The Slow Burning Fuse

This is the preface and chapter list for a work currently being compiled and hopefully will be ready sometime later in 2026 (maybe 2027). Anyway hope it sparks some interest.

Preface: On Why Freedom Matters

Before the argument begins, before the philosophical distinctions and the structural analyses and the historical evidence, there is something more basic that needs saying. Freedom matters. Not as an abstraction, not as a banner to be carried in demonstrations and then folded away, not as a rhetorical device to be deployed against political opponents and retrieved whenever convenient. It matters in the way that things matter when their presence changes the texture of a life and their absence diminishes it. When you can feel the difference in your body, in your relationships, in the quality of your days.

This book is a theoretical argument about what freedom means, what stands in its way, and what it would require to have more of it. But theory that is not grounded in the felt reality of what it is arguing about tends toward abstraction, toward the manipulation of concepts that have lost their connection to the human experiences from which they were drawn. Before the argument proceeds, it is worth spending some time with those experiences, with what it is like when freedom is genuinely present, and what it costs when it is genuinely absent. This is what this preface attempts.

What Unfreedom Feels Like

Most people in capitalist societies have a detailed, intimate knowledge of unfreedom, even if they do not name it as such. It is the feeling of the Sunday evening before the working week, the specific weight that descends when leisure time is running out and the subordination of Monday morning approaches. It is the calculation, performed automatically and often below conscious awareness, of what you can afford to say to the person who has power over your livelihood. It is the exhaustion of spending your days in work that has no relationship to anything you actually care about. Work whose meaning begins and ends with the wage it pays. Work that depletes rather than develops the capacities that make you who you are.

It is the experience of needing something, medical care, housing security, a period of time outside the labour market to recover or to learn or simply to breathe, and knowing that you cannot have it because you cannot afford it, and that you cannot afford it because the alternative is a destitution that the society you live in has decided is an acceptable consequence of failing to compete successfully in its labour market. It is the experience of being, in some fundamental sense, dependent. Dependent on the goodwill of an employer, on the continuation of a job, on the maintenance of conditions over which you have no control and no say. The anxiety that this dependence produces, the low-grade, constant awareness of your own vulnerability. That is so pervasive in the lives of most people in capitalist societies that it has become invisible, absorbed into the background of normal life, named as stress or worry or pressure rather than as the structural unfreedom it actually is.

It is also the experience of having your choices constrained not by any direct force but by the accumulated weight of circumstances you did not choose. The neighbourhood you grew up in, the school it contained, the family’s economic position that determined whether education was a path that could be pursued without unbearable sacrifice, the cultural expectations that communicated, in a thousand ways, what kind of future was and was not realistic for someone like you. These are not the dramatic unfreedoms of the explicitly coercive regime – the prison, the censor, the secret police. They are the quiet unfreedoms of a social order that presents itself as free while systematically constraining the possibilities of those who start with nothing.

And then there is the unfreedom that operates at still greater depth. The experience of wanting things that are themselves the products of conditions you did not choose, of measuring your own worth by standards you did not set, of finding that the voice that tells you what you deserve and what you are capable of sounds, on examination, less like your own voice than like a ventriloquism of the culture that formed you. This is the unfreedom that Part Three of this book addresses at length, and it is in some ways the most fundamental. It is the freedom that cannot be won simply by removing external constraints, because it lives in the person rather than around them.

What Freedom Feels Like

But most people have also had some experience of freedom, partial, fleeting, imperfect, but real enough to be recognised and to be mourned when it passes. It is worth dwelling on these experiences, because they are evidence, evidence that the thing this book argues for is not a theoretical construct but a recognisable feature of actual human life, available in the present even if not fully and not for everyone.

There is the freedom of a conversation in which you are genuinely heard. In which the person you are talking with is actually present, actually attending to what you are saying rather than waiting for their turn to speak, actually changed by the encounter in the way that genuine attention changes people. This is rarer than it should be, and when it happens it has a quality that is difficult to name but immediately recognisable – the sense of being taken seriously as a thinking, feeling person rather than as a role, a function, a problem to be managed. The relationship of genuine equality, in which neither party is performing for the other, neither is managing the other’s impressions, neither is calculating the consequences of honesty, has this quality throughout. It is one of the clearest expressions of what freedom between persons actually feels like.

There is the freedom of work that is genuinely yours. Work that expresses rather than suppresses your capacities, that you pursue because it matters rather than because it pays, toward ends you actually care about rather than ends that someone else has set for you. This kind of work exists, though the conditions of capitalist production make it the privilege of a minority rather than the common experience of the majority. When it is present, it has a quality that is the opposite of alienation. It has a sense of genuine engagement, of the self fully present in what it is doing, of time passing differently than it does in labour that is merely endured. It is not always pleasant, genuinely difficult work is often frustrating, demanding, exhausting in ways that purely routine labour is not, but it has a richness that routine labour lacks, a sense that something real is happening.

There is the freedom of collective action that genuinely works. The experience of people discovering, often for the first time, that they are capable of acting together, that their collective power is real, that the structures which seemed permanent and unchallengeable can be moved. This is the freedom that strikes and occupations and community organising can produce at their best. Not only the practical result – the wage increase, the policy change, the space reclaimed – but the transformation in the people who achieved it. Accounts of genuinely successful collective action share a common register. An astonishment at what proved possible, a new sense of capacity and solidarity, a changed relationship to the structures that had seemed immovable. People who have experienced this describe themselves as different afterward, more confident, more capable, more genuinely themselves. This is not incidental to the politics, it is a glimpse of what genuine freedom does to people when they encounter it.

There is the freedom, smaller and more daily, of a community that actually functions as a community. In which people know each other, look out for each other, share resources and attention and care without the calculation of return that market relations require. This kind of community is rarer than it should be in societies organised around competitive individualism, but it exists, and where it exists it produces a quality of life that is recognisably different from the isolated, defended private life that capitalist culture promotes as the normal condition. The freedom of not being alone, of being embedded in relationships of genuine mutual care, is not a luxury or a supplement to freedom but one of its primary expressions.

Why It Matters That It Matters

The reason for beginning a theoretical book with these experiential observations is not merely rhetorical,  not simply to warm the reader up before the argument begins. It is that the relationship between theory and experience matters for the kind of theory this book attempts to develop.

Political theory that loses its connection to lived experience tends toward two failure modes. The first is abstraction. A discourse of concepts and frameworks that has become self-referential, that addresses itself primarily to other theorists rather than to the actual conditions of actual people, that produces sophistication without relevance. The second is voluntarism. The assumption that once the correct analysis has been made and the correct programme adopted, the human beings who are supposed to carry it out will simply perform their assigned functions. That theory can skip over the actual persons involved and proceed directly from structural analysis to political prescription. Both failure modes are well represented in the history of the left, and both have had serious political consequences.

The anarcho-communist tradition at its best has understood that theory and practice are not separate enterprises and that the quality of the analysis depends on its connection to the lived reality it addresses, and that the quality of the practice depends on its connection to a theory adequate to that reality. Emma Goldman’s insistence on the personal dimension of liberation, on the freedom of desire and the body and the full range of human life, was not a distraction from political theory but an insistence on its proper scope. Kropotkin’s empirical work on mutual aid was not a detour from revolutionary politics but an attempt to ground it in a realistic account of what human beings are actually like and what they are actually capable of. The Spanish anarchists who built their collectives in 1936 were not implementing a theory. They were, as they often said, making the revolution by living it and discovering in practice what genuine collective self-governance required and produced.

