About the Work
Ashen Ruins: Against the Corpse Machine: Defining A Post-Leftist Anarchist Critique of Violence is a polemical work of anarchist political theory, published as part of The Anarchist Library. The book is structured as a sustained argumentative essay that seeks to redefine the anarchist position on violence by breaking decisively with the broader Leftist political tradition. The work opens with a table of contents and proceeds through a series of chapters that build its case cumulatively. The chapter headings include “What’s the Problem?” (page 3), “Our Violent Anarchist History” (page 9), “‘The People’ are Alienated by Violence and Other Myths” (page 11), “The Case of Mumia” (page 23), and “Mean Ends” (page 27).
The book is written in a direct, confrontational style, frequently quoting from historical anarchist figures, contemporary activists, and radical theorists. It draws on a wide range of sources, including Kuwasi Balagoon, Alfredo Bonnano, Emma Goldman, Errico Malatesta, Lucy Parsons, Luigi Galleani, Alexander Berkman, Johann Most, Noel Ignatiev, Ward Churchill, Ella Baker, Chris Crass, Charles Ross, J. Sakai, Bobby Seale, Pierre Claustre, and P.M., among others. The work is explicitly situated within contemporary anarchist debates, responding to both internal movement controversies and the broader political landscape of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with particular reference to events such as the Cincinnati uprising, the World Social Forum in Puerto Allegro, and the case of Mumia abu Jamal.
The author’s central project is to argue that anarchists have mistakenly remained within the Leftist political framework despite the Left-Right spectrum’s bourgeois democratic origins. This positioning, the author contends, has relegated anarchists to reactionary roles, forcing them to argue for “nonsensical nuanced points or for means over outcomes.” The book is thus both a critique of the Left from an anarchist perspective and a constructive argument for a post-Leftist anarchist approach to violence, revolution, and social organization. The work is best understood as a contribution to insurrectionary anarchist thought, drawing on the historical tradition of “propaganda by the deed” while attempting to adapt that tradition to contemporary conditions, particularly the central role of white supremacy in American society.
Context
The book emerges from a specific moment in anarchist history, a period when anarchism had experienced a significant resurgence as a political force. The author notes that anarchism has become “the pole that everyone revolves around,” much as Marxism was in the 1960s, creating a conundrum of anarchism as both black sheep and heart of the movement. This resurgence, however, has been accompanied by internal tensions and contradictions that the book seeks to address.
The author situates the work within the long history of anarchist violence, referencing the “famous, definitive and prognostic Marx-Bakunin split in the First International near the end of the 19th century” as a warning anarchists have disregarded by continuing to cling to Leftist alliances. The book draws extensively on this history, recounting violent anarchist actions from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: bombs thrown, clergy killed, fascists shot, industrialists stabbed, politicians assassinated, and police attacked—often with massive support from non-anarchist poor people. Named anarchists advocating violence include Emma Goldman, Errico Malatesta, Lucy Parsons, and Luigi Galleani. The CNT’s May 1936 program declared that once the violent aspect of revolution ended, they would abolish private property, the State, the principle of authority, and classes dividing men into exploiters and exploited or oppressors and oppressed.
The book also responds to contemporary developments within the anarchist movement. The author criticizes CrimethInc., a prominent contemporary anarchist collective, for what is characterized as a Bohemian, drop-out, white-privilege politics that strips references to class and race from anarchist analysis. The author contrasts this with the work of Alfredo Bonnano, whose essay “Armed Joy” resulted in prison time, while CrimethInc.’s Evasion appears on library shelves. This contrast is used to illustrate the author’s argument that the broader society and the Left are more comfortable with certain forms of anarchist expression than others.
The political context includes reference to the Cincinnati uprising, which the author criticizes anarchists for failing to participate in despite its size. The book also engages with the case of Mumia abu Jamal, the Black journalist and former Black Panther on death row, arguing that anarchist support for Mumia has been compromised by a focus on his innocence rather than a more radical critique of the justice system. The author references the Village Voice story “Keepers of the Flame” to describe anarchism’s contemporary position, and engages with the World Social Forum in Puerto Allegro, which excluded “violent” anarchists while including government officials who advocated non-violence in Algiers, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Structure of the Book
The book is organized as a continuous argument that progresses through several distinct movements, though it is presented as a series of chapters rather than formal parts. The opening chapter, “What’s the Problem?” establishes the central thesis: that anarchists have mistakenly remained within the Leftist political framework, and that this positioning has forced them into reactionary roles. The author argues that Leftism must be rejected if genuine revolution is the goal, and begins the critique of Leftist violence standards that runs throughout the work.
The second chapter, “Our Violent Anarchist History,” recounts the history of anarchist violence, drawing on figures such as Emma Goldman, Errico Malatesta, Lucy Parsons, Luigi Galleani, Alexander Berkman, Johann Most, and others. This chapter establishes that anarchists of yesteryear didn’t let the Left define their tactics and situated themselves among the oppressed. The author cites specific historical incidents, including Haymarket martyr Louis Lingg’s declaration “If they use cannons against us, we shall use dynamite against them,” Santo Caserio’s assassination of the President of France, August Vaillant’s bombing of the French Chamber of Deputies in 1894, and Mario Buda’s Wall Street bombing protesting Sacco and Vanzetti’s indictment.
The third chapter, “‘The People’ are Alienated by Violence and Other Myths,” challenges the claim that violence alienates ordinary people. The author argues that this claim refers to the middle and upper classes, not the poor, and that anarchists have failed to maintain their place within a base of popular support. This chapter includes the critique of CrimethInc. and the Bohemian strain of anarchism, as well as a discussion of affinity groups as the most natural form of class resistance.
The fourth chapter, “The Case of Mumia,” examines anarchist responses to the Mumia abu Jamal case, criticizing the focus on his innocence as a concession to State terminology. The author argues that anarchists should not validate the State’s categories of “guilty” and “innocent,” and suggests it might be more radicalizing to support Mumia regardless of whether he killed the police officer.
