Anarchism on emsenn.net

Anarchist TTRPGs

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Anarchist TTRPGs are a loose school of tabletop role-playing design that treats play as a place to rehearse anti-authoritarian social relations. These games often distrust centralized mastery, distribute authority across the table, and center community survival, mutual aid, or shared responsibility over heroic command.

This is not a single lineage. Some anarchist TTRPGs are explicit in name and politics. Others are better described as anti-authoritarian or prefigurative: they do not announce anarchism loudly, but they redesign play around many of the same commitments.

Affect

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Affect is the felt, bodily dimension of experience that precedes and exceeds conscious emotion. You walk into a room and something is wrong — you feel it before you identify it. A crowd shifts from restive to furious in a moment no individual decided. The exhaustion of precarious work settles into your body as a background hum you stop noticing. These are affects: intensities registered by the body before the mind categorizes them as feelings, and often persisting beneath or alongside whatever emotions the mind produces.

Psychoanalysis

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Psychoanalysis is the theoretical tradition originating with Sigmund Freud and radicalized by Jacques Lacan that analyzes the unconscious structures shaping human desire, repetition, and subjectivity. It is not primarily relevant to anarchism as a clinical practice (the treatment of neurosis on the couch) but as a political theory — an account of how domination operates at the level of wanting, and why some forms of resistance to domination succeed in escaping its capture while others do not.

The Pleasure Principle

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The pleasure principle is Freud’s term for the psychic tendency to reduce tension, discharge excitation, and return to equilibrium. When tension rises (hunger, frustration, desire), the organism seeks to discharge it; when equilibrium is restored, the result is experienced as pleasure. The system is homeostatic: it aims not at maximum pleasure but at manageable levels of excitation — enough to motivate, not enough to overwhelm. Pleasure, in this framework, is not ecstasy but the restoration of balance.

The Symbolic Order

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The symbolic order is the system of language, categories, law, and shared meaning through which a society organizes itself. It is not any particular institution — not the state, not capitalism, not patriarchy — but the underlying structure through which all institutions become intelligible, legitimate, and apparently natural. When a landlord collects rent, the symbolic order is the system that makes “landlord,” “tenant,” “rent,” “lease,” and “property right” mean something — that distributes these categories across persons and things and enforces the distribution as reality. Without the symbolic order, there is no landlord; there is a person and a building. The symbolic order converts that physical situation into a social relation of domination.

The Unconscious

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The unconscious is the dimension of mental life that is not available to conscious reflection. It is not a container (a box of repressed memories) but a structure — an active process that shapes what you want, what you do, what you repeat, and what you cannot see about your own motivations. You do not have an unconscious the way you have a liver. You are structured by it.

Freud’s discovery was not that people sometimes hide things from themselves. It was that the things hidden from consciousness are not random — they are organized. Dreams, slips of the tongue, symptoms, repetitive patterns, inexplicable attachments — these are not noise. They have a logic. The unconscious is that logic: a system of connections, substitutions, and displacements operating beneath and alongside conscious thought.

Alfredo Bonanno

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Alfredo Bonanno (1937–2023) was an Italian anarchist whose theoretical and practical work defined insurrectionary anarchism as a distinct current. His central argument was organizational: permanent structures — parties, unions, federations with fixed membership — reproduce hierarchy and bureaucracy regardless of their stated purpose. The alternative is informal organization: temporary, task-specific coordination among affinity groups that dissolves when its purpose is achieved.

¶Core ideas

Armed joy: Bonanno’s most influential concept. The experience of freedom in the act of resistance — intensity, joy, the dissolution of the boundary between political action and lived experience — is not a byproduct of struggle but its purpose. A revolution that demands sacrifice and deferred gratification reproduces the logic of domination it claims to oppose. Freedom must be practiced now, in the present, or it is not freedom.

Anarcha-Feminism

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Anarcha-feminism is the analysis that patriarchy is not a separate system of domination but is structurally interlocked with the state, capitalism, and colonialism. It follows that you cannot abolish one without confronting the others: a revolution that liberates workers while subordinating women has not understood what hierarchy is.

