Empty Hands – Page 7 – Empty Hands History

Willem Van Spronsen and Histories of Resistance

A year ago today, 69-year-old anarchist Willem Van Spronsen attacked an ICE facility in Washington state. He attempted to sabotage the buses the facility would use to transport people to concentration camps. For this, he was shot and killed by the police. We should remember him, tell stories of him, and draw inspiration from his sacrifice. We need to believe in the possibility of collectively organizing and acting to stop the atrocities that the US capitalist state commits.

Last summer, a presenter at a critical theory workshop I attended outlined his conception of “counterhistory.” He argued that counterhistory has two main components: 1) Identifying and dismantling the dominant historical imaginary and 2) Reconfiguring our methodological tools for understanding how history operates. He primarily writes counterhistories focused on the operations of power and what he calls the military-academic-industrial complex. I agree with this, but I think he missed a crucial third step.

I am convinced that we must complement these two components of counterhistory with a third: telling histories of resistance, struggle, and the possibility of building alternative worlds. These histories inspire action today, instill the belief that resistance and alternatives are possible in the face of a history of oppression and loss, and give us practical lessons for how to fight most effectively. Willem Van Spronsen was guided by this conception of history.

Van Spronsen had a historical understanding of the dangers of our present times and the need to fight back against the rise of fascism. In his final note before attempting to sabotage the ICE buses, he says that: “when I was a boy, in post war Holland, later France, my head was filled with stories of the rise of fascism in the 30s. I promised myself that I would not be one of those who stands by as neighbors are torn from their homes and imprisoned for somehow being perceived as lesser. You don’t have to burn the motherfucker down, but are you just going to stand by?”

History provides both a caution of the dangers of fascism as well as inspiration for struggle. Willem identified himself in a line of struggle going back to John Brown’s attempt to start an insurrection to end slavery. This historical understanding of the possibility and duty of individuals to act against violent oppression seems instrumental to his ability to make the ultimate sacrifice in the fight for freedom and justice today. As he said, “I follow three teachers: Don Pritts, my spiritual guide, ‘love without action is just a word.’ John Brown, my moral guide, ‘what is needed is action!’ Emma Goldman, my political guide, ‘if I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution.’”

Spronsen follows with: “I’m a head in the clouds dreamer, I believe in love and redemption. I believe we’re going to win. I’m joyfully revolutionary.” And he ends with “keep the faith! All power to the people! Bella ciao.”

Willem Van Spronsen, presente!

After Coronavirus: Intervening in an Explosion of Potentiality

Coronavirus has accentuated the isolation and alienation that so many of us already felt. The short- and medium-term outlook is bleak. But once the crisis is over, I anticipate an incredible flowering of blocked potentiality and I am eager to see and experience the possibilities of what may come. New forms of life, new ways of relating to one another, new commitments to a joyful and meaningful daily existence, will proliferate across the country and the world.

The exhilaration of coming back together, of non-distanced life, will explode into thousands of new encounters. For a crucial moment, going back to our previous way of life—the drudgery and anxiety of life under late capitalism—will be unthinkable. This will be an incredible opportunity for those of us with alternative visions of life to intervene and propose—nay, demonstrate!—the possibilities for living, organizing, and relating differently.

I have been reading Tom Wolfe’s invigorating book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test chronicling the acid-fueled bus trip that Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters took across the United States in 1964 spreading new forms of life and consciousness across the country and helping kick-start the ‘60s counterculture. Last night, I got pretty stoned for the first time in a while (I’m getting old, give me a break) and watched Across the Universe, which features the Merry Pranksters in a great scene. And I suddenly thought: this is it. This is the intervention—or better, one of many interventions!—to be made in the post-coronavirus moment.

I have so many dear friends scattered across the country. Five years ago, I took a mostly-solo road trip around the US in which I reconnected with old friends and saw their amazing experiments in life and politics, from the “Avant-Gardeners” in Eugene to the rollicking fun of a Halloween weekend in New Orleans. It seems that this should be repeated, but this time in a bus with a collection of friends, comrades, and fellow travelers spreading anarchy and living communism: distributing literature, propaganda, art, music, puppet shows, perhaps even a talk or two based on my research. An autonomous zone in every park, a block party on every street!

Crucially, we would see firsthand and participate in what is happening across the country. Everywhere we go, we would ask the same questions to folks involved in infoshops, communes, alternatives to policing… what are you doing? How is it going? What is working well, what is not? What do you think others could learn from your experience? And then we would spread their answers in other cities through zines and talks and fireside conversations. After so many months communicating digitally, we need to come into contact again.

