Debate

Or: Ambulance Chasing All the Way to the Xenophobia Hospital (On Identity Politics in Montreal) Prologue On March 9th, 2011, in Midan El-Tahrir in Egypt, the Egyptian military arrested an estimated 18 women. They tortured them and carried out “virginity tests” to be able to prosecute them for “prostitution” - a charge any unmarried woman who is not a virgin faces in most of the Arab world. In Egypt “prostitution” carries a punishment of up to seven years, and obviously social and cultural death if not an honor killing by the families. Women faced persecution for taking part in protests and various occupations of the square because of this case, combined with horrendous sexual assaults by security forces in the Midan. This story on its own reflects the severe consequences of conservative society. Conservatism is anti-insurrection, developed and encouraged by states to control ‘the crowd’ and ‘the people’. When every random aunty is an informant, and every random uncle is a prosecutor, who needs the state anyway? In the fight for freedom across these conservative communities, the fight against the state is one and the same with the fight against the dogma of religion and culture. In essence, a rebellion against “community”, the watchdogs of the state, cannot be separated from the fight against the state. ...

A discourse attached to an affect in relation to demonstrations has percolated on the margins of the milieu of late. “I’m not really interested in demos right now”, “Demos are very limiting”, they say. The leftist tendency to make calling a demo the default response to social problems has rightly attracted criticism. But these critiques are now being used to mask an entirely different position, according to which no demos are worth our time. I feel confident that a take-it-or-leave-it approach to such a wide class of tactics is rarely helpful in developing a coherent projectuality. ...

A statement in support of Solidarity Collectives and ABC-Belarus has been published on the internet, signed by a number of groups and individuals. We are publishing our response, which is not, however, a dialogue with these open and covert supporters of militarism. We simply want to share our analysis publicly and strengthen the connection between people with an anti-militarist and revolutionary defeatist perspective. The statement to which we are responding was written by supporters of the war, who reproduce a binary narrative for this purpose: empathetic and supportive Eastern European anarchists versus arrogant and unsupportive anarchists from Western Europe. This narrative is false and manipulative. Those who share this narrative refuse to acknowledge that criticism of pro-war projects such as Solidarity Collectives and ABC (Belarus) also exists within the anarchist milieu in Eastern Europe. The signatories of the statement ignore this anti-militarist tendency in their narrative or lie when they claim that these are Putinists or pro-Russian propagandists. They repeatedly claim that the “Eastern European voice” is overlooked in Western Europe, while they themselves overlook anti-militarist and anti-war voices from Eastern European regions. It should be added that these overlooked voices also come from a relatively large number of people directly from the war zone. By this we mean not only anarchist collectives, but also other working-class people who refuse to support the war efforts of “their” and neighboring states. Let’s look at how many people have deserted from the Russian and Ukrainian armies and how many people in both countries are avoiding mobilization(1). Hundreds of thousands of people are ignored by this “radical left” that tells us it represents the voices of Eastern Europe and fights against the arrogance of the West. Their binary narrative is hypocritical. The contradiction is not between anarchists from the West and those from the East. There is only a contradiction between the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary tendencies, which exist in all regions. ...

Following the repeated failures of so-called “combative” demonstrations in Montreal between 2023 and 2025, two militant texts sought to offer, on the one hand, a strategic analysis focused on massification through autonomous structures, and on the other, a skeptical critique of that orientation, denouncing the fetishization of demonstrations and militant voluntarism. Both texts share a common diagnosis: our collective weakness in the face of the state, our isolation, and the routinization of our mobilizations. The present text is a critique of the second piece, written by N. ...

Struggle isn’t a puzzle we solve by sharpening definitions. It is mud. It is cold dawn. It is the door that must be knocked on twice because the first knock was fear and the second is a promise. Like we’ve always been told. He insists: “We must write, because only then will we be able to tell who is serious and who is not". We need theory that walks like the body does: limping when we limp, sprinting when sirens grow, picking glass from its heel after the march, then laughing about it around the kitchen table while the kettle shrieks. ...

PDF for printing (bilingual, 8.5 x 11) This response to the statement by the Bookfair Collective was posted by @cedar on Kolektiva.social. Well, this is quite the dishonest and self-serving post. I’m pretty surprised and disappointed, and there’s a lot that deserves a response, but I’m just going to focus on a few things. You use incredibly vague and yet loaded language to talk about the conflict in the bookfair collective, and this is deliberately deceptive. You want to have us believe that some serious harm occurred, and not something that makes you look silly, like, for instance, members of your collective being unable to handle disagreement about your decision to ban tarot cards at the 2023 bookfair. To hide this basic fact - that some people melted down when others didn’t simply accept their assertion that tarot is cultural appropriation - you are talking about “behaviours rooted in the logic of white supremacy.” Yes, issues of identity can be hard and disagreement around ideas can be stressful, but dressing up your attempts at shutting down criticism as anti-racism is truly a depressing comment on the anarchist space. ...

