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Tuesday, November 05, 2024

Book review: No Harmless Power

Nov

2024

From Freedom News by bob ness ~

This warts-and-all bio of Nestor Makhno is folksy and refreshing

I’m an old-fashioned guy, a romantic, even. In my heart of hearts what I really, really want to do is to ride down capitalism with cavalry and lop off its head with our sabres. We tried that already, but it didn’t work. When something doesn’t work, we try something else. We’re still trying.

Over the years, there has been a lot of talk among anarchists about why cavalry didn’t work against capitalism. Failure often illuminates more than success. The anarchists’ historic retreat across Ukraine in the summer of 1919 was a thing of grief and glory. Some things that happened there had effects that never went away. Consider tachankas. These highly mobile weapons transformed cavalry warfare. This played a dramatic role in the Russian Civil War. Their evolution forked. One fork evolved into the sound truck, which strikes fear in the hearts of riot cops. The other fork evolved into the technical, a (usually light) pickup truck with a heavy machine gun in the back. They cast Makhno’s shadow far and wide. There’s even a war named after them. They called it the “Toyota War”. Look it up.

Many reliable sources trace the invention of this vital piece of improvised military hardware to Makhno himself. This alone is enough to cement his name in the annals of military history. Then there was his renowned tactical prowess. But he was more than an inventor who knew how to fight. What anarchists like best about him were his politics. They are legendary.

We all know at least the legend of the Makhnovists. It’s anarchist canon. At least we think know it. Even less do we know what really happened. For decades it was a major effort to find a book about him or even a book he was mentioned in. What could be found ranged from slander to hagiography. What we really need is a warts-and-all bio that includes an account of the people around him. To that end I recommend No Harmless Power.

Allison really did his homework. He devotes a long chapter to very brief bios of anarchists that even I had never heard of but who all had Makhno-era links to Ukraine. Some were born in Ukraine and grew into anarchists there. Others came from as far as Japan, like Ōsugi Sakae. There is lots of fascinating trivia in this story. One anarchist cavalry commander had had both feet amputated in WWI. A cavalryman with no feet! Sometimes his battalion dismounted and fought as dragoons. His men wheeled him into battle in a wheelbarrow. That’s a story you don’t hear every day, not in the works of ableist historians anyway.

Then there’s the gossip. Makhno really did drink too much sometimes (it’s not what killed him though; that’s a lie). Ida Mett thought his partner Galina was a gold digger… stuff like that. Who slept with who last and who owes who money have plagued our praxis forever. Somehow, we manage to work around it.

Allison explains Makhno’s predilection for drag as having grown out of his school drama program. At first glance it does seem out of character. He was a pretty butch guy. Some of his feats smack of classical machismo. But he wasn’t afraid to be thought of as a harmless old woman sitting on a tree stump, munching on sunflower seeds within earshot of some enemy brass who were discussing strategy. To them, (s)he was as invisible as the stump (s)he sat on. That’s how disguises are supposed to work. That’s also how patriarchy works. Patriarchy is a scourge upon humanity, but on occasion it can be turned against its practitioners.

Makhno wore other disguises, too. Sometimes he would dress as an enemy soldier of one sort or another. He had many enemies, and they wore different uniforms, which made them easy to deceive. It was in a Cheka uniform that he escaped into exile. This had been the idea of his righthand man, Lev Zinkovsky, the head of the anarchist intelligence service. I would have liked this book more if Allison had devoted more time to this part in the struggle. After all, a war without spies never happens. Anywhere. Ever. Fortunately, we have “Kontrrazvedka: The Story of the Makhnovist Intelligence Service”, by V. Azarov to flesh out this part of our story.

There could have been a chapter devoted to another fascinating character, Maria Nikiforova. She played a much bigger role in the story of the Makhnovshchina than Sakae, which is not to denigrate Sakae in any way. Sakae was a shining example of anarchists in action, but he managed to get deported before he could even meet Makhno. Nikiforova, on the other hand, fought in the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine (on horseback with a sabre, and with a squadron of cavalry at her back and under her command). Fortunately, we have “Atamansha: The Story of Maria Nikiforova, the Anarchist Joan of Arc”, by Malcolm Archibald to fill us in.

