Brian Thompson, CEO of health insurance giant UnitedHealthcare, was fired upon by a masked assailant around 6:46 a.m. on December 4, 2024 outside the New York Hilton Midtown Hotel where the company was set to hold an investor meeting. The shooter stepped up behind Thompson with a handgun fitted with a silencer and fired three […]
Category: Anarchism
Returning Shevek to Anarres
I chose Lee Shevek as a pen name early on in this ongoing writing project, when my theoretical focus was on insurgency and counterinsurgency. Shevek is the name given to the main character in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, a book that held — and still holds — a special place in my heart and in […]
Butch Ability
Butches hold open doors. Butches arm ourselves and patrol around the local queer bars in order to protect other queer folks from bashers. Butches use power tools, build sheds, haul the heaviest furniture when our friends are moving. Butches step in and beat down predatory men. Butches protect. Butches build. Butches act. Butches serve. This […]
The Coercive Control of Israeli Settler Colonialism
Coercive control, a framework originally conceptualized in Evan Stark’s Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Everyday Life and widely utilized in domestic violence theory, is one that can be expanded to understand the tactics and underlying values of all forms of authoritarian control. I have argued for this in other essays and have alluded […]
Tactics for the Fight Against Abuse: Learning from Anti-Fascism
The Size of the Problem We live in a culture of abuse. With acknowledgement that these numbers are insufficient due to underreporting: more than 60% of adults in the so-called United States have experienced at least one ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) and a quarter of adults have experienced three or more ACEs. Over 33% of women […]
Intimate Authoritarianism: The Ideology of Abuse
For far too long have radical communities and their discourses treated domestic violence and abuse as external from the considerations of revolutionary struggle. Abuse is seen as simply an interpersonal issue, springing from individual pathology which we must address by correcting certain behaviors and teaching better communication skills. The intervention tools of choice are frequently […]
“Who Has To Do It?”: A Reflection on the Compulsion to Coerce
When exploring the potential challenges of a liberatory future, one of the most frequent subjects we reflect upon is that of how our labor might be organized to attend to the needs of all without domination and hierarchy. There is no shortage of theory proposing various answers to these questions and it is not my […]
Do I Need To Be An Optimist To Be An Anarchist?
Many people new to anarchist ideas might find much that they resonate with in the political philosophy, but feel that they have some reservations that keep them from being able to identify fully with anarchism. Anarchism as many come to know it is, in many ways, a profoundly optimistic philosophy when it comes to the […]
Towards the Abolition of the Family!
You may have come across the radical slogan “Abolish the Family” before and found yourself dismayed. Perhaps familial connections and support has been a vitally important source of emotional fulfillment for you throughout your life and you cannot imagine where you would be without them. Are radicals seriously suggesting that you forsake your family? That […]
Against a Liberal Abolitionism
In the explosion of interest in the topic of abolitionism during and after the explosive summer of 2020 its meaning and purpose has become distorted in its trek through the popular imagination. The topic of Transformative/Restorative Justice also increased in popularity, and as a result many people even conceptualize TJ/RJ as being one in the […]