The final chapter, “Mean Ends,” addresses the relationship between means and ends in revolutionary practice. The author challenges the Leftist claim that ends and means must be the same, asking “who says that anarchists want a non-violent society, anyway?” This chapter includes a discussion of violence in primitive societies, drawing on Pierre Claustre’s The Archeology of Violence and P.M.’s Bolo’Bolo, and concludes with a critique of Platformist planning for post-revolutionary worlds.
Detailed Section-by-Section Summary
What’s the Problem?
The work opens with a table of contents that maps out its central argument across five chapters: “What’s the Problem?” (page 3), “Our Violent Anarchist History” (page 9), “‘The People’ are Alienated by Violence and Other Myths” (page 11), “The Case of Mumia” (page 23), and “Mean Ends” (page 27). The author’s thesis is immediately clear: anarchists have made a catastrophic strategic error by remaining within the Leftist political framework, a framework whose very origins are bourgeois and democratic. This positioning has forced anarchists into reactionary roles, compelling them to defend “nonsensical nuanced points or for means over outcomes.” The author insists that if genuine revolution is the goal, Leftism itself must be rejected outright.
The text invokes the “famous, definitive and prognostic Marx-Bakunin split in the First International near the end of the 19th century” as a warning that anarchists have willfully disregarded. Despite this historical lesson, anarchists continue to cling to Leftist alliances. The critique of Leftist violence standards is scathing: the dominant anarchist critique of violence shares too much common ground with Statist and Leftist standards. Leftists inherently believe in State legitimacy, support its monopoly on violence, and seek to “speak truth to power” rather than smash it. Even those Leftists who support armed struggle ultimately seek to reconstitute the State’s monopoly of force in their own hands. Revolutionary Marxists preserve the State temporarily to attack counter-revolutionaries, paradoxically claiming it will then wither away—a contradiction the author finds untenable.
A quotation from Kuwasi Balagoon’s essay “Anarchy Can’t Fight Alone” anchors the argument: anarchist goals do not include replacing one ruling class with another, which fundamentally separates anarchist revolutionaries from Maoist, socialist, and nationalist revolutionaries who cannot envision a truly free society. On the question of semantics, the author rejects the claim that “property destruction is not violence,” arguing this point fails with average people. Instead, anarchists should admit smashing a window is violent and make a case for it. The author questions whether non-violence is “the furthest frontier of our rage” against “this corpse machine, America.”
Alfredo Bonnano’s “Armed Joy” is quoted to illustrate a deep psychological problem: anarchists cannot perceive themselves as instigators of conflict. When police shoot at a peaceful demonstration and comrades shoot back, anarchists insist there must have been provocation, unable to see themselves as acting first. The Cincinnati uprising serves as a case study in failure—the author criticizes anarchist non-participation despite the movement being larger than in decades. White anarchists who are creative at road protests (lock-downs, street theater, property destruction, Black Blocs, molotovs) were at a loss when this revolt occurred. This reveals racist undertones: anarchist support for violent struggles abroad (Chiapas, East Timor, Colombia) while fearing violence at home reveals racist NIMBY attitudes. The Left has historically ignored or undermined non-white struggles in the U.S. Noel Ignatiev’s “Introduction to the United States: An Autonomist Political History” describes how New York in 1871 witnessed 20,000 radicals demonstrating solidarity with the Paris Commune while unable to look five hundred miles south to fight against the end of Reconstruction. The passage cites the Village Voice story “Keepers of the Flame,” noting anarchism has become “the pole that everyone revolves around,” much as Marxism was in the ’60s, creating a conundrum of anarchism as both black sheep and heart of the movement.
The Left’s Failure on Race
The narrative challenges Leftist mythology about the 1960s Civil Rights movement, arguing it was not the highpoint for the Left on race that their narrative claims. The author asserts the Left failed in attacking white supremacy. The anti-war and Civil Rights movements were distinct, not unified. The black anti-war refrain “No Vietnamese ever called me nigger” had little resonance with most of the Left. Black Americans understood the connection between domestic white supremacist oppression and colonial oppression of non-whites abroad in ways the white Left never did. The white Left fell away disillusioned before the war ended, leaving the Black Panthers and other non-white radical groups destroyed by COINTELPRO and internal personal and structural flaws—a point anarchists should acknowledge.
Chris Crass’s essay “Looking to the Light of Freedom: Lessons from the Civil Rights Movement and Thoughts on Anarchist Organizing” is cited. Crass discusses Ella Baker, civil rights organizer, who encountered resistance attempting horizontal organizing while working for the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference under Martin Luther King. She faced sexism, cults of personality, and top-down structures discouraging grassroots organizing—supporting anarchism’s critique of Left organizing style. Writing at the time, Charles Ross commented that no black man should fight in Vietnam, arguing a man already in slavery shouldn’t fight for someone else’s freedom; if fighting anywhere, it should be in Africa, Mississippi, or Columbus.
Ignatiev’s description is referenced: white students hurled themselves at walls of power to no avail—the war continued. Unable to recognize the Black struggle as their own cause or develop an approach to white workers, most white student radicals turned away from radicalism. The author argues that defeated but surviving institutions write history. The Left’s version plays up white students’ and leaders’ roles while ignoring everyday people and the Vietnamese entirely, who became mere background. Ward Churchill’s “Pacifism As Pathology” is cited: the armed struggle by Vietnamese themselves, without systematic support from American pacifists, forced the war to a close.
Leftist-State Symbiosis and Privilege
The passage argues that anarchists’ aggressive tactics legitimize the reformist center in the State’s eyes. Groups like Global Exchange and Bono are “lining up” for a “seat at the table.” The World Social Forum in Puerto Allegro excluded “violent” anarchists while including government officials who advocated non-violence in Algiers, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—an irony lost on Statist organizers. “Radical” peace police protect Starbucks from the Black Bloc and cooperate with police. The author suggests continued escalation of tactics will reveal the Left and State as “peas of the same pod,” arguing the violence/non-violence debate is an attempt to corral anarchists into non-threatening relationships with the Left.
