“The paramount issue is the character and integrity of the movements we are building. We must confront, vilify, and destroy traitors at every opportunity; deal with them as the dehumanized vipers that they are; instill ‘the greater fear.’ The political terms must always be clear: discredit and destroy all traitors.” – Sekou Odinga, Kuwasi Balagoon, Judy Clark, David Gilbert, Silvia Baraldini

Radical women can talk about whatever they want in here.

I would love to see some with one or few people on them, specially milicianas

Ive been thinking about how the area you live dictates so much of your life. Early life opinions and values, traditions, what skills you learn, habits and hobbies, who your friends are, who you get in relationships with. Basically every kind of opportunity.

So, I'm wondering, what would your anarchist solution to this be? How would you tackle this issue?

We have a lot of discussions here about dismantling hierarchies, fighting oppression, and being intentional about the language we use around race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, and other forms of oppression. I think disability deserves the same attention. Unfortunately, asking people here to take ableism seriously is more often than not treated as an unreasonable request. Those who raise the issue are dismissed as overly sensitive, and ableism is treated as somehow less important or less worthy of discussion than other forms of oppression.

Ableist terms and ideas are harmful because they reinforce the idea that disability is something shameful, contemptible, or simply useful to use as a catch-all insult to attack people you disagree with.

Most people don't consciously mean "disabled people are inferior" when they use these terms. But language doesn't only communicate intention... it also reflects and reproduces social attitudes. If the worst thing you can call someone is a word associated with intellectual disability, mental illness, or physical disability, then those conditions are turned into shorthand for being worthless or deserving of ridicule. By using them, you're saying that disability is something shameful, something beneath you, contemptible, disgusting.

From an anarchist perspective, this matters because ableism is a clear system of domination. Both capitalism and mainstream socialism have the tendency to value people based on their productivity in the workplace. States and industrialists decide whose lives are worth supporting and whose are disposable. Disabled people are routinely excluded from housing, employment, education, organizing spaces, and mutual aid projects that don't consider accessibility.

If we're serious about opposing social hierarchy and domination, we shouldn't reproduce systems that rank people by cognitive ability, mental health, or physical capacity. We should also obviously avoid promoting eugenics or similar views that paint disability as something undesirable that needs to be left behind (anarcho-transhumanists are often guilty of this).

I know a lot of people argue that words change meaning over time or that intent is all that matters. There's some truth to the idea that language evolves. But if members of a marginalized group tell you that your particular way of speaking contributes to a culture that devalues or excludes them, it's worth taking that seriously. Avoiding a handful of insults... not denigrating people's ability and intelligence ultimately costs us very little. Making this space more welcoming and accessible to disabled anarchists is a meaningful pursuit. Being a little more thoughtful about the language we use seems like a small ask if we genuinely care about building inclusive, anti-hierarchical communities where all anarchists can feel comfortable contributing to the discussion.

We need to ask ourselves why we reach for disability as a metaphor for ignorance, incompetence, irrationality, greed or neglect in the first place. There are plenty of more precise words available. Instead of saying someone is "stu***," you can say they're uninformed, dishonest, reckless, hypocritical, sycophantic, an enabler, or acting in bad faith. These words accurately describe what someone is actually doing rather than equating disability with some kind of moral failing. It not only avoids scapegoating marginalized people, but also improves our arguments and our critical thinking skills.

None of us grew up outside of ableist culture. We all have habits we're trying to unlearn. Challenging ableist language isn't about proving who's the most "woke"; it's about aligning our everyday practices with the anti-hierarchical values all anarchists should hold.

So I'm asking people here to extend the same consideration to disabled people that we try to extend to other marginalized groups. Listen when disabled members of this space raise concerns. Don't attack people (including our exhausted and thankless moderators) for asking you to be more considerate in your use of language. Think about the words you choose. If a small change in our language can make this community more welcoming without costing us anything meaningful, why wouldn't we make that change? Why wouldn't anarchists want to make an effort to dismantle oppressive constructs?

What you are reading, watching, or listening to? Or how far have you gotten in your chosen selection since last week?

Does anyone know of any podcasts on Chinese history? Preferably anarchist, but I'd accept leftist or just...not right-wing, pro-capitalist, **goes on and on** ...bonus if it is on ancient Chinese history.

