Fifty years later, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Novel about Utopian Anarchists

Oct

16

2024

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From Scientific American

Original title: Book Review: Fifty years later, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Novel about Utopian Anarchists Is as Relevant as Ever

In The Dispossessed, a physicist is caught between societies

FICTION

The Dispossessed: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition)
by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Harper, 2024 ($35)

A little more than halfway through The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin’s inexhaustibly rich and wise science-fiction novel about a physicist caught between societies, the protagonist, Shevek, born and raised in an anarchist’s collective, gets drunk (for the first time) at a fancy soiree in a capitalist society on a planet not his own. There this brilliant but bewildered scientist gets cornered by a plutocrat with impertinent questions. What is the point of Shevek’s efforts to create a General Temporal Theory reconciling “aspects or processes of time”?

Shevek explains that time in our perceptions is like an arrow, moving in one direction only. In the cosmos and the atom, however, it moves in circles and cycles, the “infinite repetition” an “atemporal process.”

“But what’s the good of this sort of ‘understanding,’” the plutocrat asks, “if it doesn’t result in practical, technological applications?”

The tensions Le Guin explores here—between the theoretical and the applicable, the scientist and society—have not diminished in the 50 years since The Dispossessed swept the Hugo, Locus and Nebula awards. The science in this 1974 novel—now reissued with a celebratory, pained-about-the-present introduction by literary writer Karen Joy Fowler—is vague, a physics explored through metaphor. But Le Guin’s depiction of a scientist caught between opposing, utterly convincing worlds remains thrilling in its precision, at times even frightening.

On the collectivist planet Anarres, a desert landscape ravaged by famine, Shevek’s search for a General Temporal Theory is thwarted by scientist-bureaucrats who are concerned his discoveries might prove counterrevolutionary. After engineering a diplomatic escape to lush Urras, funded by capitalist plenty, Shevek learns that his work is viewed as proprietary—a product. This perspective changes him. Shevek finds himself behaving like the patriarchal “propertarians” of Urras. Drunk and lonely, this gentle man whose language has no possessive pronouns seizes a woman as if she is his. It’s an act that later disgusts him—and sets him on a revolutionary course that will affect all the worlds that humanity has reached.

Le Guin, who died in 2018, leaves it to readers to make what they will of this shift. The arrow of time has sped forward since 1974, but the circles and cycles of Le Guin’s masterpiece continue to suggest, with urgent humanity, both present and future.

 

Anarchist Author Margaret Killjoy Crafts Trans Worlds in the Woods

Aug

31

2024

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From Autostraddle by Nico Hall

Dressed in all black down to her ankles, dark hair in two braids, Margaret Killjoy let me into her house in the forested mountains, where she lives a hermit-like life with her companion, her dog Rintrah. A transfeminine musician, podcaster, and author of multiple fantasy books, Killjoy lives in the mountains of Appalachia in a home filled with instruments, books, art, and medieval weaponry. For an author who wrote an upcoming novel described as “an own-voices story of trans witchcraft,” her home met my expectations and then some.

Killjoy’s first young adult crossover fantasy book, The Sapling Cage, comes out on September 24 and is described as a novel that hearkens back to gender-bending fantasy and speculative fiction works by women like Ursula K. Le Guin and Tamora Pierce.

I snuck in the interview just before the east coast book tour for The Sapling Cage. Killjoy tells me there has never been so much pre-publication buzz for one of her books before. But given the evil deeds in the book center around resource extraction and power hoarding, and the trans girl protagonist who is not only exploring her identity but training to be a witch, and the collective Millennial and Gen X longing for something like the fantasy stories of our youth, it’s easy to see why the moment is right for this book’s release.

***

We can look to Tamora Pierce as an expert world-builder and fantasy writer, but we also must acknowledge the shortcomings of her multiple series, especially when it comes to gender. Her book The Song of the Lioness Quartet was innovative for its protagonist, Alanna, a girl who disguised herself as a boy in order to train as a knight in a system and world where girls were not allowed to do so. In a subsequent series in the same world, Kel follows in Alanna’s footsteps. This time, she’s legally able to train as a knight openly as a girl, but she faces unrelenting sexism while doing so. The series exchanges the stresses of secrecy for the barbs of resentment Kel faces and overcomes. While Kel is notably burly, tall, and level-headed, much quieter and less romantically inclined girl protagonist in contrast to the petite, red-headed and violet-eyed, love-triangle-having protagonist of the first series, these two series of Pierce’s works still keep to gendered expectations in a lot of ways, rarely venturing into discussions of queerness or anyone who isn’t cis. In recent years, it can seem like we’ve seen fewer stereotypical and cliche ideas around femininity permeating the young adult fantasy and speculative fiction genres, but a lot of tropes still persist, and despite a genre that contains infinite room for expansive thinking and reimagining of cultures, roles, and genders, we often still see cishet normativity win out in young adult books. Still, I know that Pierce’s works, which many queer adults read as kids, left us wanting when it came to representation that felt more direct, where we wouldn’t have to stretch to see reflections of who we were growing up to be in the text.

In The Sapling Cage, Killjoy presents us with a 16-year-old protagonist, Lorel, who is smart but still learning, pretty but not ridiculously so, strong but not the strongest, good at fighting but not the best. She is frequently conflicted, but often keeps these complexities to herself. She can be brave, but she can also be afraid or unable to stomach violence. Lorel struggles throughout the book to connect with her emotions. She’s spent so much time suppressing parts of her identity, that she cannot always easily define what she wants. Sometimes she has a sense of exactly what she feels is the right course of action, but often, she’s taking the thoughts, feelings, and advice of others into account, too. She exists on the demisexual spectrum, and her romantic feelings bloom sweetly and slowly.

Importantly, to both the plot, and as Killjoy hopes, the reader, Lorel is also trans. And so, in this new addition to the genre, Lorel swaps places with her cis girl best friend who was promised to the witches from birth, but who wants to be a knight. While boys and girls in this world can join various brotherhoods of knights, only girls can join the witches, so Lorel puts on a dress, and begins her journey from thinking of herself as being in disguise, afraid of discovery, to owning her identity as a girl who will grow up to be a woman — and a witch.

When I read the early scene where Lorel and her childhood best friend agree to switch places, it harkened back so beautifully to the first time I’d read Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness. And it harmonized, too, because this was different. This time, we were going to follow the people learning magic, not knighthood. We weren’t going to a castle, but into the woods, and as someone who has often felt locked out of certain circles of girlhood or cis womanhood, the idea of following a character’s journey into a sacred women’s space, and, I hoped, into acceptance in said space, held some serious appeal.