This book tries to maintain that connection. The theoretical arguments it makes about freedom, domination, and liberation are arguments about the actual experiences of actual people, about what the Sunday evening dread is actually a symptom of, about what the conversation of genuine equality is actually an expression of, about what the exhaustion of alienated labour and the aliveness of genuine collective action are actually telling us. If the theory loses contact with these experiences, it has lost contact with what it is for. The experiences, in turn, need the theory. Without it, they remain isolated, unconnected to each other, unable to generate the analysis of what produces and prevents them that a genuine politics requires.

Freedom as a Claim on the Present

One more thing needs saying before the argument begins, and it concerns the time frame of the book’s claim about freedom.

It is tempting,  and the temptation runs through much of the revolutionary tradition, to understand freedom primarily as a future condition. Something that will exist after the revolution, in the liberated society that the present struggle aims to build. On this understanding, the present is primarily the site of sacrifice and preparation. Of discipline and organisation and the subordination of immediate desires to long-term goals. The freedom being fought for is real, but it is deferred, it belongs to the future, and the present is its antechamber.

The anarcho-communist tradition has always resisted this deferral, and the resistance is not merely impatient. It is principled. If freedom is deferred to the future, then the present, including the present of the revolutionary movement, is organised on the unfree principles of hierarchy, discipline, the subordination of persons to the requirements of the organisation. And as the prefigurative argument developed in Part Six of this book maintains, the habits and institutions developed in the present become the habits and institutions of the future. A movement that defers freedom to the future tends to produce a future that looks a great deal like its present.

Freedom is also a claim on the present. It is available, partially and imperfectly, now, in the relationships we build, in the organisations we create, in the daily practices of treating people as ends rather than means, in the small and large acts of refusing the terms that domination offers. This does not mean that the structural work is unnecessary or that individual transformation is sufficient. It means that the structural work and the personal work are the same project, pursued simultaneously, each making the other more possible. The book that follows tries to honour both dimensions of that project – the rigorous analysis of the structures that deny freedom, and the equally rigorous analysis of what it would mean to begin living differently now, in whatever conditions we actually face. That is what this book is for.

Contents

Title: Domination, Desire, and the Anarcho-Communist Vision

Introduction — frames the book’s central argument: that freedom is the organising concept of anarcho-communist politics, that the liberal tradition has hollowed it out, and that recovering its full meaning requires attending to both its structural and psychological dimensions. Sets up the book’s original contribution and its intended readership.

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Part One: The Poverty of Liberal Freedom

Chapter 1 – The Word Everyone Owns — the contest over freedom as a concept, why it matters who defines it, the question that cuts through every everything: freedom for whom, from what, to do what, at whose expense.

Chapter 2 – Two Freedoms — negative and positive liberty, the liberal fixation on the former, what that fixation conceals, Bakunin’s alternative formulation.

Chapter 3 – The Marketplace of Illusions — market freedom examined, the real history of liberal revolutions, formal equality and material inequality, Anatole France’s bridge.

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Part Two: Domination and Its Architecture

Chapter 4 – What Domination Is — a systematic account: the Church, State, and Capital as Bakunin’s triad, patriarchy as Goldman and de Cleyre extended it, the structural rather than individual character of domination.

Chapter 5 – The State: Authority Without Legitimacy — the anarcho-communist critique of the state, the social contract myth, representative democracy as managed consent, what genuine political freedom would require instead.

Chapter 6 – Race and colonialism are constitutive of capitalism, not incidental to it. Robinson on racial capitalism, Du Bois on the psychological wage and its consequences for working-class solidarity, Fanon on what colonial domination does to the person. The anarchist tradition’s uneven engagement with race — honest about its failures, including its partial recoveries.

Chapter 7 – Class, Labour, and the Freedom Not to Be Exploited — the wage relation as freedom relation, the anarcho-communist vs Marxist analysis of class, why the form of liberation matters as much as its content.

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Part Three: The Self Under Domination (the book’s original heart)

Chapter 8 – Domination Goes All the Way Down — how structures of domination shape persons from the inside: internalised authority, adaptive preferences, the stunted self, the difference between what people want and what they would want if they were free.

Chapter 9 – The Problem of Desire — the hardest version of the question: when is a desire authentically one’s own? What does it mean to want something under conditions that have shaped your wanting? Why liberal theory’s answer — expressed preferences are authoritative — is inadequate, and what a more honest account looks like.

Chapter 10 – Toward a Psychology of Liberation — what the anarchist tradition has said about the inner dimensions of freedom (Goldman, Ferrer, de Cleyre), what it hasn’t said but implies, what a contemporary account needs to include: the formation of the autonomous self, the role of education and culture, why liberation has a psychological dimension that structural change cannot substitute for.

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Part Four: Freedom in Relation

Chapter 11 – The Social Self — why freedom is not individualism, Bakunin’s claim that the freedom of each requires the freedom of all, the rejection of atomistic liberalism without collapsing into collectivism.

Chapter 12 – Solidarity as Freedom — mutual aid not as constraint on liberty but as its condition, Kropotkin’s argument, free association and what it actually means, the distinction between solidarity and obligation.

Chapter 13 – The Hard Problem — when freedom conflicts with itself. The autonomy-versus-collective tension, free agreement and federation as the anarchist response, the genuine difficulty of the problem and the genuine inadequacy of the alternatives.

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Part Five: Freedom in History

Chapter 14 – What Anarchism Has Built — the historical record honestly assessed: the Paris Commune, the Spanish collectivisations, the defeats (Kronstadt, the Makhnovists), Argentina 2001, the Zapatistas, Rojava. What the evidence actually shows.

Chapter 15 – The Leninist Objection — the full version of the most serious critique, the honest acknowledgement of anarchism’s military defeats, the assessment of Leninist successes, why the ends were shaped by the means.

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Part Six: Getting There

Chapter 16 – Prefiguration: Building the New World Now — the insistence that means and ends must be consistent, what this requires of organisations and movements, the practical difficulties and why they are the point rather than obstacles to the point.

Chapter 17 – Transition — the general strike, the insurrectionary commune, dual power, how these relate to each other, why the anarcho-communist theory of transition is less satisfying and more honest than the Leninist alternative.

Chapter 18 – What Freedom Feels Like — the phenomenology of liberation, the evidence of lived experience, why this matters politically and not just aesthetically.

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Conclusion — Freedom as Permanent Revolution — brings the psychological thread back: freedom is not a destination but a practice, not a structure to be built and then inhabited but a capacity to be developed and exercised continuously. The political and the personal are not separate dimensions of this; they are the same project.

Freedom might be the most contested word in the political vocabulary. It is claimed by libertarians who want to abolish environmental regulations, by neoliberals who mean the right to buy and sell without interference, by nationalists who mean the exclusive sovereignty of one people over a territory, and by anarchists who mean something so different from all of these that it can seem like a different word entirely. When a politician says freedom, you need to ask freedom for whom, from what, to do what, and at whose expense? The same question, asked honestly, reveals that most invocations of freedom in mainstream discourse are not really about freedom at all. They are about power dressed up in liberation’s clothing.