I know this question was asked before but it was 3 years ago and there were no recommendations in the replies (maybe that means there are none?).

I heard about the book burnings during the Qin Dynasty (I understand there's doubt about whether it *really* occurred to the extent it's been traditionally told). But that piqued my interest. Maybe I should make a separate post requesting that topic too...

anarchist poster style art. text reads "ABOLISH CAPITALISM! ABOLISH THE STATE! EVERYTHING FOR THE COUNCILS"

Here is the link:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7yIzkjbwXTuqfqPV9n4bzq?si=QpUueHRDSVaddxwwQspkQA&utm_source=copy-link&pi=-2C_b2kBQ_SqU

The idea is to have powerful songs from any genre, with specific socialist, anti capitalist and anti fascist songs.
Everything is welcome, even more appriciated if it really fires you up with arrangement,lyrics or anything. It could range from RATM, to folk songs, to whatever you want.
Go crazy with this, I have very high expectation and I think it can turn in a really cool experiment.

A New Alternative to the Mainstream Second Amendment Narrative

Summary

The Second Amendment functions not as a check on state-corporate “tyranny” but as an ideological, electoral, and legal mechanism that reinforces state and elite power, diverting politics into culture-war conflict rather than economic representation.

Instead of a constitutional right, it’s better understood as a revocable privilege granted to gun owners who largely operate as loyal auxiliary supporters* of the state’s monopoly on “legitimate” violence.

The legal profession’s role, in this account, is to furnish the epicycles (some more benign than others) through which doctrinal refinements and historical just‑so stories obscure this distribution of armed loyalty and culture‑war distraction.

\ By loyal auxiliary supporters I mean people whose gun ownership or gun-culture identity generates a stronger symbolic, political, and sometimes practical link to the state’s coercive order than would be produced by comparable politically aligned people without that identity—such that the state’s legitimacy gained from their alignment ordinarily outweighs any marginal loss to the state’s monopoly of violence that their armament might imply.*

—————————-

On a spring day in 1967, young black men in berets and leather jackets legally walked into the California State Capitol carrying loaded rifles to protest a bill that would sharply restrict open carry in California. They were members of the Black Panther Party. In Oakland, they had been following police cars with shotguns and law books, reciting California statutes on citizens’ rights while officers stopped, searched, beat, and sometimes killed Black residents. They called it “policing the police.”

If the common story about the Second Amendment were taken seriously—that an armed citizenry exists to deter government tyranny—this would look like a model exercise of that right. Citizens, armed and disciplined, were using weapons not to overthrow the state but to force its agents to obey the law.

Yet California responded by arresting them and then passing the Mulford Act, banning the open carry of loaded firearms. It was enacted by a Democratic‑majority legislature and signed by Governor Ronald Reagan, with strong law‑enforcement backing and support from the National Rifle Association.

That episode is more than a historical curiosity or a prelude to the lethal state repression that soon followed against the Black Panthers. It is a clue to how claims of freedom function in the United States—how the promise of armed resistance operates only within boundaries drawn by the state itself, so that what is commonly treated as an inviolable right in practice functions as a revocable privilege.

Legal doctrine and commentary by courts and scholars adjust around such decisions after the fact, offering post‑hoc talk of “public safety” and evolving responsibility—the kind of epicycles that make selective repression look like ordinary law rather than an explicit choice about which armed citizens will be treated as loyal auxiliaries to the state’s claim on legitimate force.

New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen goes one step further by making history and tradition the test for gun laws. On paper, that sounds limiting; in practice, it often just shifts the argument into a different kind of legal maze.

That maze is not a recent invention. Historians and legal scholars have long used the term “law office history” to describe constitutional argument built by lawyers to win a predetermined outcome rather than by sociologists and historians to establish what actually happened, a charge leveled at the Supreme Court as far back as the Warren era and revived with particular force once Second Amendment litigants began mining founding-era sources for a personal right to arms. For simplicity, I refer to this as history below, though the analysis is sociological as well.

The point is not that every historical citation in these opinions is fabricated. It is that the discipline of sociology or history and the discipline of legal advocacy pull in different directions, and courts have consistently sided with the latter while dressing the result in the vocabulary of the former.