When Allison gets to the Platform, he goes deep into the machinations and personal interactions involved in the debate surrounding this document, but on the Platform itself he’s pretty neutral, at least in print. That’s wrong of him. The Platform was a colossal mistake; its adoption would have been an even bigger one. It needs to be condemned in no uncertain terms, and this needs repeating, even today. Emma Goldman herself spoke out against Platformism. Bolshevism without Bolsheviks?! Preposterous. They’d just become Bolsheviks, and we’d be back to square one. Besides, all states excel at decapitating frontal attacks. Only a decentralised movement is immune. It has no capit to decate. Why give it one?

Despite these flaws, No Harmless Power is an excellent book. Its folksy style provides a refreshing counterpoint, for example, to Skirda’s more pedantic “Anarchy’s Cossack”, which is also an excellent book.

Allison’s judicious use of snark and vernacular does much to make it accessible to modern sensibilities. It gives us moderns a look inside the anarchist movement as it used to be and to a certain extent still is today. It’s more about the people than it is about the ideology. Anarchism itself should be more about the people than the ideology. All anarchists would do well to read this book. We’d all do well to read all of anarchist history. Without history the wisdom of our ancestors eludes us. So does their folly. We need for that not to happen. So read history. Start today.

No Harmless Power: The Life and Times of the Ukrainian Anarchist Nestor Makhno, by Charlie Allison; Illustrated by Kevin Matthews and N.O. Bonzo. PM Press, 2023. 256 pages

A Memoir of Transitioning

Ben Terrall

November 4, 2024
Facebook

Image by Katie Rainbow.

The best writers are worth reading, no matter their subject matter. The wildly talented, idiosyncratic, and erudite Lucy Sante is a case in point. Sante is a versatile wordsmith who has appeared in the New York Review of Books for decades, been the film critic for Interview, the book critic for New York, the photography critic for The New Republic, and has been published in countless “little magazines” including The Threepenny Review. She even won a Grammy for some of her liner notes. I’ve been a fan since reading Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, her deeply researched history of crime and the hard lives of the poor in lower Manhattan in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, shortly after it came out in 1991.

Sante’s latest work, I Heard Her Call My Name, is a memoir of transitioning from Luc, the male name under which she functioned until her mid-sixties, to Lucy. Par for the course with Sante, the writing is sublime, filled with artful turns of phrase and droll asides. Though Sante’s The Factory of Facts (1998) was also a memoir of sorts, that earlier work played its cards close to the vest on the personal front. It includes the memorable line, “I had no illusions about genealogy, a pathetic hobby that combined the bold passion of stamp collecting with the modest sobriety of medieval reenactments,” but large chunks of the book dig into the history of the author’s rural Belgian forebears with a level of family tree forensics which seems at least partly a convenient avoidance of self-disclosure. It provides no hint of the gender dysphoria that Sante now recalls being a lifelong struggle.

I Heard Her Call My Name, on the other hand, delves deep into the gender confusion that Sante describes actively suppressing well into her sixties. Chapters on the period leading up to and including her gender transition alternate with sections on earlier parts of her life, from childhood in Belgium and New Jersey through wild times in Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s.

Sante participated in the first-wave NYC punk and renegade arts scenes, running around with artistically inclined movers and shakers, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jim Jarmusch, Sara Driver, and Darryl Pinkney. Her descriptions of the cash-strapped but creatively fecund milieus in and around what became known as Alphabet City are alone worth the book’s cover price. One choice passage: “All of us were performing all the time. It was what we had come to New York City to do. Every single person under forty walking down Saint Mark’s Place between Second and Third was acting in a movie only they could see. Band of Outsiders, Expresso Bongo, Ashes and Diamonds, Cruel Story of Youth, Baby Doll, Shock Corridor, Lonesome Cowboys, Night of the Living Dead. Sometimes you could just about call out the name of the picture when you saw them walk by.” (Her stellar collections of essays and experimental pieces, Kill All Your Darlings and Maybe The People Would Be The Times, are packed with great stuff on Sante’s friends, inspirations, and obsessions from that era.)

