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Making numbers go up isn’t compatible with human freedom. It’s time to flip the tables in how we determine progress.

Emmy-nominated labor reporter Mike Elk breaks down Lula's incredible comeback win.

After lying to the press that he wasn’t a flight risk, Bolsonaro snuck out of the country in the dead of night, with alleged support from the Trump Administration and is now in the US

Israel’s election campaign reflected the wide support for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians across mainstream politics. The electoral stalemate between government and opposition is unlikely to slow the radicalization of Israeli society.

European authorities want France’s next government to cut welfare. It’s a stand for the same budget orthodoxies that have fueled current protests, and that have collapsed support for the liberal center ground.

Bolsonaro fled to the US via Argentina on a private jet linked to an alleged cocaine trafficker

In Cuba, land has always meant talking about food production, sovereignty and the future. Agriculture is at the center of national priorities to produce more and better to feed the people.

The post Cuba: Agriculture at the Center of the Transformations appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

Members of the Democratic Socialists of America are thinking seriously about a national presidential campaign for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2028 that would reach millions of working people and have the potential to transform American politics.

The rapid decline of Antarctic sea ice since 2016 has triggered a dramatic shift in a crucial part of Earth’s climate system, scientists say.  In a paper published Wednesday, researchers documented a sharp salinity increase in a vast layer of the Southern Ocean, extending from 2,300 to 4,000 feet deep and encircling Antarctica. The shift […]

Author: Sara Blum
Title: Martyr Culture
Subtitle: Revolutionary Culture in Rojava
Date: June 2025
Notes: This essay was written by Sara Blum, an internationalist who spent several years with the YPJ in Rojava, to accompany and contextualize Orso: Wartime Journals of an Anarchist, published in July 2025.
Source: retrieved on 10/27/2026 from https://www.tangledwilderness.org/features/martyr-culture

I remain committed, until the end, to the struggle for liberation
and to the beauty and love it creates.

Abdullah Öcalan

Kurdish friends, upon meeting an internationalist, often ask about our decision to come to their homeland in Rojava, Kurdistan. When they’d ask how I first came into contact with the friends, I felt a bit embarrassed to say that, honestly, the first friends of the movement I met were those who helped me after I actually arrived in Mesopotamia. (Editor’s note: “The friends” is a colloquialism stemming from the literal translation of the word “heval” which has historically been used by members of the Kurdish liberation movement to refer to each other.) I told them I learned about the movement by reading articles on a few different anarchist websites and contacted the friends by email. In fact, I knew so little about the movement that I first emailed YPG (People’s Protection Units) instead of YPJ (Women’s Protection Units). The friends were often amazed at this, and in their generosity considered it some kind of bravery or indication of the depth of my belief in the revolution and the people, rather than of naivety or impulsivity. It’s a common story among internationalists from the so-called USA, because the Kurdish Freedom Movement doesn’t have a presence here like it does in many parts of Europe, where there is a bigger Kurdish diaspora. When I initially went, I planned to stay for six months or a year. I ended up staying for several years, and for most of that time I was with the autonomous women’s military defense forces, YPJ.

I decided to go in late 2018, and at that time it was hard to find much information about what to expect. Not much has changed in that regard. My dad told me to bring extra socks, and that before going I must read Che Guevara’s On Guerrilla Warfare. Other than that, most of the practical information about what to bring I received from an internationalist fighter whom I reached through an online message board. He said to bring all sorts of supplies, sent a packing list, and told me to bring a bunch of US dollars. He emphasized that I should bring water for border crossing across the mountains, which he said would be long and difficult, but to not share my water because the Kurdish comrades would pass it down the line until there was none left, and then I wouldn’t have water. The YPJ friend I was corresponding with told me I didn’t need much, and if it came to be that I needed something when I got there or along the way, comrades would sort it out then. This seemed to me rather casual at the time. I felt frustrated at the vagueness.

Packing and repacking my bag, researching the weather conditions, trying to prepare as much as possible for what could be the rest of my short little life, I wanted all the information I could find and there wasn’t much. I didn’t realize then that I was encountering the first contrast of revolutionary and capitalist culture: different modes of being. The internationalist from the message board, with his best intentions, showed me one way to go about struggle, while the YPJ comrade showed me another way of joining the revolution. Preparing myself as an individual by making sure I had all the right specific things on the one hand, and on the other, preparing myself to take on the same circumstances as whomever I end up with and to sort all my needs within the context of our collective needs. As an internationalist from the West, the tension between these tendencies has long lived in me. I find that it still does, but I have also found that being out of water together always seems to be better than having water while the person next to me doesn’t.