For the anarcho-communist, freedom is not an abstraction to be celebrated in speeches and then quietly qualified out of existence. It is a living, material condition, something felt in the body, realised in relationships, built in the daily practice of collective life. It is not the freedom of the market. It is not the freedom of the isolated individual to pursue private interest without interference. It is the freedom of the whole person, embedded in community, liberated from domination in all its forms, from the wage relation, from the state, from patriarchy, from empire, from every structure that compels some people to serve the will of others on pain of hunger, imprisonment, or death.
This article is an attempt to think through what freedom actually means from an anarcho-communist standpoint, not as a slogan, but as a concept with real philosophical depth, historical grounding, and practical implications. It is written for two kinds of readers – those already somewhere in the anarchist or libertarian-socialist tradition who want to think more rigorously about what they already believe, and those on the broader left who are unconvinced, who suspect that anarchism is either too individualist, too utopian, or too philosophically thin to carry the weight it claims. The argument is that both groups are, in different ways, working with a concept of freedom that is not yet adequate to the situation we are in. The anarcho-communist tradition offers something better, not a perfect system, but a more honest account of what freedom actually requires and what stands in its way.

New Polar Blast Publication -To Be Free, Together: Freedom, Solidarity, and the Anarcho-Communist Vision

Freedom, for anarcho-communists, is not a decorative ideal or a rhetorical flourish tacked onto an otherwise rigid political programme. It is the ground upon which everything else stands. Without freedom, there is no communism worth speaking of, only new forms of domination dressed in emancipatory language. This is why anarcho-communists have historically rejected the notion of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” not out of naivety or softness towards reaction, but out of a clear-eyed understanding of how power operates, reproduces itself, and ultimately betrays the very people it claims to serve.

To understand this position, we must begin by clarifying what anarcho-communists mean by freedom. It is not the liberal conception of freedom as mere non-interference, nor the market fantasy of freedom as consumer choice. Those forms of “freedom” exist comfortably alongside exploitation, hierarchy, and profound inequality. A worker is “free” to sell their labour or starve; a tenant is “free” to pay rent or sleep on the street. These are not freedoms in any meaningful sense, they are coercions masked as options.

Anarcho-communist freedom is substantive and relational. It is the freedom to live without domination, to participate directly in the decisions that shape one’s life, to access the means of existence without being subject to the authority of another. It is inseparable from equality, not as an abstract moral principle but as a material condition. Freedom cannot exist where there are entrenched hierarchies of power, because those hierarchies inevitably constrain the lives of those beneath them. To be free is to stand in a social world where no one has the institutionalised capacity to command, exploit, or subordinate others.

This is why anarcho-communists insist on the abolition of the state. The state, regardless of its ideological colouring, is a structure of centralised authority. It concentrates decision-making power in a specialised apparatus that stands above society. Even when that apparatus claims to act in the name of the people, it necessarily separates itself from them. It develops its own interests, its own logic of survival, its own mechanisms of control. Bureaucracies do not dissolve themselves out of goodwill, but they persist, expand, and defend their existence.

The concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” as developed within Marxist traditions, is often presented as a transitional necessity, a temporary concentration of power in the hands of the working class to suppress counter-revolution and reorganise society. In theory, it is not meant to be a dictatorship in the conventional sense, but a form of class rule exercised by the majority. In practice, however, anarcho-communists argue that this formulation contains a fatal contradiction.

The problem is not the recognition that revolutions must defend themselves. Any serious political perspective understands that entrenched ruling classes do not simply step aside. The issue is the means by which that defence is organised. When power is centralised in a state apparatus, even one claiming to represent the proletariat, it does not remain a neutral instrument. It reshapes the social relations around it. It creates a division between those who govern and those who are governed. It produces a layer of officials, party leaders, and administrators who wield disproportionate power over the rest of society.

History bears this out with uncomfortable clarity. Revolutions that have adopted the framework of a proletarian state have tended to reproduce new forms of hierarchy. The language of workers’ power becomes detached from the lived reality of workers themselves. Decision-making migrates upwards, away from assemblies, councils, and grassroots organisations, and into the hands of central committees and party structures. Dissent is reframed as counter-revolutionary. Autonomy is seen as a threat to unity. The revolutionary process, which began with the promise of liberation, becomes a project of discipline and control.

From an anarcho-communist perspective, this is not an unfortunate accident or a deviation from an otherwise sound model. It is the predictable outcome of attempting to use authoritarian means to achieve libertarian ends. Power does not simply vanish once it has served its purpose. It entrenches itself. Those who wield it develop a material interest in maintaining it. The state, even a so-called workers’ state, becomes a new locus of domination.

Freedom, then, is not something that can be postponed until after a transitional phase. It cannot be deferred to a distant future while authoritarian structures are built in the present. The means shape the ends. If a revolution is organised through hierarchical command, secrecy, and coercion, it will produce a society that reflects those principles. Conversely, if it is organised through horizontal decision-making, mutual aid, and collective self-management, it lays the groundwork for a genuinely free society.

Anarcho-communists therefore place a strong emphasis on prefigurative politics, the idea that the forms of organisation used in struggle should mirror the society one aims to create. This is not a moralistic preference but a strategic necessity. By building structures of direct democracy, federated councils, and voluntary cooperation, people develop the skills, relationships, and expectations required for a stateless, classless society. They learn to manage their own affairs, to resolve conflicts without recourse to authority, and to coordinate complex activities without centralised control.

Critics often respond that this approach is unrealistic, that without a central authority revolutions will collapse into chaos or be crushed by organised reaction. But this critique assumes that centralisation is synonymous with effectiveness, and that ordinary people are incapable of sustained collective organisation without hierarchical leadership. Anarcho-communists reject both assumptions.

Decentralised forms of organisation can be highly resilient. They are less vulnerable to repression because there is no single point of failure. They can adapt more quickly to changing conditions because decision-making is distributed rather than bottlenecked. Most importantly, they maintain the active participation of the broader population, which is the real source of revolutionary strength. A passive population, governed by a self-proclaimed vanguard, is far easier to demobilise or co-opt.

There is also a deeper philosophical issue at stake. The idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat rests on a particular conception of history and human development, that the working class must seize state power and use it to reshape society from above. Anarcho-communists, while sharing the goal of abolishing class society, reject this top-down model of transformation. They argue that emancipation cannot be delivered to people, it must be enacted by them.

This is not a romantic claim about human nature. It is an observation about the relationship between power and subjectivity. When people are excluded from decision-making, they are alienated not only from the outcomes but from their own capacity to act. They become objects of policy rather than subjects of history. A revolutionary process that reproduces this dynamic, even in the name of the proletariat, undermines the very agency it seeks to cultivate.

Freedom, in the anarcho-communist sense, is therefore both a goal and a method. It is the condition of a society without classes, without the state, without coercive hierarchies, but it is also the principle that guides how we get there. It demands that people organise themselves, that they take responsibility for their collective lives, that they refuse to hand over their power to any authority, however well-intentioned.

