#allcomradesarebeautiful — Public Fediverse posts

Anarchist practices are inseparable from anarchist ethics and aspirations—and vice versus. They offer a “directionality.” Not a linear one, but in the sense of continually moving toward liberatory horizons, especially when the fierce winds of fascism are blowing so many people far off course.

Both @supportericking and @free.peppy.and.krystal offer a solid demonstration of this in their recent posts about the Prairieland case, snitching, and which defendants should and shouldn’t be supported by our circles. They hold a line—one that might provoke you to think and even change your mind, yet a line that interweaves anarchist practices+ethics+aspirations. I’m grateful for their moral compasses and interventions following the recent extreme sentences, and urge you to read their pieces.

At the same time, “snitching” doesn’t come out of nowhere in our anarchist world. (Nor in others, but anarchists are my focus here.) This is not to excuse those who cooperated with the police+prosecution in Prairieland; not at all. It’s to add another layer: collective responsibility, and not just when state repression hits.

I hope that someday, we can have honest conversations about how various defendants—in this case and others—were or were not communicated with, listened to, woven into a fabric of collective defense, made to feel not alone, able to have experienced and humble people doing support from the get-go, etc.

Yet even beyond—or prior to—that, I wish we’d double down on not letting carceral logics play havoc in our organizing, spaces, projects, Signal threads, etc. Too many anarchists learn and practice, and for those new to anarchism, in essence teach, what it means to turn on friends and comrades long before the state knocks down doors. To believe and spread rumors. To bully. To engage in mob mentality and cruel punishments. To make friends and comrades feel alone, betrayed, traumatized, paranoid. The list could go on.

Instead, how could our practices+ethics+aspirations of not talking to or acting like cops (or state, courts, prisons …) shape our daily relations of communal care, so that it’s “second nature” that #AllCollaboratorsAreBad and #AllComradesAreBeautiful?

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS (new+improved) for my next curated zine of various anarchist(ic) voices on the topic “Side by Side: XX Solid Anti-Repression Tools and Tactics”

Length: 80 to 250 words (prose)
Deadline: by or before July 15
Email to: cbmilstein {at} yahoo [dot] com

This zine is meant to be a short, sweet, and solid guide of sorts for those new to doing anti-repression work—as a form of solidarity and collective self-defense—and those new to facing and dealing wisely with state repression.

I’m NOT looking for general or abstract stories of how state repression feels or unfolded. Rather, I’m looking for those of you with anti-repression crew experience to share your tips for best practices.

An easy example of good advice is: DO NOT TALK TO THE POLICE, or as the @nationallawyersguild asserted in a widely shared video, “Shut the fuck up.” Yet I’d love it if you go deeper. In this instance, why should folks not talk to cops and what specifically should they do instead?

But I’d love it if you go deeper still—beyond the “obvious” ACAB counsel. What would you tell folks new to being hit with state repression and/or those who leap into doing anti-repression support work? What tools and tactics would you share to keep ourselves and our communities safer from state repression, or at least cause no additional harm? What communally solidaristic and caring practices have you and others implemented that worked really well when you were forced to grapple with repression’s cruelty? What’s worked in movements to keep folks from snitching, or relatedly, making everyone feel like they aren’t alone when state repression comes knocking?

Be specific. Be concrete. Share a story of anti-repression work that’s been done well and why. Tell it from your own experiences. What seems self-evident to you isn’t obvious to those who are new to organizing, activism, and/or direct action. Let’s not keep repeating the same mistakes, especially when the stakes are high, as the Prairieland 12 and Minnesota 15 are making clear.

PLEASE share this with skilled, savvy anti-repression folks!

(photo: raccoon sticker proclaiming #AllComradesAreBeautiful, Vienna, July 2026)

One would think, logically, that a “no kings” sentiment for Saturday’s rallies would make the connection to a “no cops” one too. After all, as the nursery rhyme goes, “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men”—perhaps a monarchical version of present-day police on horses, bikes, or motorcycles—can’t fix this broken world; indeed, they broke (and break) it!