As the Invisible Committee put it in their ever-relevant book Now: “the thing to do, it would seem, is to leave home, take to the road, go meet up with others, work towards forming connections, whether conflictual, prudent, or joyful, between the different parts of the world. Organizing ourselves has never been anything else than loving each other.”

The Merry Pranksters’ bus named “Further”

Learning from Bread and Puppet

Late at night after a Bread and Puppet show, we sat around our kitchen table with several puppeteers chatting over handfuls of leftover Halloween candy. I had noticed a certain presence from the Bread and Puppet members: a sense of ease and warmth that rubbed off on everyone they met. I found myself smiling more around them, talking and laughing freely, feeling more alive. After a round of Laffy Taffy jokes, I couldn’t help asking how they did it. What produced this sense of comfort, this easy joy and connection with others? The oldest of them laughed kindly and responded: “it’s just early in the tour.”

Bread and Puppet’s bus outside the Moth Mother Collective (2019)

A fair response. But what exactly is it about Bread and Puppet that generates this feeling of comfortable humanity, this ease and presence in the world? My partner and I discussed this for weeks after they left. Of course, the answer is not hard to discern. They are a group of lovely people who live collectively on a farm and spend their days making beautiful art. A few times a year, a number of them pile into a painted old school bus to travel from town to town sharing their creations with the world. Bread and Puppet has been producing and sharing incredible art, puppets, theater, and (of course) bread since the 1960s, and their method works. They put an incredible amount of life into their art, which in turn sustains so many thousands of people. My own house is filled with Bread and Puppet art that brings me daily joy.

I have yet to actually play the game featured under this Bread and Puppet poster in our living room

Of course, not all of us can spend our days making art on a collective farm in Vermont. How can we find a similar sense of happiness and fulfillment as do the puppeteers? It is perhaps a banal observation that some form of self-directed creative labor is key. Capitalism devalues our creative projects, forces them into niche “hobbies” to pursue in our precious little free time away from work. We find ourselves having to justify every hour spent on our projects—or conversely, we feel guilty when we don’t have time for them. As Marx pointed out so long ago in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, the problem is that work under capitalism alienates us from our humanity and our sense of creative possibility. The only real solution is to collectively regain control over our time and labor.

Until then, making art and puppets seems like as good a way as any to find some happiness and relief from the soul sucking despair of the present. Puppets are also, as David Graeber reminds us, vital for fun and provocative demonstrations and for sustaining our culture of resistance. So a few weeks ago, in the doldrums of coronavirus melancholia, we at the Moth Mother Collective cleared out our garage of junk and transformed it into an art and puppet studio. (We have big plans for it to double as an infoshop space and pop-up zine distro in the future; stay tuned!) We’re still a little way out from finishing any puppets, but we are making progress. And I’ll tell you what: it feels good.

The Grounded Intellectual: Articulating Self-Knowledge from Within the Movement

As a PhD student working on movement history, I think constantly about how to best use my position within the academy. It is easy to get sucked into the logics of the academic world, no matter our political commitments. How do we prevent this? How can we relate to movements outside the academy in a way that both strengthens them and transforms our own subjectivity? It seems key to me to remain grounded within movement spaces. We must function as part of movements—certainly with our own particular knowledge and tools to contribute, but as part of the movement and thus helping to articulate self-knowledge from within.

I recently read Raúl Zibechi’s excellent book Territories in Resistance and I appreciate how he frames this process:

“We strengthen and expand social movements by understanding the meaning of the actual social practices, of the ‘historical movement that is unfolding before our eyes’ (Marx). Understanding is a creative act […] But the process of understanding is a form of action; one understands only what one lives. Hence we can only understand the meaning of social practices in and with them—from within. […] In Argentina, Colectivo Situaciones and the MTD Solano have developed the concept of ‘the militant researcher.’ This is being part of the social movement—not just integrating into the organization, but participating in the disengagement or place shifting that the whole movement pursues, an act of moving-oneself that captures and reconfigures.”

In the words of the Italian Autonomist Marxist Raniero Panzieri, “analysis becomes complete only through participation in struggles.”

