Liberation will not come through the state

a ramble (#1)

This is a less structured post than my usual essays on Substack. I’ll mark these as numbered ‘rambles’ from now on.

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Bluebell in full bloom on a sunny spring day in a rare fragment of native woodland in Ireland

“We end despair by ending what is causing our suffering: destroying what destroys us.”

— Klee Benally, No Spiritual Surrender (2023)

Well.. the 2010s seemed to mark a lovely, if brief, moment of liberal reform and gain didn’t it? Large post-1945 geopolitical shifts that apparently brought an end to old empires, and the legacy of 1960’s social movements seemed to coalesce into broader societal and institutional shifts across ‘the West’. Companies and various organisations scrambled to fly queer flags and attend pride parades, professed their ‘support’ for women, and so on — diversity and inclusion was the hot thing. Not really though. All of it was always temporary and performative. It became a profitable PR requirement. It was and is a means of social control and counter-insurgent maintenance, which isn’t to say there weren’t and aren’t plenty of well-intentioned people involved all along. What’s that they say about the road to hell again?

Now the sea-change is here and the rollbacks are coming in heavy. Those apparent societal and institutional shifts weren’t ever worth very much if we aren’t willing to defend ourselves, our neighbours, and communities from fascist onslaughts that are only just getting started. Voting in favour of gay marriage one sunny day is one thing, defending your gay neighbour from attack during a storm is another. How far would you go to defend abortion rights? If you’re willing to legitimise people’s “concerns” about immigrants, or if you’re happy to allow people to casually and recklessly connect immigration to increases in violent crime completely unsubstantiated, you’re literally a door mat for fascist control. Fascism requires avoidance, cowardice, complicity, passivity, and confusion. Now is the time for agitation. Conflict avoidance isn’t an option. Get ready to agitate your friends, family, colleagues, and communities. Although the vast majority of them won’t realise it, they are going to be the ones making excuses for the expansion of fascist control, and they already are. These excuses might sound “reasonable” at first, and they’ll be framed as such.

Here we are now in the mid 2020s. As Black feminists, anarchists, abolitionists, and radicals of different kinds have repeatedly warned: liberation will not be achieved through the legal apparatuses of the state; the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house. So many well-meaning people and entire organisations have effectively wasted decades of time, energy, and precious life force battling it out for legal, institutional, and constitutional reforms only to have them rolled back or negated by decisions that are even worse than what was being reformed in the first place. It would be so predictably boring if it weren’t so consequentially devastating for the lives of more and more people. This is only a beginning. So much worse is coming. Can we organise and stop it in time? It will take a lot. Whose side are you on? Do you know who your enemies are? Are you comfortable with the idea that you even have enemies whether or not you want that to be the case? They’ve been acting against you for centuries before you were even born. The story of civilisation is a story of dispossession. There have been specific moments of acceleration and intensification within that story, and we’re in the midst of one such moment.

2025 is a precipice, a watershed, an acceleration, an intensification. Things are not going to gently slide back to the seemingly ‘Nice’ but deceptive political climate in which the liberal order merely masked ever-present colonial disintegration, destruction, and violence with their respectability politics. We need to move far, far beyond all of it — fascist, conservative, liberal, social democrat, authoritarian socialist: let them all burn in this fiery shit heap they’ve co-created. This moment of acceleration has been coming and if you’re surprised you probably weren’t paying close enough attention and that’s likely because you didn’t have to. Maybe you didn’t go deep enough — but now’s the time for depth. Or you didn’t want to listen or believe just how seriously fucked up things are, and always were — but now’s the time to listen and believe it. Maybe you’re clinging on to the idea that meaningful changes can still be achieved through state institutions even with the true character of the state currently being laid completely bare each subsequent day. Emotional work is revolutionary work. If you are emotionally resistant to taking this shit as seriously as it needs to be taken, then your emotions are the place to start because they will block you and block others around you from necessary radical transformations both personally and socially.

The most marginalised are always first on the chopping block. Trans people and non-white immigrants. Who is next after that do you think? Mark my words, the fascists currently in positions of great power and those vying for them are more deeply sick, depraved, and violent than those of yesteryear. Unless we set about stopping them in deliberate, concerted, and well-organised ways, the 1930s and 40s are going to look mild compared to what the current right-wing momentum is gathering towards. Liberal posturing won’t get us anywhere. Hitler said himself that the Nazis’ political opponents’ best opportunity to defeat them would have been to brutally crush them in the 1920s while they had the chance. Our opponents are far stronger than the Nazis were in the 1920s, and we’re far more disorganised and ill-equipped now than the Nazis’ main opponents were back then.

Please use this harrowing and grave historical moment to radicalise you towards horizontal, autonomous, abolitionist, anarchist, and decolonial ideas and action. I don’t care what we name them. It isn’t about the correct ideas or any dogma. It’s fundamentally about the multiplicitous and pluriversal means and processes by which many human societies throughout deep time once lived free and integrated with the land, and how we will get free again — and that just cannot include the kinds of authoritarian and hierarchical social structures that have created and continue to exacerbate the messes we’re in. We need to re-organise our societies in horizontal, hyper-local (but interconnected), and ecologically re-integrated ways. The state is a colonial institution; a colonial modality of organising society and social-ecological relations; a means to civilise, modernise, domesticate, and control human and non-human bodies, including the body of the land. It has never been on our side and never will be. The few protections we temporarily wrangle from its structures are from violences it enacts or enables in the first place. It exists off the back of genocides and ecocides. The state’s natural end point is the annihilation of life because at its foundations it facilitates the plundering of bodies and the planet for the short-term gain of a few human individuals. It doesn’t matter if the economic system that the state manages is nominally capitalist or socialist — as anarchists such as Goldman¹ and Bookchin² have said, state ‘socialism’ is effectively just capitalism with one capitalist: the state.

Start somewhere, but start. The arena of discourse, ideas, critical thought and analysis is crucially important, and we’re all already participating in it whether we like it or not. There is no neutral ‘opinion’. All opinion is political, and all ideas have lineages. What is your opinion being shaped by? Do you know the lineages of your ideas?

Our global predicaments are deep, and will continuously require depths of theoretical and practical understanding in order to overcome. There’s thousands of texts of various kinds available for free on the Anarchist Library website. Here’s a link to their popular texts list: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/stats/popular. I encourage you to just pick something that sounds interesting and go with it.

We must go beyond liberal analysis and action which has become the dominant standard in most Global North societies. It lands us back in this position repeatedly. Liberalism enables fascism. Allowing the state to continue to exist and expand control over our lives and the land enables fascism. The more powerful states become (and they are exponentially more powerful now than in the 1930s and 40s) the more severe and brutal shifts towards fascism will be.

One of the foremost ways people in modernised societies take liberal action is through non-profit or non-governmental organisations. While in some cases they might achieve some short-term harm reduction to modernity’s ceaseless and accelerating violences, they will never achieve lasting and meaningful change towards liberation and social-ecological autonomy, and over the long term they stymie insurgent ideas and action. Written in 2007, INCITE!’s edited book The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (linked to PDF) is a place to start for unpacking this in depth.

Liberation will not come through the state. It will come through insurgent ideas and action against the state’s control over all life. It will come through a harmonious and total reconfiguration of human societies’ relationships with each other and the rest of life on Earth.

I might start posting rambles like this more often — what do you think?

Check out my Decolonization in Ireland online course

1. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-there-is-no-communism-in-russia

2. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-listen-marxist