The text compares fears of “mob rule” to rich white men defending privilege against 19th and 20th century franchise expansions, noting suffragettes justified extending votes to white women in white supremacist terms. White, middle-class, college-degreed men dominate North American anarchism and fear broad revolution. The author questions whether privileged anarchists presume their example leads oppressed people, calling this “pure vanguardism” indistinguishable from white savior notions, ignoring everyday violence confronting the non-white poor.
Our Violent Anarchist History
The passage recounts violent anarchist history: bombs thrown, clergy killed, fascists shot, industrialists stabbed, politicians assassinated, police attacked—often with massive support from non-anarchist poor people. Anarchists of yesteryear didn’t let the Left define their tactics and situated themselves among the oppressed. Named anarchists advocating violence include Emma Goldman, Errico Malatesta, Lucy Parsons, and Luigi Galleani. The CNT’s May 1936 program declared that once the violent aspect of revolution ended, they would abolish private property, the State, the principle of authority, and classes dividing men into exploiters/exploited and oppressors/oppressed.
Haymarket martyr Louis Lingg declared: “If they use cannons against us, we shall use dynamite against them.” Santo Caserio shouted “Long live the revolution! Long live anarchy!” while assassinating the President of France. August Vaillant exclaimed “Death to bourgeois society! Long live anarchy!” at his execution for bombing the French Chamber of Deputies in 1894. Mario Buda bombed Wall Street protesting Sacco and Vanzetti’s indictment, killing 30, wounding hundreds, doing $2 million damage including J. P. Morgan’s office. Alexander Berkman, attempted assassin of Frick, wrote in Mother Earth asking whether progress ever occurred without violence and bloodshed, whether capital granted concessions without force, arguing labor resorts to violence to wrest better terms under capitalism. Johann Most wrote in “The Social Monster” that anarchists have no lust for murder but know privileged class power is never broken by peaceable means. Malatesta said passive resistance can be effective but often only reassures oppressors and betrays the oppressed. In La Question Sociale, Malatesta wrote of expropriating property owners with violence, overthrowing governments with violence, and depriving priests of privileges by force. Paul Avrich’s “Anarchist Portraits” quotes Joseph Cohen that after Berkman’s attack on Frick, his name became “a kind of talisman, a source of inspiration and encouragement.”
Mass Support and the “People” Alienated by Violence
The passage asserts that anarchists and Leftists avoid acknowledging that violent actions often enjoy mass popular support, citing late 20th and early 21st century wars and the death penalty as mainstream socially acceptable examples. Anarchists have failed to maintain their place within this base of support, allowing the Left to subsume and co-opt their energies. This foreshadows how easily the State will bring violence against anarchists, with little dissent from the poor, for whom anarchist actions often have little relevance. The text notes that poor people kill police, rob banks, shoot politicians, and attack capitalists relatively frequently, with quiet support from oppressed people nationwide. The disconnect stems from anarchists locating themselves within the Leftist tradition, while the poor have opted out of both Left and Right, electoral and union politics. The author questions when anarchists began believing the conservative Leftist lie that “now is not the time,” that non-violence is the only legitimate method, or that “the people are alienated by violence.” Anarchists have historically rejected Marxist millenarianism, insisting any time could be the right time.
Privilege within the movement has created a new role of “anarchist as conservative,” leaving the poor without support for their isolated resistance. Unorganized resistance happens everywhere, which is positive for anarchists critiquing mass organizations—unions, parties, revolutionary federations—for their co-optive, disciplining, conservatizing roles. The passage imagines a mass, decentralized revolt unmediated by party or union. Revolutionary failures are blamed on co-optability, which is a structural argument. The revolutionary element struggles twofold: against the present regime and against opportunists seeking to control them. Anarchists eschew the vanguard, recognizing average people make revolution. A praxis encouraging decentralized, unofficial organization is possible and desirable.
The affinity group is the organizational model of criminal, conspirator, street protestor, FAI saboteur, and ELF midnight gardener alike. It is the most natural form of class resistance, least conducive to co-optation, quickest to act, least bogged down in procedure, and most likely to create broad destruction for social revolution. What’s lacking for insurrectionist anarchists is recognition of white supremacy’s central role in America. The ELF is listed as public enemy number one by the FBI yet goes unnoticed by poor communities of color as irrelevant. The burden is on the ELF to bridge that gap. Environmentalists only conceive people of color within an imperialist paradigm—as indigenous people struggling far away—with no critique of race in the American context. American insurrectionists cannot transfer Italian insurrectionist ideas wholesale without considering white supremacy’s role in maintaining the American State.
Most anarchists won’t support acts by non-politicized people demonstrating class consciousness. The passage asks: Where is anarchist support for the non-political poor bank robber? What happened to “class heroes” as Utah Phillips’ mother called them? Anarchists refuse to recognize non-politicized people striking back at oppressors, possibly because anarchists feel unable to act themselves, or have fallen into the Leftist habit of viewing unmediated resistance as illegitimate. Questions are raised about wildcat strikes, riots, and affinity group actions.
The argument that “the people” will be alienated by violence refers to middle and upper classes. The author recounts a nonviolence workshop at a Colorado globalization conference where a young woman broke society into a spectrum: the poor were not alienated by violence, but middle- and upper-class people—”those people who watch the news and read the paper”—were alienated by images of violence at big demos. Many anarchists, biased by middle-class baggage, view the politically aware class as the upper classes, using State capitalist barometers (voting, union membership, reading the New York Times). This is patronizing to the poor, neglecting insurrection history and the anarchist foundation that people are the best determiners of their own fate. Paraphrasing an anarchist of yore: if I’m smart enough to choose my leader, I’m smart enough not to be led.