¶The double critique

Anarcha-feminism critiques both the patriarchal left and liberal feminism simultaneously.

The patriarchal left — including much of the historical anarchist movement — treats gender domination as secondary to class struggle. Women are told to wait: first the revolution, then liberation. But this deferral is itself a structure of domination: who decides what is primary and what is secondary? Whose concerns count as political and whose as personal? The answer reproduces exactly the hierarchy the movement claims to oppose.

Anarcho-Nihilism

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Anarcho-nihilism is the anarchist position that strips away the requirement of hope. Most political traditions — including most anarchism — ground action in the expectation that it will produce a desired outcome: the revolution will come, the arc of history bends toward justice, a better world is possible. Anarcho-nihilism dispenses with all of this. You resist domination because domination is intolerable, not because you expect to overcome it. If resistance requires hope as a precondition, then hopelessness becomes an argument for submission — and anarcho-nihilism refuses that logic.

Armed Joy

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Armed joy is Alfredo Bonanno’s name for the experience of freedom in the act of resistance. It is not the joy of winning, not the satisfaction of achieving a goal, not the pleasure of imagining a better future. It is the intensity of the present-tense act itself — the dissolution of the boundary between political struggle and lived experience. In the moment of refusal, of direct action, of collective resistance to domination, something happens that is not reducible to the action’s instrumental purpose. That something — joy that is armed because it accompanies the fight rather than the victory — is what Bonanno insists is the substance of revolution, not its byproduct.

Blessed is the Flame

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

David Graeber

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

David Graeber (1961–2020) was an anthropologist and anarchist organizer whose work demonstrated — through ethnographic and historical evidence rather than abstract theory — that the institutions most people take as natural and inevitable (the state, capitalism, hierarchy, bureaucracy) are recent historical developments, and that human societies have organized through non-hierarchical means for most of human existence.

¶Core ideas

The anthropology of non-hierarchy: Drawing on ethnographic evidence from Madagascar, Indigenous North America, and other societies, Graeber showed that self-organization without centralized authority is not a theoretical possibility but a documented reality. Many societies actively prevent the emergence of hierarchy through social mechanisms — ridicule of boasters, rotation of responsibilities, consensus decision-making — that make domination structurally difficult.

deschooling

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Deschooling is the proposal, advanced most prominently by Ivan Illich in Deschooling Society (1971), that compulsory schooling should be abolished and replaced with voluntary, community-based networks of learning. The argument is not that education is unnecessary but that institutional schooling confuses education with something else — credentialing, social control, and the production of dependence on institutions.

Illich identified several ways that schools distort learning:

Confusing process with substance. Schools teach people to equate being taught with learning, to equate grade advancement with education, and to equate a diploma with competence. The institution substitutes its own processes for the activities it claims to facilitate.
Monopolizing the definition of knowledge. By requiring credentialed teachers, approved curricula, and institutional settings, schools monopolize what counts as legitimate learning. Knowledge acquired outside schools — through practice, mentorship, self-directed inquiry, or community transmission — is devalued.
Producing dependence. Schooling trains people to depend on institutions for learning, health, and other capabilities they could develop through their own initiative and mutual support. The more schooling people receive, the more they believe they cannot learn without it.

Illich proposed learning webs as an alternative: voluntary networks connecting people who want to learn with people who can teach, with resources (libraries, workshops, tools), and with peers engaged in similar inquiry. These networks would be organized by interest and mutual agreement, not by compulsion or credentialing.

Desire

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Desire is the mode of wanting organized around what you do not have. You desire what is absent — the revolution that has not yet come, the justice that does not yet exist, the freedom you have not yet achieved. Desire is structured by lack: it targets an object, pursues it, and is sustained by the gap between the wanting and the having. If the object were obtained, desire would not be satisfied — it would relocate to a new object, because desire is not really about the object at all. It is about the movement toward what is missing.

Drive

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Drive is the mode of wanting that does not aim at an object. Where desire targets what is absent — the revolution, the better world, the thing you do not yet have — drive operates without a target. It repeats. It circles. Its movement is its own purpose. Lacan described the drive as a circuit: it goes out toward an object, does not reach it, returns, and goes out again. The satisfaction of drive is not in reaching the destination but in the going.