This does not mean ignoring the realities of conflict, scarcity, or coordination. Anarcho-communism is not a denial of complexity. Rather, it insists that these challenges be addressed through cooperative, non-hierarchical means. Production and distribution can be organised through federations of worker and community councils. Defence can be managed through popular militias accountable to those councils. Large-scale coordination can be achieved through delegation, with mandates that are specific, recallable, and limited. What is rejected is not organisation, but domination. Not structure, but hierarchy. Not discipline, but coercion imposed from above.

The rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat is thus inseparable from a broader critique of political authority. It is a refusal to accept that liberation can emerge from institutions that mirror the structures of oppression. It is a recognition that the logic of the state, centralisation, control, and the monopolisation of force, is fundamentally at odds with the creation of a free society.

For anarcho-communists, freedom is not a luxury to be secured after the “real work” of revolution is done. It is the substance of that work. It is present in every assembly where people deliberate as equals, in every act of mutual aid that bypasses market and state, in every refusal to submit to unjust authority. It is fragile, contested, and always incomplete, but it is also the only foundation upon which a truly emancipatory politics can be built.

To abandon freedom in the name of expediency is to lose the thread entirely. The history of revolutionary movements offers more than enough evidence of where that path leads, new elites, new forms of domination, and a profound disillusionment with the very idea of collective liberation. Anarcho-communism emerges from that history not as a utopian fantasy, but as a hard-won insistence that the struggle for a different world must itself be different.

Freedom, then, is not negotiable. It is the horizon and the method, the means and the end. Without it, communism becomes an empty shell. With it, the possibility of a genuinely human society, one based on equality, solidarity, and shared power, comes into view.

For many on the left, Lenin is still treated as a towering revolutionary figure, the man who led the Bolsheviks to power, smashed the old Tsarist order, and set in motion the first sustained attempt at building socialism. Yet from an anarcho-communist standpoint, this reverence is not only misplaced but politically dangerous. Leninism represents not the flowering of working-class self-emancipation, but its containment, redirection, and ultimately its suppression. In this sense, Leninism can be understood not as a radical rupture with capitalist social relations, but as a right-wing deviation within the socialist movement, a project that reconstituted hierarchy, authority, and class domination under new management.

To call Lenin a “right-wing deviation” is not to engage in empty provocation. It is to make a precise claim  that Leninism preserved and reinforced the core features of class society -centralised authority, political alienation, and the separation of decision-making from everyday life – rather than abolishing them. The Bolshevik project did not extend the revolutionary impulse of workers’ self-organisation, it curtailed it. It replaced the living, breathing movement of the proletariat with the cold machinery of the Party-state.

At the heart of this critique lies a fundamental divergence over the meaning of revolution itself. For anarcho-communists, revolution is not simply the seizure of state power. It is the destruction of hierarchical relations in all their forms and the creation of a society based on free association, co-operation, and collective self-management. It is a process, not an event, a transformation of social relations from below, not a transfer of authority from one ruling group to another. Leninism, by contrast, reduces revolution to a question of political control of who commands, who administers, who directs.

This divergence is crystallised in Lenin’s theory of the vanguard party. According to Lenin, the working class, left to its own devices, can only achieve “trade union consciousness”, that is, a limited awareness focused on immediate economic demands. Revolutionary consciousness, he argued, must be brought to the workers from outside, by a disciplined organisation of professional revolutionaries. This notion is profoundly elitist. It assumes that workers are incapable of understanding their own conditions and acting in their own interests without guidance from an enlightened minority.

Such a framework reproduces the very division between rulers and ruled that socialism seeks to abolish. The vanguard party becomes a substitute for the working class, acting on its behalf while simultaneously denying its autonomy. Decision-making is concentrated at the top, while the masses are relegated to the role of passive supporters. This is not emancipation, it is political dispossession.

The events of 1917 and their aftermath illustrate this dynamic with brutal clarity. The Russian Revolution began not as a Bolshevik project, but as a mass uprising characterised by spontaneous organisation and experimentation. Workers formed soviets, councils that embodied a radically democratic form of governance. Peasants seized land, soldiers mutinied, and communities began to reorganise social life on their own terms. For a brief moment, the possibility of a genuinely libertarian socialism emerged.

Yet the Bolsheviks, once in power, moved quickly to centralise authority and suppress independent initiatives. The soviets were subordinated to the Party. Workers’ control of production was replaced by state management. Strikes were banned, dissent was criminalised, and opposition groups were repressed. The creation of the secret police institutionalised political terror as a tool of governance. What had begun as a revolution from below was transformed into a regime from above.

Defenders of Lenin often argue that these measures were necessary, imposed by the harsh conditions of civil war and economic collapse. There is no doubt that the circumstances were dire. But necessity is not a neutral category. It reflects political choices, priorities, and assumptions about what is possible. The Bolsheviks chose to prioritise the consolidation of their own power over the expansion of workers’ self-management. They chose to treat autonomy as a threat rather than a resource.

Moreover, many of the authoritarian features of Leninism were not merely reactive but prefigured in its theoretical foundations. The emphasis on centralisation, discipline, and hierarchy did not emerge suddenly in response to crisis, it was present from the outset. The Party was conceived as a tightly controlled organisation, with strict internal discipline and a clear chain of command. This organisational model was then extended to society as a whole.

In this sense, Leninism mirrors the logic of capitalism rather than overcoming it. Just as capital concentrates power in the hands of a few, Leninism concentrates political authority within the Party. Just as workers under capitalism are separated from control over their labour, workers under Leninism are separated from control over decision-making. The form changes, but the underlying relations remain.

Anarcho-communists have long argued that means and ends are inseparable. A movement that relies on hierarchical structures, coercion, and exclusion cannot produce a free and egalitarian society. The methods used in struggle shape the society that emerges from it. Leninism, by embedding authoritarian practices at its core, ensured that the outcome would reflect those practices.

The suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921 stands as a stark example. The sailors of Kronstadt, once celebrated as the “pride and glory” of the revolution, rose up demanding the restoration of soviet democracy, freedom of expression for working-class organisations, and an end to Party domination. Their demands were not counter-revolutionary, they were an attempt to reclaim the original spirit of the revolution. Yet the Bolsheviks responded with military force, crushing the uprising and killing or imprisoning thousands.

From an anarcho-communist perspective, Kronstadt represents a decisive moment – the point at which the Bolshevik regime revealed itself as an enemy of workers’ self-emancipation. It was not an aberration but a logical consequence of a political project that placed the Party above the class.

Similarly, the repression of the Makhnovist movement in Ukraine highlights the incompatibility between Leninism and libertarian socialism. The Makhnovists, a peasant-based anarchist movement, organised large areas on the basis of voluntary cooperation, self-management, and free soviets. Despite their crucial role in resisting counter-revolutionary forces, they were ultimately betrayed and destroyed by the Bolsheviks. Again, the pattern is clear – independent forms of organisation, even when aligned with revolutionary goals, were seen as threats to Party authority.

To describe Leninism as a right-wing deviation is also to situate it within a broader historical context. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw intense debates within the socialist movement about strategy and organisation. On one side were those who emphasised centralisation, leadership, and the use of state power. On the other were those who prioritised decentralisation, direct action, and the abolition of hierarchical structures. Leninism represents a decisive victory for the former tendency, a victory that came at the expense of the latter.

