The anarchist acts thus not due to modesty, or the spirit of contradiction, but because he holds a conception which is completely different from that of the libertarian. He doesn’t believe in innate liberty, but in liberty that is acquired. And because he knows that he doesn’t possess all liberties, he has a greater will to acquire the power of liberty.
— Albert Libertad, Freedom
I speak to those who know. I speak to those who have made kindling for their fire. I speak to all who are hungry, who are cast down, who are maintaining a foothold in the absurd. My words are this: We must break away from all of it.
We live in the worst imaginable dystopia – and it only gets worse every single day. I cannot even list the relevant articles of events that adequately paint the picture; I know that a cursory glance of the totality leaves enough impression.
No one of ten ways can be the only path we all take on. No couple of revolving chores can make existing more tolerable or efficient. No hope that is not sprouting through the determined life choices of the free individual can lead to opportunities for others. A passionate creativity, its resulting clarity of oneself in relation to it all, must come about like a fine incense smoke wisping through the trash heaps of society. We who write and read this make it so.
Life is ours! This does not mean it is “all of ours”, because it rightly belongs only to all of those who love freedom and love the vast possibility in being alive and free. Life is only available to those who have no mind for controlling others. Life may only be open to those who are not bent on sealing it shut. Who says so? Those who manifest and defend freedom, those who shape the conditions of life to make it worth entering and enjoying.
But life is not so at this time. The great majority of people are slaves to some property owner, to some employer, to some notion that straps them to the rail leading to the furnace. It is a terrible configuration. It is terrible to be possessed by any configuration. In all the history of the nations and the peoples, great banners were raised, swords and rifles taken up in the march toward an upheaval that results in a new society, either of rights and due process, or of autocracy and streamlined domination. This pattern has never done any person under control any good. To fight for the nation is to fight against oneself and one’s associates. It is to fight for the negation of one’s ultimate dexterity of will. Sadly some do find a sense of righteous empowerment through surrenduring some portion of themselves to a cause, a party, an ideology, an identity. And it seems that this trend can only persist until those with radical potential assume the best possible mode of disobeying.
A turn must come from within us. A deviation that retains all the zeal of fighting for something worthy, but coordinated under the sunlight of ourselves, carried out with a direct connection between our efforts and our gains. No more with constructing new walls that still stifle who we each really are. No more with dreaming and hoping in accordance with the miasma of existing acceptability and civility. The bounds of life are there as a test: Of whether one will remain among the livestock or dare to journey beyond the fence.
A time is upon us. A time for us to affirm our lives. No more can stand in our way.
We forsake the garden of our every possibility in remaining fervent about things that truthfully do not effect what matters. We embrace our garden in the forceful counter-imposition of our beautiful rage onto what aims to imprison us and tell us “No.”.
Now is our superior right to say as an explosion of thunder and a rain of fire “No” in return. In bright dastardly flames be all the churches, all the banks, all the courts, all the detention centers, all the schools and universities, all the freshly looted stores, all the landmarks of our slavery.
What is any “savagery” of a group of anarchists compared to the sterilized, collectivist savagery of the state and what it protects? Their entrenchment into everything has reached such heights of triumph, that life unshackled from its engines can scarcely be thought of anymore. That alone should be enough to stoke a vicious revival of life altogether.
Let the blind rage of deep anarchistic insight be the guide for our journey. Let the storm inside of you be the praxis of actual liberation for yourself and your loved ones.
Co-Authored by the Effrenatum Collective