"I am no longer an anarchist." Mikalai Dziadok on prison, God, & disillusionment with ideologies

From Nasha Niva

I listen to a podcast by American anarchists. And the anarchist movement has always positioned itself as international, transnational. And so a girl in the podcast says: we don't recognize Bakunin and Kropotkin and are not going to read them because they are white men. I listen and understand: she calls herself an anarchist, I call myself an anarchist, but for me, what she says is absolute savagery.

TOTW: Persistence or Purity? The Mirror of Non-State Power

What does it say about anarchism that it so often chooses immediacy, aversion to form, and radical transparency—does it desire to win, or merely to remain pure while disappearing?

Zeal for insurrection burns bright and dies young.

However, if there is anything to be learned from formations like Hezbollah or the Houthis, it is not their ideology but their refusal of immediacy—their stubborn commitment to duration.

As they did not erupt fully formed, they sedimented. Layer by layer, year by year, they became difficult to uproot.

The Malaria of Consciousness: Wilhelm Reich and the Pathology of Ideology

From Bangladesh AnarchoSyndicalist Federation

— A Psychoanalytic Reading of Repression, Ideology, and Human Liberation

In modern thought, ideology is often seen as a set of ideas, beliefs, or political doctrines. But Wilhelm Reich — the radical psychoanalyst, Marxist, and revolutionary thinker — understood ideology not merely as thought, but as a disease of feeling, a psychic infection that spreads like malaria through the body of society.

Ken MacLeod: Red Futures in the Gutter

From The Dark Forest

This is MacLeod’s great refusal: no radiant tomorrows, no shining cities in orbit, no anarchist communes beyond corruption. Every faction is cracked. Every ideology is compromised. Every rebellion curdles into dogma, every revolution ossifies into bureaucracy, every insurgency becomes indistinguishable from the power it once opposed. And yet it never stops. People still fight, because they cannot not fight. Ideas still mutate, because they cannot die. The wheel of ideology keeps turning, grinding flesh beneath it, even when all that’s left is rubble.

Eco-fascism, “Overpopulation,” and Total Transformation

from It's Going Down

A critical look at how historically white nationalists and the State have weaponized discussions of “over-population” to intervene in the environmental movement. Proposes that anarchists and autonomous anti-capitalists need new ways of discussing the unsustainability of industrial capitalism without falling into the tropes of our enemies.

by Jessie

Subscribe to ideology