From this angle, Leninism can be seen as part of a broader counter-revolutionary current within socialism, a current that seeks to manage and contain working-class struggle rather than unleash it. By channelling revolutionary energy into the structures of the state, it neutralises the transformative potential of collective action. It replaces the unpredictable, creative force of mass participation with the predictable, controlled operations of bureaucratic administration.

This critique is not merely of historical interest. The legacy of Leninism continues to shape left-wing politics today. Many organisations still operate on vanguardist principles, prioritising central leadership and ideological conformity over horizontal decision-making and grassroots empowerment. The result is often a repetition of the same dynamics, exclusion, stagnation, and a disconnection from the lived realities of working people.

For anarcho-communists, the task is not to reform Leninism but to move beyond it entirely. This means rejecting the idea that liberation can be delivered from above, by a party or a state. It means affirming the capacity of ordinary people to organise their own lives, make their own decisions, and collectively shape their own futures. It means building forms of organisation that reflect the society we wish to create – decentralised, participatory, and rooted in mutual aid.

Crucially, this does not imply a naïve faith in spontaneity or a rejection of organisation as such. Anarcho-communism recognises the need for coordination, strategy, and collective effort. But these must be grounded in horizontal relationships, not hierarchical ones. Organisation should enable participation, not restrict it, it should distribute power, not concentrate it.

In this light, the failures of Leninism offer important lessons. They remind us that the struggle for socialism is not simply a matter of defeating external enemies, but of transforming internal practices. They highlight the dangers of substituting representation for participation, command for cooperation, and authority for autonomy.

To call Lenin a right-wing deviation is therefore to make a broader argument about the nature of revolutionary politics. It is to insist that any project that reproduces domination, even in the name of liberation, ultimately serves to reinforce the structures it claims to oppose. It is to challenge the assumption that ends justify means, and to assert instead that the means are themselves constitutive of the ends.

The stakes of this argument are not merely theoretical. They concern the very possibility of a free society. If we accept the logic of Leninism, we accept that freedom must be postponed, managed, and mediated through authority. If we reject it, we open up the possibility of a different path, one in which freedom is practised in the here and now, through the collective self-activity of the working class.

In the end, the question is not whether Lenin was sincere, or whether the Bolsheviks faced difficult circumstances. It is whether their approach advanced or undermined the cause of human emancipation. From an anarcho-communist perspective, the answer is clear. By centralising power, suppressing dissent, and subordinating the masses to the Party, Leninism recreated the conditions of domination it claimed to abolish.

That is why it must be understood not as a revolutionary breakthrough, but as a deviation, a turn away from the path of liberation and towards a new form of rule. And that is why those committed to a world without bosses, states, or hierarchies must continue to critique, challenge, and move beyond its legacy.

Language is never neutral. Every word choice is a political act, and nowhere is this more visible than in the coverage of military conflict by the Western mainstream press. The headlines we read, the verbs that are chosen, the sources that are named or left unnamed, all of it constructs a worldview before the reader has processed a single fact. It tells us, quietly and persistently, who is a legitimate actor and who is a threat. Who defends and who attacks. Whose dead deserve mourning and whose are merely a number in a disputed casualty count.

A pair of New York Times screenshots, circulating widely online, illustrates this with almost painful clarity. Two headlines, side by side, covering events in the same conflict. The first reports that dozens have been killed in a strike on a school, but crucially, Iran “says” this happened. The sourcing is attributed to the enemy state, the claim held at arm’s length. An annotation on the image labels this approach: “Casts Doubt.” The word “Strike” is underlined, labelled “No Responsibility.” The second headline reports nine people killed in an Israeli city after an Iranian missile attack, stated as fact, the aggressor named outright. Same war. Same newspaper. Entirely different standards applied depending on whose bombs fell where.

This is not an accident, and it is not bias in the sense of careless error. It is the systematic application of a political grammar that has been decades in the making.

Consider the vocabulary assigned to Iran, or to any state that finds itself on the wrong side of American foreign policy. When Iran fires missiles, the press reaches for a reliable arsenal of words: escalation, aggression, threatens, attacks. The Iranian state is routinely called a “regime,” a word freighted with illegitimacy, conjuring images of dungeons and secret police, regardless of the political complexity on the ground. Its allied movements, whether in Lebanon, Yemen, or Iraq, are “proxies,” a word that simultaneously diminishes their political agency and implies Tehran is pulling strings like a puppet master. When rockets are fired, they come in “barrages,” a word that evokes indiscriminate chaos. And then there is the spectre always hovering at the edge of the frame – the “nuclear threat,” invoked to maintain a perpetual atmosphere of existential dread around a country that has not used nuclear weapons, does not possess them, and whose nuclear programme has been subject to international inspection and negotiation for years.

Now observe what happens when the United States and Israel conduct the same categories of action. The language shifts register entirely. Missiles become “surgical strikes.” Bombing campaigns are “preemptive”, a word that performs an extraordinary rhetorical trick, converting an act of aggression into a form of defence, folding the future into the justification for present violence. Israel and America do not attack, they “target.” They do not threaten, they “warn.” The word warn implies a benevolent patience, a reluctant actor pushed to the edge. The states themselves are “governments,” their organised violence the acts of sovereign democratic authorities, however many civilians are buried beneath the rubble. Their regional allies are not proxies but “allies”, partners, coalitions, friends in the neighbourhood. And Iran’s nuclear programme is a threat, but America’s thousands of warheads and Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal are simply “nuclear energy” on one side of the ledger and an unmentionable fact on the other.

The asymmetry is total. It operates at the level of the verb, the noun, the attributive clause, the decision of whether to quote a source or state something as established truth.

This is what Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman called the propaganda model, not a conspiracy of editors meeting in smoke-filled rooms, but a structural set of filters through which news passes before it reaches the public. Ownership, advertising, sourcing, the ideology of anti-communism (now updated to anti-“rogue state” or anti-terrorism), and what they called “flak”, the organised pushback that comes when journalists deviate from acceptable parameters. The result is not fabricated news but shaped news. Emphasis here, omission there. A passive voice for one atrocity, an active voice for another. The architecture of meaning is built quietly, over thousands of news cycles, until the reader absorbs it as common sense.

The New York Times, to be clear, is not uniquely culpable. It is simply one of the most prestigious examples of a practice that pervades the entire Western media ecosystem, from broadsheets to rolling news to the truncated world of online headlines. The BBC employs careful distinctions: Western forces “carry out operations” while their enemies “launch attacks.” Reuters, the Associated Press, the Guardian, all reproduce variants of the same framework with varying degrees of self-awareness. The grammar is so embedded that individual journalists often do not recognise they are using it. It feels like accuracy. It feels like precision. The words seem to describe the world as it is, rather than constructing the world as power needs it to be seen.

But words do construct the world. Language is not a transparent window onto reality. It is an active participant in producing reality, in shaping what we can think and what we cannot bring ourselves to imagine. When we read “regime” often enough in association with a particular government, we absorb its illegitimacy without argument. When we read “surgical strike” often enough, we are reassured that a missile aimed at a populated building is the work of a careful, responsible, precise state. When the dead in one country are named, photographed, mourned in column inches, and the dead in another are reported as figures disputed by their own government, we are being trained in a hierarchy of human worth. This training is ideological work. It is, in the full and serious sense of the word, propaganda, even when it appears in outlets that pride themselves on balance and factual rigour.