Before I left, I tried many times to write letters to my family, close friends, and comrades, which I would leave in the hands of a trusted friend so that, in the event of my death, they could be sent. I was determined to leave loved ones with some words of strength—I didn’t want to die, but since it was a distinct possibility, it was important to ensure that my death would not be a weight or darkness in their lives. I had made this decision for myself, but I realized as time went on that I’d also made a decision for many other people. My mother became the mother of a YPJ fighter defending the Women’s Revolution. My close friends in the U.S. became personally involved in the defense of the liberated territories as their loved one would be there. Telling my family I was leaving was one of the hardest things I’d done in my life until that point, but writing those letters proved to be much more difficult. I found that I couldn’t finish them. The hours I spent writing and re-writing them, however, were the first I’d ever spent thinking so much about my own death and its meaning. It’s easier to think of dying than it is to think about the meaning of my own death for the people left behind. I told myself I’d finish the letters during my basic training.

I arrived first in Southern Kurdistan. After a short while, I ended up with a couple of other internationalists in a refugee camp where we stayed as we waited for the opportunity to cross the border into Rojava. We spoke not one word of Kurdish, and only very few words in Arabic, which as it turned out were all completely useless in the area we were staying. We couldn’t read any signs, or documents, or understand the most basic hand gestures which were, to my surprise, completely different from the ones of my culture. Nobody mentioned that on any message boards. I never imagined it could be so difficult to establish a shared understanding of “yes” and “no.” I felt like an incompetent toddler. Incompetent, I specify, because around me were quite often dozens of Kurdish toddlers each of a higher degree of competence within the context of Kurdish life. This is all to say that when encountering the world around me in those first weeks, as I waited in Başur (Southern Kurdistan) to cross the border into Rojava (Western Kurdistan), there was often no way anything could be explained to me with language, and often also not with a gesture, even given the downright maternal levels of patience of our Kurdish hosts.

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“No to Automation”: A Negotiating Position, Not a Programme

The Trump administration loves coal plants. The rest of us are paying the price in higher electricity bills, poorer health, and worsening climate change.  That’s the takeaway of  an analysis out today from the Environmental Defense Fund. It finds the Trump administration is directly or indirectly propping up nearly…

Plans are advancing on the Gulf Coast of Texas for an enormous seawater desalination plant which, if built, would be part of one of the largest water infrastructure developments in the country.  Unlike other projects, this one wouldn’t belong to the public, but to a private, foreign water supplier.  IDE Technologies, an Israeli water treatment […]

In the final stretch of their midterm drive to gain control of Congress, Democratic candidates are talking mostly about the pain of high energy costs, not the risks of climate change. But advocates of climate action view the Nov. 3 elections as a crucial moment for the movement. U.S. voters will decide whether to upend […]

Over the course of two weeks in October, Maine’s incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins and her Democrat challenger, former state Senate President Troy Jackson, met for four debates. Each debate focused heavily on energy affordability, and each exchange followed roughly the same script: When Jackson brought up the high costs of heating a home with […]

Heat pumps, superefficient sources of electric heating and cooling, are  winners for the climate ,  air quality , and  typically a household’s energy bills. But a common claim cautioning against their widespread adoption in the U.S. is that the electrical grid is too strained to handle all the extra demand they would…

Title: Democratic Socialists of America & Libertarian Socialism
Subtitle: A Debate
Date: 1983
Notes: 1983 debate from the Workers Solidarity Alliance magazine ideas & action on whether or not anarcho-syndicalists and libertarian socialists should participate in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
Source: From ideas & action issue # 3, Spring 1983.
Retrieved on 10-27-2026 from libcom.org/article/democratic-socialists-america-libertarian-socialism
Editors’ Note/Introduction: Bureaucratic Utopianism?, by Tom Wetzel