Emma Goldman

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Emma Goldman (1869–1940) was an anarchist organizer, writer, and speaker who insisted that freedom is indivisible: you cannot oppose the state and capitalism while accepting patriarchy, compulsory marriage, or the repression of sexuality and individual expression. Her famous formulation — “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution” (likely apocryphal but faithful to her position) — captures the core claim: revolution that reproduces domination in the name of liberation is not revolution at all.

Errico Malatesta

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Errico Malatesta (1853–1932) was an Italian anarchist who spent over fifty years organizing, writing, and participating in revolutionary movements across Italy, Argentina, Egypt, and England. His work bridged anarcho-communism and insurrectionary practice, insisting that anarchism must be both theoretically clear and practically effective.

¶Core ideas

Anarchism as will, not inevitability: Against the determinism of both Marxists (who expected capitalism to collapse under its own contradictions) and some anarchists (who expected self-organization to emerge spontaneously once the state was removed), Malatesta insisted that revolution requires conscious effort, organization, and preparation. Freedom does not arrive automatically. It must be fought for and built.

Expropriation

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Expropriation is the collective reclamation of the means of production — land, factories, housing, tools, infrastructure — from those who hold them as private property. Anarchism holds that this is not theft but recovery: everything that exists was produced through collective labor accumulated over generations, and private ownership of collectively produced wealth is itself the original theft. As Proudhon argued: “property is theft.” Expropriation is the reversal.

¶The argument for expropriation

The case for expropriation rests on the anarchist analysis of property. No individual produced the land, the roads, the machines, the electrical grid, or the accumulated knowledge on which all production depends. These are the products of centuries of collective human effort. The claim of private ownership over collectively produced wealth is maintained through coercion — enforced by the state through law, police, and military — and legitimized through the ideology that individual ownership is natural and just.

Green Anarchism

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Green anarchism is the current within anarchism that holds that the domination of the natural world and the domination of human beings are not separate problems but aspects of the same structure. You cannot abolish capitalism while treating the earth as a resource to be extracted. You cannot abolish the state while accepting the industrial infrastructure that requires centralized management. Ecological destruction is not a policy failure but the predictable output of hierarchical societies that treat both people and land as raw material for accumulation.

Hope

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hope, in the anarcho-nihilist analysis, is not a virtue but a requirement — and the requirement is the problem. The demand that activists, organizers, and resisters maintain hope — believe that a better world is possible, that things will improve, that the arc of history bends toward justice — functions as a precondition for political engagement. If you cannot produce hope, you are excluded from the struggle. Your honest assessment of conditions is reframed as defeatism. Your trauma is reframed as a personal obstacle to be overcome. Your analysis — that ecological collapse is accelerating, that state power is consolidating, that capitalism adapts faster than its opponents — is treated as something to be argued out of rather than engaged with.

Ideology

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ideology is the system of ideas, assumptions, and narratives that makes domination appear natural, necessary, or invisible. It is not a lie told by the powerful to deceive the powerless — though the powerful do lie. It is a structural feature of hierarchical societies: when the institutions that produce knowledge, education, media, and culture are themselves hierarchical, the understanding of the world they generate will naturalize hierarchy. The fish does not see the water.

Illegalism

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Illegalism is the anarchist practice of refusing to recognize the authority of law and acting accordingly — stealing, squatting, counterfeiting, smuggling, forging documents, and otherwise violating the legal order not as aberrant behavior but as a principled response to a system of domination. Where direct action acts without asking permission, illegalism acts against the legal framework that claims the right to grant permission in the first place.

¶The argument

Illegalism rests on the anarchist analysis of law and legitimacy. If law is not a neutral protector of rights but an instrument that enforces property relations, maintains class divisions, and criminalizes resistance to hierarchy, then obeying the law is not a moral obligation but a form of obedience to a coercive system. Breaking the law is not inherently criminal — it is, in many cases, the only coherent response to a legal order that is itself criminal in its protection of exploitation and domination.