The double standard extends beyond word choice into the architecture of the article itself. Western casualties tend to receive context: the names of the dead, quotes from survivors, descriptions of the streets and communities affected. Non-Western casualties, particularly those killed by Western or Western-allied forces, are more likely to appear as aggregate numbers, frequently qualified, often attributed only to local or hostile sources whose reliability is immediately questioned. The New York Times screenshots demonstrate this in miniature – Iranian claims about their dead are distanced through attribution; Israeli dead are simply dead, reported as fact. The context of grief is unequal.

It is worth being clear about what the alternative looks like, because media criticism is sometimes accused of demanding the impossible, that journalists somehow transcend the political conditions of their production. What is being demanded here is not transcendence but consistency. Apply the same standards of sourcing to all parties in a conflict. Use the same vocabulary for equivalent actions. Name all actors when actors are named. Describe all military operations with the same terms, or develop a genuinely neutral vocabulary and apply it universally. Report all civilian casualties with the same rigour and the same humanity. None of this requires political neutrality in the abstract philosophical sense. It requires only that the rules be the same for everyone.

That this simple consistency feels radical, that it reads, in the current media environment, almost as a partisan demand, reveals how thoroughly the existing framework has been normalised. The grammar of empire has become the grammar of common sense. To question it is to seem unreasonable, biased, naive about the hard realities of geopolitics.

But the realities of geopolitics, if we strip away the language, are these – states pursue power. Powerful states pursue it with more effective tools and greater impunity. The United States and Israel possess overwhelming military superiority, nuclear weapons, permanent seats on or veto power at the United Nations Security Council, and the cultural infrastructure, including the major Western media institutions, to narrate their violence as necessity and their enemies’ resistance as barbarism. This is not a moral judgement about the internal character of any of these states. It is a structural observation about how power operates and how language serves power.

For those of us who reject the legitimacy of that power, who believe that the borders of nation states do not determine the worth of human lives, that workers in Tehran and workers in Tel Aviv and workers in Washington share more interests with each other than with any of their respective governments, that the anarchist and communist traditions offer a framework for understanding this precisely because they reject the nation state as the fundamental unit of moral and political analysis, the media’s linguistic choices are not merely an academic problem. They are part of the machinery of consent that makes war possible, that makes some deaths worth grieving and others merely statistical.

To read the news critically is not the same as being informed. It is a necessary beginning, a form of political literacy. But it must be paired with a structural analysis that asks not just “why did this journalist use this word?” but “what institutions produce this kind of journalism, who funds them, whose interests do they serve, and what would it take to build media that serves different interests entirely?” The grammar of empire is not inevitable. It is produced and reproduced every day by human choices, within human institutions that human beings could choose to build differently. Until they are, reading the news means reading the politics of the language as much as the events it claims to describe.

When the Epstein files surface, as they periodically do, they arrive wrapped in the language of scandal. Names are whispered, associations mapped, flight logs parsed. The public is invited to gawk, to speculate, to feel briefly outraged. And then, inevitably, attention drifts. The files retreat back into the archive of unresolved horrors that liberal society has learned to live with. What remains unexamined is not who appears in those documents, but what sort of social order makes such documents inevitable in the first place.

Jeffrey Epstein is consistently presented as an anomaly, a predator who slipped through the cracks, a grotesque aberration made possible by institutional failure. This framing is comforting because it preserves the idea that the system itself is fundamentally sound. All that is required, we are told, is better oversight, stricter enforcement, cleaner politics. Yet nothing about Epstein’s rise, protection, or endurance suggests accident or malfunction. On the contrary, everything about his operation points to a system functioning exactly as intended, shielding wealth, managing risk, and harming the powerless.

Sexual exploitation at the level revealed by the Epstein files does not occur in spite of capitalism, it occurs because of it. Wherever wealth accumulates beyond accountability, human beings become consumable. This is not a moral observation but a material one. Capitalism reduces all social relations to exchange, all value to price, all bodies to assets or liabilities. Under these conditions, intimacy itself becomes a resource to be extracted, managed, and monetised. Epstein did not invent this logic. He simply applied it with particular efficiency.

Throughout history, ruling classes have treated sexual access as a privilege of power. From feudal courts to colonial administrations, from slave plantations to modern corporate empires, domination has always had an erotic dimension. The powerful do not merely command labour, they command bodies. What distinguishes the modern capitalist elite is not that it desires more, but that it desires without exposure. Risk is outsourced. Consequences are absorbed by lawyers, publicists, and courts. Harm is rendered invisible through distance, payment, and procedural delay.

The Epstein files gesture toward this reality without ever being allowed to name it. We are shown fragments – a financier here, a politician there, a university donation, a private jet. What remains obscured is the totality, the dense web of institutions that collaborated, actively or passively, to ensure that exploitation continued uninterrupted. Prosecutors declined to prosecute. Police failed to investigate. Banks moved money. Universities accepted funding. Media organisations softened language. This was not a conspiracy in the cinematic sense, it was coordination through shared interest.

The 2008 non-prosecution agreement was not a miscarriage of justice but a declaration of class loyalty. It made explicit what is usually left unsaid, that the law exists primarily to regulate the poor. When wealth reaches a certain threshold, legality becomes negotiable. Epstein was not spared because evidence was lacking. He was spared because prosecution would have destabilised networks too important to disrupt. The victims were not ignored, they were sacrificed.

From an anarchist perspective, this is not surprising. The state does not exist to abolish violence but to manage it. It polices disorder from below while tolerating, and often facilitating, exploitation from above. Elite criminality is treated not as a threat to social order but as a variable to be controlled. When exposure becomes unavoidable, containment follows. Charges are narrowed. Language is softened. Responsibility is individualised. The system survives intact.

Epstein’s death in custody, whether through negligence or something more deliberate, completed this cycle. With the central figure removed, accountability dissolved into abstraction. Files replaced trials. Speculation replaced justice. The network remained largely untouched. This was not closure but erasure, a familiar outcome when elite interests are at stake.

The persistent suggestion that Epstein functioned as part of an intelligence-linked blackmail operation is often dismissed as conspiracy, yet blackmail has always been a routine instrument of power. States do not rule through morality, they rule through leverage. Sexual compromise has long been used to discipline elites, enforce obedience, and neutralise dissent. Whether Epstein was formally connected to intelligence agencies matters less than the fact that his operation mirrored intelligence logic perfectly – recruitment of the vulnerable, documentation of transgression, selective exposure, and absolute impunity at the top.

What this reveals is not a secret cabal but a social structure in which power circulates horizontally among elites while accountability is blocked vertically from below. Those named in the files remain insulated not because they are innocent, but because they are useful. Power protects itself instinctively.

The media’s role in this process is indispensable. Corporate journalism thrives on scandal but recoils from structural critique. It will publish details without analysis, outrage without context. Survivors are briefly platformed, then discarded. The story is continually reset, fragmented into consumable episodes that prevent sustained political understanding. Capitalism is never named as the common denominator because doing so would implicate the very institutions that control publication.

Anarcho-communism understands sexual violence of this nature as political, not personal. The problem is not individual desire but social relations structured by ownership, hierarchy, and alienation. Under capitalism, alienation does not disappear at the top, it intensifies. When all material needs are met without effort, desire becomes abstract, mediated, and increasingly divorced from reciprocity. Pleasure is no longer about connection but about control. Risk must be heightened to be felt at all, and harm becomes an acceptable by-product.