But sadly, this blandly passive-liberal day has, at least in terms of its key NGO promoters, tended to not only ignore the fact that “kings” need enforcers for their regimes but also that the “subjects” they’re urging to fill the streets on these Saturdays somehow need “policing” too. We wouldn’t want the peasantry to rise up, right? So whether police in blue or those in yellow, the No Kings’ top-down organizers have a vested interest in containing any sort of abolitionist sentiments. “Abolition,” to be worthy of its name, would, I’d contend, involve abolishing hierarchy and domination in all of its forms: presidents and their states, cops and courts, prisons and borders, electoral politics and nonprofits…

So to all the riffraff and rabble-rousers, heretics and and other good troublemakers, if you’re planning to go to a “No Kings” stand-around-and-do-almost-nothing gathering, bring along your best “No’s” to kings, presidents, dictators, fascists … and police, among other collaborators with deadly social orders. Not that I’m advocating any specific self-organized actions, mind you. But that could look like blanketing the rallies with “Never, ever talk to cops”-type literature, stickers, banners, and buttons; doing DIY “workshops” on the streets that aim to educate folks that “We don’t talk to police” and how “We’d feel safer without police”; practicing forms of “We keep each other safe” while being ungovernable in direct contrast to any “peace police” striving to command-and-control; and other creative ideas that aid folks in breaking free of the myth that any type of police, as institutions of systemic violence, are good.

(photos: “We don’t talk to police” sticker seen in Vienna, October 2025; “We’d feel safer without police” poster seen in Madison, WI, October 2025)

#AllComradesAreBeautiful

The ABCs of Anarchism: The Letter K

Of late, I’ve noticed an unfamiliar word slipping into the anarchist vocabulary—so much so, that it felt both a pattern and palpable shift. So I began paying attention, and sure enough, more and more anarchists were using it in DMs to me, or when speaking on a panel, chatting in person, and posting on social media. One new zine I picked up at a free lit table even railed against its opposite—adding “un-“ in front of the word—and called for its banishment from our circles.

This linguistic turn felt at odds with the times at first, and then it started to dawn on me that it’s actually a healthy response to them—to fascism and the attendant disposability of human and nonhuman life.

I ran that thought by a friend who loves etymology, a fancy term for the history of languages and their wordly ancestors, and they instantly exclaimed, “Kin!” We’re queer+trans chosen family, so I didn’t get the connection at first—thinking they were simply glad that I’d called them to talk. “The origin of the word is in ‘kin,’” they added, and to paraphrase, “these days, we especially need to care for each other in that way.”

K = Kind

As a Jewish anarchist, I doubly know that “Jewishness” and “anarchism” share an inherent need to stay in motion, to continually wrestle with and remake our words, ideas, and practices, always delighting in shape-shifting based on the contexts, precisely as how we get free—together. There’s also our double aspiration as anarchists (and to my mind, as Jews): to always critique all forms of hierarchy and domination—the K = kvetch side of things—and always embody forms of freedom in their place—which includes K = kindness. Or should have.

Somehow anarchists have become an especially unkindly bunch over the past decade or so, allowing liberalism and capitalism (and posi rad-liberals) to steal and water down “kindness” into mushy meaningless—when we should have been fighting to keep kindness rebellious!

Now, we’re at a point in human history when *simple* acts of genuine kindness (from the heart, voluntarily, as kin), mean the world, quite literally, to keep us and others from falling into the fascist abyss.

#TryAnarchismForLife

(photo: spray paint, stencil, and sharpie combo of #AllComradesAreBeautiful, with two adorable pink and black cats encircled by a heart, with the letters #ACAB at their paws, as seen on a wall near an anarcha-queer feministic squat in Athens, March 2025, aka #CatsNotCops and for that matter, #KindnessNotCops)

“This is a collection of movement resources compiled by various collectives and individuals that might be of use. … Share, study … prepare.”

#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon
#AllComradesAreBeautiful

https://open.substack.com/pub/instruggle/p/resources

Took a long walk this afternoon, including among trees in Athens on their Tu B’Shvat “birthday,” & saw varied signs all around me that we are continually birthing leafy-green lives worth living, rooted in our liberatory practices. #AllComradesAreBeautiful

If May Day, among other things, is about sharing the “wealth” (aka abolishing capitalism), there’s nothing quite like going to a small but sweet Really Really Free Market on this May 1 and being gifted a sheet of freshly printed stickers that feel just right for these suddenly rebellious times. (After all, #AllComradesAreBeautiful!)

Then, soon after, redistributing that “wealth” to others at a nearby May Day rally, made merry because of the danceable tunes of @brassyourheart (which may now have some tiny water jugs on a drum or two because this marching band can #AlwaysCarryABeat!).

There are so many others reasons, of course, to wear one’s #ACAB on their sleeve (or water bottle) this May Day, when so many universities and colleges are liberating spaces of solidarity for Gaza, and in the process, powerfully demonstrating that #AutonomousCommunitiesAreBeautiful.

And likewise, so many police are painfully demonstrating that #AllCopsAreBrutal—underscoring that cop cities (aka policing) everywhere must be abolished, from every river to every sea, just as the Haymarket martyrs also fought and alas died for, in part.

Next May Day, in liberation!