Insurrectionary Anarchism

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Insurrectionary anarchism is the current within anarchism that insists on informal organization, immediate action against structures of domination, and the refusal of permanent organizations, political programs, negotiation with authority, and the deferral of freedom to a future revolutionary moment. Its central claim is structural, not merely tactical: permanent organizations accumulate bureaucracy, reproduce hierarchy, and become ends in themselves. Freedom practiced now, in the act of resistance itself, is the only freedom that is real.

¶Core claims

Insurrectionary anarchism is not a doctrine of constant armed revolt. It is an analysis of organization. Its starting point is the observation that formal organizations — parties, unions, federations with fixed memberships and permanent structures — tend to reproduce the hierarchy they claim to oppose. Leaders emerge. Bureaucracy accumulates. The organization’s survival becomes more important than its purpose. The means overtake the ends.

Jouissance

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Jouissance is the excessive pleasure that resistance produces independent of its outcomes. It is not happiness (which requires that things go well), not satisfaction (which requires that a need be met), not even joy in the ordinary sense (which implies something to be joyful about). It is the intensity of the act of refusal itself — the experience that exceeds any calculation of costs and benefits, that cannot be justified by what it achieves, and that persists even when what it achieves is nothing. This is the affective ground of anarcho-nihilism: you do not resist because you expect to win, and yet resistance is not joyless. Something happens in the act that exceeds the act’s instrumental content. That something is jouissance.

Legitimacy

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Legitimacy is the perception that authority is justified — that obedience is not merely compelled but appropriate, that those who command have the right to do so, and that those who obey are fulfilling a genuine obligation rather than submitting to force. Anarchism holds that legitimacy is not a property that some institutions genuinely possess and others lack but a mechanism through which domination conceals itself. The most effective hierarchy is the one that never needs to use coercion because its subjects believe their subordination is natural, necessary, or freely chosen.

Lucy Parsons

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Lucy Parsons (c. 1851–1942) was an American anarchist, labor organizer, and writer whose life and work demonstrated the inseparability of racial oppression, class exploitation, and gendered domination. Born in Texas — likely to enslaved or formerly enslaved parents, with Black, Mexican, and possibly Native American heritage — she became one of the most prominent radical organizers in the United States, co-founding the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and advocating the general strike, direct action, and the abolition of capitalism.

Mikhail Bakunin

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) was a Russian revolutionary whose confrontation with Marx in the First International established the defining line between anarchism and authoritarian socialism: the question of whether the state can be used as a tool of liberation or whether it inevitably reproduces domination regardless of who controls it.

¶Core ideas

The state as inherently dominating: Bakunin argued that the state is not a neutral instrument that can be seized and redirected toward liberation. Its structure — centralized authority, bureaucracy, monopoly on force — reproduces hierarchy regardless of the ideology of those who hold power. A “workers’ state” would produce a new ruling class: the bureaucrats, party officials, and managers who administer it. This prediction, made decades before the Russian Revolution, proved precise.

Murray Bookchin

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) was an American social theorist whose work established green anarchism’s central argument: that ecological destruction is not a policy failure or a moral lapse but the structural product of social domination. You cannot save the planet without abolishing hierarchy, because hierarchy is what produces the destruction.

Social ecology — Bookchin’s primary theoretical contribution — holds that the domination of nature by human beings arises from the domination of human beings by other human beings. Hierarchy, class, the state, and capitalism do not merely happen to produce ecological destruction as a side effect. They require it. Capitalism demands growth; growth demands extraction; extraction destroys ecological systems. The state requires industrial infrastructure to maintain its military and administrative apparatus; industrial infrastructure requires centralized energy, mining, and the displacement of communities. The domination of nature is the ecological expression of social domination.

mutual aid pedagogy

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Mutual aid pedagogy is a form of learning organized through reciprocal support rather than hierarchical instruction. People teach what they know and learn what they don’t, without fixed roles of teacher and student. The practice draws on Pyotr Kropotkin’s account of mutual aid as a factor of evolution — the observation that cooperation, not competition, sustains communities and enables collective flourishing [@kropotkin_MutualAid_1902].

