BROWN RECLUSE is a collectively-run zine distro for QTBIPOC by QTBIPOC. BROWN RECLUSE IS VOLUNTEER- RUN & NOT-FOR-PROFIT

Although the Black Panther Party was very hierarchical, I learned a lot from my experience in the organization. Above all, the Panthers impressed upon me the need to learn from other peoples’ struggles. I think I have done that and that is one of the reasons why I am an anarchist today. After all, when old strategies don’t work, you need to look for other ways of doing things to see if you can get yourself unstuck and move forward again. In the Panthers we drew a lot from nationalists, Marxist-Leninists, and others like them, but their approaches to social change had significant problems and I delved into anarchism to see if there are other ways to think about making a revolution.

Anarchist zine distro

On the Usefulness of Jobs and Small Businessess for Illegalist Anarchists

This zine goes into how changing gender markers for trans people might seem like a reasonable reform, but ultimately is another tool of oppression in our current system.

We are told we live in the richest and most democratic country in the world. Our rights include freedom of speech and religion, and freedom to vote for our leaders. Our country possesses more wealth than any other — more wealth in fact than much of the rest of the world combined. On TV and in real life, we see Americans with huge houses, expensive cars, plenty of state-of-the-art gadgets, and memberships to golf courses or ski resorts.

But we all know that this is not the whole picture. It is more like an advertisement. Though our neighborhoods are segregated, rich from poor; white from black, latino, and Native American, few people are unaware that most Americans do not live like the people on televised sitcoms. People living in wealthy suburbs often encounter poverty in the cities where they work for various corporations and government bureaus. People living in impoverished areas are often forced to travel out to the suburbs to work serving coffee to rich, white people.

Yet for those of us who have tasted the prospect of a world without rulership, this is simply a difference in degree of dystopia. If it truly were possible to achieve some kind of enlightened social democracy without wealth inequality, systematic disenfranchisement of minorities, and with some decentralization of state function, anarchists would still go to the barricades because this is not enough.

If anarchism is to mean anything of substance, it is surely not merely an opening bid from which you are happy to settle. Anarchy doesn’t stand for small amounts of domination: it stands for no domination. Although our approach to that ideal will surely be asymptotic, the whole point of anarchism is to actually pursue it rather than give up and settle for some arbitrary “good enough” half-measure. Such tepid aspirations is what has historically defined liberals and social democrats in contrast to us.

I steal because I’m hungry or need something I can’t afford comfortably or at all. I steal because some days I’m just bored and frustrated from either working on the clock or trying to prepare to clock back in (days off/ vacation) and it feels good. And I steal because I don’t have any real choices in most things I do in day to day life (work to pay for rent, feverishly try to decompress in my time off so I can be ready to go back to work, repeat) and stealing dumplings from Whole Foods might be the only thing I do today that was truly my own freely made decision.

Nothing compares to the feeling of elation, of burdens being lifted and constraints escaped, that I feel when I walk out of a store with their products in my pockets. In a world where everything already belongs to someone else, where I am expected to sell away my life at work in order to get the money to pay for the minimum I need to survive, where I am surrounded by forces beyond my control or comprehension that obviously are not concerned about my needs or welfare, it is a way to carve out a little piece of the world for myself—to act back upon a world that acts so much upon me.

Love this one:

Shoplifting is a refusal of the exchange economy. It is a denial that people deserve to eat, live, and die based on how effectively they are able to exchange their labor and capital with others. It is a denial that a monetary value can be ascribed to everything, that having a piece of delicious chocolate in your mouth is worth exactly fifty cents or that an hour of one person’s life can really be worth ten dollars more than that of another person. It is a refusal to accept the capitalist system, in which workers have to buy back the products of their own labor at a profit to the owners of capital, who thus get them coming and going.

It might seem weird to claim that shoplifting is a good thing, but really, shoplifting is just stealing from those who’ve stolen from all of us.

[...]

Shoplifting gives a way for you to get what you need-or just want-without reinforcing capitalism, and instead hurting the bottom line of the corporations that exploit us and destroy our environment. It’s rarely seen as a tool to fight against your oppression, though, because unlike other actions, like voting or going to peaceful protests, it can’t be used and exploited by political parties or groups looking to convert your frustration and desire for a better world into support for their town self-serving goals. Instead, shoplifting affirms your own freedom. It shows that your needs aren’t being met in the current system and that you’ll seize what you want instead of waiting for somebody else to free you.

A general, group-by-group overview of some tankie and authoritarian entryist Left orgs in Philly (though partly relevant to other contexts; many are national groups), to help more autonomous, uncontrollable rebels better understand and defend against their manipulations. Includes some reflections and propositions at the end ('Anti-Social Social War?').

Unless you make it a hobby to follow COVID news and studies, you're probably going off old info. Businesses have a clear interest in you not worrying about COVID and governments want to claim "victory" by hiding the problem.

A zine was made on resisting mask bans. It calls for a different set of strategies than the public health model, advocating for a diversity of tactics. The model proposed in this piece is inspired by the prisoner revolts against neglectful COVID practices in 2020.