Years ago, in the run-up to the 2004 election of George W. Bush, my then-Free Society Collective helped initiate the anarchist “Don’t Just (Not) Vote” effort (alas, Crimethinc, while part of, stole credit for something that should have belonged to no one). The idea was: whether you spend a few pointless minutes in a ballot booth or not, what do you do to fight hierarchy and transform the world the other 364 days, 23 hours, and fifty-five minutes a year? It was meant to encourage and highlight self-organization, and to a limited degree, did just that, including as we headed into an era that saw the anarchic “movement of the squares” and large-scale solidarity infrastructures, among other prefigurations of possibility.

Fast-forward to the run-up to Trump’s presidential election in 2016, when the anarchistic cry was, “Become ungovernable!” The successes of authoritarianism around the globe and here began to close off promise, and instead demanded anarchic disobedience, resistance, and riots. Alas, the fascists took up our slogan, even as the state clamped down on us.

Now we find ourselves at a clear crossroads: “Vote for fascism, or face fascism,” as @vickysurge aptly titled a recent piece. We’re arguably already living under the 2024 election “choice”: fascism or fascism. Even liberals understand that just enough to write “uncommitted” on primary ballots—an opening, however small.

So what should our anarchist response(s) and role(s) be heading into November and beyond? Sure, it’s still true, that urge we have to “become ungovernable,” but fascism itself is far more ungovernable than us, and dangerously so, as glimpsed in the changing face of a repression that increasingly follows no rules or the lawless Supreme Court, to name just two.

Maybe this is our window—the only one that looks toward freedom for all—to foster and fight hard for a “become self-governable” ethos and practice, a “no state” rebellion that’s liberatory, in which our dreams can’t fit in ballot boxes or fascist alternatives because both aren’t choices anymore.

We have little other option really.

It’s either: #AnarchismOrFascism, or fascism.

I want life to win.

#BecomeSelfGovernable

“Climate grief” is a daily companion of late. And not just in the narrow (albeit enormous) sense of capitalist-fueled ecological catastrophe. Like the fact that it’s snowing in May while the oceans are warmer than ever.

No, there’s a much more expansive, insidiously everyday grief that most people hardly seem to even take conscious note of because it feels so “normal.” Or shall we say “normalized.” Grief is stirred up continually by the whole climate—social, cultural, political—that surrounds people 24/7 these fascist days and nights, but it’s introduced in such bits and pieces that people become numb to it, as if “frogs in boiling water,” as the saying goes.

Or maybe they honor their grief in small, private, compartmentalized ways, seeing only their own losses. Not connecting the dots to the whole grievous climate they now inhabit—a climate that grows more heartless and deadly by the hour, as one place bans abortion, another serves up genocidal laws for trans people or immigrants, yet another is home to those who try to burn down mosques and synagogues, or the site of the umpteenth murder-by-cop and mass murder by a white Christian supremacist, and wretchedly on and on it goes.

One has to look close for signs of that “climate grief,” yearning—even if still inchoately—to gather with others for collective and rebellious mourning. Maybe a single tulip left on a bench in a garden, with what look like teardrops on the wooden seat? Maybe that person—so many other people too—aches inside and feels alone and knows that only “we keep us safe[r],” but has no idea where those kindred spirits are? All they see are tulip petals looking up at them as if kindred teardrops, as that person on a public bench ponders what feels like their own world falling apart, seemingly powerless to halt it.

Anarchists leave their own traces of grief. Flowers, yes. But usually objects that offer a sense of some communal agency, such as a humble sticker on stolen Anishinaabeg lands that cries out for less loss, more life, more of us being there for each other.

Our grief over the current climate is a crossroads: “mutual aid or mutual annihilation.”

#AnarchismOrFascism

It feels pretty special, blessedly so, to be able to do my first in-person talk and schmooze with others about an anthology that I started curating in the “before” times, which “routinely” included lots of book events at many beautiful spots, and finished in the early hellish pandemic days, and was birthed into print as the pandemic began to shift into another “new normal” part of the fascist social fabric. Like so many of us, I’ve been profoundly separated from so much I love these past 2.5+ years, including the delight of bringing the books I do—as labors of love—into the world among others.

But Jewishness, and especially queer anarchist Jewishness, is used to inhabiting liminal spaces, spaces of betweenness. Twilight is the par excellent moment—ecological and one could say trans or nonbinary sacred—that eases us into new months and new years, rituals and holidays, grief and transition. We also have millennia-long experience with separations, both traumatic and joyous, both forced on us and self-determined, whether in diasporic motion or through the separation between Shabbat (25 hours a week of dwelling in the world to come, as ongoing dress rehearsals of sorts) and havdallah, when we move out of the sacred into the mundane until the next Shabbos.

That ancestral legacy offers a palpable resilience, or perhaps fierce fighting spirit to survive, with many contemporary Jewish anarchists feeling affinity for the refrain sung by a village of Jews many moons ago as they were about to be slaughtered by Nazis: “we will outlive them.”

At many points in this binary, brutal pandemic time of “masked” vs “unmasked,” mutual aid vs abandonment, I didn’t know that I would outlive it. The same may be true for you. Many folks we love didn’t outlive it. And that feels so much truer for so many of us in the days ahead, as fascism increasingly acts out and acts on its transphobia, misogyny, antisemitism, racism …

My Jewish anarchism teaches me so much, crucially right now that joy and sorrow are always intertwined, and that it is our task not to complete the aim of mending the world, but not desist from it either.

💖🖤 to @scottbransonblurredwords for setting up this event!