As the Eighties slogged on, the ascendance of finance, insurance, and real estate profiteers squeezed out bohemians from their formerly cheap digs, decimating the world that helped shape Sante’s esthetic orientation. In that progressively more gloomy decade, Sante writes, “Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher ushered in the present sociopathic moral culture” and “we ate at restaurants where you were served seven squid-ink ravioli on a plate the size of a bicycle wheel.”

Despite displaying a slothful work ethic at her early ’80s New York Review of Books mailroom job, Sante was snagged by the highly-esteemed Review editor Barbara Epstein to be her assistant. Epstein must have noticed how well-read Sante was; her new employee was a lifelong autodidact who had immersed herself in broad reading of classic European and other literature. Sante closely studied Epstein’s sharply-honed editorial skills. Having Epstein school her in revising and improving essays helped Sante find her own distinctive voice. The New York Review of Books accepted the first piece Sante submitted to them, on Albert Goldman’s trashy biography of Elvis Presley. She took on a wide range of topics for paid writing assignments, including portraits of individual writers, artists, and musicians, cultural tendencies, and such offbeat history as the heyday of “spirit photography,” which purported to catch images of ghosts.

Sante describes an old romantic partner as having “a keen sense of the quackeries of language.” That fabulous compliment also applies to Sante, whose work embraces the esoteric and the eccentric, recovering and relishing forgotten slang and colloquialisms from previous eras and subcultures; Peter Schjeldahl, the late art critic for The New Yorker, aptly described her as “one of the handful of living masters of the American language.”

To Sante’s credit, she avoids misty-eyed sentimentality when drawing from the past: in her book Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard 1905-1930 (2009), she describes nostalgia as “the term Americans use for the bargain they strike between ignorance of the past and discomfort with the present.”

Affection and identification with women runs throughout I Heard Her Call My Name. A bohemian aesthete, very much drawn to fashion, Sante writes that as she eased into her identity as a newly-emerging woman in 2021, “I felt fortunate to have my friends: tough, stylish, independent-minded women, some of whom I’d known for over forty years and had seen evolve, who now weren’t kids anymore but were not in any way backing down. I modeled my attitude on theirs, and studied their style.” Sante exults over female role models in the wider world as well, listing a wonderfully eclectic mix which includes Eartha Kitt, Poly Styrene, Thelma Ritter, Emma Goldman, Anna Mae Wong, Memphis Minnie, Gloria Grahame, Dorothy Day, Helen Levitt, and Billie Holiday. Just to balance things out, “I inhabited Angie Dickinson as Police Woman.”

I Heard Her Call My Name clearly depicts the daunting process of transitioning to a freer, more fully realized life as Lucy, and coming out to family, friends, and acquaintances. Clocking in at 226 pages, a manageable length for even the most internet-damaged attention spans, the book includes a generous selection of photographs from Sante’s life. These include Sante head shots treated with the gender swapping feature of something called Face-App, which transformed old photos into images of the writer’s truer female self.

In describing the emotional terrain and practical realities of emerging as a woman, Sante’s honesty and attention to particulars keep her narrative free of strident polemics or grandstanding. Sante describes herself as a trans writer, rather than a trans writer. She writes, “I’m allergic to theory and even more to the kind of shibboleth retoric (and its principal by-product, a defensive posture) that pervades much — though by no means all — of trans writing. […] I don’t wish to be a spokesperson, although I accept that by writing this book I will have become just that.”

In this age of billionaire-backed fascists using weaponized transphobia to divide and conquer, I Heard Her Call My Name could hardly be timelier. The book inspires empathy and solidarity through its nuanced, powerful, and accessible account of Sante’s transformation from Luc to Lucy. Sante concludes, “I certainly hope that my story will be read by people who need to see that gender dysphoria, expressed in childhood or adolescence, is not a passing fancy that will evaporate when the social climate changes.” So do I.

Ben Terrall is a writer living in the Bay Area. He can be reached at: bterrall@gmail.com

The Republicans Are Attacking Trans People.

Why Aren’t the Democrats Talking About It?

In this election, Republicans are attacking trans people while Democrats have backed away from the issue.

