William Gillis

From Human Iterations by William Gillis

Any minority position faces an uphill battle at persuasion.

From C4SS

We live in a world of surveillance states, militarized police, and crackdowns on dissent. Meanwhile, corporate behemoths will often ally with the state to shut down dissident speech or aid and abet surveillance.

From Human Iterations by William Gillis

It’s 2015 and I’m sitting on a couch with my roommate, gazing down on another Fuck The Police riot turned street party. The day has been long, the bars have already closed, and we’re both back in our rent-controlled collective house in San Francisco’s Lower Haight, too exhausted to go out and join the rowdies blaring music beneath our window.

From YouTube via Seeds of Revolution Podcast

William Gillis is a second generation anarchist activist who studies high energy theoretical physics and has written extensively on the politics of abolition and transformative justice.

From Center for a Stateless Society by William Gillis

Content Warning: graphic and direct discussions of horrific rape, abuse, csa, dv murder, and the apologists for such

From C4SS by Wiliam Gillis

I haven’t talked much about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine since it occurred, mostly just sharing Ukrainian voices and chastising a now former friend for calling for a NATO enforced no fly zone (e.g. shooting down a nuclear power’s planes). There’s something grotesque about the way slaughter can be turned into posturing discourse among the comfortable while the bombs are falling. The way that horrors in Ukraine and Palestine are so easily turned into abstractions should bring us all up short.

But it doesn’t. For two years now the involvement of the US and NATO in the conflict has drawn out some of the most retrograde campist tendencies in the Left, who seek to turn back the clock on the ascendency of the “Three Way Fight” analysis of antifascists. 

From C4SS by William Gillis

Review: The Anarchist-Individualist Origins of Italian Fascism

In 1910 Luigi Fabbri and Armando Borghi abducted an anarchist woman who had shamed their friend by divorcing him. Together, they forced her into a gynecological exam so the doctor could publicly pronounce her deformed and incapable of sex.

from Center for a Stateless Society by William Gillis

Many years ago a latinx friend of mine designed stickers that simply read “Migrants Welcome, Against Borders” (versions in English and Spanish) under a circle-A and the two of us covered the Bay Area with hundreds of them. Amusingly, this provoked the ire of a prominent white anarchist who denounced the phrase as pro-gentrification. She emphatically preferred “Refugees Welcome” because it distinguished those who are coercively displaced from their proper homes by various forms of western imperialism in contrast to those who voluntarily choose to migrate, like (her example) those moving to the bay for tech jobs.

from Center for a Stateless Society

by William Gillis

Recent years have seen a resurrection of a Great Man Of History Marxist scholasticism that fixates on some (easily accessible) Original Core Texts of supposed genius and discards all the complicated stuff afterwards, certainly everything in recent decades. This impulse is the product of a mass flocking to radical leftism wherein new recruits have little interest in assimilating to existing discourses. A “return to the masters” thus serves as a run-around of various gatekeepers and a shrinking of required reading lists. It also enables people to use online historical archives on their own, without much social immersion. Onboarding to the tacit knowledge, prefigurative experience, and diffuse zine-based discourses of anarchism has always been a many-years long process. The onboarding process to academic Marxism — while more hierarchically structured — is likewise similarly involved.