Still, Killjoy had to wait some years to find a publisher for the book after she completed the manuscript in 2017. The book played with emotionality in ways that were atypical of the genre. “I was a fairly emotionally withdrawn teenager,” says Killjoy, “and so I wrote a book about myself as a teenager in terms of a lot of the emotional landscape that Lorel is facing.” However, as Killjoy puts it, that’s “not the way you’re supposed to write YA. You’re supposed to write these almost hyperbolically emotional characters.”

Killjoy takes great care with her handling of the “kids versus adults” dynamics pervasive in YA, resulting in a more complex book with crossover appeal. “I actually wanted her to have a realistic relationship with the power structures that she’s part of, as compared to in traditional YA,” Killjoy says. “I understand why it’s so important to give protagonists agency in the story, and I don’t think Lorel lacks agency in the story, but I think that it’s important for her to coordinate with the adults in her life as she’s attempting to save the world, you know? And I think that’s a more realistic way to solve a problem.”

In a recent post on her Substack offering writing advice, Killjoy notes in the section “Writing the Other” that “constant bombardment with negative portrayals of trans women kept me from coming out even to myself for decades.” When I ask about writing a trans girl in a YA novel, of course Tamora Pierce comes up.

Killjoy tells me about discovering the Song of the Lioness books around 5th grade. “I used to say it set me up to be a cross-dressing knight because, for a very long time, I was just a boy named Margaret who dressed like this, and then eventually came out as trans,” she says. “Then, I was like, no, I’m going to be a girl who pretends to be a boy, and then learns to be a knight.”

The Sapling Cage, she says, is in some ways a conscious inversion of the premise. “I was like okay, well I want a boy who wants to be a witch,” she says. “The most important gender part that I’m trying to convey is this idea that Lorel doesn’t know she is a girl trapped in a boy’s body. That’s not the only way to conceive of transness.”

“I think that we have this problem, although we got to it from an understandable point of view, in how we talk about transness right now,” Killjoy adds. In her childhood, she vacillated between wanting to do girly things, then wanting to change her name, then backing off a name change for a time. She describes a back-and-forth gender journey that is not necessarily neat and tidy. “I don’t want to convey to young kids who are questioning their gender that you have to be sure.”

***

Margaret Killjoy is a master world-builder. She has built a large part of her writing career on speculative fiction and is the world-builder for the recently released tabletop role-playing game Penumbra City.

“I really like the idea of exploring gender in contexts that are not and don’t need to look like the modern world,” she says. And indeed, she does not and says she never will use the words “cis” or “trans” in the Daughters of the Empty Throne series (of which The Sapling Cage is book one). “Not because those are bad words,” she explains, “but because they’re not appropriate to the gender of this high fantasy Medieval setting, you know?”

Killjoy wrote 50,000 words of world-building for Penumbra City, a game where the players use reputation as currency instead of gold, wealthy God-Kings play with the world like it’s a chess game — and yet people find ways to carve out an existence even amongst trash piles and zombies, all while resistance and revolution brews amongst different factions. When it comes to her approach, though, while she does outline her novels, Killjoy thinks that having all the answers at the start is a bore. She prefers to begin by planting seeds, uncovering and discovering throughout her writing process, surprising herself and her readers with the way the world emerges as the story unfolds.

Her first encounter with fantasy world-building came through Dungeons and Dragons. She started playing with some friends, but when they moved away, Killjoy just kept reading the books. “It was what I spent my allowance on,” she says.

World-building is also political. “It bores the hell out of me with world-building when people basically recreate our world,” says says, “and they’re like ‘oh I mapped out everything about every single town,’ but they haven’t bothered to imagine that a town could use a different economic system.”

“I do see my writing craft as sort of a magical process,” says Killjoy, “and that is an attempt to influence culture and thought.” We discussed the influence of Anarchist writer Ursula K. Le Guin, who frequently explored gender in her work in ways that are meaningfully alien to the conceptions of gender we typically hold in the real world, which asks us to interrogate just why we believe what we do, and what, if anything, is a hard and fast rule that must be followed. In speaking to the importance of imagining new worlds, Le Guin said in her speech acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

In The Sapling Cage, for example, witches don’t eat meat from domesticated animals because to do so impedes their access to magic. Killjoy, who’s vegan, says, “I don’t believe that in a literal sense…But I can have characters in the magical world have that experience, and then I think that that’s more likely to make people think about what’s involved energetically in an animal raised in captivity versus a hunted animal versus eating plants.”

Collective and radical politics can be seen throughout the world-building of The Sapling Cage: the witches practice making decisions by consensus; there are varying levels of acceptance and understanding when it comes to gender identity and asexual and nonbinary characters; and while there are serious hierarchies, there are also sometimes collectivized farms. There are different magical systems, even, and no one, right way of doing anything, no single correct way to perceive of or even see magic — the witches in the book, The Order of the Vine, represent only one view and make that much clear.

For her work on her history podcast — Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, a look at people who were legitimately awesome, good, or otherwise on the right side of history — Killjoy researches and writes a 5,000-10,000 word script every week. This, too, reflects her thinking around world-building, history, and perception. “Learning of this history has really, really informed my writing,” she says, “because the thing I love about history is learning about different ways that people have fought and felt and lived in essentially different realities and needs of the world in different ways, because humans haven’t changed, but our conceptions of everything have changed.” She talks to me about a recent search for mini-periods in time of increased LGBTQ acceptance and tolerance because history is not a linear march toward progress, but a twisting, turning thing full of backs and forths.

***

One thing I noticed when reading The Sapling Cage was that the characters sure did wander, walk, and generally find themselves traveling. I ask Killjoy if her personal past had any influence on that part of the story. “I just wanted a weird, interesting life,” she says.

She grew up with a family who surrounded her with books, then went to art school, and then dropped out in 2002 after attending an anti-globalization protest. “There was a culture of traveling anarchists at that time, where we would go to different demonstrations, and then in between the big demonstrations, we would open squats and cook with Food, Not Bombs, and ride bikes around and you know, guerilla gardens everywhere,” she says.“It was the first thing in my life that gave my life a sense of adventure and meaning.”