Sybil Davis November 4, 2024

LEFT VOICE USA

“Kamala even supports letting biological men compete against our girls in their sports” the disembodied voice in the Trump ad says, oozing contempt. The voice goes on, driving toward the central slogan: “Kamala is for They/Them, Trump is for you.” Anti-trans ads are blanketing the country: in October roughly 41 percent of pro-Trump ads were anti-trans ads. This number shouldn’t be surprising — after all, the new Republican Party is built in large part on anti-trans politics. Outside of Trump, over 100 Republican candidates are running on an anti-trans platform. This is coming after a multi-year offensive against trans rights from Republicans at the state level which has left trans rights severely limited in over half the country. Trump has long made anti-trans attacks part of his campaign and is making them a central part of his closing message to voters. At his horrific Madison Square Garden Rally, Trump declared that “We will get … transgender insanity the hell out of our schools, and we will keep men out of women’s sports.” His rally speeches frequently feature the bizarre lie that young people are getting gender affirming surgeries in school — how exactly that would work is unclear, do the schools all have a secret surgical bay?

To put it bluntly, as a trans woman, it’s a scary time. The level of demagoguery that has been employed against trans people — especially trans women and trans youth — has reached a fever pitch over the last few years making things even more unsafe for trans people, especially trans women of color.

But one of the things that makes this all scarier is the way the national Democratic Party has backed away from defending trans people. And, despite what the Trump campaign wants you to believe, that definitely includes Kamala Harris.

Harris has been largely quiet about trans issues throughout the campaign. When she has spoken about them, it’s been worryingly non-committal: she will “follow the law” when it comes to things like gender affirming care for minors and gender affirming surgeries for incarcerated people. Out of context, this may not sound so bad. But within context, it’s horrifying. There are anti-trans laws in more than half the country that restrict the bodily autonomy of trans youth and, in some states, of trans adults as well. There are laws that ban discussion of queer issues in schools and force teachers to out students to their parents. There are book bans on queer and trans books alongside books addressing Black struggle. There are laws that ban trans people from using the correct bathroom — one city in Texas even went so far as to set a $10,000 bounty on trans people using the bathroom. Laws that ban trans people from updating their legal documents to match their gender and name.

These are the laws that Harris will follow? She’s not going to try to fight them? She’s not even denouncing them? This is a huge adaptation to the anti-trans offensive. It is equivalent to her saying she would “follow the law” on abortion. Trans rights vary hugely from state to state and in many states there are laws that absolutely should not be followed.

This adaptation to anti-trans politics is not new or isolated to Harris. In fact, it’s part of the Democrats’ larger shift away from trans issues. They didn’t have a trans speaker at the Democratic National Convention — for the first time since 2016 — and trans issues were only mentioned (briefly) by two speakers at the DNC, neither of whom had primetime speaking slots. Colin Allred, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Texas, responded to anti-trans attacks by the Ted Cruz campaign by releasing an ad where he calls himself a Christian and proclaiming “I do not support boys in girls’ sports.”

The national Democratic Party has been trying to downplay trans issues for essentially the entirety of the current anti-trans offensive. They didn’t make it a major part of their case for democratic rights in the 2022 midterms, focusing instead purely on abortion. In 2023, Biden sent out guidance on, effectively, how to ban trans kids from sports and only mentioned trans rights for nine seconds in his State of the Union to offer vague support for trans youth. Now those nine seconds look positively progressive compared to the way that Harris is avoiding the issue all together and adapting herself to the anti-trans laws on the books.

This shift from the Democratic Party is part of a larger shift within liberalism and the center that has occurred during the anti-trans offensive. This shift has a lot to do with the increase in people coming out as trans and doing so at a younger age. This has thrown many members of the middle class into a crisis because, though they might support trans rights in the abstract, they don’t want their kids to be trans.

A clear example of how this kind of middle class hysteria can build is the anti-trans community that developed on Mumsnet, a parenting website in the UK. These parenting message boards became the launching ground for a whole pseudo-movement against trans rights in the UK which took up pieces of anti-trans feminism and combined it with more conservative thought about the centrality of the family. This merging, not limited to Mumsnet, became known as the “Gender Critical” movement and it has become quite influential in the UK — JK Rowling is a prominent “gender critical” advocate — and began to spread over into the United States.

