What Is Anarcho-Nihilism?

Let’s discuss anarchist nihilism, and my favorite nihilist text, Blessed Is The Flame!

Timestamps:

00:00 || 1 Epigraph

00:12 || 2 Exerpt: Blessed Is The Flame

02:35 || 3 Introduction

04:35 || 4 Nihilism, Classic and Russian

11:40 || 5 Anarchism and Nihilism

30:45 || 6 Conclusion

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCTsRou0w0E

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We have already been led to our slaughter — it is all around us. The world in which we exist is a protracted death, a sort of economically-sustained limbo in which hearts are permitted to beat only to the extent that they can facilitate the upward stream of capital. The plague of domestication has reached into every wild space, and the lines of colonization have crossed us more times than we can count. [..] We roam the desolate architecture of our slaughter houses (“the prison of civilization we live in”) like ghosts who feel but cannot quite understand the vapidity of our existence.[1]

I began thinking about this text in Toronto where my 93-year-old grandmother lives on the seventh floor of a high-rise apartment overlooking Highway 401.

Standing at the floor-to-ceiling windows in her kitchen, the horizon is swallowed by twelve lanes of concrete and an endless river of traffic, equal parts terrifying and hypnotic.

How many gruesome stories are written into this one landscape? The concrete road tells the story of the colonization of Turtle Island.

The commuter traffic tells the story of mass domestication under the rhythms of capitalism.

The billowing smog tells a story of a future that is almost too frightening to believe.

Drinking tea quietly, my grandmother is clearly unfazed by this ominous procession.

It is the world she now knows and accepts.

In a previous chapter of her life, she confronted and survived a very different infrastructure of death.

As a young adult, The bunkers and factories and crematorium of Auschwitz defined nearly a year of her life.

Her experiences of the Nazi Holocaust sit close with me as I look out over this glowing ribbon of death and wrestle with the ideas of nihilism.

To what extent do I remain attached to the society that I despise? What would it mean to sever those attachments? If this were Nazi Germany expanding out before me, how would I live my life? What does it mean to resist against such a catastrophically extensive and overwhelming system? There are many more strains of leftist thought and specifically anarchist thought that one could choose from.

A diverse philosophy that for the most part rejects sectarianism and infighting, anarchism has always made room for a multitude of approaches and ideas.

As a close friend and comrade explained to me, many view these different strains not as separate ideologies but as a philosophical toolbox where different frameworks and perspectives have differing values at different times and don’t necessarily contradict each other.

The particular strain we discussed today, anarchist nihilism, usually shares this view.

Benihilists of the anarchist variety can be a very diverse bunch and don’t always share this attitude.

Regardless of such, I find it important to discuss.

I first encountered anarchist nihilism as a framework in 2021, and I found myself perplexed, fascinated, inspired by, and brought to tears by this web of ideologies.

Anarcho-nihilists are a diverse group of people.

Being anarchists and rejecting dogmatism for the most part, there’s no one way to be an anarcho-nihilist and no inherent character to it other than the nihilism itself.

While some nihilist groups, like the currently active CCF or Conspiracy Cells of Fire, are considered active terrorist groups, others are no more than local mutual aid groups distributing vegan food to homeless people or participating in local ecological struggles.

While much of the literature invokes great revolutionary fervor and bombast, its proponents are not necessarily violent people, nor am I making this video to promote any violent ideas.

This is purely an educational and journalistic discussion of a philosophy and its historical progression.

My goal today is to present what anarchist nihilism is and isn’t, its virtues and vices, all in as fair and honest an analysis as I can.

I’m certain there are those in the crowd who would consider themselves nihilists, and I would appreciate you offering your critiques and ideas and opinions.

in good faith and kindness, as I will as well.

We’re all here to learn, and while I will criticize at times, I want to do so from a place of good faith.

So without further discussion or wasted time, let me tell you a story.

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is probably the most widely known person to discuss nihilism of all time, and to many is known as the founder of nihilism and while that’s not entirely untrue, nihilism does precede him.

The term first comes up in a novel called Messengers of Europe by Russian author Alexander Pushkin.

However, its prominence in Russian political life wouldn’t come to fruition until 1862 with the famous novel Fathers and Friends by Ivan Turgenev.