She explored, traveled to new places, exposed herself to new people, and wrote her first short story in a squat in the South Bronx. “The window was broken, and it was winter, and I had this roll top desk that had just been in that room for probably the 60 years since anyone lived there before, and it was almost an aesthetic choice. I didn’t have a computer or anything. I just hand-wrote a story.”

From there, Killjoy wrote zines that fictionalized her life but presented them as authentic perzines while writing under various names, causing some confusion later when she began to publish the work of others, readers still assuming everyone was still Killjoy. This led to her consolidating under one name, Margaret Killjoy, and no longer publishing under pseudonyms. She continued to write and submit short stories, and started Steampunk magazine, which she describes as “a critique of Victoriana.” In 2009, Mythmakers and Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Fiction, the first book Killjoy edited, was published.

In 2014, Killjoy published fantasy novel A Country of Ghosts and sold her first short story. She used the money from the story’s sale to attend the intensive speculative writing workshop at Clarion West in 2015. Following the workshop, Killjoy continued to write and sell short stories.

She recalls one of her instructors telling her he thought she’d be the most likely to make it because she lived in a van. She laughs, “I was waiting for him to be like ‘because you’re the best.'”

We talk about the realities of writing and publishing and money, about keeping expenses down and about writers who live in tents, on boats, or, well, in vans. Killjoy credits zine culture for breaking her into writing. She continued to publish books before she found an agent, including The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion, the first in her ongoing Danielle Cain series, which follows anarcho-punk demon fighters and begins when a man-eating demon deer appears in a squatter town.

Traveling constantly, losing friends to violence, and seeing other people in the movement she was in go to prison culminated in increasing panic attacks. Killjoy knew she needed to seek some more stability — and also, her van wasn’t long for this world. She built a black A-Frame cabin on an anarchist land project, where she lived without electricity through the start of the pandemic before moving into the house where she lives now with her rescue dog.

Her house is filled with instruments, mostly a variety of harps she put together from kits that require some woodworking. She gleefully takes an instrument off a high shelf and tells me it’s a “goblin harp.” Killjoy strums it, and each string plays the same note. It’s a goblin-esque troll of an instrument. She pulls out a dulcimer and skillfully plucks away at the strings while it rests on her lap.

Sound, too, is an important part of Killjoy’s life and work. She’s a musician and founder of the feminist black metal band Feminazgûl. She’s involved in additional musical projects ranging from neofolk to electronica, and of course, also just plays for fun.

She also is part of publishing collective Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. Penumbra City is published through Strangers, and I ask Killjoy, if, as a publisher, there was anything she wished writers knew or understood better. “I wish people knew that rejection is not the end of the world by any stretch, and that a rejection of a book doesn’t mean it’s a bad book, it just means it’s not what that the press can publish right now,” she says.

“I wish people knew it was a peer relationship,” she adds. She emphasizes that just as it takes a great deal of work from a writer to complete a book, it also takes the publisher an enormous amount of effort to get the book out into the world and to set the work up for success.

Killjoy takes me through her weekly writing routine, which is equal parts inspiring and intimidating. She writes 5,000-10,000 word scripts each week for Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, as well as a 2,000-4,000 word Substack post, and also, about 1,000 words each day on one of her fiction projects. The last one is looser, since Killjoy notes that actually completing 1,000 words of fiction each day would mean completing four books per year instead of the “two books a year or so I seem to be on right now.”

She holds a somewhat anti-precious stance when it comes to her work that keeps her producing. Even though she’s technically living in just one place now, Killjoy is constantly moving — and that’s how she likes it. “I love that my job is learning, and I’m not an academic,” she says. “Yeah, like that makes me so happy. You know, every now and then I’m like, oh, something’s hard in my life and then I’m like this is the sunset I get everyday, and it is paid for by me reading history books. And talking into a microphone. And I am one of the luckiest people who’s ever been born, and I worked really fucking hard to get here, yeah, you know, but like I am very aware of and grateful that I like my life.”

“So, it’s funny, cause then I realize that most people I know don’t actually want to live like I do at the end of the day, most people don’t actually want to basically be a hermit,” she adds. “My dad made fun of me when I told him I was a hermit, and he was like, you have the internet.” This is true, she concedes. But in an average week, she probably only has one in-person conversation with a cashier, or with her dog Rintrah. “But he doesn’t talk back,” Killjoy says.

In a typical day, she’ll spend time walking with her dog, and then most of her day is dedicated to reading and writing. She talks to friends, and of course, podcasts, and stays connected to the world via the internet.

“I don’t know if this is true,” Killjoy starts, “but a million years ago, I heard Enya just sort of got rich, bought a castle, and lives alone with cats in the castle and makes music.”

“And bothers no one,” I add.

“She’s not on Twitter saying turkey shit.”

Living in a place that allows her this life of solitude informs her work.. “Because it’s the mountains where no one goes, it has an attitude of ‘we let people be weird.’ We mostly just wanna let people leave people alone,” she says.It’s the kind of writing life some people dream about, and the kind that is definitely best with a silly dog who will keep trying to lick your face or bark at planes.

Despite wearing all black living in the woods, Margaret does not describe herself as a witch. “I don’t fuck with [magic] much cause I do believe in it.” Magic, real or not, is a metaphor in Killjoy’s writing. The villains in the book are resource extractors, people seeking to accrue and consolidate power. The Sapling Cage begins with a concerning, magical blight that leaves trees drained of all life. Margaret and I walk out of her house so she can show me around her land. Some of the oak trees are dying of some kind of blight here, too.

She talks about how, even here, at her hermetic outpost, she can see the effects of climate change, the ways in which the power hungry are sacrificing the commons of nature for their own personal gain. Still, the sun is setting over the rolling mountains, I am taking some very witchy photos of Killjoy, and her book fills me with a ton of hope. I’m rooting for The Sapling Cage to find its audience and its way into the hands of the kids, and especially trans kids, who will love it.

When it comes to what’s next, Margaret is, as you might predict from her writing routine, chugging ahead on future books. She tells me she’s just completed the next book in the Danielle Cain series, and then, of course, she’ll be moving onto the next book in the Daughter of the Empty Throne trilogy.

No need to wonder if she’s writing. She is definitely writing.

---

The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killyjoy is available for preorder.