This is decadence in its true sense: – not excess, but emptiness. Epstein’s world of private islands, rotating victims, and endless consumption was not an exception to elite culture but a distilled version of it. The horror lies not only in what occurred, but in how normal it was allowed to become among those with power.

There is a persistent belief that if only the full truth were revealed, every name, every document, justice would follow. This belief misunderstands how power operates. The ruling class can absorb scandal indefinitely. What it cannot tolerate is the redistribution of wealth and control. Exposure without organised resistance changes nothing. At best, it rearranges factions within the elite, at worst, it serves as spectacle that drains popular anger without threatening underlying structures.

The Epstein files will not save anyone. They will not dismantle trafficking networks. They will not prevent future abuse. They function as an archive of managed outrage, released just enough to maintain the illusion of transparency while preserving impunity. The fixation on lists and flights distracts from the deeper question – why do such operations are exist in the first place.

An anarcho-communist response does not begin with punishment but with abolition. It asks what social arrangements make sexual exploitation viable and seeks to dismantle them at their root. It demands the destruction of extreme wealth accumulation, the abolition of private ownership over institutions that govern social life, and the construction of collective systems of care and accountability outside the state. It understands that as long as some human beings wield unaccountable power over others, abuse will follow as predictably as profit.

Jeffrey Epstein was not a monster who slipped through the cracks. He was a product of a system that converts vulnerability into opportunity and treats human beings as instruments. The obsession with who boarded which plane is a distraction from the more uncomfortable truth that capitalism allows planes like that to exist.

Until the structures that protect wealth, obscure harm, and commodify intimacy are dismantled, there will be another Epstein. And another. And another. The system is not failing. The system is the crime.

For most people, the word anarchy conjures chaos – burning cars, smashed windows, shouting crowds, the collapse of all restraint. It is a word carefully trained to frighten. Politicians invoke it as a threat, newspapers as a warning, and police as a justification. Anarchy, we are told, is what happens when order disappears.
But there is a simpler and more unsettling claim: anarchy is not the absence of order, but the absence of rulers. And far from being rare, it is woven through everyday life.
Anarchism is not simply an ideology, a movement, or a future revolution. Not everyone needs to call themselves an anarchist, nor is there any blueprint for how society must be reorganised. Instead, anarchism is something quieter and more subversive. Look closely at how people already live, how they care, work, raise children, resolve conflict, and survive, often without asking permission, without formal authority, and without the state playing a central role at all. Anarchism is a lived practice, not a doctrine. It is found not in the dramatic gestures of revolutionary politics, but in the mundane. If you want to understand anarchism, do not look to manifestos or barricades, look to everyday life.
Everyday anarchism is not uniquely radical or harmonious. Mutual aid after floods. Family and friends stepping in where welfare systems fall short. Informal housing arrangements that keep people off the streets. Cash work and favours that bypass wage discipline. Conflict resolved quietly without police or courts. These are not marginal or exceptional activities. They are normal. They are how life continues. And yet they are rarely named as political.
One of the most powerful myths of modern society is that order comes from above. We are taught that without rules imposed by the state, without police, bureaucrats, managers, and experts, society would descend into violence and disorder. Cooperation is treated as fragile and conditional, something that must be constantly supervised. When people help one another, it is framed as charity or kindness, never as a form of social organisation in its own right.
This myth serves a purpose. It legitimises authority while obscuring the fact that most of what keeps society functioning happens below the level of law and policy. The state depends heavily on unpaid care, informal cooperation, and community resilience, even as it claims credit for stability and threatens punishment for deviation. It is quick to intervene when people step outside permitted channels, but slow, or entirely absent, when real support is needed.
Nowhere is this contradiction clearer than in moments of crisis. After earthquakes, floods, and fires, it is neighbours, families, and community groups who act first. Food is shared, shelter organised, children looked after, elders checked on. These responses are not centrally planned. They emerge from relationships, trust, and local knowledge. The state arrives later, often to regulate, document, or withdraw support once the immediate danger has passed.
This is not an argument that the state does nothing, or that it is always irrelevant. It is an argument that social life is not produced by authority, even when authority claims ownership over it. The order we rely on most is informal, relational, and largely invisible to official accounts.
Working-class life, in particular, is dense with informal systems that make survival possible in the face of rising rents, precarious work, and shrinking public services. People share childcare, tools, transport, and knowledge. They look after one another’s kids, cover shifts, lend money without contracts, and find ways around rules that would otherwise leave them stuck. Much of this activity exists in a legal grey area, tolerated when it is convenient and criminalised when it becomes too visible.
What links these practices is not ideology, but necessity. People do not organise this way because they have read anarchist theory. They do it because they have to, and because cooperation works better than competition when resources are scarce and institutions are hostile.
Anarchism, in this sense, is not a destination but a description. It describes what happens when people take responsibility for their own lives and for one another, rather than deferring to distant authorities. It describes social order that emerges from below, shaped by context, relationships, and mutual obligation. It is messy, imperfect, and often fragile, but so is life itself.
This perspective challenges both defenders and critics of the state. Against those who insist that authority is the source of all order, it offers abundant evidence to the contrary. Against those who imagine anarchism only as a future rupture or total collapse, it insists that much of what they desire already exists, quietly, in the present.
None of this is an attempt to romanticise these practices. Informal systems can reproduce inequality, exclusion, and harm. They can fail, break down, or be overwhelmed. Nor is the reality of violence, abuse, or exploitation within communities denied. What is denied is the assumption that the state is the natural or necessary solution to these problems.
How do people actually manage harm when they do not call the police? How do families and communities regulate behaviour without formal authority? What happens when responsibility is collective rather than delegated upward? And why are these forms of organisation so often ignored, dismissed, or actively undermined?
These questions matter now more than ever. As faith in political institutions erodes, as economic inequality deepens, and as crises multiply, the gap between official systems and lived reality grows wider. Governments promise security while delivering precarity. Bureaucracies expand even as their capacity to care diminishes. In this context, the everyday anarchism of mutual aid and informal cooperation is not a fringe phenomenon – it is a lifeline.
This is an invitation to look differently at your own life and the lives around you. To notice the ways order is created without orders being given. To recognise that much of what feels natural or inevitable is, in fact, the result of collective effort without command. And to consider what might change if we took these practices seriously, not as temporary stopgaps, but as the foundations of social life.
Once you start to see anarchism in action, it becomes difficult to unsee it.

“Everything is class war” is usually offered back to us as an insult. A way of saying we are simplistic, obsessed, and incapable of nuance. The phrase is treated as a joke because jokes are how power tries to neutralise truths it cannot refute. Those who scoff at the idea do so from a position where class war is either invisible or comfortably one-sided. For those who live under capitalism rather than above it, class war is not a slogan. It is the logic of everyday life.

Class war does not begin when workers strike, when riots break out, or when police lines form. It does not suddenly erupt during moments of crisis. It is constant, mundane, and bureaucratic. It is written into rental agreements, employment contracts, benefit sanctions, border controls, and criminal codes. It is administered through spreadsheets, algorithms, and polite press conferences. It does not require conspiracy because it is structural. Capitalism is a system built on irreconcilable interests, and everything that follows from it flows from that antagonism.

