There were several iterations of this introduction planned. But ultimately, with so many different events unfolding across the world in the month of July in the year 2024, the general overview of the world was left as follows:
We could be looking at an official conservative autocracy holding power in Turtle Island
in the face of a stubborn and severely aging Biden staying in the presidential raceas Vice President Kamala Harris is endorsed by Biden against the newly confirmed Trump-Vance ticket made emboldened by a failed assassination attempt by a fellow republican twenty-year-old; some weeks before, the Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts said on far-right media “We are in the process of the Second American revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be”; American fascist groups have marched on several different occasions in Nashville, Tennessee without proper dealing with; Project 2025 — the christian nationalist project to eliminate the administrative state and redefine presidency as autocracy — is being put into place every day before Trump’s potential re-election with backing from lawmakers in the Democratic party. Abroad: Coolock in County Dublin, Ireland has seen a far-right anti-migrant uprising involving the arson of the construction site of a migrant housing center; Argentina’s far-right government continues its war on the working class with much needed resistance taking place in the streets; India remains under the stranglehold of Modi’s recently re-elected far-right Hindu nationalist government, further sowing division in the nation and oppression onto the Muslim population; Israel’s unabated genocide of the Palestinian people begins to destabilize in the streets of Tel Aviv and elsewhere amid conscription of orthodox communities, calls for the bloodthirsty Bibi to step down continue while shipments of weapons from the US resume; The Turkish military persists in their attacks in South Kurdistan with many civilian casualties a time after the YPJ had captured the leader of the current iteration of Daesh (ISIS.)
We had revised this some ten times while trying to keep it compact, and still it was not enough to capture the evolving tire fires of humanity’s thrashing pangs. Listing off headlines is more nauseating than one can imagine. That’s all that reality is now. Everything from afar. Everything from institutional word of mouth. Something could be going on right outside your door, and the world would only know it as a headline. Your real lived experience is made lower than the lice. This is what people vote, humiliate and exhaust themselves to maintain. Just to be lice of the Earth.
But this is not a news outlet. We are not fixated on the particulars of current events as the end goal. We are here reading and writing this zine to tackle power — and we know that power corrupts, we know where it is concentrated and we know the arsenal of incendiary distractions used on working poor people against other marginalized peoples. But well after power has corrupted those susceptible and concentrated itself in their violent social systems, after all the distractions are exhausted and debunked, it becomes desperate. Thus Elon Musk is now donating $45,000,000 a month to Trump’s “America PAC”, making his campaign a competing corporate welfare baby with the Walton family. This is done generally as a consolidation of economic forces with political forces, the core tenant of fascism. There is an obvious project collaborated on from both christian nationalists and the corporate/private owning class to enshrine the government as a direct instrument of far-right interest, without any retaining of “equal protection under the law” or “due process.”
We have already seen far-right microcosm victories in Turtle Island with homelessness itself being outlawed with no actual solution to the problem. The lawmaking class of the state is actively seeking out criminalization of every aspect of human life in order for people to either be working slaves or incarcerated slaves. The picture is not pretty at all. And this is not to say it is any prettier if Harris or whoever manages to pull through and win the electoral college. It will only be a slightly preferable buffer once more between us and the next far-right political uprising. That pathetic dream is dwindling more and more every single hour that this game persists. Imagine those reading this text four, eight, twelve years in the future. We cannot afford to let our somber embrace of The Worst get the best of us.
Pessimism is only helpful if it is contextual, not general. To be generally pessimistic is to reach for the easy victory in being defeated on a cosmic scale by the calm, enormous substantive nothing of galaxies. Our problems are down here on Earth. What matters here and now is refining skills, building connections, doing tangibly helpful work. Anarchism is not to be preached as a salvation of what we have known, but demonstrated as the effective guiding principles toward a genuinely free and self-owned life for all.
Shall we allow the mental and spiritual gunk of stupid powerful people to anchor our legs to the bottoms of a moralist ocean of non-action and self-denial? Or shall we depart from every consideration they may have, every question they may pose, every mandate they may codify, and act to spitefully save our own lives, nourishing and keeping them as long as we may from the maniacs and their mindless, soulless goons of domination?
Whatever you’re going to do — just do it. But do it wisely. And if you will, raise the only flag whose black field represents the only imminent action we can know: the forceful negation of all things perpetuating domination.
Co-authored by the Effrenatum collective