 ANARCHO GREEN FASCISM

Millenarian Insurrectionary Hail Marianism

Aug

27

2024

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Millenarian Insurrectionary Hail Marianism
Invecchiare Selvatico Reflects On
Warlike, Howling, Pure
by Areïon
(published by Contagion Press)

"The early anarchist movement was galvanized by its many martyrs…
the anarchist martyrs bore witness to the beautiful idea…
anarchic life is born from anarchic death.”
- Areïon, Warlike, Howling, Pure

“Another word for divine violence is anarchy.”
- Areïon, Warlike, Howling, Pure

“This is the Way.”
- Areïon, Warlike, Howling, Pure

The clock is winding down and there seems to be no path to “victory”, no chance of “winning” (concepts only relevant for those stuck playing Their games). But no, wait… Could it be? Religiosity, self-sacrificial martyrdom, and agenda-infused opportunistic historical re-readings (what the author would likely dismiss as historical revisionism)… that’ll get us to freedom, to anarchy! Awe, well, um, ok? Warlike, Howling, Pure feels like an act of desperation, a last-ditch effort at some sort of ending-times anarchist final triumph or last stand, one that hopefully will not pull other lost souls into its hallowed and insurrecto-thiestic void.

But, before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s take a step back and quickly trace the general path to this anarcho-rapture. First, many action-addicted and street-performing anarchists reconstituted their over-inflated revolutionary goals as insurrectionary (mostly a bad take on an earlier and more interesting Italian version), but most still believed in the inherently authoritarian project of Revolution and of transforming society to their particular idea of a “better world”. Then, some of the more sophisticated of the lot seemed to pay lip-service to criticisms by merely naming them and rebranding to “combative anarchy” and duped a new generation of wide-eyed pseudo-rebels and glorified activists to take to the streets for the “good fight” (a more edgy and militant front of the typical array of symptomatic left-oriented causes). And now, as a bleak darkness envelops, millennial-driven millenarian anarchism and the embracing of a religious warrior epic battle for anti-racist and anti-fascist glory is the latest vision in the desert of insurrectionary anarchism. Little has changed, except for the depth of depression, degree of delusion, grandeur in scope, level of exaggeration and bloated rhetoric. Like a divine message from the gods, Warlike, Howling, Pure opens up this new millenarian “cyclical phase”, which I would argue is actually sick-lical, monotonously repetitive, and spiraling downward.

Add to this bound text a disjointed, convoluted, and religiously-infused Forward by communist-flavored “insurrectionary” author Idris Robinson, someone who has written in previous work that they are apparently always in “pain” except when they are engaged in attack and who has continually pushed the idea of martyrdom. Now Idris’s “pain” is extended to everyone and everywhere with statements like “[Areïon]… demonstrates, incontrovertibly, that our everyday reality, is in fact, hell, in the most literal and concrete sense” and “what you are about to read is nothing short of a life or death struggle, over what is to live and what is to die”. Robinson goes on to further describe the righteous battle of heaven and hell (good and evil without being directly explicit), by offering what thirteenth-century mystic, Aziz O-Din Nasafi, supposedly “teaches us”, which when read through contemporary eyes follows a very similar march that Marx offers in which “all people must first enter hell to reach heaven”. Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!

In a moralistic millenarian-Marxism infused with hyper-religiosity and foaming-at-the-mouth fervor, Idris proclaims from the mount: “The directive is then as clear as ever: either burrow further into the deep recesses of yourself or the moment has arrived for the proletarians to finally storm heaven” and “as religious insight has repeatedly confirmed, hell is nothing other than individual torment without collective deliverance” and “whenever and wherever the exploited and the oppressed transform themselves into insurgents, rebels, and combatants, the gates are crashed, the oath is consummated, and all this is marked by the anointing of the messiah as the collective subject” and “the messianic is therefore a volatile tension constantly traversing the souls of the chosen”.

Then consider, for instance, Robinson’s glowing appreciation for and reprinting of Father George Willie Hurley’s adaption of the Ten Commandments with a list of “Thou shalls and shall nots…” which includes “Thou shall believe that the Ethiopians and all nations will rule the world in righteousness…”, and it is clear that Idris has a disturbing religious, communist, and insurrecto-messianic agenda. Combining Robinson’s forward with Areïon’s four essays which make up this short book, what you have is a recipe for something, in my mind, that is uninteresting, not very anarchist, and a little troubling. To be fair, Idris is far more troubled and troubling than Areïon, but still, Warlike, Howling, Pure appears to be a new depth of desperation and delusion from this particular camp, and comes regrettably from the otherwise provocative Contagion Press.

Obviously, there is an almost absolute and pervasive spiritual emptiness all around. Of course, this has been a deepening general crisis for over a century now (to some extent for multiple millennia), only magnified by science, rationality, politics, and most exponentially by technology, especially the virtual realm. But filling this hole with a millenarian religiosity of perpetual apostolic attack and endless rationales for martyrdom is just plain absurd. If this were a random wing-nut, or even a cute little cult, I could find some amusement in it all. I will admit that I appreciated early ITS and even found later “off-the-deep-end” and whacky incarnations (whether they actually existed or not) interesting on some perverse level. Hell, Charlie Manson gave me some chuckles from time to time and I must confess to a little crush on the bad-ass Sheela of Rajneeshpuram. The author of this book, however, is not some detached actor, but a long-term anarchist who is part of a developing sphere of theory and practice, which, for me, feels significantly different.

A Holy War, as detailed in the book or of any variety, is about as far from my reality as I can imagine. I am against civilization, not the projection and persecution of ideologically un-pure and politicized infidels within it. My spirituality feels unique and grounded in direct organic relations, not myopic thrusts of mythological chest-pumping warrior jiz. My shared spirituality feels intimate and penetrating, not rhetorical and opportunistic. My spirituality is the daily living of getting dirty. It is not removed, epically-driven, and merely metaphorically earthen. In my life, balancing and playing with belief, cynicism, uncertainty, and enchantment is essential in the way I relate to spirituality and is fundamentally at odds with any sort of Holy War.

Whether intended this way or not, Warlike, Howling, Pure reads like the beginnings of an anarchist holy scripture, despite any caveats or disclaimers. But anarchy is neither pious nor evangelical. It is heretical and dispersed. To try to convince others is already an annoying and conceited endeavor, but to suck people’s lives into a personal (or group) vision that is nothing more than another ideological and religious meat-grinding cause is atrocious. Why would we waste the precious little time we have being alive on the delusions of someone’s (or some group’s) desperate cause rather than figuring out, exploring, or remembering how to live freely?

