Friendship, kinship, and communalization is at the heart of working against empire, across the hierarchical divides of heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, colonization, ableism, ecocide, and other systems that have taught us to enact violence on each other and internalise oppressive ways of relating. To make kin across these divisions is a precarious and radical act. Everyone knows how difficult this can be, and how people fuck up, hurt each other, and blame each other.
Yet, we need to do it. Empire with all its forms of exploitation, domination and oppression isn’t going away without a fight and – crucially – without something to replace it.
Creating the organisational structure, practice and culture that encourages and takes seriously comradely criticism, radical selfcriticism, friendship and affinity-building is literally us prefiguring the type of society we want. As anarchists, we feel we should stay with the trouble and with each other, to care when empire tells us to exclude, condemn, hurt back. The trust in individual and collective strength is crucial for a self-determined life as we strive for everything for everyone here and now.
Empire works to keep its subjects stuck in individualizing sadness, held in habits and relationships that are depleting, toxic, and privatized, in coupledom and the nuclear family. The vast majority of us growing up under racist, sexist, capitalism have been taught since birth that this is the only way that we are able to live. That is simply not true. Instead, we can tune in to that which affects us, participate actively in the forces that shape us. Radical community building comes not from avoiding pain, but from struggling amidst and through it, working together to recognise our interdependency and work through conflicts.
Interdependent relationships is a source of collective power, a dangerous closeness that empire works to eradicate through relentless violence, division, competition, management, and incitements to see ourselves as isolated individuals or nuclear family units.
To build our radical, autonomous, oppositional communities where we practice living (more) independently from the systems we oppose, we need to face that community is more than a comforting word. It is messy, it will annoy and disappoint us, but we need to struggle together and stay with the trouble.
We don’t hold all the answers, we are constantly on a learning path, as is everyone else. Here we think of the Zapatistas’ notion preguntando caminamos: “asking, we walk”.
We call for a fierce commitment to emergent forms of life in the cracks of empire, and the values, responsibilities, and questions that sustain them – for total liberation. We hope this page, the publications here, the conversations we are starting in forms of discussions and workshops, plant some seeds for these forms of life to grow. Together, let’s nurture the sprouts in rage, grief, fear, love, care, friendship, creation and destruction.