This piece is a belated response to “You Can’t be Anti-State & Pro-Lock-down” , which is itself a response to our “Anarchy, Lockdown and Crypto-Eugenics” (a critique in turn of “On the Anarchist Reponse to the Global Pandemic” ). The state has blood on its hands. Anarchists know this. Police killings are normalised - it takes riots to be noticed. Mass death beyond fortress Europe is all too usual, even as it intensifies. But it is unusual for the West to dispose of its own citizenry on such a large scale, and to do so with such a steady manner. In the UK, the pandemics’ mass of dead bodies is the greatest since the second world war.[ 1 ] And yet, at this very moment, we hear comrades slip into apologetics. They excuse the state and its economy of death. They wash the blood from its hands and blame “nature” in its place. Yes, we attack the curfews, the policing, the evolving surveillance and disciplinary techniques. We wouldn’t expect anything less. But some anarchists enter new topics; in the same breath, they shout for the freedom of business, of pubs and retail, the return to schools, the reopening of Churches. Their rallying cry: “Anti-lockdown”! The existential threat faced by the disabled and the elderly is simply an inconvenient footnote to liberal rights. ...

It has now been more than one year since the world that we have known all of our lives came screeching to a halt. And what a year’s it’s been. The collective unconscious roils in the throes of a bad acid trip, the realization seeps slow in the mind that the crisis is here to stay, and we are all along for the ride, tossed about by uncontrollable forces like a ship in a storm, trying to maintain some grace amidst all the fear and the confusion and the doubt. ...

“The Covid19 crisis has presented a challenge to anarchists and others who believe in a fully autonomous and liberated life” - so a recent submission to Montreal Counter-information declares. These words certainly resonate with our experiences. Anarchy in the UK is not just presented with a challenge; it is itself in crisis. Spycops, squatting ban, abusers, Corbynism, TERFs – the list is long, and the virus already found “the scene” in a sorry state. But Covid-19 represents something different, and on this we can agree with the analysis from Montreal. This is also where our agreement ends. In the following text we critique the analysis – we do so as its arguments are similar to those we have heard among friends and even comrades over the past months. Though the epidemic in the UK appears to be waning, its associated tendencies remain. The text calls for serious critiques, and so we offer the following in the spirit of antagonism against the present. We close with some suggested points of unity for anarchists in these times. ...

Black and white PDF for printing (imposed) Colour PDF for reading It was winter 2020 and in the aftermath of the most inspiring anti-colonial uprising of my lifetime, I read Rattachements [1] ( Re-attachments in English) and Inhabit [2] . The trains had started up again across the country, and COVID-19 was starting to reorder our lives mere weeks after we had been doing our small part to help shut down Canada. In and around Tio’tia:ke (Montreal) where I live, there were many Indigenous-led initiatives, including solidarity rounddances that blocked traffic downtown, and of course the month-long blockade of the railway tracks that run through Kahnawá:ke. On and around the island, the engagement of settlers in #ShutDownCanada took a number of forms including clandestine sabotage of rail infrastructure, demos and vandalism of RCMP property, and multiple rail blockades, one of which lasted a few days. ...

The Covid19 crisis has presented a challenge to anarchists and others who believe in a fully autonomous and liberated life. We write this today because we feel too many people who in better times carry these political and philosophical banners are setting aside their core beliefs - or worse - twisting and contorting those beliefs in wholly disappointing ways, conforming to the mandates of technocrats and politicians, and are convincing themselves that doing so is some grand act of solidarity with the most vulnerable people in our societies. ...

We are excited to announce the release of a book-length writing project called “entanglement: on anarchism and individualism.” From the introduction: “What you hold in your hands is an experiment in collective analysis and writing. It is also a critical engagement with the place individualism does hold and/or should hold in anarchism. Initially, one person asked some friends to come together and co-create a collection of texts against individualism. Whether the project is actually against individualism is still up for debate. We’ve done a lot of playing with language and some of us prefer “on individualism” or “critically engaging with individualism.” In reality, it is all of those things and also other things too – defenses of duty and futurity, critiques of some old philosophers, calls to reconsider oppression and social position, some explorations of the interdependence of all forms of life, and thoughts on our wider interstellar context.” ...