Instead, I choose to carve out as much autonomy as I can outside, on the edges, and even amongst this messed up reality, on my own terms, with the people I love, anarchically not religiously. I’ll defend myself and our people and place on this earth to my last drop of blood, but I will never be a part of any righteous epic battle over what appears to me as another interpretation of good and evil, however its rationalized. Being willing to fight for our lives is much different than feeling an obligation to some larger struggle of cleansing the unrepentant in fire and blood.

It must be said, Areïon brings many important and interesting micro-histories to the table, and in a different context I would appreciate their sharing, but these stories tend to be used as historical fodder in the ultimate agenda of supporting their particular vision of insurrectionary anarchism. From various rebellious sects in ancient China to Spartacus in the Roman Empire to the Iron Column of The Spanish Civil War to a very opportunistic and thin painting of the Diocesan spirit (and animism for that matter), Areïon appears to have a clear goal in using these stories. This, of course, is always the case to some degree, we all do it, but I find their telling particularly manipulative, exaggerated, and predictable, as is the case with most would-be revolutionaries. For instance, just one of many over-stated claims is that the White Lotus Society “attempted to abolish distinctions between genders, and practiced mutual aid”, yet the only evidence of this in the book is the fact that, according to the sourced Elizabeth J. Perry’s “Worshipers and Warriors” in some factions “women were active fighters and group leaders” and “there is some evidence of cooperative economic activities… to aid the poorest participants in the struggles,” So, if that’s all it takes, I guess we are there?

Even when Areïon attempts to move on from the heavily-handed propagandizing of their reading of certain more distant histories and comes closer to the American experience and present times, they fall into an all-too-politicized and sadly too-familiar over-simplistic axis of diametrics: “Whiteness” and “anti-blackness” vs freedom and liberation. As if that is the only choice, the only way to view things, the only way to be situated, the only tensions, the only histories, the only way to respond, or the dominant description of our time. And often when they do this, they intensely project a solidified rationale and reasoning on the players of both sides of this forced and fabricated equation.

If only it were all so simple. If only there were a good and bad, right and wrong, victim and oppressor, then Areïon’s grossly simplistic “Antiracist Holy War” and anarchist millenarian jihad might warrant a second look. But we all know, whether we admit to it or allow it to muddy lame politics or derail thesis projects, that this type of opportunistic over-simplicity only feeds the beast and becomes the negative of what we are against, not to mention the argumentation of “anti-Whiteness” is parallel (with basically the same critique, metrics, and language, just maybe slightly-skewed to account for criticisms) to most leftists these days on the subject of race. It all begins to sound too much like NPR with the volume turned up real loud. Too limited a perspective for anarchists, too trapped, too controlled.

It really starts getting creepy, however, when the author begins writing about taking “loyalty oaths” and “declaring allegiance to all of those excluded” and marginalized by their declared (and offered by academia and activists) enemy in society: “Whiteness”. Deep bonds of trust between our kin (of all sorts and combinations) is essential, but their’s is an overlaid and projected loyalty that rises up to ideology, politics, religion, warfare, and even society in strange ways, not the creative decentralized lives entwined together in the mud and seed that I sink deeper into. Ours is familiar and tribal and anarchistic, not some vague movement of the oppressed holding people accountable for previous sins carried down from generation to generation. Sound familiar? Areïon’s rhetoric and reasonings reflect the vanguardist populism draped in religiosity, as well as the religious fundamentalism that has stained history with the blood of the unbelievers. Areïon has provided a volatile and blood-thirsty religious component for the knuckle-headed, bruit, obtuse, and unsophisticated ideas and actions of Antifa and other uncritical players and activists to use. Luckily, many of them probably don’t read.

Then enters the fire and brimstone, divine vengeance, martyrdom and personal sacrificial duties, and literal sacrifices to gods. And, just like God said to Noah, “Won’t be water, be fire next time!” Areïon assures us without missing a beat of their war-drum that “The fire is here and there is no escaping it” and that “hopefully” the new resurgence in “Spiritualism… will finally spill the blood that the vengeful dead demand. If not, the Furies will hound this guilty land with madness until its crimes are purged.” Not what I am looking for when I engage in a spiritual realm. I look to connect, not project.

Again, if this were some rando on the street corner with snot in their beard holding an upside-down and (perhaps) misspelled placard reading: “God’s Cumming Again!”, I might buy them a cup of coffee and chat a bit for shits and giggles, maybe. Or, I would attempt to avoid the hell out of them. In this case, however, I would say Areïon appears (in the book) to be playing on the fads, trends, depressions, misconceptions, distorted emotions, and the bad takes of so many pseudo-anarchists who are playing games of performance and desperation, in their evangelical attempt to brand their “Antiracist Holy War” and “divine violence” as “anarchy”. It is not. Their explorations in anarchism, adventures in the streets, and excursions in the occult seem to have led them to a very strange and empty place of exaggerated conclusion and dramatic explanation. Violence is not the problem. I have no qualms here. My issues are how and why it is justified and proposed (and most likely will never actually be acted upon in this particular bloody-battled way, luckily I guess).

Even the list of quoted authors has become all-too-predictable. Walter Benjamin, James Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ursula K. Le Guin, Diane di Prima, John Brown, Franz Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari, Fredric Nietzsche, etc. (I wonder where Georges Bataille is?) have all made interesting and important contributions (some more than others). But when they are combined in this way, in this type of proposal, it all begins to feel like one continual project of propaganda for a specific flavor of revolutionary struggle, oh, I mean, insurrectionary anarchism, um, sorry, combative anarchy, I mean millenarian anarchism, whatever.

Yes, this world is ending, but to propose that people throw their bodies, hearts, minds, and spirits into its gears is absurd. To ask people to spend their lives preparing for an insurrectionary and apocalyptic bloody wave which will almost definitely never come (especially based on the current crop of hyper-domesticated cyber-humans) is infuriating. But, to attempt to convince people of the heroic value and necessity of martyrdom is inexcusable. Your Black Flame is another con job, another surrogate cause, another guilt-release valve, another act of posturing that will waste precious time, energy, and lives for nothing. Fiction is great, but that’s not how this is presented or intended. Odd, irrational, and even disturbing beliefs can be important, even much needed at times, but this comes off as all-too predictable chest-beating bombastic nonsense mixed with performative spirituality (the kind that religions are built on).

