"Water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend." - Bruce Lee

Guest Topic of the Week entry chosen by thecollective from Anathema Volume 11 Issue 1 Summer 2025 - Has Anarchist Muay Thai Gone Too Far? Some Questions for the movement

A quick note: Anarchist martial arts culture is a new phenomenon in the United States. It is generally a welcome one in the author’s view. Here’s a few questions the author is pondering.

1. How do we scale up and increase our capacity for training?
2. Should we even desire to scale up?
3. What model is best? Forward facing, semi-closed or secret? Or something else?
4. What is the role of these projects in terms of supporting revolt? Will these projects support revolt and resistance as it happens? Perhaps that has already happened?
5. Can we riot if we’re too tired from doing a thousand kicks on the bag?
6. Do we need mascots?
7. How should we relate to non-political gyms and sympathetic fighters in our cities as our movement grows?
8. Is “de-arresting” on its own a useful skill to train? What about more complicated group formations?
9. Are smokers the most useful way to organize meet-ups between different fight projects?
10. Should smokers have music during the fights?
11. Why do some of these projects break through the racial segregation common in the anarchist space? Why do some others not do that? How can we further interrogate this question?
12. How do we resist specialization?
13. Do we need our own branded Muay Thai shorts? What are the security culture ramifications of branding your gym, everyone wearing the same t-shirt and yelling the name like idiots at the smoker?
14. Should spinning back elbows be allowed if you are doing a “friendly spar” with the tiqqunist cadres/ socialist gun-bros/anarchist complainers of the world?
15- How do we recover from longterm injuries? If those injuries become disabling for long periods of time, what happens to our comrades who can no longer train?
16. When is the appropriate time to initiate the forty person bare knuckle brawl at the smoker?
17. Do we need more anarchist martial arts promotional videos? Anarchist Muay Thai TikToks? If we start making promotional content, will it draw the attention of enemies like anti-social media anarchos (jk jk, a lot of us at the gym hate phones too), clout-chasing activists, communist baddie podcast influencers and the Feds? Maybe we want the attention of the communist baddies? Enemies to lovers arc?
18. What is the role of the one-time anarchist fight workshop? Should we still be doing them?
19. How do we integrate political education into our training in better ways?
20. Should every anarchist Muay Thai gym have their own flag? Is joking about “franchising” the gym mean that we’re actually part of the trend of everyone these days being a Maoist?
21. What’s most effective when fighting an ICE agent? A thigh kick or a teep to the chest?
22. Are smoker report-backs really necessary? When you could be burning down the city instead of hiding in the safety of the rented warehouse, maybe we should ask ourselves what is the role of the anarchist social event?
23. How do we relate to youth especially Black youth and youth of color as some white youth seem intent on organizing their own fascist active clubs? Our projects seem to skew 25 and up, what could we do to change that? Or is that just the nature of the project? If often seems that only old traumatized and politically disillusioned anarchists tryna train Muay Thai, why is that?
24. Anarchist Muay Thai theme song? Why are the fights apart from Philly always so quiet?
25. Is the real purpose of anarchist Muay Thai the friends we made along the way?

Comments

anon (not verified) Mon, 08/25/2025 - 13:43

In reply to by anon (not verified)

You mean like Afghanistan under the Taliban? Because quick reminder, the Taliban, despite their atrociousness, are not anywhere near the Zionist atrocities. The Taliban have not mass murderered tens of thousands of women the last 700 days.

anon (not verified) Mon, 08/25/2025 - 20:18

In reply to by anon (not verified)

I mean, yes, the Taliban, but as well the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the Saud theocracy and empire, the Libyan Islamist regime that reinstated slave trafficking, as well as the brand new Islamist regime in Syria that's now under Sharia Law (that supports slavery as well as lower status for females in society and the capital punishment of LGBTQ people). There's also the more "moderate" Islamist dictatorships in Turkey, as well as the Arab Big Oil principalities like the Emirates and Qatar, and let's not forget the related greatness that Islamist thugs under the payroll of one of the above have brought to Sudan, Ethiopia and Yemen. Like genocides, yes.

anon (not verified) Tue, 08/26/2025 - 07:21

In reply to by anon (not verified)

Even the most brutal fascist regimes didn't need a genocide. They do it when they see fit. Franco, Mussolini and Pinochet did not commit genocide, yet they mass-murdered the opposition like Islamist regimes have been doing.