In mutual aid pedagogy, the distinction between teacher and learner dissolves or rotates. A study group where participants take turns presenting material, a skill-share where community members teach practical abilities, a reading circle where no one leads and everyone contributes — these are mutual aid pedagogical forms. The assumption is not that no one has expertise, but that expertise is distributed and that learning flows in multiple directions.

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) is Pyotr Kropotkin’s systematic demonstration that cooperation is as fundamental to evolution as competition. Written as a direct response to Social Darwinists who claimed that nature justifies hierarchy — that competition and domination are natural laws — the book assembles evidence from animal behavior, medieval communes, and Indigenous societies showing that mutual aid is the primary factor in the survival and flourishing of both species and human societies.

Patriarchy

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Patriarchy is the structure of gendered domination in which masculine authority is embedded in institutions — family, religion, law, economy, the state — and maintained through coercion, custom, economic dependence, and the threat of violence. Anarchism analyzes patriarchy not as a separate system from capitalism or the state but as part of the same structure of hierarchy: you cannot abolish one form of domination while preserving another.

¶What patriarchy is

Patriarchy is not the claim that all men dominate all women. It is the claim that social institutions are organized to concentrate authority in masculine roles and to subordinate feminized roles — and that this arrangement is maintained through force when custom fails. The family under patriarchy is a unit of governance: the father commands, the wife and children obey. This structure is replicated at every scale — the boss commands workers, the state commands subjects, the priest commands congregants — and in each case the logic of authority reproduces gendered patterns of dominance and submission.

Paul Virilio

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Paul Virilio (1932–2018) was a French urbanist and political theorist whose work analyzed speed, technology, and warfare as the constitutive — not incidental — structures of modern political power. His central contribution was dromology: the claim that political history is, at base, the history of speed — that whoever controls the means of acceleration controls the territory, the population, and the future.

¶Core ideas

Dromology: the study of speed as the determining logic of political power. Virilio argued that the capacity to move — troops, information, capital, force — faster than one’s adversary is the foundational political capacity. The state is a speed-machine before it is a legal order.
The logistics of perception: warfare is not only about destroying the enemy but about seeing before being seen. From the watchtower to the satellite to the real-time battlefield feed, the history of war is the history of perception technologies — each accelerating the cycle between observation and destruction.
The accident: every technology produces its specific accident. The ship produces the shipwreck; the train produces the derailment; the nuclear reactor produces the meltdown. Speed technologies produce the speed-accident: the catastrophe that arrives faster than the capacity to respond.
Polar inertia: at the limit of acceleration, movement ceases. When everything arrives instantly — real-time communication, teleconferencing, remote warfare — there is no longer any reason to go anywhere. The result is a paradoxical immobility: the most connected populations are the most sedentary.

¶Significance for this research

Virilio was not an anarchist, but his analysis is directly useful for anarchist critique. His demonstration that speed serves domination — that acceleration is not neutral progress but a political technology — provides the analytical ground for understanding why prefigurative politics requires temporal autonomy, why consensus is structurally incompatible with the speed-regime, and why the demand to “be more efficient” is always implicitly a demand to accept hierarchy.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) was a French printer, self-taught political theorist, and the first person to explicitly adopt the term “anarchist” as a positive political identification. His 1840 work What Is Property? posed the question that would define anarchism’s relationship to capitalism: “What is property?” The answer: “Property is theft.”

¶Property is theft

Proudhon’s argument is structural, not moral. Private property in productive resources — land, tools, workshops, factories — is not a natural right that individuals possess independently of society. It is a social arrangement in which one person’s claim to control something is enforced against everyone else. The enforcement requires the state — police, courts, laws of trespass and contract — because without enforcement, the claim is merely an assertion. Property is theft because it appropriates what was once common or unowned and excludes others from it by force. The landlord who collects rent, the factory owner who profits from workers’ labor, the speculator who holds land idle while people need it — each extracts value from others’ needs and work, and each depends on the state to maintain the arrangement.

prefigurative education

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Prefigurative education is education that embodies the social relations it seeks to create. If the goal is a non-hierarchical society, the learning environment is organized non-hierarchically. If the goal is communal self-determination, the curriculum is determined by the community. The form of education is not separate from its content — the medium carries political meaning.