#CareNotCops
#CommonsNotCapitalism
#SolidarityNotStates
#TryAnarchismForLife
#UntilAllAreFree

(Ongoing love+solidarity to the brave+bold folks at @occupycalpolyhumboldt for gifting the world the joy of a humble water jug vs. cop during their occupation)

Amid so much that’s so utterly wrong in this world, it’s already been a delight to be part of the Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair (ACAB) organizing crew for the 2024 version of this particularly sweet “anarchist ritual of spiritual recovery” and its “big gay” spirit. After all, #ACAB falls on Stonewall weekend and happens to take place in a town with lots of us queer+trans rebels.

Personally, I want to encourage you to dream up all sorts of imaginative proposals! I’d love to see ideas that reflect the changing (for the better) voices and faces, strategies and practices, of anarchism; that tell stories of inspiring anarchic histories and lessons gleaned for today; that reflect on the new fascist landscape we’re now in, and what ways we might shift to better fight and outwit it, to lessen losses and expand life against the murder machinery, to engage in communal care and self-defense as well as world-building; and that offer different formats, ranging from panels to play, conversations to ritual, workshops to hands-on to keynotes.

If you want to run ideas by me before you put in a proposal, DM me (keeping in mind I’m just one of about ten collective mates).

For now, read and revel in our friendly public invite, from which you can find links to the session proposal and tabling request forms. And big gay love to Bash Back News for posting our invite, which I had the joy of collaborating on with my dear friend and fellow Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair organizer Shuli Branson!

https://acabookfair.noblogs.org/

Here’s an excerpt:

“Amid all the horror, we cannot neglect our capacity for joy. To struggle against the state and for liberation, there must be a life worth fighting for. Our anarchism taps into our pleasures along with our disgust, our wholeness along with our brokenness. The bookfair offers us a space to feel and reflect on these oppositions together. During these gatherings, we witness the breadth of our interdependences and solidarities as we contemplate the crumbling of infrastructure and social well-being, devastation of ecosystems, and growing hot spots of fascist action. We see how much we already make possible through the spirit and substance of our practices.”

#AllComradesAreBeautiful 🖤🩷🌿

Holding in my heart: each and every person (except the police) who was at a music festival in the Weelaunee Forest one year ago today. Those performing. Those dancing and reveling. Those resisting. Those doing logistics and care. Those mourning Tortuguita. Those savoring moments of reinspiration and respite, joy and connection. Those looking out for others.

Especially those brutalized, arrested, and detained that day, and now facing heavy yet absurd charges.

Cops ruin everything, from March 5, 2023, in Atlanta, to yesterday among Appalachians Against Pipelines, to March 5, 2024, in Gaza, to all the days in between.

Courts aren't any better, even when they purport justice or rule something "a genocide." Prisons and militaries, states and borders, continue apace, churning out death.

We know this.

(At this point in human history, everyone should.)

What we too often overlook amid the despair, intensity, and trauma of these times is: we are the ones who make music. Even when it feels a whisper. Or when we feel as if we're humming alone or singing aloud with only a few friends. Our tunes float from forests and rivers to mountains and seas, in melodic forms that no cop, court, or country can see, hear, or comprehend. They take the shape of everything from rituals of resistance to jail solidarity and collective defense, to our many imaginative direct actions, dreamy do-it-ourselves spaces, mutual aid through asundry disasters, and communal care, to our ability to find cracks of possibility even when their walls seem impenetrable.

Still, anniversaries can feel hard. Our bodies remember, even if our minds try to block them out.

Let's all hold all of those (except the cops) who were at a music festival a year ago in our hearts, and others grappling with the state's crackdown on @stopcopcity as a movement, until all the charges are dropped, #UntilAllAreFree—everywhere.

#AllCopsAreBad
#AllCourtsAreBad
#ACABincludesIOF
#CareNotCops
#AllComradesAreBeautiful
#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon

(photo: #ACAB Palestinian solidarity sticker seen recently on Stone Mountain in so-called Georgia; while they last, these stickers are free at @community_books_ga)

I went to a noise demo on this #NotMyNewYear, #NotOurWorld evening, and felt profound love for how anarchists make time and space, day in and day out, for solidarity, deep and reciprocal.

I went to a noise demo that took pauses in the cacophony of @brassyourheart marching band, amplified music by the @pansy.collective, and the banging of pots and pans to give voice to how our solidarity sees intimate kinship between struggles—naming political prisoners and those politically imprisoned because of things like racism and classism; naming criminalization against anarchistic movements both local like @parksareforeveryone and further afield such as @stopcopcity; naming the open-air prison and now genocide in Gaza; naming the injustice system’s logic and our abolitionist ways of troubling it.