Then we get to the final chapter of Warlike, Howling, Pure, the one that ties it all together, what this was all leading up to, feeding into, Their Way Forward: The Black Flame. We are told that “Anarchy is a spiritual practice, whether its practitioners understand it as such or not. We may distinguish three interwoven currents within it: the devotional, the ancestral, and the initiatory.” First, thanks for defining anarchy for us; funny how it is explained exactly the way you sell it in your book. Oh wait, that’s how propaganda works, it binds things too tightly and grafts ideas, events, and situations to agendas for utilization. And again, spiritual emptiness is a no brainer, especially in this appallingly alienated techno-post-modern nothingness age. Atheism has always been an unfulfilling half-step, rejecting the ideological, moralistic, and authoritarian mindset of religion (a system that enslaves our spirit) but never filling that void with a uniquely individual or tribally-shared spiritual relationship of people and place. So yes, spiritual emptiness is a colossal problem, but stuffing it with this religious garbage seems highly opportunistic.

As with much of the book, there are nuggets, statements, and thoughts that resonate with me in isolation, that I even agree with, but they almost always direct us towards a place I abhor, and this final section is certainly no exception. For instance, I would agree with Areïon, that anarchy is “a force within the world—a spirit.” I often describe it this way, yet to call it “devotional” both traps it and forces us to submit to it, rather than it moving in us. It is not something to serve. It is not something to kill and die for (specifically). It is not a practice or a religion. It is an agent of chaos and freedom that cannot be reified. It is life itself: undefinable, unmolested, unrestricted, uncontrollable.

Even to talk of anarchy in historical terms, as is often the case with certain insurrectionary types like Areïon, seems opportunistic, for we know not, nor live in, those contexts. How it flowed within those anarchic moments and people is purely speculation and often later agenda-derived for propagandistic purposes, not for anarchy. And while I gain personal strength from the written histories and statements of rebellious anarchists like Giuseppe Fanelli, Louis Lingg, or Emile Henry (all mentioned in the text), they are of certain situations and mostly not very transferable or fully understandable to us, especially in regard to martyrdom (of which Emile Henry was absolutely opposed to). This making of propagandist lore is littered throughout the book.

As far as Areïon’s claim that “to name oneself an anarchist is to situate oneself within an ancestral lineage, of all those who have named themselves anarchists before.” Well, yes and no. Intergenerational honoring and exchange is sorely missing in most people’s lives, but this relationship is most potent closer to home, outside of identity, politics, or ideas than most anarchists are willing to reach and is more meaningful in more selective and situational ways than most anarchists move in regard to other self-declared anarchists. If we lined up most people who have called themselves anarchists throughout history, I would have very little to do with most of them, and the closer one comes to our current pathetic subcultural manifestation, the less so. I don’t relate to people who primarily identify with what has become (and in many ways unfortunately always has been for most) a political identity or ideology. My grandmother—riddled with many problems from my perspective—had more to teach me and was more deserving of my love and remembrance than most anarchists.

True rebels, outlaws, drop-outs, deviants, and creative spirits warrant more respect from me and more to pass on than puffed-up play-warriors in some imagined struggle for liberation, and definitely much more than the millenarian insurrectionary religious zealots of this type. The parts of anarchist history that most anarchists fail to remember are the endless repeated mistakes both in theory and practice or the marginally-known exceptions to this norm (see the publishing project Enemy Combatant for some insights here). In the digital age, when every previous anarchist’s thought and action is supposedly at one’s fingertips, why do most continue to skip over the vital parts, have lame generalized and superficial takes, sink deeper into collectivism and leftism, play political games, promote reform, or even worse, martyrdom?

This idea that in “understanding anarchy as an ancestral lineage… anarchic life is born from anarchic death,” follows and promotes this lame logic of intrinsic lineage and martyrdom. Perhaps Areïon is most direct here: “The willingness of the anarchists of old to kill and die — to be martyred — for the beautiful idea enters the realm of the religious, or more properly the devotional, from Latin devotio, to “vow downwards,” originally a battlefield vow to gods and spirits of the underworld of one’s own life in exchange for victory.” So the one thing that is truly our own, our life, we sacrifice for a victory we cannot share in—except in the spilling of our own blood which is promised to the gods? (What about the 72 virgins?) No. The spirit of anarchy does not ask such a sacrifice (or offer empty rewards). It is not a god. If it were, I could only have a heretical and adversarial relationship with it.

To risk our lives for freedom or defense of autonomy or even as some night-time anonymous attack against specific parts of the machine’s apparatus (including individual actors), for sure, but that is very different than the religious martyrdom of some sort of notion of eternal glory and righteousness, I leave that for the multitude of fundamentalists and their endless wars. This all reminds me of a horrible take on the war in Palestine called “Gods Of Gaza”. It had very similar language and ideas as Warlike, Howling, Pure. It glorified Hamas and considered them part of a righteous “Axis of Resistance” (of which the authors situated themselves and anarchists within) which will eventually prove victorious across the globe, and soon! There was so much to criticize in the piece that it overwhelmed me. I burned it during a spontaneous pyre while the eclipse was occurring this past Spring, not as a sacrifice or offering, but as a heretical show of disgust for this type of thinking. My black sun and theirs seem to mean very different things, but that is another story.

The book continues on with Areïon’s faithful cult-like ideas on so-called “anarchist initiation”, filled with “secret rites and symbols, whose mystical significance can only be truly understood by the initiated.” I would agree, anarchy is not for most domesticated humans, but not because they are not anointed in some holy fluids or not in possession of the sacred and ordained black mask that is suggested. Despite its relative simplicity, anarchy is sadly over most people’s slavish heads (situationally not inherently). We are not proselytizers, we live anarchy, but we also are not a cult of those who hold the true wisdom either, mystifying the profane for only the high priests and prophetesses to comprehend and disseminate, making it sacred and removed from the dynamic elements of life. We are not the divine keepers of the holy Black Flame, nor carriers of the corny black and red banners, we are anarchists. We live anarchy, here and now.

As the book concludes with “Eternal Fire”, even when they describe interestingly immoral and more deviant historical (or possibly mythical) situations, martyrdom, self-sacrifice, and dutiful offerings of our blood for what Areïon has turned into a crusade of purity and righteousness is once again the main point, including very loaded and laughable statements like “May Day, the greatest of anarchist holy days”. May Day has never been that important of a day for me, no matter how hard I tried or it got pounded into me. The workerist and martyr angles never got me off. I suppose I can appreciate Beltane a little more, but still, it is not my holy day. I am left to pick through the detached and discarded refuse and make my own micro-cultural points of meaning with people I love.