A suspicious eye towards transness from the bourgeois media in the U.S. is not a particularly new phenomenon but it took on an increased visibility when, in the midst of anti-trans offensive’s harshest phases, the New York Times began to publish several articles which cast doubt on trans youth’s identities. These articles were directed towards the Times’ readership — which is to say, largely, middle-class liberal readers — and sought to give them a “scientific” or “rational” basis for their “gender skepticism.”

This spoke to a shift in the Democratic Party base against trans issues, especially among middle-class parents in the suburbs who the Democrats definitely didn’t want to push away. So, rather than defend trans rights, the Democrats largely dropped it for more popular issues like abortion. Now, as the Republicans make hay out of painting Harris and the Democrats as big supporters of trans people, the Democratic response can basically be summed up in Harris’s comments: they’ll follow (anti-trans) laws.

As all this has been happening, the major LGBTQ+ organizations like the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) — who are linked to the Democrats — have largely been sitting on their hands. A demonstration may be organized on the local level but there have been essentially no moves to build a national movement for trans rights during the offensive. Rather, they fostered illusions that the courts would protect us and that we should continue supporting the Democrats. Relying on the courts is a dangerous strategy because we’ve seen time and time again, especially with the current hard-right Supreme Court, that these institutions will not protect us. History shows that we win our rights through class struggle. As we wait for the Supreme Court to hear a case on the legality of banning gender affirming care for minors, we should be clear that we cannot put any faith in them. We need to build a movement to defend our rights in the streets, in our workplaces, and in our schools.

Unions, especially those representing education and healthcare workers, need to stand up and take part in this fight for our rights. These attacks, in addition to attacking a community with strong links to both of these sectors, limit the ability of education and healthcare workers to actually do their jobs. The tremendous power that these unions hold need to be turned against these laws and we must fight with all the methods of the working class — work protests, sickouts, and walkouts — to overturn these reactionary, draconian laws. In this, we also need to start building student and worker unity so that student organizations like Gay-Straight Alliances fight alongside teachers and their union. Further, these unions can play a vital role in helping shift the discourse around trans rights. Education unions could host spaces where parents could come and learn about trans issues. Healthcare unions could hold meetings on how best to care for your trans child, and what to expect from medical transition in all its diversity. Workers and the trans community must lock arms and fight this struggle together.

It would be disingenuous to say or imply that Harris and Trump are equals on trans issues — clearly, Trump is far worse. But we should expect more from our representatives than the promise to not make things worse. The situation for trans people in much of the U.S. is dire, and the way to reverse that is through a concerted civil rights movement on the streets, in our workplaces, and in our schools that demands the repeal of all anti-trans laws and free gender affirming care for all who want it. We won’t win this from Harris or the Democrats, we’ll win it with our united power.

Sybil Davis
Sybil is a trans activist, artist, and education worker in New York City.

Friday, October 25, 2024

The First Decade of Agency, an Anarchist PR Project

NEVER HEARD OF YA

Oct

2024

From Anarchist Agency

Just over a decade ago, a small group of anarchist media activists started what they defined as an anarchist PR project—Agency was officially launched. As we develop a vision and plans for the next decade, we want to share how Agency came to be, how it has evolved, what we have accomplished, and how we hope to spread anarchist ideas and practices into the future.

The seeds of Agency were planted in 2012, when a few of us helped organize a public and widely-viewed debate between CrimethInc. and journalist-activist Chris Hedges about the tactics of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and specifically perspectives on violence and property destruction in contemporary social movements. Agency emerged from our recognition of the need to facilitate a better understanding of anarchist ideals among the general public.

We spent 2013 building the collective; the following year, Agency was officially launched when our website premiered. Agency was founded on the heels of social movements like Occupy, but the project was also inspired by anarchist practices honed during the Global Justice movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which included new decentralized forms of media like the global Independent Media Center network, and high profile direct action campaigns and mass mobilizations that garnered regular international media attention on anarchist organizing.

Agency took lessons learned from these and other projects, along with our own analysis of the weaknesses and strengths of mainstream media coverage of anarchist theories and practices, to build a resource that offers a better understanding of anarchism and ties it into interconnected issues including war, racism, heterosexism, economic and social injustice, and the rise of neofascism. By inserting anarchist ideas into timely mainstream political discourse through commentaries, a newswire, and other content, Agency seeks to help fellow anarchist organizers and groups make often unheard and misrepresented anarchist perspectives better understood.