Before we get further into that topic, what is the actual definition of nihilism itself? Briefly, Nietzsche would define nihilism as not necessarily the belief that nothing matters or has meaning, but specifically the state of despair and disdain for life that comes with that realization.

for some who need the idea of an overarching goal or theme of life and existence to go on.

Nietzsche basically believes that one should embrace meaninglessness but also still see the value of life.

He believed that the hypocrisies and decadence of institutions like the church and the state and their morality, or rather lack thereof, as well as advances in science and reason, had rendered them meaningless and that it was essential to embrace this meaningless.

Hence the line, God is dead and we have killed him or whatever.

Understanding nihilism as life-denying in this first sense allows us to recognize one of Nietzsche’s most striking insights.

If life denial involves the negative judgment of this life and the world as they actually are, then even beliefs and values that we typically understand as bestowing meaning and value upon life can function as covertly nihilistic.

Let us return to the individual who believes that life is worth living only if there is some higher purpose to it, in which all human beings participate.

For such an individual, it is not only nihilistic to disavow her belief in a higher purpose, it is also nihilistic for her to believe in a higher purpose.

After all, Nietzsche argues that, if we think life is worth living only if there is a higher purpose in which we participate, and it turns out that there is no higher purpose in which we participate, something that Nietzsche insists we must accept, then one’s belief in a higher purpose is life-denying because it implicitly devalues life as it actually is, that is, as devoid of higher purpose.

In other words, given that there are no higher purposes, belief in higher purpose, as that which is required to make life worth living, covertly devalues life.

It indicates that life, as it actually is, not worth living.

Getting back to Turgenev’s book and the Russian nihilist movement, Fathers and Sons features a provocative nihilist character named Bazarov.

It was this character’s attitude and Byronic appeal that in part made nihilism explode into a subcultural, punk intellectual scene.

The nihilists of the Russian nihilism movement, as this came to be called from 1855 to 1866 roughly, became known for being sort of hippies, sort of punks, and sort of nerds, with men having distinctive long, unkempt facial hair, rough oversized coats, dark faux, and blue-tinted glasses, women having a similarly rough style of dress and behavior wearing large dresses and shawls, the same hats and glasses and having short hair.

They rejected traditional social norms and were seen as crass.

Their style and attitude were made in part to imitate Bazarov, the quintessential nihilist character.

This movement started as just a counter-cultural movement, but as repression against them from the Tsarist government grew, What many early nihilists referred to as a purely negative strain of socialism began to take root.

The movement at this point was essentially a countercultural fandom, though it did have explicitly political motivations.

The origins of nihilism are deeply tied with socialism, and many of the first nihilists considered themselves socialists, although this isn’t always the case.

They believed that until the system of the Tsars was totally and utterly destroyed, no utopian vision of the future could possibly take root without the bones of the present worming their way in.

The phrase purely negative strain of socialism refers to the destructive instinct of the Russian nihilist being rooted in a desire to create.

To quote Bakunin, The urge for destruction is also a creative urge.

The ordinary answer to these questions is simple enough.

They are common assassins, and what they aim at is a senseless destruction of all existing social or political forms of life.

The abolition of religion, morality, family life, property, as well as every kind of political organization.

This definition of nihilism, however, is as absurd as it is unjust.

In truth, nihilism is nothing else than Russian socialism, and as such it stands ahead of all other parties.

It is the natural leader of the present revolution and will retain its place until the least part of its claims have been realized.

Russian socialism, it is true, is destructive in its tendencies, fierce and unrelenting in its hate for all it strives to destroy.

But before judging and condemning the Russian socialists, public opinion would do well to solve the question against what their attacks are directed and in the name of what principles.

What Russian socialism wants to destroy may be defined in two words, Russian tsardom, the chronic cancer on Russia’s body politic.

While some nihilists championed the self and selfishness, some were more socially minded and formed communes, but all shared distinctly counter-cultural attitudes.

They also formed sharp criticisms of the liberal reformers that had dominated the previous generations of Russian politics.

The Russian nihilist movement from its inception would face much ridicule that would slowly turn to derision and repression, as they themselves, in response, shifted from harmless local punks to activists, and at times terrorists, committed to direct action, propaganda of the deed, and the total annihilation of Tsarist Russia and her physical and ideological structures.

Russian nihilism can be dissected, perhaps unnaturally, into two periods.