When I was involved with Food Not Bombs and the Antidote Infoshop, I felt that my studies and my political activity were each part of a connected whole. I shared my research with my non-academic (but equally intellectually committed) comrades, who in turn kept me grounded and pointed in the right direction. Without this anchor, my research process feels adrift. I feel an urgent need to rediscover a radical intellectual community on the border between academia and movement spaces, dedicated to consciously articulating self-knowledge from within the movement.

Reflections on Defeat and Disorientation: Nine Years on the Left

I have been feeling very politically unstable and unsure lately. Experiencing several projects fall apart in the past couple years as I struggled to hold them together while immersed in my PhD really took a toll on me. I’m currently teaching a course on anarchism to a class of 18-year-old freshmen—my age when I first got involved in radical politics with Occupy Boston—so I’ve been reflecting on that time period. During Occupy the possibilities seemed endless and I was convinced of the rightness of our approach and the imminence of change. Now I feel cautious, a bit bitter, and so unsure of what the correct political approach is. My optimism has been tempered by almost nine years of defeats, by countless hours poured into campaigns and projects of many kinds, often with barely anything to show for it.

I generally maintain an anti-state left orientation, but I simply do not know how to get from where we are to the world I want to see. My growing disillusionment came to an inflection point last fall. The anarchist projects to which I had dedicated an enormous amount of time and energy for the previous two years—Food Not Bombs and an infoshop we named the Antidote—had fallen apart, in part due to a lack of structure and unwillingness to have serious conversations about politics and strategy. An attempt to establish a local version of Cooperation Jackson likewise collapsed. Bitter from the latest setback, I felt incapable of mustering the energy to co-found yet another organization. Although I flirted with the idea of founding a Black Rose chapter, what I wanted was simply to join a national organization with an established structure and plug into the work they were doing.

In light of this disorientation, and in the context of living in a relatively small town without many options for a political home, I joined DSA. Yet I quickly discovered that our DSA chapter suffered the same basic problem as the anarchist groups I had left: an aversion to real conversations about our politics, our goals, and our strategy. Months into my involvement, the truth set in: I had nothing in common with the people in my chapter. I disagreed with their politics, though I was willing to accept this. We did not have a shared cultural understanding, as I had with the punk-adjacent anarchist crowd. I came away from every meeting more frustrated than the last. Worst of all, we barely even did anything political. I began to see the organizational structure as an impediment to taking action. A week ago, I finally decided that I was done. This experience has driven home a simple point to me: if you want to take action, then you need to find a few friends and comrades wherever you can, link up with others with similar ideas and affinities, and take action together. You may find these people in your local DSA chapter or you may not.

I don’t currently have the capacity to help found yet another small organization and struggle to keep it together—if that would even be possible in the context of coronavirus. So I try to take a step back, focus on my studies and their political implications, teach my class on anarchism, and regroup. Yet I am wracked by feelings of political impotence and frustrated by inaction. The relative success of the Bernie campaign was of course a spot of hope in all this, as is the burgeoning climate justice movement led by young people. But in some ways it all feels too little, too late (particularly after Bernie’s defeat) and I don’t have the patience for the long hours of strategic discussion to produce the reorientations that we desperately need. Instead, I read for hours each day desperately searching for lessons from those who came before.

In this context, I found resonance in a piece by Nietzsche that I recently read “On The Use and Abuse of History For Life.” “To be sure, we need history […] we need it for life and for action, not for the easy withdrawal from life and from action […] We only wish to serve history to the extent that it serves life.” So I ask myself: how can I work to put history into the service of life? Perhaps this question will help reorient me in a disoriented time. I want—I need—to rediscover a new sense of possibility and a new mode of political engagement. Maybe then I will recover my previous faith in our collective project of building a new world.

This post is by nature quite melancholic. But as I survey the last nine years I am also struck by how much I have learned and grown since my days in Occupy Boston. In many ways I am now much better equipped to contribute to radical projects. Yet I have also calcified and have brought a certain bitterness to my recent activities. As I struggle to correct the course, I am reminded of the way that CrimethInc. ended their somewhat satirical but very earnest 2006 CrimethInc. Shareholder Report: An Incomplete Report on and Critical Analysis of the Past Decade of Activity: OUTDO US! OUTDO US! OUTDO US!

I wrote most of this before the coronavirus crisis really hit. The crisis has produced a widespread disorientation and the left has struggled to respond. But in the mutual aid networks and beyond, we see glimpses of the new world struggling to be born.