CrimethInc. Critique and White Privilege
The split between anarchists’ middle-class perspectives and classical class analysis has produced Bohemian strains, of which CrimethInc. is one prominent example. Class analysis has been dropped for lifestyle issues and hippy-style drop-out “feel good” politics. CrimethInc.’s drop-out, white privilege, middle-class, poverty-fetishizing road festival vacations masquerade as revolutionary strategy, stripping references to class and race. Society is reduced to tension between fun times and bummers, boredom and excitement. This leads to rebelling for its own sake rather than fighting to remove oppression. CrimethInc. is the new hippy movement, too focused on spoiled-kid good-time. Fire dancing and dumpster diving are not revolutionary strategies—they validate capitalism and the State, breeding dependence. Living off capitalism’s excess requires capitalism to continue. The scams go away as no one realizes exercising white privilege makes it possible to travel city to city shoplifting and scamming without attracting suspicion. CrimethInc. does not challenge white supremacy; it wallows in it. Anarchists should not exercise privilege to extricate themselves from capitalism at others’ expense but dedicate themselves to kicking the whole system over in solidarity. The privileged will not make revolution. Opting out without challenging capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy is insufficient.
The passage contrasts the author’s position with CrimethInc.’s essay beginning “Your politics are boring as fuck,” which urges dropping out and abandoning illusions of physically challenging the State and capitalism. The author quotes its advice: “Enjoy yourselves! There is never any excuse for being bored. . .or boring!” CrimethInc.’s book Evasion states on its back cover: “Homelessness. Unemployment. Poverty. If you’re not having fun, you’re not doing it right.” The author calls this “screams of privilege,” comparing it to a Hollywood script and finding “truly disturbing” parallels with white supremacist, Reaganite, “color blind,” pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps capitalism. The response to Evasion‘s publication contrasts sharply with Armed Joy: Evasion appears on library shelves while Bonanno did prison time just for writing his essay. CrimethInc.’s claim “Our lives are our weapons” is deemed “sad and pathetic.”
Bonanno, the State, and Physical Attack
Bonanno argues that while the State is a social relation depending on everyone upholding it, it is simultaneously a concrete thing that can be attacked. Police depend on belief in their necessity (calling them, voting for law-and-order politicians), yet they operate from real places in space and time with hierarchical, centralized structures having real weaknesses. One has an obligation to opt out by refusing support, but also to recognize that blowing up a police station has real effects on police organization, especially if timed correctly. Bonanno is anti-work like CrimethInc., but rejects merely refusing work and the unions, clergy, parties, and capitalists that glorify it. Refusal is part of strategy; physical attack is the other part. The Contra war against the Sandinistas exemplifies this—the physical foundation of the Nicaraguan State was attacked until it stopped running. Anarchists wouldn’t apply this identically, but the lesson is worth learning (anarchists wouldn’t target people merely for profession, except cops and politicians). In France during illegalist and “propaganda by the deed” anarchism, workers whistling songs exalting past assassinations of capitalists exacted concessions from bosses. The Bonnot Gang and other individualist anarchists robbed banks and battled cops, driven by egos in the Stirner sense. Sabate and Durutti did the same in the Spanish Revolution, though for different reasons.
Terrorism and Ethics
The author addresses terrorism, arguing that in an anarchist world without morality, ethics define actions. As with critique of law, one cannot create a preconceived category for future actions. Conditions on liberation actions should be defined by the oppressed, not oppressors. Anarchism requires active participation in decision-making; all possibilities must be evaluated on their merits per circumstance. Terrorism is in the eye of the beholder. Denmark Vessey’s planned slave insurrection intended to kill every white person, including women and children—all white oppressors, current and future. The author asks whether we view this as terrorism because we oppose violence or because under his race analysis we’re embarrassed to find ourselves oppressors. Columbine and the German school shooting (13 teachers killed) cloud the issue. Teachers and bullies can be perceived as oppressors worth deterring. A Third World peasant might consider all Americans enemies by First World lifestyles. These are matters for anarchist ethics, not preconceived categories.
Primitivism and Community Gardens
The author acknowledges Bohemian-anarchists raise important issues. Murray Bookchin’s flaw was failing to appreciate that the dichotomy between providing for oneself and building class-focused revolution is false. The Primitivist critique of “totality” is useful for evaluating the techno-post-industrial First World but seems “cart before the horse” for a movement not yet addressing patriarchy and white supremacy—possibly an attempt to sidestep issues uncomfortable to whites and males (as the New Left did). Periodicals like Species Traitor seem premature given whiteness hasn’t been seriously dealt with. A human/animal common front against civilization is hard to imagine organizing. Since animals and “earth” cannot speak for themselves or participate in liberation, parallels to the white savior complex are “disturbingly clear”—such organizing is “the ultimate playground for white activists” because it doesn’t challenge their privileges.
Some anarchists focus on few tactics and discount others. Community gardens and self-sufficiency are snobbishly rejected as “lifestylism,” but these are small-scale revolutionary acts not yet contextualized in larger struggle. Guerilla gardens should be defended as revolutionary, not temporary. Gardens are no more non-violent than cops and corporates who bulldoze them—they are expropriations. The author quotes Balagoon from his Brinks Trial Opening Statement: “Expropriation is an act of war carried out by every revolutionary army in history.” Though about bank robbery, the link to Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin’s Anarchism and the Black Revolution is obvious—a free society must procure needs from its region. Abolition of work fits this strategy; affinity groups provide revolutionary context. Formal organizations view affinity group actions as counter-revolutionary—uncontrollable rebellions against authority—and that’s one of the few things they get right. But one shouldn’t believe the evolutionist myth of withdrawing from capitalism without the State using its violence monopoly. The passage quotes Ervin: “The idea behind a mass commune is to create a dual power structure as a counter to the government, under conditions, which exist now.”
The Forgotten Violence of Women and the Critique of “Manarchism”
The narrative turns to the historical record of women’s militancy, which the author argues is systematically erased by Statist and pacifist narratives. The text reminds readers that Suffragettes rioted on numerous occasions, burning churches, attacking officials, battling police, and destroying property. The author points out that the Statist argument conveniently forgets that national monuments, theaters, and government offices were shut down, and downtown shops were boarded up—not against “rampaging black-clad youths” but against violent, stone-throwing Suffragettes. Also forgotten are the Bolivian women who strapped dynamite to their bodies and seized government buildings, and the elderly women who recently stood against whip-wielding Argentine police. The author asks about the women of the Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground, mentioning Diane Oughton, who was blown up with two comrades when their bombs accidentally detonated, and the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade.