"Whatabout GAZA!!!" is also a cheap red herring tactic. Lke as long as a regime isn't causing a genocide then let's only care about Gaza...

anon (not verified) Mon, 08/25/2025 - 05:38

"Our projects seem to skew 25 and up, what could we do to change that?"

this is so american-brained. 25 is still extremely young!!

anon (not verified) Mon, 08/25/2025 - 06:48

you are hypocrites complaining about troll comments then posting a troll totw

anon (not verified) Mon, 08/25/2025 - 09:09

"Anarchist martial arts culture is a new phenomenon in the United States"
not at all true.

anon (not verified) Tue, 08/26/2025 - 08:55

In reply to by anon (not verified)

no history, although i am sure it is back there. i am just saying that i and my anarchist friends have been involved with various martial arts for decades, both generally and specifically with anarchists. normie spaces and anarchist-specific ones. so there.

lumpy (not verified) Tue, 08/26/2025 - 09:01

In reply to by anon (not verified)

can confirm. only need to point to the anti-racist-action 90s for the most obvious stuff but there's probably many more examples that were slightly less famous.

any time lots of folks are facing violence in the streets and it scales up to a certain point, people learn similar lessons, draw similar conclusions, etc

anon (not verified) Mon, 08/25/2025 - 12:18

Honestly, I think that a specifically "anarchist" martial arts program sounds horrible. Here's why:

Anytime you take an activity, a sport, a hobby, an artform, etc. and you try to turn it into a vehicle to drive a set of politics, the politics become the priority, and often this happens at the expense of the quality of the activity itself. For an ideology that claims to liberate, and open things up, I find that people who carry the Ideology into everything they do tend to be rigid, dogmatic and closed minded. For example, I know some people who are so insistent that their politics are baked into everything that they do that they'll refuse to learn from a proven combat art like Judo, simply because it possesses a traditional belt system, which presupposes the existence of a hierarchy, which they consider anathema, ...or haram.

Speaking from personal experience, I remember once at an anarchist gathering that some people wanted a co-ed muay thai workshop to materialize, but with the stipulation that the instructor must NOT be a straight white male. The workshop never wound up actually happening, but it struck me as so backwards that the criteria for who should be instructing muay thai ought to be determined, not by one's skill, experience or commitment to the art—but by some basic bitch identity politics. And this tendency extends far beyond muay thai.

Personally, I think it would be better to just simply learn from the martial arts with an open mind, and try to take the things they teach you into your politics (the value of discipline/hard work, humility, respect tenacity, ferocity, etc.) rather than try to take your politics into the martial arts.

lumpy (not verified) Tue, 08/26/2025 - 08:45

In reply to by anon (not verified)

... you're just describing annoying people with bad opinions, which exist in every gym. you also indicate that you haven't seen anarchist fight gyms actually happen because it "sounds horrible", therefore only a hypothetical.

but the point of the writing is that these places already exist. i've been part of a half dozen or so, varying degrees of success, aimed at different groups with different concerns but identity isn't inherently "backwards". people can make good points about not wanting to learn grappling with somebody they don't trust OR they can be whiny and derail a project.

you'll have to deal with far worse than this petty, stupid problem to organize a fight gym at all

anon (not verified) Tue, 08/26/2025 - 12:22

In reply to by lumpy (not verified)

But what caliber of fighter are these projects actually producing?

I mean, take a good hard look at this demo by the "haymakers" antifa fight club:

https://youtu.be/nTMjFBTHfLI?si=myrF1EQvrvTxCK3K

I mean jfc.

Now maybe you are impressed by this display but as a longtime practitioner I felt it was just absolutely pitiful. I've trained at normie, apolitical gyms my entire adult life, and I know 14 y/o boys with rudimentary striking and grappling who would absolutely run thru this lot like a bull in a china shop.

