Blessed is the Flame: An Introduction to Concentration Camp Resistance and Anarcho-Nihilism (2016) by Serafinski argues that resistance to domination does not require the expectation of success. Drawing on the history of Jewish resistance in Nazi concentration camps — uprisings, sabotage, escape, refusal of compliance — the text demonstrates that people resist even when they know they cannot win, and that this resistance is neither irrational nor futile.
The argument
The standard justification for political action is consequentialist: we act because we expect our action to achieve something. Serafinski observes that this framework produces paralysis when the prospects for success are negligible — and that in the present historical moment (ecological collapse, consolidated state power, surveillance capitalism), the prospects for any revolutionary transformation are, by most honest assessments, negligible.
Rather than accepting paralysis, Serafinski strips away the requirement of hope. The Jews who revolted in the concentration camps — the Sonderkommando uprising at Auschwitz, the revolt at Treblinka, countless individual acts of sabotage and defiance — did so knowing they would die. Their resistance was not a calculated strategy but a refusal to allow domination the final word. They would determine the terms of their own death.
This, Serafinski argues, reveals something about resistance in general: it is not fundamentally about winning but about the refusal to submit. If that is true, then the impossibility of victory is not an argument for inaction. You resist because domination is intolerable, not because you expect to overcome it.
Anarcho-nihilism
The political position the text derives: anarchism stripped of its progressive assumptions. Most anarchist theory assumes that a better world is possible, that human societies tend toward freedom, that history has a direction. Anarcho-nihilism dispenses with these assumptions. Resistance is unconditional — grounded in the present experience of domination, not in future expectations. This is not despair but the liberation of action from the requirement of optimism.
Significance for this research
Blessed is the Flame connects to this school’s analysis of temporality and speed. The demand for optimism — “believe things will get better” — is a temporal demand: defer your judgment, keep working, keep hoping. Anarcho-nihilism refuses this deferral, insisting on present-tense engagement with present-tense domination. In this sense, it is a form of temporal autonomy: the refusal to let dominant temporalities determine when and whether resistance is justified.
Related
- refusal — the stance the text grounds
- insurrectionary anarchism — the current anarcho-nihilism extends
- Serafinski — the author
- Alfredo Bonanno — the insurrectionary framework Serafinski builds on
- The Armed Joy — Bonanno’s parallel argument about freedom in present action