Bracing Against the Future

fighting back; remembering Syria; reading and listening for January

It’s early January and I’m breathing in pieces of California.

The air quality warning competes with the grey sky, the brilliant snow. Should I go for a walk? The temperatures have been undulating around -10º for over a week (between 10F and 25F). Maybe four inches of snow. It might last another week or two, and that puts my heart at peace. I’m also aware that if this is the most wintery spell we get this season, it’s about four feet less snow and ten degrees warmer than what people on the southern shore of Lake Erie might have expected three decades ago.

At the same time, the high at the North Pole is a balmy 30ºF, -1C, during what should be the coldest time of year. In Barcelona, my home for most of my adult life, it’s above 20C during the day, 70ºF.

Photo by Nima Sarikhani

I found out last week I lost a friend. He’s gone forever. Two other friends are having babies. One of them can’t go outdoors at all: she lives in LA.

This week I’m sending out links to articles and podcasts, a fundraiser for LA, news about the Syrian revolution. Some of the podcasts should be calming, others might help us build back some hope. I’d love for you to help spread all of it. But first I want to say something about this year we’re facing.

We can get through it. And we need to – for those growing up in these times, and for those we’ve lost along the way.

Exactly a year ago, I posted a sardonic article, “The Year Ahead in 2024.” Below an image showing a stock market ticker, it began:

the likelihood of global civil war: +10%

the likelihood of the current world system continuing : -15%

I was still in the thick of chemo, and it was a tongue-in-cheek way of reducing suffering to numbers, and also buying time until I could find the energy to write some actual analysis. In the end, though, I’d say it was a fairly accurate prediction for how this last year shifted the probable scenarios for our global future. The entire year, Israel carried out blatant genocide without any meaningful, substantial consequences from any major government, regardless of whether the party in power was from the right, left, or center. It’s the year that broke the barrier of 1.5C of global warming, the target that the IPCC and the whole official climate framework have been trying to set as a hard limit for the entirety of their existence, and yet those of us who have been saying for years that the methods they are using (investment in green capitalism, stronger government planning and regulations) are incapable of saving us, and are in fact only making things worse, are still being silenced and excluded.

The mainstream climate framework is only making things worse

Calling it months before the New York Times and the IPCC is a bitter consolation, because unless we change our approach fast, the rich and powerful are going to be among the last to die from the cataclysm they’re driving us towards.

I don’t want to spend 2025 bitter and cynical. I meant for this newsletter to bring a little comfort.

This year could easily mark a tipping point in our resistance. When we finally turn our back on false solutions and commit to collective healing, to ecosystemic survival, and to total social transformation.

What does that mean?

Remembering

We have struggled for generations. We should know by now that exclusive nonviolence does not work if our goal is anything more than minor reforms. We know that the government only grants improvements if it strengthens their own position or weakens our resistance, and any victory we win from the State is temporary at best. We should remember that political parties harm the struggle by recreating hierarchy, oppression, manipulation, and policing in our own movements. We should remember that revolutionary governments have always butchered the revolution, and that all the communist and socialist states of the 20^th century just built new paths back to capitalism. And in the two and half decades of this century, the most progressive governments and the most groundbreaking referendums have only demobilized the revolutionary movements that created space for progressive politics in the first place. Whatever improvements the progressives achieved weren’t enough to make the difference between disaster and survival. Progressives are just a corrective mechanism on this colossal ship that is carrying all of us towards a certain collision.

We need to stop trusting the experts and leaders who distract us with ways to save the ship. Fuck the ship. We need to save ourselves.

On the other hand, we need to remember the major rebellions that more than half the planet has participated in over these last decades. When cops killed our neighbors, we chased them out and burned police stations down. We’ve stopped new pipelines and airports, saved forests and wetlands, launched rent strikes and halted evictions, opened borders and blocked deportations, carried out rescues and distributed food and first aid in the wake of catastrophic floods and wildfires, taken over plantations and parking lots to plant gardens, held the line against actual armies to slow the forces of conquest and genocide.

Using direct action and solidarity, we were getting to the heart of the problem. These uprisings weren’t perfect. We had so much still to learn. But we were learning, we were growing stronger and healthier and more connected, faster than we had in a generation, until that learning process got interrupted.

The interruption was inevitable. Too many of us expect something to get stronger in a linear fashion, like some greater and greater mass, until we cross a numerical tipping point and poof! it’s the revolution. Real revolutions, like society, breathe, they ebb and flow, and in each moment there are different tasks we need to accomplish. Here’s another problem: we gave too much power to the charismatic leaders in our midst, we didn’t identify all the skills we need to value and cultivate, we didn’t learn how to deal with conflict and harm in a transformative way. Or, some of us did, but they got plied off by NGOs or subcultures, happy to leave the radical milieus that were addicted to egos, afraid of real healing, and that treated them like crap, that devalued or ignored what they contributed.