The foundational period, 1860–1869, where the countercultural aspects of nihilism scandalized Russia, where even the smallest of indiscretions resulted in nihilists being sent to Siberia or imprisoned for lengthy amounts of time, and where the philosophy of nihilism was formed.

The other period would be the revolutionary period of nihilism, between 1870 and 1881, when the pamphlet The Catechism of a Revolutionist inspired the movement in wading into a movement with teeth, with dozens of actions against the Russian state.

The revolutionary period ends, of course, with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II on March 13, 1881, by a series of bombs, and the consequential crushing of the nihilist movement.

Catechism of a Revolutionist, published in 1869 by author Sergei Nichaev, sparked the revolutionary period of Russian nihilism.

Over the course of the next decade, nihilists would do everything from move to the countryside to become teachers, to become devoted terrorists, bank robbers, extortionists against the rich, assassins and saboteurs against the state, engage in communalist living and individualist expropriation.

Nihilists did all of these things and more.

The movement would end with a period of brutal repression culminating in the successful plot to kill the Tsar, Alexander II, carried out by the nihilist organization People’s Will.

On March 1^st, 1881, A group of five attackers attacked his caravan, blowing his legs off with a bomb, and killing one of their own in the explosion.

Five of the plotters were subsequently hanged.

It’s a fascinating story, and I always am down to see emperors get murdered, but I’ve brushed over some details.

I can happily link sources below for people wanting more videos reading on this particular subject.

Let’s start this section off in a brief aside on what anarcho-nihilism isn’t.

It’s not fascism! Fash-jacketing is a concept similar to fed-jacketing, where one accuses someone of being a cop with no evidence to support that claim.

In that vain, people love to claim that nihilist symbols and nihilists are fascists when this is not true.

Anarcho-nihilism is an explicitly anti-fascist ideology.

With that being said, though, there absolutely can be nihilists with reactionary, racist, ableist, or even fascist ideas or takes, just like there can be liberals, communists, abolitionists, or otherwise, who also have those bad takes.

People can call themselves anything they want.

Part of the reason examining actions over ideology and not taking everything at face value is so important is exactly that.

A nihilist is someone who takes no principle on faith and I would extend that saying to a nihilist is someone who takes no principle on faith, including other nihilists.

Symbols like the Chaos Star are frequently used by nihilists, and I cannot stress enough that this is not a fascist symbol.

It’s a Chaos Star.

It’s a symbol appropriated by anarchists from Michael Moorcock and his science fiction novella, Eternal Champion.

It’s also commonly used in D&D and in other tabletop role-playing games.

People often genuinely or dis-genuinely confuse it for a Sonenrad, which is a distinct and genuine occult fascist symbol, but they are deeply distinct.

Don’t fast-jacket anarcho-nihilists.

They’re just nerds, not Nazis.

With that said, I do want to point out that while not all anarcho-nihilists are anti-communists, some are in fact communists.

Some can be very anti-communist, to the point that it’s sometimes just edgy humor and sometimes a bit disturbing.

Now, one would think that anarchists of all people would be hostile to the inherently totalistic, collectivizing nature of leftist ideologies like communism and socialism.

Yet to this day, a large number of so-called anarchists continue to express sympathy with communist goals, communist epistemology, and Marxist class analysis, and allow their brains to be bamboozled and misled by euphemisms like anti-state communist, autonomist Marxist, or the current favorite of the urban hipster, communization.

Anarchists who drool over this ******** are worshiping at the altar of a stagnant pool and remain tethered to a political tradition of authoritarianism and mass graves.

Regardless of the updated terminology, the thin rhetoric of communization has reached new summits of tedium with the trendy writings of mealy-mouthed shysters like Tikwin and the umbilic gurglings of applied non-existence.

Both duplicitous commie front groups that specialize in speaking postmodern gibberish, in substituting elitist masturbatory language for real speech, and in choking unfortunate readers with a foul, dreamless air.

Much like that emanating from uncovered garbage cans.

From the zine, Anti-left anarchy, hunting leftism with the intent to kill.

Make no mistake, even if your intention in writing something like this isn’t vascistic, it comes off extremely so.

