#everydayanarchism — Public Fediverse posts

ANARCHIST PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT, #4

(Note: this was written for an earlier No Kings rally, but it might be helpful for the ones tmrw, which should at least be renamed “No Fascists” aka “We Are All Antifascists”!)

🖤🩷🖤🩷

If you go to “No Kings” rallies today, no doubt it will be all you can do—as an anarchist who believes deeply in liberatory practices and politics—to maintain your cool when faced with both liberals’ and authoritarians’ lack of solidarity. Go with other anarchists and be each other’s support system, and debrief (rant, cry, laugh, and/or chill) afterward.

But also go as “friendly anarchist factions” to model what solidarity actually looks like—even if too many nonanarchistic folks don’t yet know what that feels like or how to do it. I always wish that people didn’t need to be, say, tear gassed or arrested to learn that ACAB isn’t just a slogan, and that anarchists will almost certainly be the ones to have their backs. But such is the wearisome “learning curve,” and the more folks who see beloved community self-defense modeled for them, unflinchingly, on the streets, the more they’ll understand how (and why!) to stick side-by-side too—including with us.

Be solidarity.

#EverydayAnarchism
#TryAnarchismForLife
#EducatingEachOtherForFreedom
#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon

ANARCHIST PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT, #3

(Note: this was written for an earlier No Kings rally, but it might be helpful for the ones tmrw, which should at least be renamed “No Fascists” aka “We Are All Antifascists”!)

🖤🩷🖤🩷

Back in the day, ahead of a big protest, anarchists set up “convergence centers”: big, scrappy, communal spaces where folks could not only find each other, make and eat food, plug into art and media making, etc. in the days before an (often direct) action based on a wide-ranging diversity of tactics—under an umbrella name like “Carnival against Capitalism” or “No Olympics on Stolen Native Lands”—but also skill up together.

There’s no time to do this before the poorly named “No Kings” (aka, it’s fascism) protests tmrw. Yet you could easily do pop-up skill shares. So many “newbies” are open to learning and eager for alternatives!

Remake the urban landscape into temporary autonomous “classrooms.” Use public furniture or gathering spots, or bring blankets or chairs to sit on. Write the skill share topic on cardboard and display it. Run around and announce skill shares as they start. Bored protesters waiting for a march to begin or tired of listening to rally speeches make great participants. Circle up and start passing along handy skills—say, how to help each other rinse tear gas out of eyes or turn a T-shirt into a mask (over your N95), or how to do forms of community self-defense or jail support. Offer an Anarchism 101 or local rad history talk too. Exercise hands and minds, encouraging liberal and progressive folks to (begin to) think and act for themselves.

#EverydayAnarchism
#TryAnarchismForLife
#EducatingEachOtherForFreedom
#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon

ANARCHIST PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT, #2

(Note: this was written for an earlier No Kings rally, but it might be helpful for the ones tmrw, which should at least be renamed “No Fascists” aka “We Are All Antifascists”!)

🖤🩷🖤🩷

It’s tough not to fume over the “peaceful protest” call for a “sit-down wave” at this Saturday’s “No Kings” rallies, such as one that asserts: if you see so-called infiltrators “destroy[ing] property,” “sit down and leave the provocators” standing. That’s how the self-appointed leaders of these nonprofit-corporate “ally” demos uphold a status quo that benefits them. In practice, it means anyone not falling in liberal line will get the brunt of police violence and state repression.

Enough fuming. My anarcho-prefigurative self says: outorganize the “peace police”! #BeGayMakeFun! Alongside bringing many zines to gift out at these rallies: Set up carnivesque “no kings, no masters” participatory games! Bring screen-printing supplies (stencils, silk screens, or even humble potatoes carved with printable slogans) and let folks print your rebellious designs on T-shirts, patches, or cardboard! Create playful shield-making art station! Become snack faeries, carting around yummy treats in wagons to freely distro! Do some rebel street theater or radical cheerleading! Bring a queer rebel marching band or amplified music, and start a street dance!

Anarchism is not just good politics; make it good fun, and when folks are drawn to you, anarchism will not only be welcoming but irresistible too. Plus, who knows, maybe you can joyfully teach people how do a “stand-up wave” against the real provocateurs (cops).

#EverydayAnarchism
#TryAnarchismForLife
#EducatingEachOtherForFreedom
#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon

ANARCHIST PUBLIC SERVICE, pt 4

If you go to “No Kings” rallies today, no doubt it will be all you can do—as an anarchist who believes deeply in liberatory practices and politics—to maintain your cool when faced with both liberals’ and authoritarians’ lack of solidarity . Go with other anarchists and be each other’s support system, and debrief (rant, cry, laugh, and/or chill) afterward.