The author challenges the notion that any woman acting aggressively is “male-identified.” While the “Manarchist” document doesn’t explicitly use this term, the author claims it functions that way when self-appointed non-violence and pacifist authorities use it to marginalize women outside their control. Rather than claiming violence contradicts women’s nature, the author suggests the underrepresentation of women in armed groups stems from patriarchal systems of privilege and exclusion that dominate both society and anarchist groups themselves.
The passage quotes Laina Tanglewood’s article “Against the Masculinization of Militancy,” which criticizes “feminist” critiques of anarchism that condemn militancy as sexist and non-inclusive. Tanglewood argues this idea is itself sexist—instead of condemning black bloc men while ignoring black bloc women, both men and women who want to fight should be welcomed, while those uncomfortable with such risks can do other activities. The author notes this hinges on the “already addressed falsehood” that violence alienates and non-violence is inclusive.
The Leftist Myth of Change and the State’s Interests
The author argues that the Leftist/Statist myth of social change—whether non-violent or handed down by benevolent leaders—collapses under examination. What terrifies the ruling class isn’t mobs attacking polling booths with ballots. The masculinization of violence and feminization of passivity owes more to those whose vision excludes revolution or State annihilation. If government is potentially responsive and necessary, violent tactics seem useless; petitioning, voting, and non-violent civil disobedience should suffice. The author claims mainstream and Leftist feminism has a vested interest in maintaining the State, requiring State protection for capitalist women’s privileges. Leftist feminism seeks equal power-sharing among elites—half of all bosses and presidents should be women—rather than attacking inequalities. “Rejecting kings in favor of queens is not compromise that anarchists should be willing to make.” Tanglewood ends: “Come the revolution, women will be (as women have historically) physically fighting oppression.” Nonviolence is “a call for the pacification of revolt.”
Violence and People of Color
The author addresses claims that anarchist violence alienates people of color. Violence imposed from outside an oppressed group—whether by cops, the Klan, or privileged activists—is undemocratic, un-anarchist, and counterproductive. But this argues for anarchists to reflect on privilege and abandon “vanguardist white savior pipe dreams” of leading black or brown revolutions from the suburbs. Such illusions are conservative attempts to head off genuine revolution threatening white privilege.
The text cites historical violence by communities of color. J. Sakai, in an interview titled When Race Burns Class, said: “Why should it be so hard to understand that capitalism, which practically wants to barcode our assholes, has always found it convenient to color-code its classes?” Kuwasi Balagoon, in Anarchy Can’t Fight Alone, wrote that anarchists permit others to define anarchy, permit corporations to poison air and water, permit police and Klan terror without repayment—becoming “anarchists in name only.” Bobby Seale, Black Panther Party co-founder, described white America’s fear of “Niggers with guns”—a symbolic shift from non-violence. The passage cites slave insurrections (Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, Nat Turner), Herbert Aptheker’s American Negro Slave Revolts cataloging hundreds of uprisings, and Balagoon’s count of over 250 slave revolts plus arson and poisoning. Recent uprisings in L.A. and Cincinnati continue this pattern. Indigenous peoples fought a centuries-long violent war, including at Pine Ridge and Wounded Knee. Ward Churchill’s Pacifism as Pathology makes the case for revolutionary violence. The argument over violence is “really just an argument over privilege and vested interests masquerading as tactics.”
The Case of Mumia and the “Bad Apple Theory”
The author criticizes anarchist fetishizing of Mumia abu Jamal, particularly arguments about his innocence. Discussions center on evidence, court rulings, and Judge Sabo’s relationship to the Fraternal Order of Police—details interesting to liberals who believe the system can work. The author calls this the “bad apple theory.” Anarchists shouldn’t validate the State’s terminology of “guilty” and “innocent,” which concedes debate territory and prevents critiquing the injustice system as incapable of delivering justice. The author asks: “Who cares if Mumia is innocent or guilty? Isn’t it a tragedy either way?” Even accepting Pennsylvania’s case—that Mumia shot a cop stopping his brother—the author asks what objection anarchists have, suggesting it might be more radicalizing to say Mumia probably did kill the cop and anarchists support him for it. Mumia’s innocence claims reflect his strategic situation, not necessarily the movement’s.
Censorship Within the Anarchist Community
The passage criticizes self- and group-censorship within the anarchist community regarding support for certain violent actions. Such censorship is compared unfavorably to “wishy-washy liberals” who silence anarchists or denounce the Black Bloc as too aggressive, with the complaint that violence “will overshadow the message.” The author claims these liberals are “really just scared of losing control of events and the dialogue.” This censorship is likened to a “passive-aggressive version of the ‘now is not the time’ argument” preached by liberals and Leftists lacking commitment to overthrowing the system. While censorship is usually justified on “security culture grounds (wrongly),” the author argues it more accurately derives from “unacknowledged white supremacist and vanguardist assumptions” underlying middle-class anarchist critique.
Mumia and White Supremacy in Anarchism
The author distinguishes between “propaganda by the deed” revolutionary anarchists of the past and Mumia. Historical figures like Alexander Berkman stabbing Frick do not threaten contemporary white anarchists’ “latent white supremacist notions” because Berkman was a fellow white anarchist attacking a symbol of capitalism. However, when Mumia—a black man killing a white man and a cop, “defender of the color line”—is the actor, white anarchists retreat to “the machinations of the white supremacist State for validation,” supporting him only if he receives the State’s stamp of approval: innocent. This is compared to white jurors’ zeal in handing down death penalties when blacks kill whites.
Critique of Anarchist Priorities and Historical Models
Despite denunciations of vanguardism, anarchists are uncomfortable with revolution moving ahead without them. The author criticizes dogmatic adherence to workplace organizing over community organizing, noting police brutality organizing is “pooh-pooh’ed as a distraction.” Workplace organizing has failed to produce “revolutionary fruit in over a hundred years.” The author proposes flipping the formula: workplace organizing should support anti-police brutality organizing. Police brutality organizing could unite workers, zero-workers, unemployed, community members, and those in the underground economy. Community self-defense in affinity group style could translate to workplace collectivization and community militias to drive out police.