The point I was making earlier was simply that quality control tends to fly out the window the moment it takes 2nd or even 3rd place priority after ideological commitments. Especially when those commitments contain structural elements that awkwardly put it at odds with conventional strength/lifting culture and modern combat sports.

lumpy (not verified) Tue, 08/26/2025 - 14:51

In reply to by anon (not verified)

true! i mean anyone would have to try to balance all these things. it's a lot easier to be a commercial gym, have people sign a waiver and not give a fuck about anything except their money and MAYBE quality training. a political martial arts project is going to be more complicated, no doubt!

i probably don't need to tell you that as soon as you step away from strict combat sports and in to the "self defense" sphere, there's a lot of bullshido and worse and that's without adding things like trying to teach self defense to people who are definitely facing political violence but aren't even that athletically inclined, extremely anxious by nature, dogmatically opposed to training with people who don't look like them and on and on and on like this...

BUT ... it's the beautiful idea, no? nobody said this was making things easier. quite the opposite!

anon (not verified) Mon, 08/25/2025 - 13:10

^^^to wrap it up in a nice turn of phrase, I'd like to say:

Take your martial arts into your politics; but don't take your politics into your martial arts.

anon (not verified) Tue, 08/26/2025 - 14:07

All obsessive fundamentalist 1)religions, 2) ideologies 3)Identities/nationalists are the crypto-fascistic influencers all anarchists must avoid. Now, martial arts is a sport and it is seperate to 1) 2) and 3) and only be for the purpose of self-defence and wellbeing.

anon (not verified) Tue, 08/26/2025 - 19:46

A dream

Thaniel kept circling the block to jump me

Even though i have more friends than them
Im not welcome in williamsburg

We always secretly liked [your band] because you were so mean and selfish
didnt you guys get in a ton of crazy fights?

I wont speak on that

She cornered in the kitchen “I dont want meetings, I want dreams”

anon (not verified) Wed, 08/27/2025 - 05:34

Martial arts like other militancy and professionalism lends itself to ingroup-outgroup and heirarchal mentalities that have a tendency to promote and protect people who repeatedly harm others.

anon (not verified) Wed, 08/27/2025 - 08:52

wow. scraping the bottom of the barrel for TOTW. "Has Anarchist Muay Thai Gone Too Far? Some Questions for the movement" joke right?

noone (not verified) Thu, 08/28/2025 - 14:31

The gyms and smokers here are trying to imitate the antifascist fighting gyms in Europe but they’ll never be a 1:1 match. Radical politics over there have a certain cultural cache that they don’t have in the US, so, say, the Spanish and Italians having proven, professional fighters involved in local political life and thus the antifascist gyms actually makes sense. On top of that there’s cross over with soccer hooliganism and those guys train specifically to be better street fighters. Of the very few US gyms I know of, they seem to be experimenting with what they all feel is missing in the more activist-inclined parts of the anarchist movement, and in reaction to all the far right and neo nazi fighting clubs. If they’re going to be willingly participating in street battles then I’m glad being proficient in fighting their enemies is a priority for them. But the US gyms themselves will only be a lesser-immitation of European antifascist culture. I don’t know how much closer we are to our ideas becoming as common.

I could give a fuck about the list cuz it treats Muay Thai as a weird near specialization and it orients the gyms as recruitment tools to patronize black kids (specifically 23) rather than to organize the actual fighting of fascists, especially now in the middle of this antifascist's water park of a wet dream we’re living in.

lumpy (not verified) Thu, 08/28/2025 - 14:58

In reply to by noone (not verified)

yeah, that's all pretty fair!

plus there's all other instances for knowing how to defend yourself. i don't think there's any possible argument for how not knowing is better? it's literally always better

able to wade through bureaucratic demands while fighting for play or neutralizing a fascist. For example, what makes music only a concern for "smoking anarchists"? Is the implication that smoking anarchists have to sit on the sidelines (reference to question #10, section Z)? What if "eye of the tiger" is what i need to throw a proud boy?

i think a lot of people are immediately going to recoil about the idea of "scaling up" and making martial arts about race and politics. It's not people in prison can kick their way out. However, i would always welcome a historical discussion about where the martial arts came from and how it changed. Nevertheless, proud, anarchist warriors can be brought down by giant lists.

lumpy (not verified) Mon, 09/01/2025 - 17:43

In reply to by CalvinSmith

uhhh ... no? that was open hostility, no disguise

it's still constructive tho, designed to make fools who have self awareness, feel shame and perhaps think harder before talking. you're proof against these tactics of course but still!

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