But also go as “friendly anarchist factions” to model what solidarity actually looks like—even if too many nonanarchistic folks don’t yet know what that feels like or how to do it. I always wish that people didn’t need to be, say, tear gassed or arrested to learn that ACAB isn’t just a slogan, and that anarchists will almost certainly be the ones to have their backs. But such is the wearisome “learning curve,” and the more folks who see beloved community self-defense modeled for them, unflinchingly, on the streets, the more they’ll understand how (and why!) to stick side-by-side too—including with us.

Be solidarity.

#EverydayAnarchism
#TryAnarchismForLife
#EducatingEachOtherForFreedom
#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon

(photo: pink and black circle A heart spray-painted on a wall in Athens, Greece, during a queer+trans International Women’s Day march on March 8, 2025)

ANARCHIST PUBLIC SERVICE, pt 3

Back in the day, ahead of a big protest, anarchists set up “convergence centers”: big, scrappy, communal spaces where folks could not only find each other, make and eat food, plug into art and media making, etc. in the days before an (often direct) action based on a wide-ranging diversity of tactics—under an umbrella name like “Carnival against Capitalism” or “No Olympics on Stolen Native Lands”—but also skill up together.

There’s no time to do this before the poorly named “No Kings” (aka, it’s fascism) protests tmrw. Yet you could easily do pop-up skill shares. So many “newbies” are open to learning and eager for alternatives!

Remake the urban landscape into temporary autonomous “classrooms.” Use public furniture or gathering spots, or bring blankets or chairs to sit on. Write the skill share topic on cardboard and display it. Run around and announce skill shares as they start. Bored protesters waiting for a march to begin or tired of listening to rally speeches make great participants. Circle up and start passing along handy skills—say, how to help each other rinse tear gas out of eyes or turn a T-shirt into a mask (over your N95), or how to do forms of community self-defense or jail support. Offer an Anarchism 101 or local rad history talk too. Exercise hands and minds, encouraging liberal and progressive folks to (begin to) think and act for themselves.

#EverydayAnarchism
#TryAnarchismForLife
#EducatingEachOtherForFreedom
#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon

ANARCHIST PUBLIC SERVICE, pt 2

It’s tough not to fume over the “peaceful protest” call for a “sit-down wave” at this Saturday’s “No Kings” rallies, such as one that asserts: if you see so-called infiltrators “destroy[ing] property,” “sit down and leave the provocators” standing. That’s how the self-appointed leaders of these nonprofit-corporate “ally” demos uphold a status quo that benefits them. In practice, it means anyone not falling in liberal line will get the brunt of police violence and state repression.

Enough fuming. My anarcho-prefigurative self says: outorganize the “peace police”! #BeGayMakeFun! Alongside bringing many zines to gift out at these rallies: Set up carnivesque “no kings, no masters” participatory games! Bring screen-printing supplies (stencils, silk screens, or even humble potatoes carved with printable slogans) and let folks print your rebellious designs on T-shirts, patches, or cardboard! Create playful shield-making art station! Become snack faeries, carting around yummy treats in wagons to freely distro! Do some rebel street theater or radical cheerleading! Bring a queer rebel marching band or amplified music, and start a street dance!

Anarchism is not just good politics; make it good fun, and when folks are drawn to you, anarchism will not only be welcoming but irresistible too. Plus, who knows, maybe you can joyfully teach people how do a “stand-up wave” against the real provocateurs (cops).

#EverydayAnarchism
#TryAnarchismForLife
#EducatingEachOtherForFreedom
#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon

(photo of a brick wall with a circle A spray-painted on the concrete foundation below it, as spotted on the stolen lands of Tioh’tià:ke/Montreal, June 2025)

Mini review of my latest book, #TryAnarchismForLife, published by the amazing Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness collective, with springlike-joyful cover by @eff_charm and life-giving circle A by Landon Sheely.

Grateful to @AntifascistMoon for posting their thoughts, in three tweets, about my 26 tightly crafted prose pieces revolving around some of the many beautiful dimensions of anarchism, all paired with a gorgeous circle A dreamed up and drawn by 26 different anarchist artists.

As they write:

“I couldn’t have higher praise for Try Anarchism for Life by @cindymilstein — absolutely incredible, beautifully written prose about the beauty found in a boundless, liberated, free existence for all!

“Ecotones of Possibility [one of the pieces] honestly made me cry — the beauty in [Milstein’s] descriptions of liminal space-times and the joy expressed in the anarchist grabbing their friend by the hand to come see those places found the perfect heartstring to pluck.

