The ABCs of Anarchism: The Letter K

Of late, I’ve noticed an unfamiliar word slipping into the anarchist vocabulary—so much so, that it felt both a pattern and palpable shift. So I began paying attention, and sure enough, more and more anarchists were using it in DMs to me, or when speaking on a panel, chatting in person, and posting on social media. One new zine I picked up at a free lit table even railed against its opposite—adding “un-“ in front of the word—and called for its banishment from our circles.

This linguistic turn felt at odds with the times at first, and then it started to dawn on me that it’s actually a healthy response to them—to fascism and the attendant disposability of human and nonhuman life.

I ran that thought by a friend who loves etymology, a fancy term for the history of languages and their wordly ancestors, and they instantly exclaimed, “Kin!” We’re queer+trans chosen family, so I didn’t get the connection at first—thinking they were simply glad that I’d called them to talk. “The origin of the word is in ‘kin,’” they added, and to paraphrase, “these days, we especially need to care for each other in that way.”

K = Kind

As a Jewish anarchist, I doubly know that “Jewishness” and “anarchism” share an inherent need to stay in motion, to continually wrestle with and remake our words, ideas, and practices, always delighting in shape-shifting based on the contexts, precisely as how we get free—together. There’s also our double aspiration as anarchists (and to my mind, as Jews): to always critique all forms of hierarchy and domination—the K = kvetch side of things—and always embody forms of freedom in their place—which includes K = kindness. Or should have.

Somehow anarchists have become an especially unkindly bunch over the past decade or so, allowing liberalism and capitalism (and posi rad-liberals) to steal and water down “kindness” into mushy meaningless—when we should have been fighting to keep kindness rebellious!

Now, we’re at a point in human history when *simple* acts of genuine kindness (from the heart, voluntarily, as kin), mean the world, quite literally, to keep us and others from falling into the fascist abyss.

#TryAnarchismForLife

(photo: spray paint, stencil, and sharpie combo of #AllComradesAreBeautiful, with two adorable pink and black cats encircled by a heart, with the letters #ACAB at their paws, as seen on a wall near an anarcha-queer feministic squat in Athens, March 2025, aka #CatsNotCops and for that matter, #KindnessNotCops)