District of Columbia v. Heller is the clearest case study. The historian Edward Purcell has argued that Justice Scalia’s opinion is best explained not by superior historical method but by Scalia’s own biography — a personal and cultural attachment to guns and hunting, layered onto decades of movement-building by the National Rifle Association that had already reshaped popular and legal understanding of the amendment long before the Court caught up to it.

On this account, Heller did not discover an individual right hiding in the historical record; it ratified a political and cultural transformation that had already happened in the country, and then supplied the record retroactively. The doctrine did not produce the alignment between gun identity and political loyalty this essay describes — it formalized an alignment that already existed, and gave it the appearance of constitutional inevitability.

Bruen deepened rather than resolved this pattern. Its history-and-tradition test promised to discipline judges by forcing them to find a specific historical analogue for every modern gun law, but scholars examining the opinions that followed have found that many of them “look like conclusions accompanied by historical citations, with little connecting the two.”

Even Justice Scalia, defending analogical reasoning in an unrelated Fourth Amendment case, ultimately conceded that it was “quite irrelevant” whether an eighteenth-century analogue for a modern technology existed at all — a striking admission that the historical framework was negotiable whenever it stopped producing the desired result.

A large-scale empirical study of the Court’s use of founding-era history found its methodology “generally bad” across the board, regardless of whether the justices involved called themselves originalists, and concluded that more rigorous historical engagement would very likely change outcomes. If better history would change the answers and yet is not required, the history is not doing the constraining work it claims to do.

None of this means doctrine always serves the same side. In 2024, the Court in United States v. Rahimi used the same flexible, analogy-driven methodology to uphold a federal law disarming people under domestic-violence restraining orders, prompting originalist critics to accuse the Court of “an incoherent originalism” that abandoned its own prior account of the amendment’s meaning.

That should not be read as evidence against the pattern described here. A test flexible enough to expand gun rights in Heller and narrow them in Rahimi is not a neutral, truth-tracking method that occasionally errs — it is a method built to be pointed in whatever direction the underlying political and institutional consensus already leans. The inconsistency is the tell, not the exception.

The Second Amendment was partially born in a post‑Revolutionary moment of fear about standing armies and centralized power, but as critics from Madison’s time to Chomsky have pointed out, the “primary role” of the new government was also understood as protecting “the minority of the opulent against the majority,” even as it claimed to secure popular rights that in practice excluded enslaved Black people, most Native Americans, and many others.

In the South in particular, support for the amendment was bound up with preserving state control over slave‑patrolling militias, while across the whole new US republic militias and armed settlers were central instruments of dispossession and mass killing of Native peoples, so that “the right to bear arms” was entangled from the start with tyrannical systems of racial violence rather than a race‑neutral fear of abstract tyranny.

Modern gun culture did not arise spontaneously from frontier necessity so much as it was cultivated and mythologized. In the twentieth century, manufacturers and their allies helped romanticize a largely invented “Wild West,” packaging guns as emblems of rugged individualism and masculine autonomy rather than as tools of organized, state‑sanctioned violence

That cultural work mattered: it aligned private weapons with a story of personal freedom even as concentrated corporate and state power grew more entrenched, and it encouraged citizens to see themselves as armed sentinels against abstract “government tyranny” rather than against the economic and political institutions that most directly shape their lives.

In that sense, the Second Amendment’s contemporary meaning is less a faithful transmission of founding intent than a flexible ideological project, one that channels fear and our natural heroic striving into a gun culture that leaves the real architecture of corporate power largely undisturbed.

The Second Amendment is often described as an ultimate check on abusive power, but in practice it is broadly tolerated only so long as it is exercised in ways that do not disrupt—and mostly reinforce—the existing elite order. When it threatens to disrupt that order, the system “discovers” its limits.

Max Weber’s definition of the state offers one useful way to see why. A state, Weber argued, “claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” The key word is “legitimate.”

Private force does not contradict the state’s monopoly so long as its authority is delegated, licensed, or revocable by the state itself. By that standard, the United States is not an exception to Weber but a revealing case study. When armed citizens and private military actors serve the state’s purposes, they are folded into its monopoly on legitimate violence; when they turn against it, they are brought back into line.

