As the US supports the most imperial and militarists ambitions of the Netanyahu it was interesting reading this 1982 essay on the eve of the 2026 Iran conflict.

Fredy Perlman reflects on his narrow escape from the Holocaust to critique the Zionists. Drawing on Sartre, he argues that surviving a genocide does not inherently grant moral wisdom or a "license to kill"; rather, an individual remains free to choose their future.

Perlman critiques the shift in Zionism from an egalitarian dream to a show more state-driven "technocratic Messiah" that mimics the traits of its former oppressors:

Nationalism & Racism: The dehumanization of indigenous "Semites" as "Primitives."
Militarism: The celebration of technological death-science and disproportionate force.
Gleichschaltung: The demand for total racial synchronization and the labeling of dissenters as "traitors."

He concludes that the modern "voyeur" of violence—the cheerleader for the Beirut Pogrom—seeks to fill an internal vacuum caused by the "meaningless" nature of industrial labor. By identifying with the "machine" of progress and state power, these individuals abdicate their humanity and choose the role of the salaud (bastard), turning the memory of the Holocaust into a hollow alibi for new cycles of extermination.

[I actually read the 22-page Black & Red edition.] show less

Apr 19, 2026

magonistarevolt 136 reviews

Letters of Insurgents by Sophia Nachalo

Eight years ago I listened to this book during Insurgent Summer, an effort to get a anarchists in the US to engage with the ideas in this book. The idea was that I would get together with comrades in my area and discuss the content. Instead, I listened to it alone, and cheered. I hungered at the time for this ultra-left politics. So much so that I shrugged off the really warped shit that in memory took up a small portion near the end of the book.

Eight years later, I listened to a podcast show more where one of the readers of the audiobook breathlessly recounted its importance. I have a job with a 45 minute commute, so I downloaded the audio files again and jumped back in.

The book is a series of straw-man arguments between a pretty impressive catalog of ideologies you might come across in your local anarchist infoshop: tankie leftist, classical anarchist, syndicalist, lumpenprole, primmie, pacifist, new-age hippie, medicine (the stupid straw-man argument from the book on this one would have drawn the most ire from me if it wasn’t for, uh... the other thing we’ll get to), transhumanist, academic, post-68 ultra-left. Each of these are ridiculed in turn, held up as a standard to which we are to compare with the book's golden ideology of insurrectionary incestuous pedophilia.

I wish I was kidding. The first go around, the incest and pedophilia was a quirk that I chose to ignore. The second round I knew what to expect, and I found the book to be so infatuated and saturated with incest and pedophilia that I found it entirely unignoreable. To the point where it crowds out other incredibly important things about the book. The book doesn’t just contain incest between brother and sister and father and daughter. It insists upon them. One of the protagonists initially resists fucking his own daughter. But through consistent browbeating by the other characters, in the climax of a global revolutionary moment, where people are throwing off their shackles and pursuing their desires, he gives in and fucks his own daughter. No, really. He is ridiculed for having social mores like not wanting to fuck his own daughter, they are compared to mores like wage slavery and capitalism, and he is accused of counterrevolutionary behavior for resisting fucking his daughter. “If you can’t see past what’s weird about fucking your own daughter” his brotherfucking wife tells him “then you’re the same person who would construct a global economic system that brutally oppresses billions of people and you would run tank treads across anyone’s face who dared question whether there should be police and prisons.”

What the actual fuck? How do you recommend this book to someone? It’s not subtle, it’s not some part at the very end thrown in. It’s alluded to throughout the book, and the incest writ large is pervasive.

Letters of Insurgents:incestuous pedophilia :: Atlas Shrugged:rape

This metaphor stacks up pretty well. Disturbing fucked up sex shit that is beaten into the reader in the middle of a book whose everyone-is-wrong-except-me worldview would most closely appeal to 19 year-olds. The fact that the politics are worlds better in the former doesn’t do it any favors, because, really, if a politic excuses (no! INSISTS on) incestuous father-daughter pedophilia, it’s also really shitty politics.

