Anarcho-nihilism is the political orientation that acts against domination without requiring hope, progress, or the expectation of success as preconditions for action. It combines anarchism’s opposition to all forms of domination with nihilism’s refusal to ground action in transcendent meaning, historical progress, or faith in a better future.
The position was developed most explicitly by Serafinski in Blessed is the Flame (2016), which examines resistance within Nazi concentration camps — sabotage, revolt, escape, refusal — as political acts that cannot be evaluated by their prospects for success. The concentration camp is the limit case: resistance persists where victory is impossible, where no program can be implemented, where the future offers nothing. Serafinski argues that this is not an aberration but a revelation of what resistance has always been — an act grounded in present conditions, not future expectations.
Anarcho-nihilism is not despair. It is the insistence that despair and hope are both irrelevant to the question of whether to resist. The orientation connects to hospicing humanity — the recognition that the current form of human civilization may be in terminal decline and that care through that process does not require optimism about its outcome. It connects to active nihilism (Nietzsche’s distinction) in its constructive refusal: the old values are destroyed not to produce emptiness but to clear space for action that does not depend on them.