Sharing the mic with future Occupiers (2011)

The Quarantine Commune

We call ourselves the Moth Mother Collective to honor our kitchen’s many winged inhabitants. Even before coronavirus, we strove to live our lives in common. Six days of communal meals each week, a rotating chore wheel, a garden and workspace, and collective care for the needs and desires of five beings: three humans, our cat Reno, and our wise old hamster Toby. Social distancing measures have forced us to band even closer together to face the crisis. We are becoming the quarantine commune.

Social distancing has paradoxically compelled every household and living group to orient towards the commune form. In their book To Our Friends, The Invisible Committee argue that “what constitutes the commune is the mutual oath sworn […] to stand together as a body […] So a commune was a pact to face the world together. It meant relying on one’s own shared powers as the source of one’s freedom. What was aimed for in this case was not an entity; it was a qualitative bond, and a way of being in the world.” Today, a home must be a commune or it will fracture and die. Each decision must become a collective decision: how much risk to take, how to relate to others outside the living group, but most importantly the collective decision of how to live together, of how to be together in the world. The quarantine commune-orientation is a silver lining of the crisis which we should embrace and deepen.

We cannot go back to normal when this crisis ends, for returning to life as atomized individuals would be a significant defeat. Instead, the commune may become the new foundation for our social relationships. Before, during, and after social restrictions are lifted, each commune should make prudent contact (physical or otherwise) with other communes. Links should be forged, networks formed (mutual aid and beyond), the territory of communal relations deepened and enlarged. We have taken the first step—whether by choice or necessity—in the fragments of our own immediate living situations. The next step, when we can take it, is to link the fragments, to form circulation between them and collectively elaborate a new form of life-in-common.

Lifting social distancing restrictions will release a torrent of energy, mobility, and circulation. In our fragmented, socially distanced world, bringing people and places back into contact and re-articulating our social relationships in new forms becomes even more crucial. There is an opportunity to build from our communal foundation towards an entirely new community. As The Invisible Committee put it years ago but seemingly speaking to our moment, our goal “is the great health of forms of life. This great health is obtained through a patient re-articulation of the disjoined members of our being, in touch with life.”

For the Moth Mother Collective and each other quarantine commune, it is time to begin.

From the Archive to the Infoshop: Reflections on Movement History

Forty sweaty people stood shoulder to shoulder in a crowded punk space listening to an old anarchist talk politics. Despite the familiar atmosphere, we were not between songs at a show. The crowd was gathered for one of the most popular events in a “Week of Anarchy” that I helped organize in August 2018 at our local infoshop, The Antidote. Ramsey Kanaan, founder of the anarchist publishers AK Press and PM Press, was animatedly sharing his experience organizing against the UK poll tax in the 1980s. Ramsey was sharply critical of the fact that our local political work was centered around Food Not Bombs and the infoshop. He argued that we needed to organize around more substantial political issues and engage in mass social struggle, as did UK anarchists fighting in the poll tax rebellion. Infrastructural projects might feel good, he maintained, but they would not lead to revolution. Let the Catholic charities feed people—they could do it better than Food Not Bombs, anyway.

We were indignant and a little defensive. Food Not Bombs and the Antidote Infoshop were the foundation for our political work in Ithaca. They helped us build community and find meaning in our own lives. Most of all, they were a living example of the new world we sought to build based in mutual aid and solidarity. And yet within half a year the infoshop fell apart; after another eight months I quit Food Not Bombs, frustrated by our lack of strategic vision.

Why did these projects fail? After much reflection and conversations with comrades, I concluded that these projects became ends in themselves which sucked up an enormous amount of time and energy. Rather than expanding our capacity to engage politically, they ended up constricting our field of vision. Frustrated conversations about this with my partner would often end with us saying “shit, was Ramsey right after all?”

Later, conducting dissertation research at the Brooklyn Interference Archive, I eagerly pored through numerous zines, personal reflections, and debates from the infoshop movement in the 1990s. I was shocked to read many of the exact same discussions and debates that we had had about our own infoshop, particularly the lack of political direction and the drain of energy. Without knowledge of the history of infoshops, we had tried to reinvent the wheel from scratch. Had we known about this previous generation of infoshops and learned from their errors, we could have avoided some major pitfalls.

