The modern world is ruled by a thousand forms of domination. 

This fact is so clear that it doesn’t even need to be said any more, it has always been known by those who suffer under this system and is only denied by those who benefit from it. 

They have shamelessly paraded their own decadence for all to see, while telling us that we should not believe what we have just seen. They have tried to distract us from it, by trying to consume us with their narratives, by making us see an enemy in everyone who shares our same struggle. Their hubris has made them believe that the working class is too stupid and too powerless to see through these devices. But no matter what illusions or distractions they resort to, the people who have built their wealth can see through their lies. 

We have seen their limitless growth in greed, in depravity, and inhuman cruelty. We have seen how they have employed their cruelty against their enemies, both at home and abroad. We have seen how they have acted out their depraved desires, which they commit behind closed doors and increasingly in public. And we have seen how they have committed and accomplished these crimes in the name of capital. 

The capitalist class — and the sycophantic supporters of their regime — will never admit to their injustice; they are incapable of going against what is in their own interest. They look down on the poverty which they have created and sanctioned, and the despair of the people is completely unbelievable to them. It is incomprehensible to them, because their very way of life is in exact opposition to ours — what is to their benefit is to our loss.

Their very existence owes itself to parasitically exploiting all the good things which the modern labour force produces, while the worker is only given enough to keep on living and working for their masters. These masters, who from the highest are the shareholders, their corporate officers, their financiers, and at the lowest our bosses who wish they could be like them. And by their side are their loyal defenders, who from the lowest are the police, the military, and at the highest the government which commands them. And through this hideous succession of offices, they have established a hierarchy in this world that is all consuming of both mind and body. 

To justify this system, they have devised innumerable arguments, each more absurd than the last; each which they will desperately repeat more than the last, ad nauseum from their foaming lips until they hope they have quieted us: “It’s your own choice to be a worker!” — “There’s not enough to go around!” — “It’s human nature for some to rule and the rest to obey!” And with these magic words, they think that we will just disappear. 

But it is clear that we only work because they keep from us the necessities of life, and by keeping these necessities they have created this scarcity, and in this way they have created the hierarchy between rich and poor.

Even a surface level analysis of modern production proves that there are enough resources to sustain all of society many times over — it doesn’t even need to be said anymore how much goes to waste every year. And yet, by no accident, only a few enjoy the fruits of this labour and the comfortable life which it provides, while the rest of us can only ever briefly touch these things after endless hours of work, as if our entire lives were lived on borrowed time. And these capitalists will tell us that we should be thankful for this life which they have lent us, and for the innovation which they have sold us, as if they had built this world themselves.

They have sold us their lifestyle, replacing human connection with uninhibited consumerism, trust and honesty with suspicion and treachery, and concern for others with the pure obsession for the self. 

They have told us that if we work hard enough, we too will be like them someday, and be released from our misery. And we keep on working, day after day, while the heir and their friends never worked even once for all that they have — and they’re still telling us “your lucky day will come soon.” And for the few who do succeed, if they learn how to keep that wealth and not lose it immediately, they won’t want anything to do with their former selves, and they’re happy to exploit the people who would’ve once been their coworkers. And for those who have nothing left at all, there is nothing left but death. 

They have imposed on us their own system of governance, and call it the will of the people. But it is clear that the rule of the rich over the poor will never be reversed by a vote. Though they pride themselves on the freedom of political parties, and on the separation of powers, these divisions are meaningless when they were all founded by the interests of capital. Though the parties may be divided in how they want to rule the state, in fact they are all united in terrorizing the working class — and so there cannot truly be a democracy, or a separation of powers, when there exists a single capitalist power that will use the full extent of its violence to preserve and expand its empire. 

This is the order of the modern world. It is violence, deception, and exploitation. To share all things equally would naturally mean the end of their power over others — freedom and peace are against the interests of the capitalist class.

For these reasons they cannot understand or even sympathize with our plight. And for these reasons they will never hand us the tools or the knowledge to reverse these conditions; not through their government, or through their courts, or through their economic powers. To ask for their help, to trust in their guidance for a way out of this misery, is like begging predators to lead their prey. 

Only the people can free themselves.

We know that this domination was created by humanity, and so we know that humanity can also destroy it. 

