by anonymous (not verified) Apr 25, 2026
event poster

From Bienal Anarquista de Madrid

April 24-26, 2026
Reclaim our time. Down with work.

"Work is the source of almost all the misery in the world. Nearly every evil you can think of stems from work, or from living in a world designed for work. To stop suffering, we have to stop working."
- Bob Black

Struggles against work have emerged powerfully at different historical moments, challenging the naturalization of work as the organizing principle of the world. From workers' uprisings to theoretical and practical currents that imagined other forms of existence, the critique of work has been and continues to be a critique of the heart of capitalism.

In this third edition of the Biennial, we return to these traditions of thought and action. We open a space to explore theories and practices that aim toward the abolition of work, questioning their possibilities in the present and the horizons they can open for imagining other ways of living.

Talks, workshops, roundtables, and space and time to (re)connect. Alongside the event will be stands from publishers, bookstores, and partner collectives.

PROGRAM

Friday, April 24

18:00 – The critique of wage labor: foundations and political proposals for the 21st century. By Álvaro Briales.

19:30 – 150 years building libertarian communism. Anti-capitalist theories and practices at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries . By Myrtille Gonzalbo and Juan Cruz.

9:30 PM – Dinner (100% vegetarian)

Saturday, April 25

12:00 – Against the Cult of Work: Class, Social Reproduction, and the Subversion of Everyday Life . By Alfredo Apilánez.

13:30 – Today's strike: material conditions, transformative possibilities . By our fellow activists in the metalworking (Cádiz), El Corte Inglés, education, housing, and healthcare sectors.

3:00 PM – Meal (100% vegetarian)

5:00 PM – Agricultural work, food justice, and ecosocial transition. Fruita amb Justícia Social. By Fruita amb Justícia.

6:30 PM – Libertarian Political Economy: Proposals and Limitations. By Jose Luís Carretero.

8:00 PM – Book presentation: LET THE RICH WORK. Project SHADOWS Volume II – Wage Labor. By Deyanira Schurjin.

9:30 PM – Dinner (100% vegetarian)

10:00 PM – Flamenco concert. By the Lavapiés flamenco club .

Sunday, April 26

12:00 – Algorithmic overseers, disciplined lives, multiple subversions: the current state of relations between technology, work, and society . By Clara Navarro.

13:30 – Social Economy: limits, contradictions and future possibilities . By ADELA (labor self-defense group of the Carabanchel Popular Assembly).

3:00 PM – Meal (100% vegetarian)

5:00 PM – A walk through Tetuán in the 1920s and 30s . By the Salvador Seguí Foundation.

Throughout the event we will have book stalls and several exhibitions.

Long live anarchy!

La Bienal Anarchist Madrileña has the object of connecting theories and libertarian practices, salir de nuestros spaces confinados y construir alternativas reales con las que poder enriquecernos en nuestra búsqueda de una radical transformation social.

Aunque nos hellos in a moment of blockage and desmovilización, in the actuality we can encounter colectivos, individuals and communities that exemplify with our dreams the anti-authoritarian and horizontal ideal. These experiences desafían al poder establecido y desmontan la, cada vez más, extendida idea de que hay que relegar las prácticas anarquistas a los libros de Historia, como ejemplos fallidos y románticos de teorías utópicas y desfasadas.

In this current moment of social control in which the revolutions are in full swing, we understand as a priority the participation and debate of these experiences. We have the intention that our anime has brought new herramientas with the dirt of the pozo and that because it is a continuation of a tradition of lucha in our new city. Before we hear as a new capitalist restructuring, various people we create need the creation of a space that receives these living experiences in the actuality, that fights the racial, general, class, medial oppression… and that builds, day by day, new forms of hearing and living the reality, More accurate, igualitarias and horizontals.

Therefore, our project is to realize a few days every day we have lots of books, testimonies, interviews, debates and all the communication strategies that we can help to advance on this route.

Dada la current situation, we start with a series of charlas and glimpses of short stories, which we want to present the project and connect with experiences of current games. These days, scheduled for October 2020 and 2021, will be realized (with the current situation) in digital format.