Most importantly, perhaps we could have seen the danger of putting too much focus on maintaining the space itself at the expense of serious discussions about our political strategy. Had we been familiar with this history, we could have pushed ourselves to have more political discussions from the start, worked out a broader intentional strategy to build anarchism as a force in Ithaca, and positioned the infoshop as something that contributes to that broader strategy rather than being an end in itself. Of course, many participants did have their own sense of political strategy; the problem was that we did not have these discussions as a group. We fell into the trap that Joel Olson (himself an active participant in the 1990s anarchist movement) identified in his essential essay Between Infoshops and Insurrection, that all too often “infoshops and insurrection get taken as revolutionary strategies in themselves rather than as part of a broader revolutionary movement. In the infoshops model, autonomous spaces become the movement rather than serving it.”

Movement history is necessary because it brings these histories to a new generation of radicals. Not everybody can spend weeks in archives reading obscure documents from previous movements. Historians can compile these resources and interpret lessons from them for new waves of anarchist activity. This is what I hope to do with my own historical work. The highest honor I can imagine as a historian would be to someday see my book sitting on an infoshop bookshelf, marked as the material for an upcoming meeting of an anarchist reading group.

Punks, Panthers, and Feminists: American Anarchism from the New Left to the Anti-Globalization Movement

Despite this blog’s title, I have not yet posted anything “historical.” Partly this is due to the times; responding to coronavirus seems more pressing, and I don’t study any history that might be useful (relatedly, does anyone know how anarchists responded to the Spanish Flu?). I plan to start posting more historical writing related to my research as well as reflections on the kind of movement history that I find most useful. To give a sense of my research here is a short prospectus for my dissertation, which is tentatively titled “Punks, Panthers, and Feminists: American Anarchism from the New Left to the Anti-Globalization Movement.”

From Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter to the rebirth of democratic socialism and antifascism, today’s American left has regained a strength and vision absent since the 1960s. A revival of anarchist thought and practice has been central to this revitalization of anti-capitalism. Ostensibly marginalized since the Russian Revolution and the defeat of the Spanish Revolution, anarchism underwent a global revival following the collapse of the Soviet Union. By the early twenty-first century, most radical social movements in the United States operated along anarchist principles: decentralization, horizontal organizational structures, militant street demonstrations, and rejection of the state and capitalism. My dissertation traces this anarchist resurgence to its roots in a critique of the New Left, inspiration from the women’s and Black liberation movements, and transnational connections to German autonomists and the Zapatistas. This transnational history of American anarchism is guided by three primary questions. First, how and why did anarchism gain hegemony within the American left by the end of the twentieth century? Second, how have transnational networks shaped American anarchism? Third, what lessons can we learn from this history?

My dissertation is an intellectual and social history of contemporary American anarchism. From preliminary research, I argue that social anarchism—organized socialist anarchism, as opposed to individualism—was central to the revitalization of the anti-state left through the development of intersectional anti-authoritarian politics. Social anarchism provided a meeting point for feminist, anti-racist, anti-state, and anti-capitalist traditions which together produced a revolutionary intersectional politics for the twenty-first century. In the 1970s, social ecologists like Murray Bookchin critiqued all forms of hierarchy, anarcha-feminists such as Ithaca’s Tiamat collective challenged masculinist class-essentialism, and ex-Black Panthers including Ashanti Alston and Kuwasi Balagoon theorized Black/New Afrikan Anarchism. In the 1980s-90s, these currents converged in organizations like the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, Anti-Racist Action, and the Black Autonomy Federation. My research critically evaluates their theory and practice in order to understand the development of intersectional social anarchism.

My work contributes to three primary academic and activist conversations. First, it encourages historians of the left to more fully engage anarchism, which has been viewed as Marxism’s immature sibling despite its growing importance. My research historicizes how anarchists have shaped the strategy and tactics of left-wing social movements to the point that horizontal, leaderless forms of organization have become dominant in social struggle from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter. Second, I contribute to the literature on intersectionality by exploring Black/New Afrikan Anarchism, anarcha-feminism, and white “race traitor” politics, which offer much to today’s identity politics debates. Third, my research strengthens the anarchist movement’s historical self-knowledge by framing conversations around organizational form and emphasizing post-1960s continuity. Could privileging continuities alongside ruptures offer insight into practicing anti-capitalist politics in periods of low mobilization? I explore the anarchist movement’s successes and failures during a counter-revolutionary era to offer lessons for a time of resurgent global fascism.