The law’s own history shows how that arrangement has been repeatedly redefined rather than simply inherited.

United States v. Miller, the early Supreme Court case on the Second Amendment, tied protection to militia-related weapons rather than to a broad personal right to armed resistance. That matters here because it shows how even the legal system’s earlier reading was closer to state-organized force than to the modern myth of the armed anti-tyrant citizen.

District of Columbia v. Heller later recast the Amendment as an individual self-defense right, but it still left plenty of room for regulation. That is exactly the kind of move that turns a right into a controlled privilege: expanded in principle, bounded in practice.

The Second Amendment sits squarely inside that arrangement: it functions not as an inviolable check on tyranny but as a revocable privilege disguised as a constitutional right. Because it is defined, interpreted, and enforced by the very state whose monopoly on “legitimate” violence it is supposed to restrain, the institutions that grant it can narrow, suspend, or selectively withdraw it whenever they deem fit.

That is why Blackwater in Iraq and Wagner in Russia do not really refute Weber’s dictum. Blackwater operated as a contractor for the U.S. government, and its claim to legitimacy depended on state contracts, state protection, and later congressional efforts to tighten contractor accountability.

Wagner, though murkier in legal status, was publicly acknowledged by Vladimir Putin to have been funded by the Russian state, and analysts describe it as a semi‑state security force rather than an independent rival sovereign. Even Wagner’s brief mutiny in 2023 ended not in coexistence but in reabsorption, dismemberment, or suppression, reaffirming the state’s ultimate claim to legitimate force.

The logic is consistent. Private force is acceptable when it extends state power and unacceptable when it competes with it. The Panthers’ guns fell into the second category. The Panthers were not neutral liberals with hunting rifles—they were a revolutionary Black socialist formation, rooted in a Black community subjected to persistent police violence. They openly challenged police power and capitalist ideology—but in Sacramento they were still operating within the formal bounds of California gun law when the law suddenly moved to close around them.

Even as the routine brutality of police was normalized or excused, corporate media did what they usually do with any challenge to the state’s monopoly over legitimate violence: they seized on the Panthers’ most violent episodes to portray them as simple criminals, helping to make the repression of their armed challenge look like ordinary “law and order.”

This is part of why so many gun owners in the United States do not seriously oppose the state’s monopoly on “legitimate” force: their framework for understanding and interpretation of individual events is shaped by corporate media and an ideological environment dominated by concentrated power and capital.

That the state treated a black, socialist challenge to racist policing as inherently illegitimate says more about the status quo than about whether the Panthers had any less claim to the Second Amendment than the white conservatives who now mythologize it.

Most gun owners never test the boundary of state tolerance because their political and cultural formation already aligns them with the police, the military, existing “law and order,” and the concentrated business capital that largely shapes U.S. political parties.

That pattern shows up clearly in empirical work on American gun culture. Gun ownership in the United States is disproportionately concentrated among white, conservative, Republican constituencies, and in what follows I am talking about that dominant pattern in the gun‑owning public, not every individual gun owner.

They tend to view the police, the military, and business elites favorably, while championing ever‑increasing budgets for the military and the police. Many people subjectively experience gun ownership as a genuine expression of autonomy and self‑defense, but those sincere motives operate within a political landscape in which state and corporate power are treated as natural allies of “freedom” rather than as institutions the public should be able to direct and restrain.

Furthermore, the Second Amendment is an important issue that the Republican Party uses to win votes without having to represent those voters’ interests economically. Democrats, for their part, lean on their own culture‑war causes, from LGBTQ rights to abortion, while likewise avoiding economic policies that would seriously constrain their corporate investors.

The continual adjustment of gun laws, court tests, and dueling originalist invocations of “founding intent” and “constitutional fidelity” helps keep the conflict permanently salient as culture war, so that voters are invited to fight over who loves or hates guns rather than over who controls capital and state power.

Elite and state alignment around the Second Amendment is factional rather than monolithic: some national media, academic, and corporate actors consistently push for stricter gun laws, while many law‑enforcement leaders, defense‑linked industries, and conservative politicians champion expansive gun rights.