In the full quote, the author attempts to make vague references to the atrocities that took place under communism, and while that discussion does need to be had, folding all people who use that terminology you don’t like into the same vein as murderers who actually wielded state power and making no distinctions based on actual actions or nuance or ideologies is the exact kind of violent dogmatism this particular work is claiming to be against.

Besides the anti-communism, which I find deeply frustrating, this is also anti-anarchist.

It’s not even anarchist in praxis.

To so aggressively reject social and class-conscious autonomists and to demand such rigid control over what people call themselves, there is a legit conversation to be had about state socialism and its history and I find texts like this one simply aren’t having those conversations, but regurgitating empty anti-communist dogma.

Even other nihilist texts will emphasize the importance of things like mutual aid and local autonomous action.

Socialism is not simply a statist ideology, but is also the social and communal practice of how we liberate and care for each other in egalitary and selfless kind and empathetic ways.

Those things are core to what anarchism is and these kind of statements, at least to me, can feel very against those core concepts.

This kind of statement is on the further post-left end of the nihilist spectrum, and while a level of skepticism and anti-statism is present, it’s not always this dogmatic as to accuse even other anti-statists of being basically fascists, simply for being class conscious or socialistic.

Even other nihilist texts will emphasize the importance of things like mutual aid and local autonomous action.

I’ve also heard it said that anarcho-nihilists and anarchists more broadly are anti-masses, and I think this is also not necessarily a fair representation.

Anarcho-nihilists are critical of the concept of the masses as a political tool one can wield.

I think that’s an important criticism.

In our study of the Ethiopian Revolution, I found that...

Of the several warring Marxist groups, every single one claimed at one point or another to have the support of the genuine masses, or the real masses, or the proletariat, or they would claim to be the only real socialists in Ethiopia.

This take isn’t anti-mass action.

Again, many anarcho-nihilists openly participate in mass action, but it’s a point about the concept of the masses as political rhetoric and how that can be used to manipulate people and control their actions.

Similarly, nihilists critique Marxism and communism and the concept of ideology itself on the basis of them substituting religions for people, which is typical of all nihilists and has a lot of merit.

Revolutionary politics and rhetoric of any kind, even nihilism, can take on a religious fervor in people.

Nihilists particularly see these various post-Enlightenment ideologies as having culturally Christian roots, the Messianic rapture theology of Christianity to the nihilist is replicated in the Marxist theory of the inevitable coming global revolution that will usher in utopia.

Even so, when you see all these things, you know that it is near, right at the door.

Truly, I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.

Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.

But about that day or hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven nor the Son, but only the Father.

This Bible verse, used by proponents of rapture theory, can bear an eerie resemblance to the rhetoric of coming impending revolution and haunting red specters we often hear of but don’t see.

Nihilists even critique other nihilists in their own continuation of culturally Christian roots in rapture theology, in some nihilist texts that provide prescriptive visions of an idealized post-collapse future.

So what is anarchonihilism? This is similar to regular nihilism in that the ideology can mean different things to different people.

There are a number of characteristics that, while exhibited in different levels, are generally somewhat ubiquitous.

Anarcho-nihilists in the present day believe in a sort of pessimistic futurism, when they believe in a concept of time or a future at all.

Desert, by Anonymous, was an exceptionally prominent piece of anarcho-nihilist literature in the early 2010s, partly because, at the time, its assertion that climate change was impossible to stop was a revolutionary piece of climate realism that was beforehand not a widely believed assertion.

Today, it’s something we know as fact.

Climate change won’t be stopped.

It will be survived, if we’re lucky.

Like it or not, climate change is probably now the context in which ecological struggles are fought, not a subject against which one can struggle.

This text, while having its merit, has problems.

I think its climate realism was genuinely groundbreaking at the time it was released, but other than that, it rings a bit hollow now.

Its chapter on Africa fails to really talk about the continent in an appropriate way, folding hundreds of thousands of cultures and peoples into a single chapter that barely reads with more complexity than Africa’s totally gonna go anarchist, bro, I swear.

That being said, its emphasis on immediate climate action, climate realism, and encouragement of the possible success of smaller-scale local revolutions or insurrections reified global revolution is a genuinely useful framework.

Nihilists seeing no future on the horizon eschew any form of revolutionary politics that espoused utopian visions of the future.

The nihilist musings on time are an expression of this anti-progressive, anti-progressivism sentiment.