The concept draws on the broader anarchist principle of prefigurative politics: the conviction that means must be consistent with ends, that a just society cannot be produced through unjust methods. Applied to education, this means that a school organized through coercion, competition, and hierarchical authority cannot produce free, cooperative, self-determining people — regardless of what it teaches.

Propaganda of the Deed

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Propaganda of the deed is the principle that political ideas are communicated more effectively through action than through argument. An act of resistance, an example of self-organization, a demonstration that life without hierarchy is possible — these are more persuasive than any pamphlet because they show rather than tell. The term originated in the 1870s among Italian and Russian anarchists and has been used to describe a wide range of actions, from insurrectionary violence to the construction of cooperative institutions.

Pyotr Kropotkin

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Pyotr Kropotkin (1842–1921) was a Russian geographer and anarchist theorist whose central contribution was demonstrating that mutual aid — voluntary cooperation without command — is not a utopian aspiration but an observable, empirically documented fact of biological and social life. Against Social Darwinists who claimed that competition drives evolution and therefore justifies hierarchy, Kropotkin marshaled evidence from animal behavior, medieval communes, and Indigenous societies showing that the most successful species and societies are those that cooperate most effectively.

Recuperation

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Recuperation is the process by which structures of domination absorb radical practices, defuse their oppositional content, and redeploy them in service of the existing order. The form survives; the substance is neutralized. The term comes from the Situationist International but names a process anarchists have observed since the nineteenth century: every challenge to hierarchy risks being transformed into a new product, a new management technique, or a new justification for the system it opposed.

Serafinski

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Serafinski is the pseudonymous author of Blessed is the Flame: An Introduction to Concentration Camp Resistance and Anarcho-Nihilism (2016), the text that establishes anarcho-nihilism as a distinct position within anarchism. The text poses a question that most political theory avoids: what does resistance look like when there is no possibility of victory?

¶The concentration camp as limit case

The genius of Serafinski’s method is the choice of subject. The Nazi concentration camp is the limit case of domination — a situation in which the conditions for consequentialist action have been entirely eliminated. There is no possibility of revolution. There is no external force that will rescue you in time. There is no future in which your suffering is redeemed. Every progressive assumption — that history moves toward justice, that suffering is temporary, that resistance will eventually be rewarded — is falsified by the situation itself.

Speed and Politics

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Speed and Politics (Vitesse et Politique) is a 1977 text by Paul Virilio that argues political power is fundamentally dromological — organized around the control of speed rather than the control of territory, wealth, or law. The capacity to move faster — militarily, economically, informationally — is the foundational political capacity, and all other political structures are downstream of it.

Virilio traces this logic from ancient siege warfare through the motorization of the battlefield, the development of logistics as a military science, and the emergence of real-time communication and nuclear deterrence. The modern state is not primarily a legal entity but a speed-machine: its sovereignty rests on its capacity to project force faster than any challenger. The city, the highway, the airport, the telecommunications network — all are dromological infrastructure, organized to accelerate the movement of people, goods, and information in service of state and capital.

The Armed Joy

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Armed Joy (La gioia armata, 1977) is Alfredo Bonanno’s central text, arguing that revolution is not a future event to be prepared for through sacrifice and discipline but a quality of present action. The “armed joy” is the experience of freedom in the act of resistance itself — the dissolution of the boundary between political struggle and lived experience, the refusal to defer liberation to an always-receding horizon.

¶The argument

Bonanno attacks the revolutionary tradition’s demand for sacrifice: suffer now for freedom later. This demand, he argues, reproduces the logic of domination it claims to oppose. The state demands deferred gratification (work now, retire later). The church demands deferred gratification (suffer now, heaven later). The revolutionary party demands deferred gratification (organize now, revolution later). All three require obedience in the present in exchange for a promised future that never arrives.

The Commons

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The commons are resources governed collectively by the communities that use them. They are not private property (owned by an individual or corporation), not state property (owned by the government), but commonly held — managed through shared agreements, reciprocal obligation, seasonal rotation, and direct participation by the people who depend on them. Pastureland, fisheries, forests, waterways, seed stocks, knowledge, and care networks have all been organized as commons across human history.