The last few years have been a discouraging period for those in the U. S. who want fundamental change in the direction of freedom and equality. Though struggle against the powers-that-be goes on, as always, struggles in the last few years have tended to be episodic and isolated. It’s hard to find signs of a widespread willingness to fight the bosses and the government. This lack of movement among the mainstream of the population is, in all likelihood, the root cause of the general political drift to the right and, as well, the evolution towards social-democracy among so many leftists whose radicalism had been spawned by the movements of the late 60s and early ’70s. One evidence of this latter trend was the evolution of the New American Movement (NAM) away from the revolutionary New Left politics of its origin, culminating in its merger last year with Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) — a tiny social-democratic sect that had emerged from the break-up of the old Socialist Party in 1972. That split-up had been itself a reflection of the Vietnam War, since the Socialist Party of the 1960s had been firmly in the hands of the “State Department socialists” who thought the Communists were such a threat that it merited allying themselves with U.S. bosses, by supporting the U.S. government’s imperialist foreign policy. This fit in with the practice of cooperation with the bosses which characterized the union chiefs who controlled the Socialist Party in those days. The split in the SP created three groups — the majority formed the Social Democrats USA, made up of such class-collaborationist union leaders as Lloyd McBride of the United Steelworkers and Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers. They had no compunction about supporting U.S. imperialism in Indo-China (and anywhere else) right to the bitter end. In 1981, for example, Shanker’s AFT ran a major spread in the “American Teacher” supporting U.S. policy in El Salvador as a struggle for “democracy” (even while members of the Salvadoran teachers union were being tortured or hunted down by forces of the local dictatorship). Another outfit that came out of the break-up of the old SP was the group headed by ex-Milwaukee mayor Frank Zeidler which resurrected the name “Socialist Party “ for itself. This group opposed the Vietnam war but more on the basis of liberal pacifist than class-struggle grounds. And finally, the third fragment from the old SP was Harrington’s liberal group who had no consistently anti-militarist or anti-imperialist position (for example, they have supported U.S. military aid to Israel until just recently) but who simply followed the evolution of the liberal mainstream in its belated opposition to the Vietnam War. Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is the organization which resulted from the absorption of NAM by Harrington’s DSOC. Chris Nielsen, whose piece on “DSA and Libertarian Socialists” we are printing here, recommends the “democratic socialist” milieu — and specifically DSA — as an appropriate area for participation by anti-authoritarian socialists or anarchists. Though we disagree with Chris’ conclusion, we think he raises a number of issues worth discussing. Social democratic ideas are on the rise, and the sort of position Chris argues for is one that needs to be answered by libertarian socialists.

What is “social-democracy’’? Social-democracy is not unique in pursuing or supporting short-range changes to benefit working people — the revolutionary libertarian unions of the early decades of this century, such as the IWW in this country, used militant tactics for goals short of class emancipation. Social-democratic politics is typified by a reliance on electoral politics with the union bureaucracy providing the major base of support. Social-democratic tactics have traditionally led to a statist conception of what socialism is all about — socialist politics get defined in terms of what state policies the social democratic leaders will implement on our behalf once in office, and structure of socialism usually gets defined in terms of nationalization — and certainly this is the content of DSA’s politics. Of course, it is true that some people who have proposed the use of social-democratic tactics have not proposed statist solutions. There was the now-defunct People’s Bicentennial Commission (an off-shoot of NAM) which proposed the idea of “self-management” in a market framework, achieved through the electoral process. (An old idea, first advocated in the 1800s by LaSalle, the father of the German Social Democratic Party.) And then there are the tiny DeLeonist sects like the New Union Party and the Socialist Labor Party who propose to use the electoral process to abolish the state (eventually) and institute industrial self-management. Chris, on the other hand, is not recommending social-democratic politics for our participation because he wishes to defend the actual political content of social-democratic groups like DSA but only because he believes that such politics represent a necessary intermediate stage in the evolution of the consciousness of the American people towards a socialist future.

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Author: Kevin J. Holohan
Title: Navigating Extinction
Subtitle: Zen Buddhism and Eco-Anarchism
Date: 2022
Notes: College of Education and Community Innovation, Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI 49401, USA. Religions 2022, 13(1), 60; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13010060. This article belongs to the Special Issue Buddhist Practice for the Crises That Face Us.
Source: https://www.mdpi.com/
Abstract