Check out our Agency Chronology for articles, interviews, press releases, and other content we’ve created in a readily available archive of 10+ years of anarchist commentary and responses to timely issues.

Black Liberation and Anti-Fascism Shape the Trajectory of Agency

Anarchist movements are often inclined toward fresh and urgent thinking. But ten years ago, the landscape of social movement organizing was lacking new public-facing anarchist projects. Agency was founded at a time of racial upheaval in the US, punctuated by the killings of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, and Eric Garner that helped, however tragically, to propel the Black Lives Matter movement. Black liberation, along with police and prison abolition, became a left political centerpiece in the last decade, and a focus of the struggles around which countless anarchists have organized.

Meanwhile, new Indigenous sovereignty struggles were also taking shape. We saw the labor movement initiate innovative organizing tactics that won substantial victories for the working class. Expert reports warned of the next extinction event: record-breaking heat waves, wildfires, droughts, and floods compelled organizing on a massive and international scale to fight the fossil fuel industry and other contributors to the climate crisis. Entrenched neoliberalism, a seemingly ever-expanding wealth gap, and a housing market that is increasingly out of reach for many Americans also prompted widespread resistance. And the countervailing rise of a new fascism compelled anarchists to refocus on the antifascist struggle that has been part of our DNA for the better part of the last century. In 2020, the US Department of Justice invented a new term, “anarchist jurisdiction,” as a propaganda tool and a means to repress left and radical activists. All of these developments created new challenges but also opened up fresh opportunities for anarchist education and organizing.

We were also seeing dramatic changes in the media itself. An explosion of workplace organizing by journalists has coincided with the industry’s shift away from print and a corresponding dramatic loss of jobs at outlets across the country. Paradoxically, more anarchists have managed to find a voice for themselves within the corporate media or with innovative online outlets over the past decade. And while the rise of corporate social media has often been followed by its co-optation, social media has also created new opportunities for movements seeking to broadcast liberatory narratives.

Agency Amplifies Anarchists in the News and Anarchist Voices

Agency exists in part to study and expose how anarchist movements are covered by corporate news providers so that, as anarchists, we can make better informed choices as to how or whether we want to interact with them. Ever since our website launched, it has been a crucial resource for anarchist theory and practice. Anarchists in the News provides a constantly updated collection of mainstream media articles in which anarchism and anarchists appear. Critical Voices is Agency’s platform for amplifying anarchist commentary on current events originally published elsewhere. These pieces call attention to issues of direct concern to anarchists and contribute to a radical examination of power relations, the state, and capitalism. We also issue press briefs that clarify the anarchist perspective on issues and events that reporters and editors don’t typically regard as having one, such as the spread of the Ebola virus.

News never sleeps, the saying goes, and neither should the anarchist response. Agency Newswire traces both mainstream and alternative media, highlighting pivotal political struggles and social movements over the years, including: resistance to state power in places like Greece, Hong Kong, Rojava, Syria, Ukraine, Russia, and Palestine; Black Lives Matter and the 2020 uprisings across the US, sparked by the police murder of George Floyd; the rise of antifascism and militant responses to white supremacist organizing in Charlottesville, at the Trump inauguration, and in the targeting of anarchists and antifa during the Trump presidency; mobilizations to stop fossil fuel-based projects like the Dakota Access Pipeline, Keystone XL, and Line 3; the Stop Cop City movement at the intersection of radical environmentalism and police abolition; the resurgence of mutual aid networks, especially in addressing the tragic impacts of COVID-19 and the climate crisis; and the hardline responses to attacks on abortion access, like Jane’s Revenge.

Through our original commentary pieces, Agency has aimed to bring a vital anarchist perspective to the discourse around urgent issues that need an anti-state, anti-capitalist analysis but seldom get one. Some of these articles are generated by Agency members, others are solicited and written by other anarchist writers, activists, and journalists. Topics and themes we’ve covered over the years include: an anarchist response to Ebola; the anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; sexual assaults on campus; antifa and the rise of fascism; anarchist perspectives on J20, both in anticipation and in the aftermath of the Trump inauguration; Emma Goldman’s 150th birthday and her continuing influence; the tradition of May Day protests; mutual aid, from an Indigenous anarchist perspective, and dispatches from the front lines; mass surveillance; and social media censorship.

