The Strain

"The future cannot be plotted, planned, forced, or demanded—these are the efforts of states."

"Anarchism is, fundamentally, an ethical critique of authority — almost an ethical duty to question and resist domination in all its forms."

"To pose the problem in terms of the state means to continue posing it in terms of sovereign and sovereignty, that is to say, in terms of law. If one describes all these phenomena of power as dependent on the state apparatus, this means grasping them as essentially repressive: the army as a power of death, police and justice as punitive instances, and so on. I don’t want to say that the state isn’t important; what I want to say is that relations of power, and hence the analysis that must be made of them, necessarily extend beyond the limits of the state…because the state can only operate on the basis of other, already existing power relations. The state is superstructural in relation to a whole series of power networks that invest the body, sexuality, the family, kinship, knowledge, technology, and so forth. …this metapower can with its prohibitions can only take hold and secure its footing where it is rooted in a whole series of multiple and indefinite power relations that supply the necessary basis for the great negative forms of power."

"In suggesting that postmarxism’s line of flight from communism takes it into liberal-capitalist territory, I do not mean to imply that these two ideologies are equivalent. ..rather that postmarxism and liberalism rely upon a similar logic, a logic of representation of interests within a state-regulated system of hegemonic struggles. The expected outcome of the representation of a situation of inequality of lack of state rights is recognition of the oppressed identity by the state apparatus. Recognition is supposed to lead to an improved situation for the identity in question though its inclusion in the list of ‘those who are granted equal rights’; that is, through its integration into the hegemonic social order."

"A postanarchist critique of foundationalism does not mean that we must abandon the politics of emancipation and the principles of equal liberty which motivate anarchism. On the contrary, I simply contend that anarchism today does not need these deep foundations in human nature and moral and rational enlightenment to advance a radical politics of equal liberty."

"When you join a Black Bloc, you render yourself indistinguishable from all other participants. …you know that each one of these other participants is looking out for you, watching your back, that while everyone is trying to avoid arrest, the situation in which most will be willing to risk arrest is trying to save you from being arrested. …it is a way to create one, fleeting moment when autonomy is real and immediate, a space of liberated territory, in which the laws and arbitrary power of the state no longer apply, in which we draw the lines of force ourselves."

"Just a block away, we encounter a miracle. There, on the corner, plain as day, is an Army/Navy store. It’ still open! And there, in the plate-glass window, large as life, is a gas mask. I dash in and ask if they still have any in stock, and—equally miraculous—it turns out that they do. Preciously one. Forty bucks Canadian. And its one of those good, Canadian military gas masks, too, with the filter on the side, not like the crappy civilian-issue Israeli gas masks from the first Gulf War everyone complains about, where the eyes fog up and the plastic isn’t even shatter-proof. This one is thick black plastic, with a dozen straps on the back in black with fine yellow stripes that are to my eyes, at the moment, strangely beautiful."