One thing on top of another, and the repression, the precarity, the exhaustion, the fear, the depression, the sickness that we might have been able to get through stronger and better connected, all these things took their toll, and we found ourselves drifting. The reformers and the reactionaries stepped in and they’ve been controlling the narrative ever since.

We can’t start from scratch all over again. We need to remember those collective, revolutionary experiences we created these past years, we need to learn from the successes and failures of the generations that came before us and we need to connect with the generations that will come after us.

We need to struggle like an ecosystem.

: : : :

The fighters don’t fight for their own glory, they fight so the community can be safe, can have the space to exist, they fight to destroy the machines and the institutions that make survival impossible. The connectors can’t travel individualistically or treat contacts and relations like social capital to hoard for status. They have the urgent task of rebuilding and strengthening our networks of global solidarity, of linking together our communities-waiting-to-be-born. And we can’t give birth to those communities without the healers, the mediators, the builders, and the gardeners who heal and mend and feed the community. But lately, the progressive wing of capitalism has been monetizing those skillsets. And it’s easy to distance yourself from a struggle that doesn’t value what you contribute, especially if there’s a job waiting for you, a job that pays the rent, that places a value on what you do, a job that convinces you you’re doing your part. All of us need to choose risk, all of us need to choose the struggle, and commit to one another, to learn from one another and support one another.

Mutual aid means we each create the space the other needs to survive.

*As the future of Syria hangs in the balance, it’s important to remember the Syrian revolution and to remember Omar Aziz, the Syrian anarchist murdered by the Assad regime and one of the most influential organizers of the decentralized network of free towns and cities, involving hundreds of thousands of people holding out for over five years despite the onslaught of Assad’s brutal army and the Islamic fundamentalists of ISIL. Many participants in this uprising were killed, many fled, and many were able to survive inside Syria. As some of the exiles return, as prisoners are released, and as the dead are remembered, it’s vital for people all over the world to support them. There’s a special commemoration on February 16 to Remember the Revolution, Remember Omar Aziz. The site is in English and Arabic. There’s a book you can download and a call-out for events around the world to remember the Syrian revolution and support its remembrance and its revival! Please check it out and help spread it! Anyone have a group or a social center to organize something on the 16^th? A print shop or an unguarded printer at your job to print out DIY copies of the book? Go for it!

*A friend recommended this mutual aid fundraiser for anyone who wants to contribute funds to help people in LA survive and recover: https://hcb.hackclub.com/donations/start/malan

Here are those reading and listening recommendations:

• In “To Build a Home,” Alison Rose Reed writes about unlikely intimacies in the apocalypse.

• The Last Archive has an episode about Ishi, the last surviving member of an Indigenous people in California who were exterminated by Spanish, Mexican, and finally US settlers; who spent his last years living in a museum; and how his life and captivity influenced someone who I’m sure is the favorite speculative fiction writer of many of you. “The Word for Man Is Ishi.”

• Thanks so much to Audible Anarchist and this anonymous narrator who recorded an audio version of The Solutions Are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below (this is a rare document: one of the few places someone pronounces my name right!)

• I feel bashful: Jonas Goonface also took on the huge task of recording this book so you can choose whichever voice you prefer. Here’s his audio book version of The Solutions Are Already Here

• I was back on Last Born in the Wilderness to talk about Memory and Enclosure: “Movement Heartbreak, Generational Ruptures, and continuity”

• I got to speak with Prince Shakur on the Beautiful Idea podcast about how we can expect the terrain of struggle and repression to change over these coming years. Shakur is one of the hosts of the Black anarchist podcast, The Dugout. Give it some support!

• It’s Going Down was going to close shop after ten years of publishing anarchist and antifascist news, but they got a flood of support and they just announced they’re going to keep at it (but hopefully at a healthy rhythm, giving themselves time to rest and welcoming in new folks to move the project forward!)

• Are there any budding radical writers out there looking for a place to publish their essays or reporting? While we’re on the topic of long-lasting anarchist projects finding new life, consider reading or submitting writing and art to the oldest anarchist publication in North America, Detroit’s Fifth Estate, which is turning 60 this year!!!

• FE still has a ways to go to surpass the Fraye Arbeter Shtime, the “Free Voice of Labor,” an anarchist paper published for 87 years in Yiddish, out of NYC’s Lower East Side, finally closing down in 1977. Anarchist historian Paul Avrich writes about them and so many others in Anarchist Voices.

• Also consider supporting the longest-running English-language anarchist publication in the world, Freedom Press (which, understandably, has changed format over the years, but currently includes a news site).

• A prize for anyone who knows what the oldest annual anarchist gathering in the world is! (Don’t get your hopes up, the prize might just be me saying, “way to go!”)

• As I’ve been saying a lot lately, continuity is really important. Not a straitjacket of inflexible tradition, but a relationship with the past, an ability to remember it, learn from it, and dialogue with it. But also, creativity and inventiveness are amazing, interesting, and vital! What are some new publications or platforms that have you excited? Name some in the comments. I’ll start! Have any of you been able to check out Tinderbox? You won’t be able to find it on the internet!

Photo by Debra Garside