Changing the Public’s Response to Media

Agency also issues press releases on timely and relevant events in the anarchist movement itself. Some of our most recent have focused on the untimely death in 2023 of our comrade Jen Angel, an Agency co-founder, long-time anarchist, and media activist, and her enduring legacy of fighting for transformative justice.Our newsletters are another way we keep readers and followers updated on our work. You can sign up to receive our newsletter, and view an archive here.

Agency doesn’t just follow and comment on the news, however. We work to change how the public absorbs and responds to the media. In 2019 and 2020, we conducted a series of interviews with radical and anarchist-identified journalists, highlighting their work and sharing their insights. This Agency series, which included interviews with Dan Arel, Shane Burley, Natasha Lennard, and Abby Martin, addressed what it’s like being an explicitly left journalist, issues they’ve faced working in the corporate media, the importance of non-mainstream, left publications, and why engaging with media is important to the advancement of anarchist ideas.

In 2021, we began to explore the visual medium as a way to broadcast anarchist ideas when we partnered with AK Press to produce “What is the State?” an animated video primer based on Eric Laursen’s book, “The Operating System: An Anarchist Theory of the Modern State.” The following year, we launched Finding Agency, a livestream series that kicked off with an interview with Daryle Lamont Jenkins, examining his campaign to expose the new racist neofascism.

We’re dedicated to helping make media activism and anarchist interventions with public discourse a widespread, grassroots practice. In 2023, Agency launched a media grants program for radical writers, artists, and creators in collaboration with the Institute for Anarchist Studies which, following the tragic loss of Agency co-founder Jen Angel, became the Jen Angel Anarchist Media Grant to honor her legacy. The program helps fuel the types of projects that Jen created throughout her life: projects that make anarchist ideas accessible and reflect the spirit of do-it-yourself action. The core tenets of anarchism that underscored Jen’s life and work—autonomy, mutual aid, voluntary association, direct action—are all amplified by the independent media projects we fund through our anarchist media grants.

Working with Activists and Organizers to Build Skills to Advance Anarchist Movements

Agency also works directly with left activists and anarchist organizers to help them hone their media and messaging skills. By coaching and training members of the anarchist community to develop effective press releases, talking points, and other content, and by training them in managing relationships with mainstream journalists, we hope to enable the next generation of anarchists to gain greater control of the media narrative.

Most recently, Agency has supported activists in the #StopCopCity movement in developing their media skills to oppose police militarization and preserve the Weelaunee Forest from destruction. Agency has been working to build the media skills of defendants charged with domestic terrorism and RICO (Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act), with the aim of seizing media narratives to help fight their charges.

That doesn’t mean we avoid working with mainstream journalists. Agency is instrumental in educating reporters and writers from mainstream, corporate outlets on anarchist issues and connecting them to the best subject matter experts to interview and cover. When an anarchist voice is needed, we make ourselves available to be interviewed for stories in print and online, on podcasts, on TV/video, and through other media formats.

Who is Agency and Where are We Going?

The members of Agency bring a diverse skill set to this work from their different backgrounds and political histories. We are activists, organizers, educators, writers, public relations workers, communications strategists, graphic designers, web designers, documentary filmmakers, and video journalists. Demystifying anarchism, making it visible to a broader public, and clarifying inaccuracies consistently perpetuated in the mainstream media are the common goals that bring all of us together.

The devastating loss of our comrade Jen Angel brings a sad close to our first decade, but it has also enabled us to share her legacy and build a grant program in her name, as a way to support cutting-edge and DIY media projects similar to those that played such a big role in her life and work. The opportunity to bring Jen’s legacy into the future has inspired us to continue our commitment to making anarchism more visible and powerful. By furthering our collaborations with fellow anarchists, troublemakers, and radical journalists, we strive to find new ways to support the fight against capitalism and the state and promote alternative visions of a more just world through media work and development of resources within our community to do so.

We’ll see you in the streets and in the headlines!