I want to be absolutely clear: violence, revolt, belief, and spirituality, are not my problem here at all. In fact, they all are important elements to my very being and my relationship to anarchy. Even elements of myth-making, cult-like affinity, and ceremony can be interesting at times in certain ways. It is the “why” and “how” that I take issue with Areïon’s offering of Warlike, Howling, Pure. In times of deep desperation, millenarian, apocalyptic, and martyr-fueled ideas and actions are not uncommon, but as anarchists, they offer absolutely nothing but cautionary lessons. They are only relevant to religious zealots, political opportunists, or hyperbolic rhetorical posturing. “Warlike” is for people fighting for power, “Howling” can be authentically wild, but for most domesticated humans is usually just a bunch of self-aggrandizing hot-air, and “Pure”, well, this is the no-brainer concept anarchists should run from or attack.

So, the clock is ticking, all odds are stacked against us (especially if your lame goal is to transform society into your self-righteous vision of it, rather than fight for your autonomy and freedom from society and for those you care about), Areïon goes back to throw a last-ditched attempt at a millenarian insurrectionary hail Mary pass made of morality, religion and ideology, proposed with fiery rhetoric and opportunistic readings of history and myth, and filled with martyrdom, convoluted ceremony, and your anarchist blood…. Hmmm. Can you say blitz!

(Sorry for the sports reference,cI actually loath most forms of professional competition, but it seemed fitting.)

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* Invecchiare Selvatico was a primary editor and writer for Green Anarchy magazine and is the author of Black Blossoms At The End Of The World available from: www.underworldamusements.com or from the author: nazelpickens@gmail.com or PO Box 316 Williams, OR 97544

 

A Letter to the Libertarian Left

Aug

10

2024

comments

From DSA: Libertarian Socialist Caucus

“The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.”

The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin

We in the Libertarian Socialist Caucus (LSC) of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) recognize that our formation has dual obligations, both to the development of the socialist movement in the United States and to the broader libertarian socialist movement that exists outside of DSA. While much of our caucus’ focus thus far has been on DSA’s internal politics, we believe in cross-pollination with the broader libertarian left via an exchange of ideas and mutual support of organizational projects.

To accommodate this aspect of our vision, current and former members of LSC established the Horizon Federation, a network designed to bring libertarian socialists together, regardless of affiliation, in order to share knowledge, skills, and opportunities for cooperative praxis[1]. This piece seeks to expand upon our vision for the anarchist movement in the aftermath of LSC’s post-2023 reorganization, explain how DSA-LSC and Horizon fit into that vision, and summarize our short and long-term goals toward strengthening the cause of libertarian socialism.

Social Anarchism, Social Insertion

Before describing our suggested means of intervention in the broader socialist movement, as well as within DSA specifically, it is worth defining the concepts of organizational dualism and social insertion. These concepts were developed at the end of the 20th century by South American anarchist movements whose particular theories form the backbone of what is now known as especifismo, a tendency of social anarchism which advocates for the creation of specifically anarchist organizations. These organizations serve as rendezvous points for anarchists to develop theory and coordinate effective strategies and tactics for popular struggle which both adhere to and propagate anarchist principles.

Organizational dualism is the idea that the struggle against capitalism occurs on two levels, the political and the social. There are two main kinds of organization through which this struggle occurs: political organizations, which operate under a specific political line with strategic and tactical unity, and social organizations, which are popular organizations, such as labor and tenant unions, social movements, and mass organizations.[2]

Between the political and social movements themselves, there are also two forms of political transmission that may occur: the flow of militants from the social to the political, which we call political organization, and the flow of anarchist praxis from the political to the social, which we call social insertion.[3]

Social insertion describes the relationship between anarchist organizations and social movements through which anarchism comes into contact with the popular movement. As anarchists, we take seriously Marx’s opening proclamation in the General Rules of the International Workingmen’s Association: “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.”[4] It is on the social level, not the political, that the class-wide struggle against capitalism is predominantly fought, and we believe that the most thoroughly democratic principles of organization are necessary for the working class to win that struggle.[5] These principles include direct democracy, subsidiarity, direct action, self-management, federalism, class independence, revolutionary perspective, and popular protagonism. When these principles are upheld and defended within social movements and organizations, we have social insertion.[6]

As stated by Carl Eugene Stroud, “it is anarchism that should be within the class struggle and not the class struggle that should be within anarchism.”[7] Because means and ends are always intertwined, we believe that these principles of anarchism can only become widespread on the social level through democratic dialogue, not by dictating them. In Social Anarchism and Organization (SA&O), the Anarchist Federation of Rio de Janeiro (FARJ) describes this as an ethics of horizontality:

When in contact with the social level the specific anarchist organization acts with ethics and does not seek positions of privilege, it does not impose its will, does not dominate, does not deceive, does not alienate, it does not judge itself superior, it does not fight for social movements or in front of them. It struggles with social movements, not advancing even one step beyond what they intend to.

We understand that, from this ethical perspective of the political level, there is no fire that is not collectively lit; there is no going forward, illuminating the way of the people while the people themselves come behind in the dark. The objective of the active minority is, with ethics, to stimulate, to be shoulder-to-shoulder, giving solidarity when it is needed and requested. By this, unlike the vanguard, the active minority is legitimate.[8]

Social insertion is not entryism. It is not vanguardism, and it is not the mass line. Social insertion is a specifically anarchist method of engaging with and influencing mass movements to adopt anarchist organizational principles in a manner that flows from our most important strategic and ethical anarchist principle: the unity of means and ends.

Entryism is a strategy in which members of a political organization seek out positions of leadership in order to impose their line or recruit for their organization, thereby co-opting them to adhere to the line of the insurgent group or tendency. Entryism gives the appearance of political change without directly engaging the base, eventually acting as a parasite on these movements as the base progressively disengages from an organization that they inevitably feel politically disconnected with. Social insertion, on the other hand, advocates for developing the already existing anarchic tendencies of social movements in order to build them up and push them as far as they can go.[9] Rather than directly seizing the decision-making institutions of an organization to assert our control, we must engage the membership directly to encourage development of a desire to seize democratic control for themselves. This can only be done through social work in which anarchists join many different social movements and operate within them. To build the class struggle, we must push its democratic, horizontal character to the highest degree. To build democracy and horizontalism within the class struggle, we must be present and working within the mass organizations as anarchists and libertarian socialists in order to advance democracy and horizontalism, bringing anarchism from our caucuses and organizations to every front in the struggle against capitalism.