The Conquest of Bread

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Conquest of Bread (La Conquête du Pain, 1892) is Pyotr Kropotkin’s practical outline of how an anarcho-communist society could organize production, distribution, housing, and governance without the state, capitalism, or hierarchy. Where Mutual Aid demonstrates that self-organization is empirically real, The Conquest of Bread shows what it could look like at the scale of an entire society.

¶The argument

Kropotkin begins with a claim about wealth: everything that exists — every building, every machine, every road, every piece of cultivated land — is the product of collective labor accumulated over generations. No individual produced any of it alone. The claim of individual property rights over collectively produced wealth is therefore a form of theft — not Proudhon’s abstract “property is theft” but a concrete accounting argument. If everything is collectively produced, it should be collectively owned.

The Death Drive

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The death drive is the force that operates beyond the pleasure principle. Freud introduced it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) to account for phenomena that his earlier theory could not explain: the compulsion to repeat traumatic experiences, the pursuit of situations that produce suffering rather than satisfaction, the tendency of organisms to seek not equilibrium but dissolution. He proposed a fundamental duality: Eros (the life drives) binds, connects, and builds complexity; Thanatos (the death drive) unbinds, disintegrates, and tends toward the dissolution of every organized structure.

Violence

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Violence is the exercise of physical force to damage, restrain, dispossess, or kill. Every political tradition claims to oppose violence. The question anarchism asks is: whose violence counts as violence?

The state defines itself as the monopoly on legitimate violence — Weber’s formulation. Police violence, military violence, incarceration, deportation, the enforcement of property claims through eviction, the enforcement of borders through detention and death — these are not called violence. They are called law enforcement, national defense, maintaining order. The violence is real — people are beaten, caged, killed — but its classification as “legitimate” renders it invisible as violence. It becomes the background condition, the way things are, the price of civilization.

Adult Supremacy

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Adult supremacy is the political arrangement in which adults hold power over children and young people, and in which this power is treated as natural, inevitable, and justified. The term draws a deliberate parallel to white supremacy and male supremacy: it names not individual prejudice but a system — a set of interlocking institutions, norms, and ideologies that concentrate political, economic, and social power in the hands of adults and exclude young people from participation in decisions that affect their lives.

Conjecture: The anarchism of the liberal subject derives from civic duty and is thus incommensurable with decolonization

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Conjecture :: The anarchism of the liberal subject derives from civic duty and is thus incommensurable with decolonization.
Proof :: unproven
claims ::
- Given that liberal anarchism, that is, anarchism of the liberal subject, requires itself be functional within liberalism and thus a part of liberal worlding, it must maintain compatibility with liberalism.
- Given the lineage of liberal anarchism is deviation of the lineage of liberal individualism, its a priori determinations may be derived from that lineage.

Anarchism on emsenn.net

Anarchist TTRPGs

Affect

Psychoanalysis

The Pleasure Principle

The Symbolic Order

The Unconscious

Alfredo Bonanno

¶Core ideas

Anarcha-Feminism

¶The double critique

Anarcho-Nihilism

Armed Joy

Blessed is the Flame

¶The argument

David Graeber

¶Core ideas

deschooling

Desire

Drive

Emma Goldman

Errico Malatesta

¶Core ideas

Expropriation

¶The argument for expropriation

Green Anarchism

Hope

Ideology

Illegalism

¶The argument

Insurrectionary Anarchism

¶Core claims

Jouissance

Legitimacy

Lucy Parsons

Mikhail Bakunin

¶Core ideas

Murray Bookchin

¶Social ecology

mutual aid pedagogy

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

Patriarchy

¶What patriarchy is

Paul Virilio

¶Core ideas

¶Significance for this research

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

¶Property is theft

prefigurative education

Propaganda of the Deed

Pyotr Kropotkin

Recuperation

Serafinski

¶The concentration camp as limit case

Speed and Politics

The Armed Joy

¶The argument

The Commons

The Conquest of Bread

¶The argument

The Death Drive

Violence

Adult Supremacy

Conjecture: The anarchism of the liberal subject derives from civic duty and is thus incommensurable with decolonization