Some nihilists believe in, and almost venerate, the concept of oncoming collapse and the failure of global capitalism, while some instead don’t believe capitalism will fail or see any point in anticipating it.

While some dream of a post-collapse, post-capitalist world of some kind, many literally reject the concept of a future and of time entirely.

This rejection carries out into political or anti-political action in the form of propaganda of the deed, where what matters is not any form of future revolution or the action being in service of some greater movement, or having utility for some greater movement, but is merely an individual act of liberation and joy in what is in their mind the only real form of liberation: totally hostile violence against techno-industrial capitalism.

Anarchonihilists reject the notion of capitalist time, i.e. progressivism, and the idea that society naturally progresses toward a better future, and thus our responsibility to suffer now for the well-being of the future, and reproduce the future generations of capitalism for a level of progress we never actually achieve.

The author of a text entitled Blessed is the Flame calls that feeling one receives when rejecting this tendency and enacting individualist, militant resistance as rosence if I’m pronouncing that correctly, which is French for delight, ecstasy, or joy.

Nihilism asks us to cut ourselves from any attachment to reproductive futurity.

Instead, fight hopeless to tear our lives away from that expanding horizon and to erupt with wild enjoyment now.

What nihilism glimpses outside of progressivism and reproductive futurity is perhaps similar to what Rosemeth saw when she chose to resist despite a lack of hope, the insurrectionary mode of messianic time.

The concept of messianic time, which is an irrational now time, an interruption of linear time, and which exists as splinters diffuse throughout the empty fabric of capitalist time, as a rupture from oppressive and chronological modes, it contains unlimited possibilities and threatens to interrupt the continuum of history.

The Invisible Committee, also taking inspiration from Benjamin, applies this concept to resistance generally.

Every attempt to block the global system, every movement, every revolt, every uprising, should be seen as a vertical attempt to stop time.

Part of the motivation for this cult of immediate action, for one’s sake, is a sense of disillusionment with the left.

Nihilists and post-nihilists see the left broadly as a failure in many cases.

In Blessed is the Flame, the author Serafinski, a pseudonym is mentioned, uses the concentration camps run by Nazis during World War II, and specifically the resistance that took place within them, as a framework to sketch out a new perspective on action in the face of climate collapse.

It and Desert are both famous works of climate realism, but Serafinsky seeks to inspire more direct and immediate actions and provide an alternative way of looking at resistance, so that when hope for a better future fails or falters.

A love of the act of resistance itself can be found and used to provide motivation.

The author of Blessed is the Flame is much less anti-socialist in the way that other anarcho-nihilists can be at times, but is specifically very critical of the way that, in the face of a need for immediate action within the camps, some members and leaders of underground socialist groups within them hesitated or failed to seize moments of eruption, always waiting for a more ideal time, always focused on the organization surviving, when immediate action regardless of convenience was necessary or available.

Though there is a great deal of nuance and complexity that should not be overlooked, the fact remains that the two most successful uprisings to occur in Nazi concentration camps happened in two of the only camps without formal organizations.

This, in itself, should challenge anarchists and other radicals to deeply question the pragmatic function of organizations in our lives.

While formal and sustained organizational methods can be useful for certain goals, we should remember that they are often structurally incapable of working toward moments of complete rupture.

What they offer in terms of resources, visibility, and longevity must also be measured against the hurdles they often create between people and their insurrectionary desires.

With that being said, while the informal organizational methods being experimented with by nihilists are exciting and have clearly facilitated a great deal of incendiary action, they also carry with them inevitable shortcomings and pitfalls, not least of which is a sort of solipsism that results in a Greenpeace office getting bombed and though informal organizational models may be able to mitigate the problem of collective responsibility, they will never fully be able to solve the problem.

Without dismissing or attacking every formal organization we encounter, we can continue to experiment with non-hierarchical organization forms that might facilitate, rather than defer, moments of liberatory rupture.

Blessed is the Flame is my favorite anarchonihilist text, and upon rereads is growing on me more.

The text places a useful emphasis on direct action and taking autonomous action, and also discusses genuine instances of a failure to act from organizational structures.

I think it fairly analyzes and critiques many aspects of statist socialist movements and industrial society without falling into the dogmatic and at times overly hostile anti-socialism and anti-social anarchist attitudes that other texts can fall into.