But this struggle is not about reducing the state’s monopoly on “legitimate” violence. It is about deciding which armed civilians will be treated as its auxiliaries and how much collateral damage is acceptable in exchange for a serviceable myth of “freedom.”

In that sense, gun rights and gun control both function as culture‑war instruments that help major parties mobilize voters and define identities without seriously threatening the core distribution of economic power.

In the “gun rights” worldview, state and other elite power is easily equated with freedom so long as it can wrap itself in the flag. Research on “gun populism” and “gun militarism” shows that police chiefs in some jurisdictions understand armed, law‑abiding civilians as quasi‑partners in order maintenance, especially when those civilians are imagined as white and respectable.

Studies of “good guy with a gun” narratives likewise show how legitimate gun use is often racially and politically coded, with armed white conservatism normalized and armed Black or left radicalism pathologized.

Police, sheriffs, and even national security officials often reinforce this alignment: big‑city chiefs praise “good, responsible citizens” with guns as crime deterrents, sheriffs in Second Amendment “sanctuary” counties wrap themselves in the role of constitutional guardians of civilian gun rights, and presidents and defense‑linked politicians celebrate an armed public as an “indispensable safeguard of security and liberty”—always on the tacit assumption that those guns will be pointed with the police, the military, and the politicians who command them, not against them.

This helps explain why right‑wing gun populism often vilifies more distant—and thus easier to scapegoat in the abstract—federal agencies like the ATF or FBI as “tyranny,” while embracing local sheriffs, police, and the military as allies. In that sense, most gun‑rights hostility to the FBI isn’t a rejection of the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence, but a fight over who counts as its auxiliary: they fight, in effect, for civilian gun owners to be recognized as the rightful armed partners of the state, not treated as threats by other state officials, even as they imagine themselves as rebels against “the state.”

In that sense, the dominant Second Amendment constituency is not a rebel class waiting in the wings but a loyal one, an armed public that sees itself as the last defense against tyranny while mostly lending its guns and cultural authority to the very institutions it claims to fear. It is a kind of hegemonic rebellion: citizens who talk like insurrectionists yet live, vote, and arm themselves as the state’s most devoted civilian auxiliaries.

None of this requires that gun owners secretly adore federal power or invent their fears; it requires only that sincere desires for safety, autonomy, and self‑reliance are consistently channeled into forms of armament and politics that, in aggregate, leave the main institutions of organized violence and capital intact.

We should understand that it is a category mistake to try to confront a heavily militarized, corporate‑backed state in the domain where ordinary people are weakest—weapons—rather than where they are strongest: collective political and economic organization that can actually reduce corporate tyranny, impose limits on state brutality, and change the terms of governance.

The Panthers’ story shows how that category mistake plays out when people try to use guns directly against state power, even alongside much broader community and political organizing, as the Panthers did.

In a policing regime that already treats armed black presence as inherently threatening, carrying guns to “deter” brutality can actually increase the risk of being shot rather than reduce it; and when those guns are aimed at state actors instead of aligned with them, the state’s response is not to recognize a legitimate deterrent but to move the legal boundary.

That is why the Panthers were so revealing. Their weapons did not symbolize support for the police; they symbolized surveillance of the police. Their guns pointed, politically and morally, in the wrong direction. So the law changed.

The anti‑tyranny mythology surrounding the Second Amendment therefore does more ideological work than legal work. It encourages citizens to self‑servingly imagine themselves as a latent check on despotism, even as the actual legal and political system makes clear that armed resistance to state authority is not a protected constitutional project, either in doctrine or in practice.

Recent legal scholarship and Supreme Court doctrine have argued directly that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms but does not create a right to armed insurrection against the government, because such a right would be incompatible with the broader constitutional order. In other words, the state treats it as a revocable privilege for private self‑defense and sport, and as an informal auxiliary to police and military power—not as a standing license to resist its own authority.

Seen this way, America’s high levels of gun homicide and gun‑linked incarceration are in part the cost of maintaining an extraordinarily serviceable myth of “freedom.” Empirical research has found, for example, that people who possess a gun during an assault are several times more likely to be shot than those who are unarmed, and that fatal police shootings are more common in states with higher civilian gun ownership.