What can esoteric knowledge and spiritual practices from the East teach us about the deep psychological roots of domination and hierarchy? In what ways have ancient Buddhist sages acted as anarchist exemplars and deep ecologists long before these traditions began in the West? How might these anarchistic spiritual traditions inform our approaches to work in education, expand our notions of community, help us navigate ecological collapse, and contribute to our efforts to sustain living systems and rekindle our connection to the myriad sentient inhabitants of the places we live beyond the reaches of capital and the State? This paper will examine the anti-doctrine doctrine of Zen Buddhism as a concrete and embodied system of thought and practice for seeing through the delusions of the ego and the psychological and cultural conditioning these delusions engender. What will also be acknowledged is the general lack of attention this spiritual tradition has given to the capitalistic, authoritarian, and anti-ecological systems that tap into and flow from these delusions. It will be argued that these experiential approaches to overcoming the tyranny of the ego have significant implications for loosening the grip of hierarchical thinking, capitalist hyper-consumption, centralized systems of obedience and command, and human destruction of the biosphere.

1. Introduction

“The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both.”

—Gary Snyder, Buddhism and the coming revolution, 1969.

What can esoteric knowledge and practices from the East teach us about the deep psychological roots of domination and hierarchy? In what ways have ancient Buddhist sages acted as anarchist exemplars and deep ecologists long before these traditions began in the West? How might these anarchistic spiritual traditions inform our approaches to work in the social foundations, expand our notions of community, help us navigate ecological collapse, and contribute to our efforts to sustain living systems and rekindle our connection to the myriad sentient inhabitants of the places we live beyond the reaches of capital and the State? This paper will examine the underlying premises of Zen Buddhism as a concrete and embodied system of thought and practice for seeing through the delusions of the ego and the psychological and cultural conditioning these delusions engender. What will also be acknowledged is the general lack of attention this spiritual tradition has given to the capitalistic, authoritarian, and anti-ecological systems that tap into and flow from these delusions. It will be argued that a refined set of principles and practices for overcoming the tyranny of the ego have significant implications for loosening the grip of hierarchical thinking, capitalist hyper-consumption, centralized systems of obedience and command, and human destruction of the biosphere. Transcending the ego and the direct recognition of a “community of all beings” has foundations-shaking repercussions and can be realized through the pursuit of a Buddhist Anarchism.

Many scholars, social critics, philosophers, and religious leaders have pointed out that the social and ecological crisis of which we are in the midst is, at root, a cultural and spiritual crisis (Berry 1988; Bowers 2001; Martusewicz et al. 2015). Taking this idea seriously, humanity is at a crossroads. One possible path represents the continuation of philosophical and cultural frameworks that posit humans as standing above and independent from natural living systems and the earth itself, a path of control and domination, of conquest and colonization of communities human and more-than-human, where the only possible solutions to the mess we are in lie in technological manipulation of the biosphere or escape to far-off worlds for those who can afford it. However, other possibilities exist and have been operating alongside the techno-industrial social order since its inception. One of these possibilities, an alternative that has been well-traveled by our paleolithic ancestors, past and present land-based cultures and communities, contemporary indigenous peoples, and eco-centric conscientious objectors who refuse to participate in the systems and institutions responsible for murdering the planet, points in the direction of scaling down and dismantling industrial civilization and creating communities the every action and decision of which is rooted in the recognition of interdependence, compassionate concern for all sentient beings, and a desire to end suffering. It would be naïve, and perhaps misguided, to think we could simply abandon the complex system of nation-states and economies and the deeply held cultural beliefs the undergird and perpetuate this system. However, we have living examples of those who have chosen to take an alternative path, and in the spirit of the old saying, to build a new world in the shell of the old. As will be argued, Zen Buddhism provides a map and compass for this path but leaves the walking to each of us.

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Author: Gaëtan Pirou
Title: Proudhonism and Marxism
Date: 1919
Notes: Originally published as ‘Proudhonisme et Marxisme’ in La Grande Revue, No. 100 (August 1919), pp. 226–241. Translated from the French by Shaun Murdock.
Source: Retrieved on 23 October 2026 from Root & Branch – Proudhonian Sociology Portfolio (PDF edition)

A contemporary study of Proudhonian ideas might have one of two objectives. Either we will strive to retrace Proudhon’s historical physiognomy,{1} discover the guiding principles of his thought, and explain them by his heredity and temperament, the social circles he lived in, and the events he witnessed. Or else, concerned more with utility than with reconstruction, we will retain from Proudhonism only what may be used by scholars to understand today’s world and foresee tomorrow’s, and by reformers to build an effective, fruitful doctrine for action. Both methods are equally legitimate. The first is necessary for historians of ideas, for whoever wishes to restore Proudhon to us as he was. The second should be preferred if we seek less to describe the past than to shed light on the present and prepare for the future.