“The entire book made me realize I was an anarchist before I ever even properly understood what anarchism was. Thank you for sharing this view with the world!”

As always, this book is a labor of love for me. Any proceeds go to support the rad work of @tangled_wilderness to put out all sorts of other anarchic media from books to games to zines to podcasts.

http://www.tangledwilderness.org

#BeautyOfOurCircle
#TryAnarchismForLove
#EverydayAnarchism

(photos: book seen in the wild at Insoumise, a longtime anarchist bookstore in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal; 3-part mini review posted on Twitter, 3/20/23)

Care packages aren’t just beautiful on the inside—for what they contain as gifts, as sustenance, as rebel “love letters” to each other. (Though getting a no. 10 envelope filled with stickers from @municipaladhesives last week was lovely indeed, as the shimmery-metallic circle A that found a good home outdoors today attests to.)

It’s what overflows outward into the “worlds in which many worlds fit”—to borrow Zapatista words—that we are already, always, crafting in the here and now that’s especially beautiful, messiness and all.

That includes the “little touches” like the black and red rubber-stamped logos that Municipal Adhesives put on the envelope’s outside, meaning that various postal workers maybe couldn’t help but notice—perhaps speaking to their antifascist and/or anarchic hearts during yet another deadening day of capitalism.

Or the bigger, prefigurative ones, in which Municipal Adhesives thinks to make and distro stickers with circle A slogans that hold out a hand—on public walls and lamp posts—to the anarcho-curious or world-weary who long for something besides the daily disasters of the current social order—but need glimpses of what that could be and is when one embraces anarchistic forms of social relations and social organization.

Or the bigger-still ways that anarchists create do-it-ourselves spaces in which we remember that “we are the ones we waited for”—spaces open and welcoming to whoever is on a journey, their journey, to liberation and freedom. For as Municipal Adhesives reminded me when they PM’d me about sending a care package my way, we’d met years ago at the annual National Conference on Organized Resistance, in which a tiny anarchistic collective brought some 2,500 young folks together for a weekend that was a smorgasbord of hundreds of workshops and tables (by young-at-heart folks) spanning the whole range of radical politics. In this outwardly solidaristic, generative, open-door space, thousands found their political passion and calling—and each other.

Care packages are a joy—a life line—on a personal level in these dispiriting times, warming our insides. Yet anarchistic care shines when we common it, outward and upward.

#CollectiveCare
#WeAreAllWeHave
#EverydayAnarchism
#TryAnarchismForLife

(Part 5 of 6): By way of celebrating my new book “Try Anarchism for Life” being in print and in the world, and because I have a backlog of photos of circle As in the wild, plus to honor and thank the folks who took the time and care to write blurbs for this book, here’s a trifecta of what I trust are some beautiful expressions of anarchism: street art + the book’s cover + a blurb.

As it serendipitously and delightfully happens, my book came out on the heels of my dear friend Scott Brandon’s book, “Practical Anarchism,” and both of us seem to be preoccupied with focusing on anarchism as life, as living. Perhaps that’s no coincidence in this fascist time that would see so many of us dead—most of us, in fact. So our #EverydayAnarchism has to be a fighter for and carrier of life. It feels no exaggeration to say it’s either #AnarchismOrFascism.

Thanks to @TheRhizomeHouse and the caring labors of our friend @reblgrrlraechel, Scott and I hope to bring our books into life-giving conversation when we gather on December 3.

Now, onto the blurb:

“What a beautiful and playful collection of anarchist ruminations, like an imaginative picture book for adults (but not in the grown-up sense)! It’s a joyful contribution to anarchist literature as well as to Milstein’s own writing. You can read this poetic book in any order—an alphabet that goes from big A to little a and beyond—which makes it a perfect book to pick up to stimulate creativity and meditation. But after reading the whole thing, one gets the sense of the fullness of a life devoted to anarchism; that is, the mutual care and love for each other and the world that raises the stakes for freedom from domination. As we Jews say, ‘To life!’—that is, to a life worth living!”

—Scott Branson, author of “Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily Life”

Copies of my book are available from @tangledwild at www.tangledwilderness.org (in and outside the US), @akpressdistro at www.akpress.org, or your favorite anarchist(ic) bookstores and libraries.

(photos: #QueerAsFuck circle A as seen in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal, summer 2022; fabulous book cover, designed by @eff_charm with circle A by @landonsheely; 2 out of 3 panels from the “flyer” for our schmooze—see The Rhizome House on social media for full info)

#TryAnarchismForLife
#TheBeautyOfOurCircle
#PracticalAnarchism
#WeAreAllWeNeed
🖤💖🌿