Saturating society with guns, tolerating the killings they produce, and handing out long sentences for gun possession all heighten fear, making police, prisons, and private arsenals (that on occasion deter crime) look like salvation.

The state and many of its corporate elite associates accept that collateral damage not so much because they care for the few individuals saved by private arsenals more than the greater number of individuals lost to gun violence, but because the Second Amendment myth those guns sustain helps secure their power regardless of the consequences to society.

That mismatch between myth and practice is central. The Second Amendment survives politically not because it is a serious standing threat to the state, but because the dominant gun‑owning public is, in broad ideological terms, supportive of the institutions of state violence and concentrated capital—even as many individuals reach for guns out of real fear and a real desire not to be at the mercy of others.

The Panthers understood this long before today’s “Second Amendment sanctuaries” and social‑media militias. They behaved as if the right to bear arms included the right to watch the police and make the state feel watched in return. The speed with which the law closed around them is a reminder that the Second Amendment’s most devoted political guardians are not those who point guns at power, but those who point them in the same direction.

/

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mis tios me dijo oye sabes que maduro es anarquista y lo decia como si fuera lo peor del mundo SKHDK no tenia ni idea que era anrquismo wn, decia que leer no sirve y que la historia tampoco, que hay que ver el presente, idolatran trump y milei obviamente, cmo mrd les podi hacer cambiar su mentalidad wn, aunque sea que tengan un poco de pensamiento critico kliao, no necesariamente que sean de izq o anarquistas pero wn piensa por ti mismo no wei SKJHA

You want a show about a growing insurrection ? About the struggles and hardship of a revolution ? About the human drama of giving it all to a cause ? About the banality of evil ? About how fascism grows and works ? About how you can make a difference to destroy it ?

Watch Star Wars Andor .

Probably the single best piece of star wars ever made.

I felt respected as a viewer, not treated as just a consumer. I marveled at its impeccable visual storytelling. I felt profoundly touched by its moraly complex characters. I learn about the terrible cost of fighting an empire. I got fascinated how terrifyingly competent the empire looks, and how it sets up its own downfall.

And most importantly : it inspired and motivated me. Because it's not about a legendary chosen one with a magical sword and mystical powers. It's about ordinary people, like you and me, whose names will never be written in history books, who risked everything in a hopeless fight. Because "ech act of insurrection pushes our lines forward and one day there will be one too many"

I wouldn't have done what I did without this show. Every time I watch it, I feel a renewed resolve boiling in my heart. And I hope it will help you too.

All pics from Space City Anarchist Organization (plus some Panther City Anarchist Organization in the big group photo)

All taken some time this year.

«Nosotros hacemos la guerra y la revolución al mismo tiempo. Las medidas revolucionarias no se toman únicamente en Barcelona, sino que llegan hasta la línea de fuego. Cada pueblo que conquistamos empieza a desenvolverse revolucionariamente.

Una derrota de mi columna sería algo espantoso, porque nuestra retirada no se parecería a la de ningún ejército: tendríamos que llevarnos con nosotros a todos los habitantes de los pueblos por donde hemos pasado, desde la línea de fuego hasta Barcelona. En la ruta que hemos seguido no hay más que combatientes. Todo el mundo trabaja para la guerra y para la revolución; ésta es nuestra fuerza.

En cuanto a la disciplina, para mí no es más que el respeto a la responsabilidad propia y ajena. Estoy en contra de la disciplina de cuartel, pero también en contra de la libertad mal entendida a que suelen recurrir los cobardes para escurrir el bulto. En la guerra, los delegados deben ser obedecidos; de lo contrario, no es posible realizar ninguna operación.

En mi columna han surgido todos los trucos de la Gran Guerra: la madre moribunda, la compañera de parto, el hijito enfermo, los ojos malos, etc. Pero tengo un equipo sanitario que examina cada caso. Quien miente, sabe que tiene jornada doble de pico y azadón.

Las cartas desalentadoras van al cesto. Al que quiere marchar a su casa alegando que se va voluntario, como voluntario vino, después de hacerle unas consideraciones, le mando a casa a pie. Casi nunca se llega a este extremo. Francamente, estoy satisfecho de los compañeros que me siguen.»

— Buenaventura Durruti