We hope to bring impulses and herramientas that contribute to reactivating the protests in our neighborhoods and fomenting a lucha culture that can infringe on the stories that our plants present.

bienalanarquista@gmail.com

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Comments

CalvinSmith Mon, 04/27/2026 - 19:55

sitting through 8+ hours of lectures does sound like work to me, especially considering that my spine has been diminished through that kind of activity...

Bob Black can have his buddhist utopia of zero suffering, but many will do some kind of "work", not only for money but preserving sanity.

Max Stirner (not verified) Tue, 04/28/2026 - 04:48

Samsara is inescapable. The samsara of work is obviously not. By the way 1 in 5 Americans are considered to be mentally ill and that's probably underreporting; work is not doing a great job of preserving sanity apparently. No one ever put a sign up saying leisure macht frei either.

CalvinSmith Tue, 04/28/2026 - 09:44

critique of what i said: it's pretty typical of mainstream and university logic to reason "that 1 in 5 americans are mentally unhealthy", and therefore, that's somehow related to work?

If you don't want to work, that's fine: but don't try to brand educational lectures as being an escape from "work". I'm currently more tired of the fact that everything is built around this idea that some guru or whatever lecturing you is "healthy" or whatever, and i'm also tired of chair culture, and buddhists as well.

...but if i need to spell it out, to preserve my credibility as an anarchist: "work", in the institutional sense, is a carving up of time for the sake of efficiency and profit, and it has tons of negative effects, even though practically everyone feels coerced into participating. It is exactly the fact i need to openly state that, whenever i enter an "anarchist room", along with denouncing "racism, fascism, blah blah blah", that makes anarchist ounter culture so disgusting to me. It's an identity politics of positions, it's not really about criticizing empty bullshit!

Max Stirner (not verified) Tue, 04/28/2026 - 12:12

People really got a bee in their bonnet about this name; Stirner is a fellow traveller, but his hand is not up my arse like he's my ventriloquist, you get me?

The mainstream take is 1 in 5 with slight causation. Mine is 4.99999999999999999 of 5, full causation (along with the Enlightenment). I arrived at this thought while sitting in a comfortable chair, maybe give it a whirl? Also we need more gurus.

Max Stirner (not verified) Wed, 04/29/2026 - 07:48

Even though you're being sarky, this is correct. Praise be to the elephants, may your trunks glisten forever, may the SPF50 perputally flow.

PS. I exfoliate 4 times a week, I am already on board with self-mutilation. But then the utopia of good skin demands sacrifice...

CalvinSmith Wed, 04/29/2026 - 20:05

when the anarchists tell you to adopt a vegan diet, get regular exercise, and train yourself to be ready when the state attacks...that's when you cook up the meth and order Micky D's, it makes sense because the best rebels have oppositional defiance disorder.

That might not be funny enough for thecollective to keep up, but i figured that was a good way to end things before disappearing into the abyss again.

Max Stirner (not verified) Thu, 04/30/2026 - 01:35

As a Taoist, dietwise I can only suggest neither meat nor vegan. That leaves, you guessed it, cigarettes, which are vegetarian and therefore balanced. Respect nonexistence and expect nonexistence. *chains ten in a row, zero cough*

CalvinSmith Thu, 04/30/2026 - 08:00

Hate ciggs and try to keep meat as a lower item on my diet rather than getting rid of it entirely (meat tastes really good, but shitting everday is better)...every once in a while, i smoke a cheap cigar just to balance my high standards with a bad habit i used to indulge in with impunity.

GO3 Thu, 04/30/2026 - 17:12

The ideal anarchist is vegan straight-edge with ultra-left politics. This goes back to the 90s where we can trace the beginnings of the unlikely merger between liberal orthodoxy and Sharia law. All the newer strains of anarchism are apologetics for an incomplete revaluation. It was always about the ubermensch and the new man but this can't be achieved without eliminating fatal flaws.

Eternal Jihad
https://youtu.be/CiO6-mcfz4I?si=HR6QmLXD2Z2ArMW9

GO3 Thu, 04/30/2026 - 18:27

That’s a layered and deliberately provocative set of claims. I’ll unpack them one by one and offer some historical and philosophical context, then leave you with a few questions to sharpen where you’re going with this.

