Greetings and felicitations! We’re back from our summer travels and eager to catch up with you!!!

First, if you are a student returning to class for the fall, form an anarchist student organization! We’ll gladly send you outreach material in bulk. For inspiration and ideas, you can read about how one anarchist student organization got going here.

The RICO Case in Atlanta and the Fight to #StopCopCity

At the beginning of this month, the Georgia Attorney General brought RICO charges against 61 people accused of protesting against the construction of Cop City, a planned police militarization facility. The indictment is an attempt to portray the entire movement as a criminal conspiracy. Three people central to this case are being accused of “money laundering” for providing legal support to previous arrestees.

 

By indiscriminately lumping together scores of arrestees, many of whom have never met, into a fabricated conspiracy case, the prosecutors aim to criminalize protest itself. This is a case of politically driven repression aimed at suppressing all forms of activism and dissent, in the style of authoritarian despots like Vladimir Putin.

 

A surprising part of the text of the indictment is given over to painting a picture of the defendants as anarchists who engage in mutual aid, read zines about how to address the media, and disapprove of police violence. The prosecutors hope that this smear campaign will goad jurors into declaring the defendants guilty despite the shortage of concrete evidence.

For background on the fight to stop Cop City, you could consult the most recent installment of our ongoing chronology of the movement.

 

After the announcement of the RICO charges, the Atlanta city government made the outrageous decision to reject a petition signed by over 100,000 locals demanding a referendum on whether to build Cop City. Now participants in the movement are calling for a mass action November 10-13 to shut down construction.

Reports from Saint-Imier

Over the summer, some of us joined 5000 other anarchists from around the world at an anarchist gathering in Saint-Imier, Switzerland. We’ve published a full report including background on the historical events that the gathering commemorated and accounts and appraisals from attendees from half a dozen different countries.

We followed up that coverage with a narrative exploring the political practices and discourse around gender and sexuality during the gathering in Saint-Imier and in the contemporary anarchist movement at large.

Other News from Europe

In July, 2023, the Greek government evicted a Kurdish refugee camp in Greece. The decades-old camp had served as an important center of organizing in southeastern Europe. In this analysis, Beja Protner shows how this operation connects Turkeys’ war on Kurdish people, the Greek government’s war on autonomous spaces, and the European Union’s war on migrants.

Following up on our earlier coverage of the revolt in France sparked by the murder of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk, we published “Learning from the Flames,” a reflection on the series of powerful movements that have rocked France over the past decade and what has prevented them from bringing about revolutionary transformation thus far.

You Still Can’t Kill an Idea

Our comrades at Municipal Adhesives are reprinting the sticker they published in solidarity with us after Elon Musk banned us from Twitter. You can order these here. Our comrades from Black Mosquito have done a European printing, as well, which is available here.

Speaking of that particular despicable billionaire, last month, Musk made his agenda more explicit by amplifying an openly anti-Semitic campaign to ban the Anti-Defamation League from the platform formerly known as Twitter. Musk is trying to blame declining advertising sales on Jewish people; in fact, the fault is his alone, for going out of his way to welcome self-declared Nazis back to the platform while banning or suppressing the users who originally made Twitter interesting.

 

As long as there are billionaires, they will be able to purchase and destroy the technologies we depend on for information. This is just one of the many reasons we seek to abolish capitalism—to bring about a world in which narcissistic bigots cannot monopolize control of any communications platform. In the meantime, we urge you to shift from corporate social media platforms to comparatively horizontal communications technologies.

 

You can follow us on Mastodon, on Bluesky, and on Telegram. If you want to keep up with our publications in languages other than English, we announce those on our Telegram channel.

 

Speaking of which, we’re still seeking assistance translating our articles! If you can help, please contact us!

Events This Fall!

Last weekend, we participated in the Bash Back convergence in Chicago. This coming weekend, we will be tabling at the New York City Anarchist Book Fair, and the first weekend in October, we will table at the Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair. If you want to invite us to participate in an event anywhere in the world, contact us.

Print Material

We’ve added another zine to our zine library—our classic introduction, A Civilian’s Guide to Direct Action.


We’ve also designed a zine version of our coverage of the RICO case so you can distribute it in your community. Please print these out and share them:

In Memory of

Active Distribution has published a book version of our eulogy for the Russian anarchist Dmitry Petrov. Dmitry organized against the autocratic government of Russia until he was forced to flee the country with the secret police looking for him. He traveled to Rojava and helped publish a series of books about the revolutionary experiment there, participated in uprisings in Ukraine and Belarus, organized a clandestine network to fight against Putin, and was finally killed last April fighting against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The book includes a biography tracing Dmitry’s activities and collects our translations of his writings. You can order it here.

 

Our comrades at the anarchist PR project Agency have announced a media grant in memory of Jen Angel, a longtime anarchist organizer who passed away last February.

 

This September also marks three years since the passing of David Graeber, a tireless, insightful, and wide-ranging anarchist thinker. We encourage you to visit The Museum of Care and the David Graeber Institute in his memory.

 

Until next time!