I went to a noise demo where DIY solidarity looked like warm pizza and fresh flowers and zines and handcrafted stickers, freely gifted, and the @certaindayscalendar offered as a fundraiser for @avlbail.

I went to a noise demo on stolen Cherokee lands, walking to and from it past capitalist excess drunk on its own delusions and power, and I cried both ways. I wiped tears away during the demo. My body was there, seeing those in the jail flash lights back at us, wanting them to all be free, and prisons and police to be abolished, and a wholly new world take their place. But my heart was far, far away, with the dead. The dead who should still be here were it not for thefts of lands and all that’s sacred, including life.

I went to a noise demo, yet this #NotMyNewYear, #FuckThisWorld, I heard and felt the quiet of absences: three months of tens of thousands of Palestinians murdered or still “missing” under the rubble, and today, one sudden and still incomprehensible death that’s hitting hard for me and many others, @kleebenally. May their blessed memories—each and every of our dead—topple walls and empires, colonialism and fascism, and all that keeps us from being free, from living lives worth living and dying in our own good time, not killed off early by this sick, sick social order.

#AllComradesAreBeautiful
#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon
#UntilAllAreFree

Serendipitous promotion for the Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair, August 11-13, as stumbled on during a riverside #FuckThePolice ramble on the stolen lands called Asheville, NC.

Walk, run, bike, or otherwise get yourself to the @ACABookfaire! For one, I’ll be there, enthused to see lots of friendly anarchist faces (masked up indoors), because it almost goes without saying that #AllComradesAreBeautiful. But also because the bookfair will create a lovely and lively temporary autonomous zone, and #AutonomousCommunitiesAreBeautiful! And the bookfair schedule looks amazing, bringing together lots of savvy and bighearted anarchists, including many who are (as befits a bookfair) anarchist publishers and authors, and anarchists love to #AlwaysCarryABook. No doubt, too, there will be lots of anarchist pups along for the ride (if my time in Asheville so far is any indication), and for the most part (even though I’m more of an #AllCatsAreBeautiful person), #AllCaninesAreBeautiful.

And somehow, I suspect there might be a whole lot more #ACAB scribbled around town following next weekend’s anarchist influx (not that I’m encouraging it or anything)—as early promo for next year’s bookfair.

https://acabookfair.noblogs.org/

p.s. Just in case anyone mistakes my playfulness for something factual, I’m adding this disclaimer from the bookfair collective: “The phrase ACAB is not a copy-written product of the organizers of this bookfair and we cannot take credit for every appearance of it.”

The place where I’m currently staying in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal has the best little “welcome” sticker on the front door—making it clear who is welcome and who is not.

#CareNotCops
#AllComradesAreBeautiful

The good folks at @detritus.books said it well yesterday as heavily armed police attacked a music festival for @stopcopcity, arresting numerous people: “One doesn’t have to be in Atlanta tonight to fight cop city. In this world, cop city is everywhere.”

Which is also why—besides basic good solidarity—folks in this world should be concerned about the heavy state repression being waged against Defend the Atlanta Forest; it too is or will be everywhere. For the more that forest defenders and water protectors and abolitionists and those defending bodily autonomy or defying evictions increasingly capture the imagination and grow resistance, the more the state, in allyship with its cops and courts, will up the ante of its brutal tactics.

Last night in Atlanta, 23 people scooped up by the cops were charged with domestic terrorism—this time, for the crime of listening and dancing to music in the Weelaunee Forest. They join 19 other defendants who were also charged with domestic terrorism recently for the crime of caring about and communing with trees—bringing the total to 42.

This tactic, if at all successful, won’t stay put in one city. It’s already sent Jessica Reznicek behind bars for trying to defend this earth in another struggle (see and support @freejessrez). Hence the need, wherever we are, to make sure collective solidarity beats out statist violence. Every time. Everywhere.

Unfortunately, another tool in the state’s arsenal is exorbitant bond/bail fees as part of the exorbitant charges. So our solidarity has to be both immaterial and material.

Materially, hundreds of thousands are needed to bond out and defend forest defenders in Atlanta, as part of our #NoLoveForCops and much rebellious love for each other strategy.

Let’s all give generously and/or help raise funds for Atlanta Solidarity Fund at http://www.atlsolidarity.org.

And let’s continue to mourn our dead and fight like hell for the living, while sticking side by side with each other—toward cops nowhere.

