higher than they were in January 2023.

BEFORE YOU DOWNVOTE LIKE SHEEPLE, READ THE ARTICLE FIRST AND THEN COMMENT WHY YOU DISAGREE, THEN, AND ONLY THEN, OUGHT YOU DOWNVOTE

We don’t dismiss the reality that, on the scale of U.S. settler colonial violence, even the slightest degree of harm can mean life or death for those most vulnerable. What we assert here is that the entire notion of “voting as harm reduction” obscures and perpetuates settler-colonial violence, there is nothing “less harmful” about it, and there are more effective ways to intervene in its violences.

These are incredibly important translations by an Armenian anarchist who wrote on WW1, the Russian Revolution, Tsarist ethnic cleansing of Kurds, the Armenian genocide, and even a proposal for a revolutionary “Free Army” (as opposed to Red or White).

I voted for the “harm reduction” vote in the 2016 Presidential election. Mar Roxas wasn’t great, but he was better than Duterte. Surprise, surprise, Duterte won. Hundreds of thousands died.

For the 2022 Presidential election, I voted for a principled vote for Leody de Guzman. Surprise, surprise, the Marcos dynasty returns to power.

Then people are treating Biden/Trump round 2 as top priority. Newsflash, if democracy was at stake in the election, then you don’t have democracy. I’ve been watching the Biden administration from afar. Biden, Trump, they’re the same. Same killer police. Same concentration camps at the border. Same prison industrial complex. Same trans genocide. Same abortion bans. No meaningful climate action. And now, a genocide in Gaza. Biden doesn’t care. Voting isn’t harm reduction.

What will it take to free ourselves? Is this book a manual for utopia? Join me as we embark on a journey to uncover the strange modern dystopia of the Planetary Work Machine and decipher the visionary language of bolo'bolo.

P.M. — Bolo’bolo

There is no single anarchist position, and many anarchists refuse to offer any proposal at all, arguing that if society liberates itself from State and capitalism, it will change organically, not on the lines of any blueprint. Besides, the attitude of policy, seeing the world from above and imposing changes, is inextricable from the culture that is responsible for destroying the planet and oppressing its inhabitants.

Nonetheless, I want to outline one possible way we could organize our lives, not to make a concrete proposal, but because visions make us stronger, and we all need the courage to break once and for all with the existing institutions and the false solutions they offer. For the purposes of this text I’m not going to enter into any of the important debates regarding ideals — appropriate levels of technology, scale, organization, coordination, and formalization. I’m going to describe how an ecological, anti-authoritarian society could manifest itself, as it flows from the un-ideal complexity of the present moment. Also for simplicity’s sake, I won’t enter into the scientific debate around what is and isn’t sustainable. Those debates and the information they present are widely available, for those who want to do their own research.

I added a YouTube livestream as a channel on Hypnotix. It was added to favorites automatically. I don't see any UI to edit it. Is there a way to edit added channels?

In the last few decades, we have experienced how academics have used anarchism as a theoretical tool, though they have not done anything to bring about change with regards to the increasing ecofascism, corporativism, and globalisation of neoliberalism in the last 40 years. In addition to this, we have a myriad of examples of anarcho-curious people destroying anarchist groups from the inside when they infiltrate anarchist spaces with their own capitalist values where hierarchisation, oppression, and individualisation are introduced into our spaces. This helps to destroy our organisational capacity because they create and maintain power dynamics that give many of us even more work to do. We don’t just have to try to create new radical spaces against our classic common enemies, but we also have to fight our internal saboteurs. It is not strange that a lot of comrades are absolutely burnt out. This internal sabotage by the anarcho-curious has happened in many different spaces, from radical publishing houses to squats or book fairs. Time after time, we experience an alienation from our own principles and spaces because we won’t deal with our own internalised oppressive attitudes that prevent us from behaving in ways aligned with anarchist principles, and we allow an additional destruction when our own spaces become altered by the deradicalised, dissolving all of our theoretical analysis.

Rest in power, we lost a real one.