North American anarchists should not fit “a 19th century European revolutionary, work-centered, anarchist model” onto current situations, nor look to “Spain 1936” or “the Paris Commune.” “Too many anarchists are historians, not revolutionaries.” A revolutionary “appreciates the past yet seeks to overthrow the present in the interest of the future.”
Insurrectionist Tendencies and De-linking from the Left
The author encourages supporting “bank robbers to cop killers to black market escapes from work” and organizing in “small, unofficial bands.” Leftism and anarcho-syndicalism have little relevance today, though a general strike to “abandon the means of production” has value. “The Left and anarchy must be de-linked as soon as possible.”
Means and Ends, Hobbes, and Primitive Societies
Leftists claim ends and means are the same, requiring non-violent means for a non-violent world. The author asks: “who says that anarchists want a non-violent society, anyway?” Violence is inherent in nature. The Leftist presumption derives from Hobbes, whose defense of the State in Leviathan (17th Century) is quoted at length, describing life without common power as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
The author cites Pierre Clastres’ The Archeology of Violence, listing ritualized warfare, duels, and feuds as violent ways early anarchic humans solved problems. The Iroquois League exhibited anarchist traits but included violent tribes like the Mohawks, whose name meant “cannibal.” Clastres is quoted: war of all against all would institute “domination and power that the victor could forcibly exercise over the vanquished.” Pre-State societies were not Hobbesian war zones but had outlets for violence. Non-violent Statism is the real utopian vision, never realized due to the State’s massive inherent violence.
P.M.’s Bolo’Bolo and the Futility of Blueprints
P.M.’s anarchist book Bolo’Bolo acknowledges violence by reviving the duel as dispute resolution. A lengthy quote describes bolos with “bandit-nima” terrorizing regions “as the Huns or Vikings did,” with “generalized terrorism, the law of the club, raids, tribal wars, vendettas, plundering.” Pre-State societies showed wide ranges of attitudes toward violence, from human sacrifice and cannibalism to peaceful co-existence. The author criticizes Platformists for planning post-revolutionary worlds in minute detail, suggesting such planning will be inversely proportional to actual relevance. The argument concludes that the obsession with non-violence and detailed blueprints for the future is a distraction from the immediate, practical task of revolutionary action, which must embrace the full spectrum of human experience, including violence, if it is to be genuine and effective.
Main Arguments
The book’s central argument is that anarchists have mistakenly remained within the Leftist political framework despite the Left-Right spectrum’s bourgeois democratic origins. This positioning has relegated anarchists to reactionary roles, forcing them to argue for “nonsensical nuanced points or for means over outcomes.” The author contends that Leftism must be rejected if genuine revolution is the goal, and that “The Left and anarchy must be de-linked as soon as possible.”
The author argues that the dominant anarchist critique of violence shares too much common ground with Statist and Leftist standards. Leftists inherently believe in State legitimacy, support its monopoly on violence, and seek to “speak truth to power” rather than smash it. Even Leftists who support armed struggle ultimately seek to reconstitute the State’s monopoly of force in their own hands. Revolutionary Marxists preserve the State temporarily to attack counter-revolutionaries, paradoxically claiming it will then wither away. The author argues that anarchists’ aggressive tactics legitimize the reformist center in the State’s eyes, and that continued escalation of tactics will reveal the Left and State as “peas of the same pod.”
The author rejects the claim that “property destruction is not violence,” arguing this point fails with average people. Instead, anarchists should admit smashing a window is violent and make a case for it. The author questions whether non-violence is “the furthest frontier of our rage” against “this corpse machine, America.” The violence/non-violence debate is characterized as an attempt to corral anarchists into non-threatening relationships with the Left.
A significant argument concerns the relationship between violence and popular support. The author asserts that anarchists and Leftists avoid acknowledging that violent actions often enjoy mass popular support, citing late twentieth and early twenty-first century wars and the death penalty as mainstream socially acceptable examples. Poor people kill police, rob banks, shoot politicians, and attack capitalists relatively frequently, with quiet support from oppressed people nationwide. The disconnect stems from anarchists locating themselves within the Leftist tradition, while the poor have opted out of both Left and Right, electoral and union politics.
The author argues that the claim that “the people” will be alienated by violence refers to the middle and upper classes, not the poor. Many anarchists, biased by middle-class baggage, view the politically aware class as the upper classes, using State capitalist barometers such as voting, union membership, and reading the New York Times. This is patronizing to the poor, neglecting insurrection history and the anarchist foundation that people are the best determiners of their own fate. Paraphrasing an anarchist of yore: if I’m smart enough to choose my leader, I’m smart enough not to be led.
The book argues that privilege within the movement has created a new role of “anarchist as conservative,” leaving the poor without support for their isolated resistance. White, middle-class, college-degreed men dominate North American anarchism and fear broad revolution. The author questions whether privileged anarchists presume their example leads oppressed people, calling this “pure vanguardism” indistinguishable from white savior notions, ignoring everyday violence confronting the non-white poor.
The author argues that anarchist support for violent struggles abroad (Chiapas, East Timor, Colombia) while fearing violence at home reveals racist NIMBY attitudes. The Left has historically ignored or undermined non-white struggles in the U.S. The argument over violence is “really just an argument over privilege and vested interests masquerading as tactics.”
Regarding the Mumia case, the author argues that anarchists should not validate the State’s terminology of “guilty” and “innocent,” which concedes debate territory and prevents critiquing the injustice system as incapable of delivering justice. The author asks: “Who cares if Mumia is innocent or guilty? Isn’t it a tragedy either way?” Even accepting Pennsylvania’s case—that Mumia shot a cop stopping his brother—the author asks what objection anarchists have, suggesting it might be more radicalizing to say Mumia probably did kill the cop and anarchists support him for it.