(photo: in every language, “abolish the police,” seen here in French on the wintery streets of Tio’tia:ke/Montreal)

#ACAB #ForestsNotFascism
#AllComradesAreBeautiful
#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon

No doubt I’ve mentioned this before on other similar sightings, but there’s something purrrfectly pleasing about spotting a sticker—in this case, way up high on a street-sign post—made by friends in a far, far, faraway city nowhere near the one you’re currently meandering around.

It’s as if they are sending you a big, warm-and-fuzzy, kitty-cat cuddly hug, just for you! Or a secret shared wink of recognition that even if oceans and pandemics and other big things have kept you from seeing them for too long, you’re sure that you still both hate the police and would love to see each other again.

So even if @svartkattprints is curled up in a snowy Sweden, and I’m walking quietly as if on cat’s paws through the snow-covered streets of Tio’tia:ke/Montreal, a tiny sticker created by them in a distant land that somehow strayed here is more than enough to melt away some of the chill of these “cat”astrophic times.

#AllComradesAreBeautiful
#AllCatsAreBeautiful
#ACAB

(photo: stencil-like image of a kitten in black on a white sticker with letters “ACAB,” stuck on a black street post)

We don’t need videos.

As the Ayotzinapa 43 families have been saying since 2014, after 43 beloveds in Iguala, Guerrero, were disappeared and likely murdered, including by police, “We want them back alive.”

Meaning: they never should have been killed.

We shouldn’t need videos to somehow prove that we want every single person murdered-by-cop to be alive. That their names should still be spoken to them, here in this world. That each and every person assassinated by police was loved and lovable, and never deserved that kind of death.

We shouldn’t need videos as evidence that there are no good cops.

The proof is in the grieving people left behind, the uprisings fueled by rage and sorrow, the abolitionist and stop cop cities/academies organizing and direct action, the myriad forms of solidarity, the murals and tags on urban walls, the DIY altars.

“We want them back alive.”

For that to have full meaning, we want and need and fight for a world without police.

#AllCopsAreBad #ACAB
#NoMoreStolenLives
#CareNotCops
#AllComradesAreBeautiful
#TowardAWorldWithoutPolice
#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon

(photo: downtown storefront boarded up with plywood and then tagged with graffiti asserting #NoGoodCops and #Fuck12 as seen on stolen Ho-Chunk lands in so-called Madison, WI, after the windows were smashed during the George Floyd uprising in 2020)

When the police try to fuck us over, time and again, anarchist+abolitionist folks do their best to make sure they don’t succeed, and the recent arrests of six people—all now facing “domestic terrorism” charges—in the Defend the Atlanta Forest / Weelaunee forest is no exception.

Instantly, in Atlanta and far beyond, without fanfare, and with as much security and sensitivity as possible, an infrastructure of love and solidarity for the defendants arose—jail and court support, lawyer and DIY legal counsel, phone zaps and letter-writing to support the arrestees before they were released, emotional care, fundraising for bond money so they could be released, and so much more. And while that anarchic infrastructure was built on do-it-ourselves knowledge gleaned and accumulated from other such moments, and is a beautiful thing to see and be a part of, much always gets lost between the latest instance of state repression.

Hence a critical part of the infrastructure of solidarity is, as Malatesta asserted decades ago, “educating ourselves for freedom.”

And hence this #WeekOfResilience!

As you’ll see, five groups and many people have come together to offer this week of community self-defense and anti-repression trainings—some of them online and much of it person in Atlanta. And they pulled this together while the courts and statist bureaucracy took the holidays off—just another inking of how damned much we anarchists and abolitionists strive hard to love, protect, and defend each other in these situations, 24/7, 365 days a year.

It’s short notice, though, so please circulate the infographic for the Week of Resilience, especially to folks in and near Atlanta right now.

(photo: redecorated trail marker in Weelaunee forest, as seen in October 2022)

#Fuck12
#StopCopCity
#WeKeepUsSafe(r)
#AllComradesAreBeautiful
#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon
#TalkToTreesNotCops

The anarchist elves have been busily working overtime—voluntarily—to keep the lights on at #Kolektiva, especially as a whole slew of us have finally starting using our long-dormant accounts (like me) or joined in the past few days. And until capitalism is history, anarchistic infrastructure isn’t completely free—at least monetarily.

So if you can spare some change, or better yet, dollars in whatever currency is commodifying your part of this imperiled world, kick some love and cash (like I just did) to our rad admin crew!

http://kolektiva.info/donate/

#WeAreAllWeNeed
#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon
#AllComradesAreBeautiful
#TryAnarchistInfrastructureForLife :anarchismred:

(photo: stencil of a can of paint filled with the “greed” of billionaires’ hubris and capitalism’s violence being poured over our home, planet earth, as seen on the wall of some hierarchical infrastructure in summer 2021 in so-called Asheville, NC)