There is a place called Rojava that you won’t find on any map. It is home to millions of people, but it is not a nation state, nor is it even geographically contiguous. Many Kurds live there, but all nationalities, ethnicities and religions are welcome — Yezidis, Arabs, Turkmens, Chechens, and Armenians among them. Rojava, or the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, is a de facto autonomous region in northeastern Syria, bordered by Turkey, Iran and Iraq, and consisting of three cantons: Cizre, Kobane and Afrin. The region gained visibility in the global left and anarchist imaginations after the Kurdish struggle against…

Towards the end of science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s award-winning 1974 short story, The Day Before the Revolution, an italicised musing interrupts the flow of the writing: “What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.” There is something jarring about seeing the terms ‘anarchist’…

The origins of unconsciousness in the breakdown of the modern mind — “One who has no god, as he walks along the street, headache envelops him like a garment.” — inscription on stone tablet, approx. 1230 BC, Mesopotamia One of the strangest theories of the emergence of modern consciousness is Julian Jaynes’s bicameralism, popularised in 1976’s highly controversial yet still influential The…

Note: this article was first published shortly after the death of Chávez and is republished here in response to the current situation in Venezuela, as inegalitarian Big Men on both the right and the left vie for power. His enemies say he was a king without a crown, and that…

A Conversation Between Jesús Sepúlveda and Aragorn Eloff — 15 December, 2016 The Garden of Peculiarities, by Chilean poet and green anarchist Jesús Sepúlveda, is one of of my favourite books. bolo’bolo, the anarchist collective I’m part of, has republished this title several times and it continues to inspire all…

As a way to collectively refer to — and flippantly dismiss — the works of mid-late 20th century French philosophers like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Jean- François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and their contemporaries, the term ‘postmodernism’, usually deployed in combination with epithets like ‘relativists,’…

[Author’s note: in what follows I am committing what Deleuze calls the injustice of speaking for others. Most problematically, I am representing black pain. I have, however, attempted to avoid making assumptions about specific people’s experiences and tried instead to reiterate those experiences that have been directly shared with me…

Note: this is an excerpt from Rites of the Nomads — a longer paper that was written several years back for an animal rights conference. …

Dear David, In the title of your latest response to me you allude to the important observation that in trying to make what is already good better or perfect, we sometimes make it worse. There is some truth embedded in this old aphorism, but also a question: who gets to…