Event description:

Mending the World as Jewish Anarchists

Using the anthology “There Is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart” as a jumping-off point, editor/writer Cindy Barukh Milstein will sketch a picture of contemporary Jewish anarchism and then facilitate a conversation. Today’s Jewish anarchists pull from ancestral wisdom, within Judaism/Jewishness and millennia of diasporic rituals and communities (without states). Yet they are also remaking Jewish anarchism, especially via anarcha-feminist and queer+trans practices—cultural, political, and spiritual—building bridges from bittersweet grief to rebellion and joy. Milstein will touch on ways that Jewish anarchism is being utilized in organizing and movements as a weapon against, to name a few, colonialism, capitalism, fascism, and ecocide. Yet they’ll also explore what it means to embrace Jewish anarchism as the ground for communal solidarities that sustain and “mend” us while cultivating visionary forms of liberation—and life—all with the aim of getting better and better at living “the world to come” in the here and now. Whether you’re Jewish or not, an anarchist or not (yet), come share in reflecting on the promise of Jewish anarchism.

Notes: At Oberlin on Friday just before Shabbat begins. To embody our collective care, masks are required at this event—with N95s and KN95s strongly recommended—and we urge everyone to rapid test before coming, and don’t come if sick or COVID positive. There will also be copies of the anthology and other books by Milstein for sale, at a sliding scale (cash or PayPal). Lastly, Milstein encourages everyone to bring along a small offering/memento to place on a temporary grief altar.

#AnarchismOrFascism
#WeMustOutliveThem
#MourningOurDead #MendingTheWorld
#TryAnarchismForLife
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife

(Part 5 of 6): By way of celebrating my new book “Try Anarchism for Life” being in print and in the world, and because I have a backlog of photos of circle As in the wild, plus to honor and thank the folks who took the time and care to write blurbs for this book, here’s a trifecta of what I trust are some beautiful expressions of anarchism: street art + the book’s cover + a blurb.

As it serendipitously and delightfully happens, my book came out on the heels of my dear friend Scott Brandon’s book, “Practical Anarchism,” and both of us seem to be preoccupied with focusing on anarchism as life, as living. Perhaps that’s no coincidence in this fascist time that would see so many of us dead—most of us, in fact. So our #EverydayAnarchism has to be a fighter for and carrier of life. It feels no exaggeration to say it’s either #AnarchismOrFascism.

Thanks to @TheRhizomeHouse and the caring labors of our friend @reblgrrlraechel, Scott and I hope to bring our books into life-giving conversation when we gather on December 3.

Now, onto the blurb:

“What a beautiful and playful collection of anarchist ruminations, like an imaginative picture book for adults (but not in the grown-up sense)! It’s a joyful contribution to anarchist literature as well as to Milstein’s own writing. You can read this poetic book in any order—an alphabet that goes from big A to little a and beyond—which makes it a perfect book to pick up to stimulate creativity and meditation. But after reading the whole thing, one gets the sense of the fullness of a life devoted to anarchism; that is, the mutual care and love for each other and the world that raises the stakes for freedom from domination. As we Jews say, ‘To life!’—that is, to a life worth living!”

—Scott Branson, author of “Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily Life”

Copies of my book are available from @tangledwild at www.tangledwilderness.org (in and outside the US), @akpressdistro at www.akpress.org, or your favorite anarchist(ic) bookstores and libraries.

(photos: #QueerAsFuck circle A as seen in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal, summer 2022; fabulous book cover, designed by @eff_charm with circle A by @landonsheely; 2 out of 3 panels from the “flyer” for our schmooze—see The Rhizome House on social media for full info)

#TryAnarchismForLife
#TheBeautyOfOurCircle
#PracticalAnarchism
#WeAreAllWeNeed
🖤💖🌿

(Part 4 of 6): By way of celebrating my new book “Try Anarchism for Life” being in print and out in the world, and because I have a backlog of photos of circle As in the wild, plus to honor and thank the folks who took the time and care to write blurbs for this book, here’s a trifecta of what I hope are some beautiful expressions of anarchism: street art + the book’s cover + a blurb.

I’ve been thinking a lot—or more than I already do—about “tipping points, when phenomena palpably shift from bad to worse—such as, to my queer Jewish anarchist mind, proto-fascism tipping to fascism after the US midterms—and how those of us who are anarchists see train wrecks coming long before the train has even left the station and beautifully prepare all sorts of infrastructures of #Solidarity way ahead of time. Infrastructures of #MutualAid, #CommunitySelfDefense, #RebelliousMourning, and #FierceLove. It’s shattering my heart that we must increasingly use those infrastructures *merely* to try to lessen the genocidal impacts of Christian fascism here. Yet they are also, always, gesturing toward #AWorldWithoutFascism.

“‘Try Anarchism for Life’ is both a beautiful homage to the countless fragments of ephemeral resistance that constitute everyday antiauthoritarianism and a principled call to commit to stitching together those fragments of daily autonomy-making into flourishing lives of resistance. Paired with unique renditions of the classic circle A, Milstein’s poetic phrases endow age-old concepts like mutual aid and solidarity with renewed vitality and urgency.”

—Mark Bray, author of “Antifa,” “The Anarchist Inquisition,” and “Translating Anarchy”

Copies of the book are available from the publisher, @tangledwild, at www.tangledwilderness.org (for folks in and outside of the US too), @akpressdistro at www.akpress.org, or your favorite anarchist(ic) bookstore, and libraries.

(photos: the rock-solid strength of our circles, as portrayed on a sticker seen in mid-Oct at @defendatlantaforest; beautiful book cover, designed by @eff_charm with circle A by @landonsheely)

#TryAnarchismForLife
#TheBeautyOfOurCircle
#AnarchismOrFascism
#FuckFascism #FTP
#WeAreAllWeNeed
🖤💖🌿