The modern world was not designed by some enlightened class that can make anything happen according to a plan. Their power is the inheritance of centuries of conquests, revolutions, and accidents which have left them in charge while dispossessing the rest of the human race. Though they would want more than anything to have destroyed our independent action, they have not beaten us down into mindless instruments of production; their oppression inevitably generates a response from the marginalized. No empire has lasted forever, no power is eternal — there is no violence that can crush the human will to be free. 

And so just like things have changed a thousand times before, things will change again. The only barrier between what we could have, and what we have now, is the organization and the desire to make this change. And to ensure that there is true liberation, and not just a rearranging of things, the means we use will need to be in alignment with the end we desire. 

Society is the result of the actions of millions of people repeating in an endless cycle — and ours is a vicious cycle of domination, violence, and oppression which is reproduced every single day, and not only by those in power, but by us as well, who have been coerced into it since our birth. If these are the things we want to end, then we can’t use the same tactics of our oppressors — or else, we are just destined to reproduce these conditions again. Our liberation cannot be delivered by capitalist enterprise, by governments, or by any self-appointed “leaders of the people” — no matter how rightly guided they believe themselves to be. It’s not just that these tactics would be morally reprehensible: They would make true liberation impossible by their very nature. 

We need to know what we’re really fighting for. We need to understand the cause of this domination; then, how we will free ourselves from it; and finally, the actions that must be taken towards this goal.

Some well-meaning people — and some, not so well-meaning people — will say that “We need to take the money out of politics!” Is this what we are arguing for? 

No, this is not what we want. Though their sentiment comes from a real place of wanting change, it betrays a naivete towards the functions of this political system — which is to mediate the unending conflicts between capitalists, and to repress the working class. No, what we want is not to just “take the money out of politics” — what we need is to take the politics and the money out of society, and create a new politics: not one of politicians who “represent our will” but of the direct self management of communities by themselves. 

Political parties will be quick to answer the call to “take the money out of politics,” and they will promise to be the salvation of the working class. Yes, they will make themselves out to be our saviors, while making all the choices for us. On one end, these are the ones in power in Washington right now, and their fascist disciples here in Canada and around the world. And on the opposite end are the social democrats, who every season will chastise us to “come out and vote” so that eventually, some day, some year, they will finally have enough seats in parliament to shake hands with business owners and leaders of foreign nations, while placating us for a while.

Rather than actually solving the problem, these people are more interested in playing a game of musical chairs, switching rulers around over and over again, throwing all their adoration on whoever has the spotlight for the moment until the next one comes along. They will pretend that this has solved our problems — and we are still left with nothing.  

No, we don’t want to play your games anymore — what we need is to throw all the chairs away, and instead give everyone their own seat at their own table. We don’t need another special group with power over us, who will appoint themselves as our personal saviors. Those who are given power over others will become the new oppressors and exploiters of society, because there is no such thing as being free when others have the power of life and death over you.  

There can’t be freedom as long as workers are not given what they are due, as long as we are exploited for the enrichment of others. There can’t be freedom as long as all the good things in this world aren’t freely shared with all, as long as some have everything while others have nothing. 

There can’t be freedom as long as we have to pay for someone else’s life just to keep a roof over our head, as long as anyone can make a passive income from someone else’s work. There can’t be freedom as long as people are dying in the cold, from Main Street to Mexico City, from Los Angeles to São Paulo, in every city of the world just because landlords need to make a profit. 

There can’t be freedom as long as we are subject to laws we had no say in writing. As long as minorities are still targets for the brutality of the police, as long as people are still kept behind bars for having committed a crime against this criminal system. There can’t be freedom as long as families are separated across borders, as long as people are still surveilled and killed because of their origin. 

There can’t be freedom as long as we must pay taxes used to fund wars in far away places, for no reason at all except to feed a psychopathic desire for blood. As long as people are forced to give away their lives for a flag that will leave their own children destitute, as long as an empire still exists that was founded on top of the graves of children. 

There can’t be freedom as long as we live in a world of corporate officers, presidents, prime-ministers, monarchs, and whatever other pretentious titles those who seek power will invent for themselves. 

No, there will not be freedom, there will never be freedom, until we have replaced all these things with the free association of people. And we must fight for this reality, not as a half-measure, not as a step towards something better, but as a single leap over the abyss of oppression. 

