William Gillis on Radical vs Liberal Abolitionism

From YouTube via Seeds of Revolution Podcast

William Gillis is a second generation anarchist activist who studies high energy theoretical physics and has written extensively on the politics of abolition and transformative justice.

Against Campism and Nationalism on Ukraine

From C4SS by Wiliam Gillis

I haven’t talked much about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine since it occurred, mostly just sharing Ukrainian voices and chastising a now former friend for calling for a NATO enforced no fly zone (e.g. shooting down a nuclear power’s planes). There’s something grotesque about the way slaughter can be turned into posturing discourse among the comfortable while the bombs are falling. The way that horrors in Ukraine and Palestine are so easily turned into abstractions should bring us all up short.

But it doesn’t. For two years now the involvement of the US and NATO in the conflict has drawn out some of the most retrograde campist tendencies in the Left, who seek to turn back the clock on the ascendency of the “Three Way Fight” analysis of antifascists. 

From Stirner to Mussolini

From C4SS by William Gillis

Review: The Anarchist-Individualist Origins of Italian Fascism

In 1910 Luigi Fabbri and Armando Borghi abducted an anarchist woman who had shamed their friend by divorcing him. Together, they forced her into a gynecological exam so the doctor could publicly pronounce her deformed and incapable of sex.

Partition & Entanglement

from Center for a Stateless Society by William Gillis

Many years ago a latinx friend of mine designed stickers that simply read “Migrants Welcome, Against Borders” (versions in English and Spanish) under a circle-A and the two of us covered the Bay Area with hundreds of them. Amusingly, this provoked the ire of a prominent white anarchist who denounced the phrase as pro-gentrification. She emphatically preferred “Refugees Welcome” because it distinguished those who are coercively displaced from their proper homes by various forms of western imperialism in contrast to those who voluntarily choose to migrate, like (her example) those moving to the bay for tech jobs.

Anti-Engels (or Anti-Anti-Duhring Aktion)

from Center for a Stateless Society

by William Gillis

Recent years have seen a resurrection of a Great Man Of History Marxist scholasticism that fixates on some (easily accessible) Original Core Texts of supposed genius and discards all the complicated stuff afterwards, certainly everything in recent decades. This impulse is the product of a mass flocking to radical leftism wherein new recruits have little interest in assimilating to existing discourses. A “return to the masters” thus serves as a run-around of various gatekeepers and a shrinking of required reading lists. It also enables people to use online historical archives on their own, without much social immersion. Onboarding to the tacit knowledge, prefigurative experience, and diffuse zine-based discourses of anarchism has always been a many-years long process. The onboarding process to academic Marxism — while more hierarchically structured — is likewise similarly involved.

The Superior Race of Good People

from Page of Swords by Jack

On William Gillis' "Bad people"

"Contrary to the assertions of some leftists there are in fact thoroughly monstrous people who are not just victims of their social conditions."

That’s how starts "Bad people", a bizarre essay published in The Anarchist Library last August by the scientist, writer and activist William Gillis, where he both advocates for the ostracism of abusers as a good anarchist praxis, and… errr… proposes a way to prevent ex-cops from forming urban gangs in the post-state anarchist society to come.

A Letter to Conservatives

From Center for a Stateless Society

by William Gillis

It’s Red Dawn! It’s here! Sprinkle around some more memes where AOC’s eyes bug out and you can seriously imagine her sending people off to gulags for playing golf or whatever. Never mind the actual concentration camps, the actual secret police, the actual mass surveillance, the actual military on our streets. Communists!

Introducing The Left Market Anarchist Zinelibrary

From C4SS by William Gillis

The great advantage of the anarchist movement is our decentralization, but without resilient protocols and networks we’re always at risk of losing pieces of our history and knowledge. There have been a number of compilations of anarchist and left-market anarchist pamphlets and zines over the years, and unfortunately most of them have decayed or fallen into obscurity.

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