Until All Are Free

From Fifth Estate #417, Winter 2025

A review of “All Will Be Equalized”: Georgia’s Freedom Seekers of the Swamps, Backwoods, and Sea Islands 1526-1890 by Andrew Zonneveld. On Our Own Authority Publishing, 2024

“All Will Be Equalized” (AWBE) is in many ways the right book for the current moment. It is a book of popular history, a synthesis of academic sources for non-academics, written from an explicitly anarchist perspective. It is broad enough to be a great introduction, is relatively short, but well written and full of inspiring stories and historical detail.

White lotus, red turbans, black flags: revolutionary buddhist heretics

from No Selves, No Masters

Hello, my patient readers. Believe it or not, the work continues behind the scenes. Among other things, I have been interested in revisiting the pre-modern historical roots of Buddhist Anarchism. This is because I have clarified my historiographical methods. Instead of searching for analogues of Anarchism in the distant past long before it was developed I will look for its ancestors. This helps us avoid anachronism and the pitfalls of projecting modern ideologies onto the people of the past.

Anarchism and Revolutionary Defeatism

From History is What's Happening by K. C. Sinclair

What is “revolutionary defeatism,” where does it come from, and what is its current relevance for anarchists and other social rebels? As a slogan and stance, revolutionary defeatism was devised by the Russian statist socialist Vladimir Lenin and, to a lesser extent, the Ukrainian statist socialist Grigory Zinoviev, in the context of the First World War.

We Are a Conspiracy: 56 Notes on Red

From Black Ink

Because the history and practice of anarchism have been foundational to me—and because I’m aware of the toxicity of deadnames, the patriarchy embedded in surnames, and the trauma at the root of slavenames and government names—I have a high tolerance for anyone who, whatever the reason, changes their name. I read the shifting of Red’s name, over time, as a survival strategy; she was a Black woman in a country founded on, among other things, the abuse and erasure of Black women.

Bad History

From Collective of Anarchist Writers

I wrote this before Luigi Mangione shot the CEO of United Healthcare. Such an act, totally unpredictable but ripping open the seams of this world to instantiate possibility in the present, is a beautiful act—not historical, since it breaks with this world and cannot be contained by time.

Why do we tell ourselves history? Why this pious agreement that being informed about history, along with politics, makes us somehow better, smarter, aware?

Joan Busquets Vergés, the last Catalan Maquis

From Memoria Libertaria
November 30, 2024

During this November, Joan Busquets, “El Senzill” visited the Spanish State to present his claim as a victim of Francoism.

In this post you can find the chronicle of the event and the recording at the FAL (Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo) on the 19th, the press conference in Barcelona, and a conversation between him and the historian and researcher Dolors Marín.

The Fall of Assad, the Future of Syria

by Peter Gelderloos
Dec 8, 2024

As we wait to hear if Bashar al-Assad has already fled Damascus or fallen to a coup, here are a few thoughts about what might come next. Syria may well prove to be a linchpin of West Asia, as the civil war of 2012-2018 has suddenly reignited. Just two weeks after a surprise offensive in the northwest of the country by Sunni fundamentalists, all of Assad’s many enemies are sweeping the country and by tomorrow morning his regime may have definitively collapsed.

Subscribe to history