They will say that we want chaos, because they have confused authority with peace and stability. But we have seen that authority is the cause of all the violence, of the oppression of the many by the few — it is not that their hierarchy causes injustice, it has always been the very injustice itself. They were the ones who created chaos, when they sent us running from job to job in search for a living, from country to country to escape from their wars, from party to party in search of leaders. We know what their order means. There is nothing left to be said. 

The only true order of peace and justice will be everything opposite to this, the order of anarchy: Communities working in collaboration with one another, with the freedom of the individual as their standard, and workplaces run by collective agreements between labourers, who will share their fruits with all. A society where the first and highest priority is the well-being of those who live within it — without a doubt this will be chaos for the oppressor, and order for the people.   

Anarchists need to actively fight for liberation.  

Anarchism is not just the work of advocacy, it’s not just a pretty idea to aspire to — it’s the war that we must wage against the ruling class. 

For any sort of Anarchism to truly win, it must be organized, it must make its position clear to society, and it must actively fight in the struggles of the oppressed. This is what the first Anarchists believed, and it’s what all anarchists who are truly engaged in class struggle believe. 

Anarchism used to be a leading force in the labour movement, which itself used to be a leading force in society as a whole. It was Anarchists who created the first labour unions and won the first rights for workers in Spain, France, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Cuba, Mexico, Indonesia, and many other places. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the Anarchist movement was present in every single country on Earth, and feared by capitalists everywhere. The Anarchist movement had a smaller presence in the United States, though it still played an important part in its early labour movement through the work of the IWW  — Canada itself has even less of a history with Anarchism, though it was brought over by some of the European working class. In Winnipeg, it was largely spread by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, who played a part in the general strike of 1919.

Particularly in Spain and Latin America, the organized Anarchist movement was so influential that it legitimately had the potential to bring about revolution — which in some cases actually did break out into open conflict, as seen in the Spanish Civil War and the Mexican Revolution. This necessarily called for an organized repression from the ruling classes of the world. 

By the mid 20th century, the Anarchist movement would successively fall at the hands of fascist governments in Europe, American-backed dictatorships in Latin America, the Soviet Union and the CCP, and the First Red Terror in the United States — events which all roughly coincided with the death of the old militant labour movement as a whole. After this fall, our ideas became disconnected from their material reality; they were just words on pages, the aspirations of a dead and dying generation. Whatever was left was picked up by petty-bourgeois hippies, academics, careerist activists, and after them punks and artists. From then on it became just a personal philosophy, nothing more than a lifestyle choice. 

It’s no surprise that it lost its relevance as a political force in the world. Some people might enjoy these aesthetics and philosophies, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But the fact is that the working class doesn’t need aesthetics — we need prosperity, land, dignity, and freedom. And we aren’t just hungry for it, we are starving. 

This is why it is absolutely crucial for us to be involved in the fight of the working class, whether that be in labour unions, in the movements against imperialist war, against the colonial state, against the destruction of the environment — everywhere, anywhere, anytime that people rise up. 

We have no interest in sitting around and contemplating political philosophy, in spending our time arguing against a million different tendencies. What we need is to unite with those who share the common idea that all hierarchies, whether they be in gender, race, money, the state, or any other form, are the enemies of humanity, and find a way together to bring these forces down and build something better in their place. 

We can’t wait for the perfect opportunity to fall on us, we can’t expect that society will just spontaneously wake up from the delusion of slavery and hatred. We have to build towards this through our own efforts, and then be prepared to capture the moments when they come. We also can’t wait for the end of the world, because it won’t come. What will come is only the end of this current social reality, and unless we prepare to make the next one better, it will just be worse — because people will only rebuild what they already know, and the oppressor will still be alive and even more powerful than before. Though even this power will not last forever, because every ruler creates and fosters their own downfall: The people over which they rule. 

The Red River Anarchists are not here to formulate a perfect political line that can’t be strayed from — because perfection does not exist in society, and those who go chasing after it will inevitably lead their herd into an even worse reality. We believe that once workers start fighting for their own interests, independent from the influence of capitalist institutions, we will together find the way. There won’t be a perfect golden path, each step will have to be decided along the way.