To post one final extended passage: The anarcho-nihilist position is essentially that we are ******.

That the current manifestation of human society, civilization, leviathan, industrial society, global capitalism, whatever, is beyond a salvation, and so our response to it should be one of unmitigated hostility.

There are no demands to be made, no utopic visions to be upheld, no political programs to be followed.

The path of resistance is one of pure negation.

In short, that conditions in the social organization are so bad as to make destruction desirable for its own sake independent of any constructive program or possibility.

I began thinking about this text in Toronto where my 93-year-old grandmother lives on the seventh floor of a high-rise apartment overlooking Highway 401.

Standing at the floor-to-ceiling windows in her kitchen, the horizon is swallowed by twelve lanes of concrete and an endless river of traffic, equal parts terrifying and hypnotic.

How many gruesome stories are written into this one landscape? The concrete road tells the story of the colonization of Turtle Island.

The commuter traffic tells the story of mass domestication under the rhythms of capitalism.

The billowing smog tells a story of a future that is almost too frightening to believe.

Drinking tea quietly, my grandmother is clearly unfazed by this ominous procession.

It is the world she now knows and accepts.

In a previous chapter of her life, she confronted and survived a very different infrastructure of death.

As a young adult, The bunkers and factories and crematorium of Auschwitz defined nearly a year of her life.

Her experiences of the Nazi Holocaust sit close with me as I look out over this glowing ribbon of death and wrestle with the ideas of nihilism.

To what extent do I remain attached to this society that I despise? What would it mean to sever those attachments? If this were Nazi Germany expanding out before me, how would I live my life? What if I were in my grandmother’s position in 1943? What does it mean to resist against such a catastrophically extensive and overwhelming system? Post-left anarchism and anti-left anarchism are the two strains alongside anarcho-nihilism known for these attitudes.

Anarcho-nihilism and anti-left anarchism are both post-left ideas, but they aren’t the same approach and they have similar attitudes.

Post-left anarchists are, like nihilists, deeply skeptical of leftist history and implementation of left ideas.

Post-left anarchists heavily criticize aspects of leftist history and culture, citing things like careerism, counter-revolution, being the left wing of capitalism, impotence, celebrity culture, co-option, and opportunism.

They critique the tendency for leftist organizations to become more concerned with their own continued existence than addressing or solving an issue, the way organizations can stifle acts of resistance in favor of playing politics, and how they replicate capitalist thought processes, organizational methods and principles, and patterns of oppression within themselves.

The dream of orderly revolutions, neatly drawn up principles, anarchy without turbulence.

If things take a different turn, they start screaming provocation, yelling loud enough for the police to hear them.

Revolutionaries are pious folk.

The revolution is not a pious event.

I’m almost inclined not to consider post-leftism its own thing, but more an umbrella term for anti-left anarchy and anarchist nihilism to exist under, as they both share basically the exact same makeup as post-leftism, but divulge in their approaches.

Post-leftists are not necessarily hostile to leftist ideas, but call into question their implementation historically.

Anti-left anarchists, however, are hostile to leftist ideas in most cases, and basically believe that leftism is something to be challenged and advanced beyond.

They view leftist ideas as lacking entirely actual revolutionary, anti-capitalist, and liberatory character.

Anti-civilizational anarchism falls under this umbrella as well, as an anti-left ideology, most specifically the industrial left.

Anti-civ anarchists, who are typically also anti-left anarchists or anarcho-nihilists, view all civilization, and sometimes just specifically industrial civilization, as genocidal.

While leftists want to collectivize the factory, anti-civ and anti-left anarchists are mad the factory still exists at all.

To quote from the zine, Anti-Left Anarchy, hunting leftism with an intent to kill again.

The deceptive verbiage of the Left has placed a strangle knot on our imaginative field for far too long, freezing our energy and obscuring the essence of the struggle for anarchy, its basic and intrinsic qualities with artificial and pretentious ideologies that stifle the action of thought and dream in tedious one-dimensional holding patterns.

All ideologies are straightjackets to the free spirit, but ideologies that don’t reflect the chaos, nonsensical whimsy, and maniacal laughter of life, like Leftism, are particularly boring impediments to the unrestrained expression of autonomous and uncivilized rebellion.