A small minority controls land, capital, infrastructure, and production. The majority must sell their labour to survive. This is not a neutral exchange between equals. It is a coerced relationship maintained through the threat of deprivation. Work or poverty. Pay rent or be evicted. Obey borders or be caged. Accept precarity or be discarded. These are not unfortunate side effects of an otherwise functional system, they are its conditions of survival. Class war is not something that happens within capitalism. It is what capitalism is.

When wages stagnate while productivity rises, that is class war. When rents increase faster than incomes that is class war. When inflation is blamed on workers pay-rises rather than on corporate price-setting, that is class war. When public services are cut while profits are protected, that is class war. None of this happens by accident. It happens because the system is designed to extract value upward while pushing risk downward. Losses are socialised, profits are privatised, and the working class is expected to absorb the damage quietly.

Austerity is one of the clearest expressions of this logic. It is always framed as necessity, as inevitability, as economics doing what economics must. We are told there is no money, no choice, no alternative. Yet there is always money for policing, prisons, militaries, surveillance, and corporate subsidies. There is always money to protect property, borders, and investors. Scarcity appears only when it is time to support those who actually produce social wealth. Austerity is not about living within our means, it is about disciplining labour and restoring profitability by making life harder for those with the least power to resist.

The language of austerity is deliberately moralistic. We are told to tighten our belts, to be responsible, to accept pain for the greater good. Meanwhile, those at the top are insulated from crisis entirely. Their losses and their assets protected, their lifestyles unchanged. Austerity shortens lives, increases suffering, and deepens inequality, and it does so along predictable class lines. That is not failure. That is success, measured from above.

The state presents itself as a neutral referee standing above society, but this is one of the most persistent myths of capitalist modernity. The state is not an external force acting upon capitalism, it is one of its core instruments. Law, policing, taxation, and borders exist to stabilise exploitation, not to abolish it. When workers organise, police appear. When tenants resist eviction, police appear. When Indigenous land is defended, police appear. When corporations steal wages, destroy ecosystems, or kill through negligence, the state responds with fines, if it responds at all. Violence is reserved for those who threaten property relations, not those who profit from harm.

Prisons are not responses to social breakdown; they are warehouses for people capitalism has no use for. Poverty, addiction, trauma, and violence are criminalised because addressing their causes would require confronting exploitation, alienation, and inequality. The carceral system manages the surplus populations capitalism continually produces. It removes them from sight, strips them of rights, and presents punishment as justice. This is class war carried out through cages and uniforms rather than open conflict.

Healthcare tells the same story. Capitalism breaks bodies and minds through overwork, stress, insecurity, and deprivation, then treats the damage as individual pathology. Mental distress is medicalised while the conditions that produce it remain untouched. Addiction is treated as moral failure or disease rather than as a rational response to alienation and pain. Underfunded healthcare systems struggle heroically downstream from exploitation while governments insist that nothing fundamental can change. Who waits longest for treatment, who dies younger, who lives with untreated pain is not random. It maps almost perfectly onto class position.

This is why attempts to isolate class from race, gender, or colonialism are analytically useless. Capitalism has always relied on other forms of domination to intensify extraction and divide resistance. Unpaid domestic labour, overwhelmingly performed by women, subsidises the entire system by reproducing labour power for free. Colonial land theft created the material basis for capitalist accumulation. Racialised labour markets ensure a permanent supply of cheap, precarious workers while encouraging resentment between exploited groups rather than solidarity against exploitation itself. These are not distractions from class struggle. They are how class struggle is organised.

When working-class people name this reality, they are often accused of economic illiteracy. We are told markets are neutral, that inequality is natural, that capitalism is simply human nature expressed mathematically. This is ideological nonsense presented as common sense. The economy is not a law of physics. It is a set of social relationships enforced by violence and habit. Property rights, wage labour, debt, and profit are political arrangements, not inevitabilities. To challenge them is not naïve. To accept them as eternal is.

The real illiteracy lies in believing that a system generating permanent crisis, ecological collapse, and mass precarity can be tweaked into justice without confronting its foundations. Every reform that has improved working-class life was won through struggle and conceded reluctantly. None were gifts. None were secure. As soon as profitability is threatened, reforms are rolled back. Welfare states are dismantled, labour protections weakened, public assets sold. The state does not protect gains out of principle; it manages them until they become inconvenient.

This is why social democracy ultimately fails. It seeks to humanise a system that requires dehumanisation to function. It asks the state to restrain capital while remaining dependent on capital for revenue, growth, and legitimacy. At best, it produces temporary relief. At worst, it disarms resistance by convincing people that voting harder will solve structural antagonisms. When crisis returns, as it always does, the mask slips, and the same old class war renews intensity.

Climate collapse exposes this contradiction more clearly than anything else. The poorest contribute least to emissions and suffer most from the consequences. Entire communities are displaced, poisoned, and abandoned while corporations continue extracting, polluting, and expanding. Responsibility is individualised, consumption moralised, and systemic change declared unrealistic. Green capitalism promises salvation without sacrifice for capital. Workers are told to recycle more while fossil capital continues its assault on the planet. This is class war waged against the future itself.

To say “everything is class war” is not to claim that every human interaction is hostile or that solidarity is impossible. It is to recognise that our lives are shaped by a system built on antagonistic interests. Neutrality is an illusion. You are already taking sides by participating in society as it exists. The only question is whether you align yourself consciously with the exploited or unconsciously with their exploitation.

Charity does not negate structural violence. Kindness does not dismantle power. Representation does not equal liberation. As long as a minority controls the means of life, the majority will be disciplined into obedience. Ending class war requires abolishing the conditions that make it inevitable. That means abolishing private ownership of land and production. It means dismantling wage labour, it means organising society around need, not profit, cooperation rather than competition, freedom rather than hierarchy.

Anarcho-communism is not a fantasy of perfect harmony. It is a recognition that the existing order is neither natural nor sustainable. Mutual aid, worker self-management, communal care, and horizontal organisation already exist wherever people are forced to rely on each other despite the system. Our task is not to invent liberation from scratch but to generalise what already works and defend it against those who profit from misery.

Class war will not end through appeals to reason directed at those whose power depends on unreason. It will not end through technocratic adjustments or moral exhortation. It will end when the exploited withdraw their consent, their labour, and their obedience. Everything is class war because life under capitalism is organised around exploitation. The only real choice is whether we continue losing it quietly, one policy, one cut, one crisis at a time – or fight to abolish it altogether.

Digital ID – The New Chains of Capitalist Surveillance

Charlie Kirk’s Death and the Violence of Capitalism

You may already be an anarchist

Felix’s little red and black book

What Do Anarchists Mean by Communism: An Easy to Understand Guide

Rafts in Troubled Waters: Anarchism, Anti-Immigrant Protest, and the Rise of Reform UK

The Rise of Inverted Totalitarianism: An Anarchist Analysis

There Is No Authority but Yourself: A Revolutionary Ethic of Anarcho-Communism

They Sell Us Our Own Rebellion: Capitalism and the Commodification of Resistance

Why Class Matters Most — and Why That Doesn’t Mean Ignoring Identity

another collection of words posted here and there

Volume 1 here

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