From Mutual Aid to Counter-Institutions: Revisiting scott crow

Mutual aid networks have rapidly spread across the United States in response to the coronavirus crisis. While mainstream media outlets have approached this with some confusion, this is nothing new for anarchists: mutual aid is the bread and (vegan) butter of anarchist theory and practice. Following the post in which I compiled a reading list on Disaster, Coronavirus, and Mutual Aid, I found it useful to revisit scott crow’s excellent book on the anarchist response to Hurricane Katrina, Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective (2011). scott crow’s book is a gripping, eminently useful account of mutual aid that also points beyond the immediate responses to disaster. How can we transform mutual aid networks into permanent institutions with transformative capacity? crow encourages us to embrace our “emergency hearts” and act in a spirit of love and solidarity to meet people’s needs now while planting seeds in the concrete that can blossom into broader autonomous infrastructure and counter-institutions.

Black Flags and Windmills tells the story of the Common Ground Collective, a mutual aid organization formed in response to Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans. As we know, the state cared far more about establishing military order than it did about helping people, particularly poor Black people. crow rightly insists that the real disaster was the long history of oppression and exploitation of the poor Black community in New Orleans. In response to the state’s inaction, the Common Ground Collective was established by Malik Rahim (a former Black Panther), scott crow, Sharon Johnson, and others to provide food, shelter, medical aid, and other necessities. Common Ground successfully organized to save lives and rebuild destroyed neighborhoods—not only without the help of the state, but indeed in spite of the efforts of the state and white racist vigilantes to disrupt their organizing. For anyone interested in this experience and its political implications, Black Flags and Windmills has so much to offer, from practical organizational knowledge to theoretical background. I can’t recommend it enough, especially in these times.

crow encourages us to think about turning mutual aid networks into durable autonomous infrastructure. “Could street medics and their temporary first aid stations become a permanent clinic or hospital? Could groups who served food once a week set up long-standing free kitchens? Would we be able through alternative media […] to tell the deeper untold stories that countered mass-media sensationalized hype?” (66). This seems crucial to moving from networks of limited mutual aid to actually establishing anti-capitalist alternative infrastructure that can support life long-term. crow’s reflections upon his experience in New Orleans showed him that “movements need infrastructure and counter-institutions if we want people to stay engaged. If we want people to leave the destructive capitalist system, we have to create something better” (168). This led him to help create a network of cooperatives and mutual aid projects in Austin. Could we similarly pivot in the coming months from mutual aid networks to counter-institutions and infrastructure? One could certainly imagine local food systems deepening in strength, neighborhood networks transitioning to grassroots organizing, and online organizing becoming real-world activity.

Apart from mutual aid, crow’s discussion of his political influences is fascinating and very helpful. He identifies three main movements that inform his work: anarchism (largely from Spain), the Black Panthers, and the Zapatistas. These three influences lead him to approach political work undogmatically, and he takes some of the best parts from each. He emphasizes the kind of anarchism that I can most identify with, which is based in building autonomy and direct alternatives to capitalism. From the Black Panthers, he emphasizes self-defense, survival programs, and political education. His entire approach is shaped by the Zapatistas, who he says created a “living revolution” which “chang[es] people’s lives now and after the revolution” (83). The Zapatistas’ “anarchism that is not anarchism” provides perhaps the best path forward for serious anti-state and anti-capitalist political work, acting as what crow calls “a living synthesis of two disparate methods for liberation: the Black Panther Party’s integrated programs and the open-ended horizontal practices of anarchism” (83).

This was realized, however imperfectly, in the Common Ground Collective, which crow says was “closer to the Zapatista model, with a base decision-making body that consulted and accepted some leadership from the various communities we were in” (136). What more do the Zapatistas, the Black Panthers, and undogmatic anarchism have to offer to our own practice of mutual aid today? In moments of respite, we can reflect on the political implications of this crisis and orient ourselves towards the radical possibilities of mutual aid networks.

In response to the continuing disaster we live in and the greater ones we see coming in the future, Black Flags and Windmills provides hope. In response to these disasters and crises, crow reminds us that “another beautiful and flourishing tendency has been revealed: the efforts of decentralized responses to disasters, both ecological and economic, rooted in anarchist-inspired solidarity, direct action, and mutual aid. These emerging tendencies are offering rudimentary, but viable alternatives to the continuing crisis wrought by climate change and capitalism’s effects on communities in direct response and in rebuilding pieces from below” (178). If we all embrace our “emergency hearts” and help to cultivate seeds in the cracks of the system, perhaps we will not only survive the coming disasters but actively use them to help create another world.