The author critiques dogmatic adherence to workplace organizing over community organizing, noting that police brutality organizing is “pooh-pooh’ed as a distraction.” Workplace organizing has failed to produce “revolutionary fruit in over a hundred years.” The author proposes flipping the formula: workplace organizing should support anti-police brutality organizing. Police brutality organizing could unite workers, zero-workers, unemployed, community members, and those in the underground economy.
Key Concepts
The Corpse Machine: The author refers to “this corpse machine, America,” characterizing the United States as a system that produces death and destruction. This concept frames the entire critique: the State and capitalism are understood as a machine that consumes lives, and violence against this machine is therefore justified.
Post-Leftist Anarchism: The book’s subtitle announces its project of defining a post-Leftist anarchist critique of violence. This concept involves rejecting the Leftist political framework entirely, including its assumptions about the State, reform, and the legitimacy of certain forms of political action. The author argues that the Left-Right spectrum has bourgeois democratic origins and that anarchists should not position themselves within it.
The Marx-Bakunin Split: The author references the “famous, definitive and prognostic Marx-Bakunin split in the First International near the end of the 19th century” as a historical warning anarchists have disregarded. This split represents the fundamental incompatibility between Marxist and anarchist approaches to revolution, and the author argues that anarchists’ continued clinging to Leftist alliances betrays this lesson.
Propaganda by the Deed: Though not always named explicitly, this historical anarchist concept underlies much of the book’s argument. The author draws on the tradition of anarchist violence—bombs, assassinations, expropriations—as a legitimate and historically supported form of revolutionary action. The book references the French illegalist and “propaganda by the deed” anarchist period, the Bonnot Gang, and figures like Sabate and Durutti in the Spanish Revolution.
Affinity Groups: The affinity group is presented as the organizational model of criminal, conspirator, street protestor, FAI saboteur, and ELF midnight gardener alike. It is described as the most natural form of class resistance, least conducive to co-optation, quickest to act, least bogged down in procedure, and most likely to create broad destruction for social revolution. The author argues that a praxis encouraging decentralized, unofficial organization is possible and desirable.
Expropriation: Drawing on Kuwasi Balagoon’s Brinks Trial Opening Statement—”Expropriation is an act of war carried out by every revolutionary army in history”—the author develops a concept of taking resources from the capitalist class as a revolutionary act. This extends from bank robbery to community gardens, which the author argues are expropriations that should be defended as revolutionary, not temporary.
The Bad Apple Theory: The author criticizes liberal approaches to injustice that focus on individual bad actors within an otherwise functional system. Applied to the Mumia case, this means focusing on evidence, court rulings, and Judge Sabo’s relationship to the Fraternal Order of Police—details interesting to liberals who believe the system can work. The author argues anarchists should instead critique the injustice system as incapable of delivering justice.
Vanguardism: The author critiques vanguardist assumptions within anarchism, arguing that privileged anarchists who presume their example leads oppressed people are engaging in “pure vanguardism” indistinguishable from white savior notions. This concept is linked to the critique of Leftist organizing structures and the celebration of unmediated, decentralized resistance.
The Manarchist Label: The author challenges the notion that any woman acting aggressively is “male-identified,” arguing that the “Manarchist” document functions this way when self-appointed non-violence and pacifist authorities use it to marginalize women outside their control. The underrepresentation of women in armed groups is attributed to patriarchal systems of privilege and exclusion rather than any inherent feminine nature.
Dual Power: Drawing on Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin’s Anarchism and the Black Revolution, the author references the concept of creating “a dual power structure as a counter to the government, under conditions, which exist now.” This involves building alternative structures that challenge State authority.
The Bolo: From P.M.’s Bolo’Bolo, the author references the concept of bolos with “bandit-nima” terrorizing regions “as the Huns or Vikings did,” with “generalized terrorism, the law of the club, raids, tribal wars, vendettas, plundering.” This concept acknowledges violence as inherent to human society and imagines post-revolutionary forms of dispute resolution, including the revival of the duel.
Themes
The Critique of Leftism: A dominant theme throughout the book is the fundamental incompatibility between anarchism and Leftism. The author argues that Leftists inherently believe in State legitimacy, support its monopoly on violence, and seek to “speak truth to power” rather than smash it. The Left’s version of history plays up white students’ and leaders’ roles while ignoring everyday people and the Vietnamese entirely, who became mere background. The author argues that defeated but surviving institutions write history, and the Left’s narrative of the 1960s is a self-serving mythology.
Race and White Supremacy: The book is centrally concerned with the role of white supremacy in American society and the failure of both the Left and the anarchist movement to adequately address it. The author argues that the Left failed in attacking white supremacy, that the anti-war and Civil Rights movements were distinct rather than unified, and that Black Americans understood the connection between domestic white supremacist oppression and colonial oppression of non-whites abroad in ways the white Left never did. The author argues that anarchist support for violent struggles abroad while fearing violence at home reveals racist NIMBY attitudes, and that the argument over violence is “really just an argument over privilege and vested interests masquerading as tactics.”
Privilege and Revolution: The book repeatedly returns to the question of privilege within the anarchist movement. White, middle-class, college-degreed men dominate North American anarchism and fear broad revolution. The author argues that privileged anarchists who presume their example leads oppressed people are engaging in “pure vanguardism” indistinguishable from white savior notions. The privileged will not make revolution, the author argues; instead, anarchists should dedicate themselves to kicking the whole system over in solidarity.
Violence and Popular Support: The author challenges the myth that violence alienates ordinary people, arguing that violent actions often enjoy mass popular support. Poor people kill police, rob banks, shoot politicians, and attack capitalists relatively frequently, with quiet support from oppressed people nationwide. The claim that “the people” will be alienated by violence refers to the middle and upper classes, not the poor. This theme connects to the broader argument that anarchists have lost touch with their base among the oppressed.
The State and Its Violence: The book develops a critique of the State as a “corpse machine” that maintains itself through violence. The author argues that the State’s monopoly on violence is illegitimate and that anarchists should not concede this territory. Bonanno’s argument is cited: while the State is a social relation depending on everyone upholding it, it is simultaneously a concrete thing that can be attacked. Police depend on belief in their necessity, yet they operate from real places in space and time with hierarchical, centralized structures having real weaknesses.