A United Front Toward Popular Power

When it comes to applying the strategy of social insertion to the context of organizing within DSA, a caveat must be made. DSA is a “big tent” organization – meaning it is open to a variety of socialist tendencies, from Trotskyism to Orthodox Marxism to anarchism and many more, all united under the banner of democratic socialism.[10] This entails a basic unity around the commitment to both democracy and socialism, with a diversity of views regarding the means of achieving socialism. If we analyze DSA through the lens of organizational dualism, we quickly realize that DSA is neither strictly a social organization nor a political organization; it is in some sense both – an intermediate organization, also known in SA&O as a grouping of tendency:

The grouping of tendency puts itself between the social movements and the specific anarchist organization, bringing together militants of distinct ideologies that have affinity in relation to certain practical questions. [...] This form of organization aims to solve a very common problem that we find in activism. For example, when we know very dedicated activists; revolutionaries that advocate self-management, autonomy, grassroots democracy, direct democracy, etc. and with whom we do not act because they are not anarchists. These activists could work with the anarchists in the groupings of tendency and defend their positions in the social movements together.[11]

Within DSA, we find a myriad of comrades organizing on every front of the class struggle in the United States – from labor organizing, to tenant organizing, to mutual aid and beyond. Many of them concur with us on a number of practical questions: the necessity of revolution, popular protagonism, self-management, militancy, class independence, and anti-vanguardism. While the particular affinities we have with comrades from each of the internal caucuses within DSA varies widely, the assemblage of caucuses with which we have the greatest affinity comprises what is colloquially referred to as the “left wing” of DSA, with LSC at its left edge.

This coalition, albeit loose and informal, has fought and continues to fight for an anti-capitalist, class-independent, militant and revolutionary DSA. We believe that DSA has the potential to be such a grouping of tendency wherein comrades from every sector of the anti-capitalist struggle come together to create a united force exponentially more powerful than the sum of its parts. In fact, we believe it is already acting as such, albeit only partially.

Beyond merely being a grouping of tendency, DSA has the potential to be an organization which can unite the socialist tendency of the entire struggle and produce a force great enough to topple capitalism – what Black Rose Anarchist Federation describes as the front of dominated classes:

This Front of Dominated Classes seeks to unite the broad base of the dominated classes in all their diversity, in all their organizational expressions and demands. While the organized working class remains a critical component of this front, our fundamental task is to build bridges between the full range of organized social forces fighting against the system of domination—from undocumented immigrants struggling against deportation, detention, and discrimination, to fights over housing, healthcare, gendered violence, war, policing, ecology, and more. Isolated from each other, there are concrete limits to what these movements can achieve. Only through a Front of Dominated Classes will we be able to bring about a revolutionary rupture with the system of domination and replace it with libertarian socialism.[12]

This front, like DSA, lies at the intersection of the political and the social, presenting a broad coalition of forces united in the struggle to end capitalism and the state. The front of dominated classes is the seed of popular power, the ultimate strategic aim of especifismo during the pre-revolutionary period, and the necessary condition for social revolution:

When the especifistas claim that it is necessary to “build popular power”, what is defended is nothing more than the construction of a popular social force capable of promoting a social revolution and, with that, establishing a relationship of power against the ruling classes and great agents of domination in general. Obviously, it is not about the construction of any power, but about a self-managed power, which implies the direct combat of the relations of domination, and that points to a society without classes and other forms of domination. Therefore, our conception of popular power is a conception of self-managed power.[13]

Despite our belief in the potential of DSA, we are under no illusions that DSA is ready at this moment to be a front of the dominated classes. DSA is in serious danger of losing itself to the traps of reformism and electoralism, leading comrades down a political dead end via opportunism and cooptation.

We must also note, however, that DSA is the largest socialist organization in the United States. If we ignore the role that DSA plays in the American socialist movement we risk losing out on the gains made in left-wing politics over the past decade. We believe that all socialists need to recognize the opportunity that DSA’s genuinely democratic organizing model provides us. It is an organization with the potential to be a major catalyst in the formation of a genuine popular power, rather than merely siphoning off the existing power of the state by cozying up to politicians or appointing a clique of “enlightened” leaders to govern on behalf of all.

Building the Libertarian Left Beyond DSA

One of the outcomes of our caucus’ reorganization has been a renewed emphasis on direct ideological expectations upon one another. The Points of Unity we drafted and approved near the start of 2024 committed us to an overall ideological platform that simply did not exist in the previous iteration of LSC.[14] As one member of our caucus described in their piece “LSC Does Not Belong to DSA: We Caucus Wherever We Are,”[15] we do not see our work as having to exist within DSA or even within LSC. Our commitment is, above all, toward the revolutionary cause. If there is a need to discard our own identity as a formation, we are willing to do so, especially if it would allow for the unification of the libertarian socialist movement in shared struggle.

To this end, we not only tolerate dual-carding with other libertarian socialist organizations but honor our members’ diverse movement backgrounds. We respect the prerogative of our comrades to freely associate at their discretion. And, we are thrilled to welcome Cooperation Milwaukee to Horizon Federation. To our siblings on the libertarian left, we invite you to connect with us to further shared goals. Regardless of your relationship to DSA, we know there exists countless organizing projects in the communities we share, and we endeavor to aid your work and build mutual trust and power.

Finally, we recognize that if the libertarian socialist movement is to unify in our means and ends, it does not benefit us to remain disorganized while the working class continues to have no place to turn for liberation. Our goal is not to demand that a plethora of libertarian socialist and anarchist organizations immediately unify and cast aside their independent identities and ideological distinctions. Rather, it is by engaging one another that we will better learn to engage with the American and global working classes and empower them to fight for their freedom.

To those watching from the sidelines and not currently active in struggle: multiple comrades in our caucus became radicalized as libertarian socialists during, or even because of, their time in DSA. Whether our work happens within DSA or outside it, we must continue to support each other amidst the atomization of our capitalist society. If you wish to fight for freedom, solidarity, and democracy, we're building the libertarian socialist left here and now, and we need all the help we can get.

Reach out to us at dsa-lsc.org/horizon, dsa-lsc.org/join, or contact us by email at lsc.dsa.lux@gmail.com, and let's get to work.

Solidarity Forever,

Libertarian Socialist Caucus