The beginning of a new year offers us an opportunity to look back over our accomplishments and the things we stand to learn from the previous year. In the following report, we will review our efforts throughout 2019, set in the context of world events. This has been a year of stalemate in the US, while elsewhere, a new wave of confrontational movements has inspired some commentators to predict a global revival of anarchism on an unprecedented scale.
While this strikes us as optimistic, it adequately describes the stakes of the situation today. The first decade of the 21st century saw the end of the era of capitalist triumphalism; the second decade saw an explosion of uprisings followed by a wave of repression and reactionary nationalism. The decade ahead of us marks a decisive turning point in the history of our species. Increasingly polarized and nationalistic geopolitics are producing one war after another now. Desperate and oppressed people are rising up—though often without a clear analysis of the causes of their misery—while governments and corporations race to develop technology that can effectively surveil populations and suppress revolt. Meanwhile, industrially driven climate disruption is generating ecological disasters that threaten the biosphere itself.
We will either figure out how to break down the existing mechanisms of control on a massive scale, as people have been doing in Chile over the past several months, or we will enter a period of worldwide tyranny from which humanity may never emerge.
Currently, we are hardly prepared for the struggles this coming decade will bring. Still, it is helpful that some projects and networks persist from the struggles of the previous decades—including this particular project, the CrimethInc. ex-Workers’ Collective. At the bare minimum, we have to pass on the lessons of past struggles, update our analyses and strategies for the current era, and form much more ambitious and wide-reaching networks and initiatives. The price of failing to do this will be unspeakable.