Historical Memory and Amnesia: The author argues that the Statist argument conveniently forgets the history of violent resistance, including the Suffragettes who rioted, burned churches, attacked officials, battled cops, and destroyed property. Also forgotten are Bolivian women who strapped dynamite to their bodies and seized government buildings, and elderly women who recently stood against whip-wielding Argentine police. This theme of historical amnesia serves the author’s argument that violence has always been part of struggles for liberation.
The Meaning of Terrorism: The author addresses terrorism as a contested concept, arguing that “terrorism is in the eye of the beholder.” Denmark Vessey’s planned slave insurrection intended to kill every white person, including women and children—all white oppressors, current and future. The author asks whether we view this as terrorism because we oppose violence or because under his race analysis we’re embarrassed to find ourselves oppressors. These are matters for anarchist ethics, not preconceived categories.
Nature and Violence: The author challenges the assumption that anarchists want a non-violent society, arguing that violence is inherent in nature. Drawing on Pierre Claustre’s The Archeology of Violence, the author lists ritualized warfare, duels, and feuds as violent ways early anarchic humans solved problems. Pre-State societies were not Hobbesian war zones but had outlets for violence. Non-violent Statism is the real utopian vision, never realized due to the State’s massive inherent violence.
The Author’s Conclusions
The book concludes with a sustained meditation on the relationship between means and ends in revolutionary practice, and a final argument about the nature of violence in human society. The author challenges the Leftist claim that ends and means must be the same, requiring non-violent means for a non-violent world, asking: “who says that anarchists want a non-violent society, anyway?” Violence is inherent in nature, the author argues, and the Leftist presumption of non-violence derives from Hobbes, whose defense of the State in Leviathan is quoted at length, describing life without common power as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
The author concludes that pre-State societies were not Hobbesian war zones but had outlets for violence, and that non-violent Statism is the real utopian vision, never realized due to the State’s massive inherent violence. Drawing on P.M.’s Bolo’Bolo, the author acknowledges violence as inherent to human society, describing bolos with “bandit-nima” terrorizing regions “as the Huns or Vikings did,” with “generalized terrorism, the law of the club, raids, tribal wars, vendettas, plundering.” Pre-State societies showed wide ranges of attitudes toward violence, from human sacrifice and cannibalism to peaceful co-existence.
The author concludes with a critique of Platformists who plan post-revolutionary worlds in minute detail, suggesting such planning will be inversely proportional to actual relevance. This final point reinforces the book’s overall argument for a decentralized, insurrectionary approach to revolution that rejects both Leftist frameworks and elaborate blueprints for the future. The author encourages supporting “bank robbers to cop killers to black market escapes from work” and organizing in “small, unofficial bands,” arguing that Leftism and anarcho-syndicalism have little relevance today, though a general strike to “abandon the means of production” has value. The book ends with the assertion that “The Left and anarchy must be de-linked as soon as possible,” a conclusion that follows from the entire preceding argument about the incompatibility of anarchism with Leftist politics and the need for a genuinely post-Leftist anarchist practice.
Significance
The book represents a significant contribution to contemporary anarchist theory, specifically to the insurrectionary tendency within anarchism. It attempts to synthesize the historical tradition of anarchist violence with a contemporary critique of white supremacy and privilege, arguing that anarchists must break decisively with the Left if they are to be effective revolutionaries. The book’s significance lies in several areas.
First, it offers a sustained critique of the relationship between anarchism and the Left, arguing that this relationship has been fundamentally detrimental to anarchist practice. The author contends that the Left-Right spectrum has bourgeois democratic origins and that anarchists’ positioning within it has forced them into reactionary roles. This argument challenges a significant strain of anarchist thought that has sought alliances with Leftist movements and organizations.
Second, the book provides a comprehensive defense of revolutionary violence from an anarchist perspective, drawing on the historical record of anarchist violence and arguing that such violence has often enjoyed mass popular support. The author challenges the claim that violence alienates ordinary people, arguing that this claim reflects middle-class biases within the anarchist movement.
Third, the book offers a sharp critique of white supremacy within the anarchist movement itself. The author argues that white, middle-class, college-degreed men dominate North American anarchism and that their privilege has led them to fear broad revolution and to ignore the everyday violence confronting the non-white poor. The argument over violence, the author contends, is “really just an argument over privilege and vested interests masquerading as tactics.”
Fourth, the book engages with contemporary debates within anarchism, particularly the critique of CrimethInc. and the Bohemian strain of anarchist politics. The author argues that CrimethInc.’s drop-out, white-privilege, middle-class, poverty-fetishizing politics strip references to class and race from anarchist analysis, reducing society to a tension between fun times and bummers. This critique has been influential in subsequent debates about the direction of contemporary anarchism.
Fifth, the book contributes to the ongoing discussion of the Mumia abu Jamal case from an anarchist perspective, arguing that anarchist support for Mumia has been compromised by a focus on his innocence rather than a more radical critique of the justice system. The author’s argument that anarchists should not validate the State’s terminology of “guilty” and “innocent” has been a provocative intervention in this debate.
The book’s significance also lies in its attempt to develop an anarchist ethics of violence that avoids both pacifism and indiscriminate terrorism. The author argues that in an anarchist world without morality, ethics define actions, and that one cannot create a preconceived category for future actions. Conditions on liberation actions should be defined by the oppressed, not oppressors. This nuanced approach to the ethics of violence distinguishes the book from both pacifist and simply terrorist positions.
Finally, the book’s engagement with the history of anarchist violence—from the Haymarket martyrs to the Bonnot Gang, from the Spanish Revolution to the Black Panther Party—provides a valuable resource for understanding the anarchist tradition. The author’s argument that anarchists of yesteryear didn’t let the Left define their tactics and situated themselves among the oppressed serves as both a historical claim and a contemporary call to action. The book thus functions as both a work of historical recovery and a political intervention, seeking to reclaim a tradition of revolutionary violence that the author argues has been obscured by both Statist history and Leftist mythology.