In seeking some reason for the inclusion (the saturation!) of incestuous pedophilia, I have read and heard others talk about how that is the risque conclusion that one should pursue all of their desires: that one inevitably comes up against a taboo like this one. I'm not so sure. First of all, that taboo is not nearly dealt with in the text. The character in question never deliberates on why one might not have this desire to fuck his daughter, other than that he is an uptight counterrevolutionary. Secondly, surely there are thousands of other taboos to breach. Why was this one chosen? I can't answer that honestly. show less

Apr 23, 20202 other reviews

tearaway 3,557 reviews

The reproduction of Daily Life by Fredy Perlman

As a purgative during the "crass commercialism" Christmas season, I read this monograph indicting capitalism for its crimes against nature.

Under capitalism, daily life consists of related activities which re-produce and expand the capitalist form of social activity. The sale of labor-time for a price (a wage), the embodiment of labor-time in commodities (salable goods, both tangible and intangible), the consumption of tangible and intangible commodities (such as consumer goods and

spectacles)-these activities which characterize daily life under capitalism are not manifestations of "human nature," nor are they im-posed on men by forces beyond their control.

If it is held that man is "by nature" an uninventive tribesman and an inventive businessman, a submissive slave and a proud craftsman, an independent hunter and a dependent wage-worker, then either man's "nature" is an empty concept, or man's "nature" depends on material and historical conditions, and is in fact a response to those conditions.

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Dec 31, 2025

2dgirlsrule 39 reviews

Letters of Insurgents by Sophia Nachalo

Letters of Insurgents is one of the more savage books I’ve read about anarchism. Told through a sprawling series of letters between two characters, one behind the Iron Curtain and one in the US, the exchange subjects the radical milieu of anarchists, various shades of red bureaucrats, professionals, liberals, hippies, etc. and most of all the characters’ own life goals and projects to unrelenting criticism. As the characters question each other and themselves, it in turn invites the show more reader to ask the same of themselves while offering no easy answers.

Part of its savagery is the uncomfortable mirror it holds up to the readers - in watching Sophia and Yarostan try and make their way in the world I was able to see some of my own story as well. Projects that begin with hope and often end in failure, the friends who ‘make it’ into the professional class, people who you underestimate who surprise you, the way we can mythologize our own past - all of these things and more spoke to me in ways that radical texts don’t often do. The larger themes in this work - trying to find one’s way in a world that challenges you at every turn and where you can easily find yourself as one of the biggest impediments to realizing some sort of radical existence; engaging in projects that fail and disappoint and may get you hurt and still doing stuff; conceiving of doing something at all and with people you love in a world dominated by capitalism, the state, and where so many of today’s radicals wish to be tomorrow’s bosses - are painted with the eye of an artist whose experience with all of these seeps through the pages and into his characters.

Though I enjoyed this book a lot, it can feel somewhat unwieldy at a length approaching 800 pages. The letter format is well-executed but one should expect a lot of ‘tell’ rather than ‘show’ when it comes to events in the characters lives as all of them are described by characters reporting to each other rather than in real-time. And while I appreciated the skewering of socialists, there were times when a character would start holding forth and it was ‘here we go again, another pages-long paragraph about dialectics and working class consciousness that’s going to end with them being told to go to hell for the same reason as the last one’. The dryness and repetitiveness of their arguments was I’m sure intentional, but perhaps there were a few too many stock ‘politicians’ in this work for my taste. That said, the arguments the characters have with them are incredibly quotable, and for all of the caricatures that surface there are many characters who are less straightforward.

The standout element of this work to me was its introspectiveness. Its guiding concept of liberation - the realization of one’s desires without law - is subject to constant criticism as Perlman asks ‘What do we mean by this? What would it mean in practice?’. That some of how this plays out is held as controversial or taboo by some readers is good, I think, because it shows some of the laws that readers may be operating within under in the guise of anarchism. If it doesn't encourage self-reflection, at the very least I think this book can be the start of a good (or at least interesting) conversation. show less

Jul 12, 20202 other reviews

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