The ideal anarchist as vegan straight-edge with ultra-left politics
You’re pointing to a very specific subcultural archetype that crystallized in the ’90s hardcore and anarcho-punk scenes. Straight edge (no alcohol, no drugs, often no casual sex) and veganism were fused with insurrectionary, green anarchist or post-left politics in milieus around bands like Earth Crisis, Vegan Reich, and later CrimethInc. and ALF solidarity networks. The synthesis was one of radical purity—bodily discipline, moral absolutism, and an uncompromising rejection of the “system” on all fronts. So the “ideal anarchist” here isn’t a broad political subject but a figure of total personal and political consistency.

The 90s and the “unlikely merger between liberal orthodoxy and Sharia law”
This is where things get cryptic. I suspect you’re making a polemical analogy rather than a literal historical claim. One reading: The ’90s saw the rise of a managerial multiculturalism (liberal orthodoxy) that, in its effort to be anti-imperialist and “respect difference,” ended up sanitizing or even allying with deeply illiberal religious-political forces—most vividly, certain Islamist movements. A specific anarchist critique could be that the anti-globalization left tolerated or partnered with groups whose gender politics and legal authoritarianism mirror what they’d otherwise call fascism, all under the banner of anti-colonial solidarity.
Alternatively, you might mean that liberal orthodoxy itself began to function like a religious law—enforcing purity codes (veganism, sobriety, linguistic taboos) with the absolutism and social punishment structure of a theocracy. The “ideal anarchist” is then not a liberator but the perfect subject of a new hybrid orthodoxy, complete with dietary and behavioral prohibitions.

Newer strains of anarchism as apologetics for an incomplete revaluation
You’re invoking Nietzsche’s Umwertung aller Werte (revaluation of all values). If the original anarchist impulse was a radical break with all transcendent moral systems (God, state, capital, traditional morality), then many newer anarchisms—queer anarchism, anarcha-feminism, social ecology, even post-anarchism—might look like they stop halfway. They retain a core set of moral commitments (care, equality, anti-oppression) that are treated as self-evidently good, rather than subjected to the same ruthless critique as other values. From a strict Nietzschean/egoist perspective, that’s indeed an “incomplete revaluation”: they’ve swapped one moralism for another, still clinging to a “slave morality” dressed in left-wing language.

Ubermensch, the new man, and eliminating fatal flaws
The “new man” was a 19th- and 20th-century revolutionary trope (from Bakunin and Kropotkin to Bolsheviks and even fascists) about creating a human being free from the psychological and moral deformations of the old world. Anarchism, especially in its individualist and post-left currents, has often run this through a Nietzschean filter: the goal is the sovereign individual who creates their own values—something like the Übermensch. The “fatal flaws” then would be the lingering attachments that prevent this—pity, ressentiment, herd morality, the need for external validation, ideological rigidity, even the compulsions of “ethical” consumption. In your framing, even the vegan straight-edge ultra-leftist might still be trapped in a reactive, moralizing posture, and therefore not truly free.

---

A few questions to push this further, if you’re willing to go there:

1. Are you critiquing the concept of the ideal anarchist you opened with, or holding it up as the most consistent yet still flawed stage before the next leap?
2. What, concretely, are the “fatal flaws” to be eliminated—psychological, biological, ideological—and what method of elimination do you envision?
3. When you say the merger of liberal orthodoxy and Sharia law is traceable to the ’90s, do you mean a rhetorical/structural homology (both are totalizing moral-legal orders), or an actual political coalition whose legacy persists in today’s anarchist and leftist spaces?

I’m genuinely curious how far you see this revaluation needing to go, and what remains after the flaws are gone.

CalvinSmith Fri, 05/01/2026 - 06:51

with the vegan post, and i listened to the song...

but it's interesting to learn that the anti-oppression sympathy for islam does go back to the 90's, i thought that was only a recent thing. AK press explicitly had a book about parallels between anarchism and islam, but my conclusion (from having read portions of the Quran) is that analysis is totally false. The Quran itself has very little to do with islamic extremism, and the writer would judge that movement as being highly immoral, but it does support a patriarchal framework where corporal punishment is justified (husbands may spank their wives if they are naughty, and the quran has explicit instructions for how it's supposed to be done), and that stuff above chopping off the hands of thieves does come directly from the Quran...it's not a "rogue interpretation".

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