The left is solidly embedded in this civilized order, and as we struggle against this poisoned horrible darkness that is dragging us toward universal collapse, it would behoove us to struggle with open eyes.

I don’t feel like I need to explain this, but I’m going to add this side note anyway, but I feel like folding all leftist ideas into this way of thinking is extremely unproductive, especially because leftists notoriously do not like or agree with each other and have very, very diverse ways of thinking.

While as we mentioned earlier, many nihilists are still social anarchists, they are also individualists and egoist anarchists.

We mentioned earlier how this expresses itself and the emphasis on immediate acts of liberation and an attack on oppressive systems, not for social benefit or for a concept of future progress, but for the individual joy and individual benefit and liberation one receives from that action.

Anti-civilizational attitudes are an essential part of anarchonihilism.

Although anti-civ anarchy is its own thing, part of the anti-communist attitudes that come up aren’t just anti-authoritarianism, but anti-industrial.

Anti-civ anarchists and our main subject in nihilists view all industrial society, whether capitalist or communist, as ecocidal.

Desert and much of the anarcho-nihilist milieu also came into being a long while before the concept of degrowth and its possibilities would be brought to light, so while Desert’s anti-civ attitudes are only alluded to lightly, I still find this relevant to point out.

Anarcho-nihilism is a complicated web of ideologies.

Despite these varying ideologies and ways of looking at the subject, in the modern day, the touch of anarchist nihilism can be felt everywhere there is struggle.

A chaos star painted on a hastily made banner in Atlanta, spray painted onto someone’s block in grainy cell phone footage from Chile, backyard venues in Los Angeles, and in the middle of fierce battles in Exarchia, reminding people of 1000 ways of thought and being.

To struggle even when there is no victory to be had.

To struggle simply because the act itself may one day be all we have left.

I know many nihilists in my personal life, and some of them are genuinely the coolest people I know.

I wanted to study this topic in a video because I feel like misconceptions and lack of knowledge about this topic lead to a lot of needless arguing, and I hope to declare my own misconceptions as well as any others.

The nihilist emphasis on autonomous action is useful even to socialists of the typical variety in organizations like DSA.

There’s a potential value in these learnings that they do not need to wait for an organization to tell them to act, but should act themselves.

The revolutionaries aren’t coming down from the mountains anytime soon, so we have to act on our own, sometimes even alone now.

This does not negate the value of social action or social organizing, but exists alongside it.

Nihilism’s rejection of futurity and time, while at times coming off as a bit strange and poorly worded, are fascinating ways of discussing chrono perceptions of reality, and alongside the discussion of acting without hope or at least the promise of victory, provide myself at least with a powerful alternative of motivation for when I lack the hope or will to continue fighting, and when I question the value of the things I sacrifice to a movement.

I also think that in a genocidal fascist system that crushes us all and encourages us to step on each other, in a system that has doomed us and believes we mean nothing but money or trouble, kindness and care are nihilism.

Kindness even when we don’t know the answer, when we don’t know what to do, when there’s nothing else left to do, is the most important kind of kindness.

I want to reiterate the importance of being specific and informed when making accusations of someone being a fascist, and to stop fast-jacketing nihilists over symbols, not actual actions or words. Leave them alone.

I hope that the discussion that took place here was helpful in explaining this very complicated framework to you, and I hope that you enjoyed learning. Thank you.

Let’s be done with waiting, doubts, dreams of social peace, little compromises and naivety. All metaphorical rubbish supplied to us in the shops of capitalism. Let’s put aside the great analyses that explain everything down to the most minute detail. Huge volumes filled with common sense and fear. Let’s put aside democratic and bourgeois illusions of discussion and dialogue, debate and assembly and the enlightened capabilities of the Mafiosi bosses. Let’s put aside the wisdom that the bourgeois work ethic has dug into our hearts. Let’s put aside the centuries of Christianity that have educated us to sacrifice and obedience. Let’s put aside priests, bosses, revolutionary leaders, less revolutionary ones and those who aren’t revolutionary at all. Let’s put aside numbers, illusions of quantity, the laws of the market. Let us sit for a moment on the ruins of the history of the persecuted, and reflect.[2]

Sources

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[1] Blessed is the Flame by Serafinski.

[2] Armed Joy by Alfredo M. Bonanno