Depending on which of these two angles we approach it from, the relationship between Proudhonism and Marxism appears very different.

Historically, Proudhon and Marx are adversaries and constitute an antithesis.[1] After having maintained friendly and sustained relations in 1844 during Marx’s stay in France, and having spent whole nights discussing philosophy and political economy, they fell out irremediably when Marx replied to Economic Contradictions with The Poverty of Philosophy and disdainfully dismissed Proudhon as petty-bourgeois. The years passed without softening this animosity. In 1865, in his famous letter to the Sozial-Demokrat, Marx did not hesitate to judge Proudhon’s memoir in these terms, forgetting his past praise: ‘What Is Property? In a rigorously scientific history of political economy this work would scarcely be worthy of mention’, and he protested against Proudhon’s ‘scientific charlatanism’, ‘unbearable chatter’, and ‘imbecile cynicism’.[2]

In fact, between Proudhon and Marx the contrast of spirit and tendency is obvious. Whereas Marxist thought arose from the development of industrial life, from large-scale production concentrated and socialised in its technical forms if not in its legal regime, Proudhonian thought is fundamentally rural in origin and orientation: the social cell of the future society that Proudhon envisages is neither the factory nor the workers’ group, but the peasant family with austere morals and an individualistic life, whose property, founded on possession, takes on an absolute and sacred character. If Marx holds that the fundamental explanation of world history lies in variations of economic technique, according to Proudhon the guiding thread that enables us to find our way in the chaos of historical events is philosophical in nature: history is a long process of reasoning and society a metaphysics in action. And while for Marx only a change in the mode of production is capable of putting an end to economic instability and class struggle, Proudhon seeks the solution of the social problem in a reform of circulation and exchange, leading gradually to the disappearance of all usurious levies.

Opposed during their lifetime in personality and doctrine, Proudhon and Marx were opposed even after their death through the struggles between their disciples. The triumph of Marxism in the International after 1867 was accompanied by the decline of Proudhonism, and the Proudhonian renaissance at the beginning of the 20th century asserted itself all the more strikingly as the crisis and disintegration of Marxist ideas intensified. When Proudhon rises, Marx, by an almost automatic movement, falls. Those who extol Proudhon – a Fournière or a Rouanet – judge Marx lukewarmly, while orthodox Marxists – Charles Rappoport, for example – do not hide their contempt for Proudhon.

Finally, during the war, the antagonism was marked even more vividly and acutely than before, and some sought to elevate it to the height of a conflict between two national psychologies. Opposite Marx, profoundly German in his authoritarianism and materialism, Proudhon was held up as the symbol of the French mind through his intransigent liberalism and generous idealism. Summarising this thesis, Charles Turgeon wrote:

In this duel, where the antipathy of two minds is heightened by the incompatibility of two doctrines, it is permissible to see, above the antagonism of two exasperated prides, even above the clash of two doctrines and the opposition of two tactics [...] a more serious and more irreducible conflict, the conflict between the French mind and the German mind.[3]

I do not dream of denying that this way of presenting things is broadly accurate. If we wish to place Proudhon back within his historical context, synthesise his ideas faithfully, and characterise his past influence, we are necessarily led to bring to the foreground how Proudhonism stands opposed to Marxism.

Yet it is not at all the same when, moving on to the second point of view mentioned earlier, we focus primarily on the current scientific and practical value of Proudhonian thought. If we place ourselves deliberately on this terrain – as I would like to do in the following pages – we will be led to highlight certain Proudhonian ideas to which commentators, and perhaps Proudhon himself, have sometimes granted only secondary importance, but which, appreciated with the benefit of hindsight and experience today, prove to be singularly profound and eminently useful for the work of revision and reconstruction imposed upon us by the necessities of the present hour.

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Plug for latest issue of the Anarchist Communist Group's theoretical magazine.

Author Anarchist Communist Group (ACG) Submitted by Battlescarred on November 4, 2026

Latest issue of Stormy Petrel, with important articles on AI, and much more!

https://www.anarchistcommunism.org/2026/10/06/new-stormy-petrel-now-out-2/

• anarchist communism
• Anarchist Communist Group (ACG)

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