Cindy Milstein (they)

I read a book recently (“Pirate Care” on @plutopress, gifted to me by @aundtse) that highlighted a crucial element of solidarity: vulnerability. Without being vulnerable—without facing or opening oneself up to harm or injury (the Latin noun “vulnus” means “wound”) and taking risks—one stays in the realm of charity, aka upholding the brutal status quo.

It doesn’t mean that all who engage in solidarity are equally vulnerable. Rather, we’re side by side in tending to what wounds each other in a world (dis)order that feels one foolhardy fascist move away from destroying us all.

Such solidarity is sometimes large—like the @globalsumudflotilla—and often small—like a solidarity kitchen. Yet all shapes and sizes point to a sea change in what’s possible when we stretch vulnerability beyond and against borders.

It takes a small risk, of course, to publicly paint a lengthy solidarity banner (pictured here at the top, and reading “Against state repression. Freedom for those in prison. Honor to those we have lost in the struggle,” made for Kyriakos, Marianna, Dimitra, the Sudanese boys [@50outofmany], and others who can’t safely be named here in Greece) on a grubby sidewalk in Athens outside a squat that’s home to and self-managed by migrants and refugees, and balance on a ladder to hang it high up; to do so in a language that isn’t anyone’s first tongue; to ask consent beforehand from the squat’s assembly and hope the banner’s message resonates in the wounded hearts of those to whom it’s directed; and put up a second banner (left-hand side of photo), made by others, in solidarity with @saveprosfygika and the two hunger strikers Aristotelis Chantzis and Suzon Doppagne.

But these fascistic days, even words are being deemed illegal. The freedom to move, to house oneself, to forge community, to resist … so much is illegal. We are shoulder to shoulder, arm in arm, in breaking laws aimed at breaking us, breaking solidarity, breaking life.

Solidarity is our best—and most tender—weapon.

At long last, the latest zine in my series related to “everyday antifascism” has sprouted: “Pandemic Care Without States: 12 Prefigurative Practices in Supplying Well-Being from Below.” And as usual, it’s a labor of love, but also a political intervention and, I trust, source of inspiration. Moreover, it’s yours to freely read, print, and distro in both readable and print-ready formats. DM me an email address — or better yet, send it to me via cbmilstein (at) yahoo — and I’ll gladly send you this zine and previous ones in this series.

Here’s an excerpt from my intro:

“From a grumpy anarchist perspective, it’s disturbing, to say the least, how ‘the fog of mass forgetting’ (as my friend @kit__bla dubs it) has blanketed too many within our own spheres. We anarchists, cultivators of the beautiful idea, should know and do better — far better. Sadly, that so many anarchists have ‘moved on’ has been a profound source of sorrow and rage among those of their fellows — such as the voices within this zine — who still aspire to practice ‘well-being from below.’ Moreover, when COVID-19 first hit, we could and should have been far more imaginative in terms of filling the statist vacuum; such a missed opportunity still eats away at my heart, including in terms of how that gap allowed fascists to leap in, leveraging the pandemic to their own deadly ends.

“Yet from an affable anarchist stance — my belief in always illuminating our messy beautiful experiments, meaning what we actually do well, day in and day out — this zine supplies varied glimpses of how anarchists did and are still trying to embody, even if modestly, ‘pandemic care without states.’ The stories spotlight the ways that some anarchists took up the challenge and ran with it, never forgetting — indeed, instead remembering — that love and solidarity are verbs, and our task is to dream up and enact liberatory visions, even if hard or inconvenient.”

(Photo: by me while wandering the sunny-springlike streets of Vienna. Thanks to all who sent me pieces, the contributors in this zine, @biglukethomas for the cover art (borrowed from the free graphics at @justseeds), and my friend Jonathan, who turned my layout+design into a printable PDF.)

I’m wrapping up this #ACAB week of picture-posts (though alas, we’re far from abolishing police, so keep up the spirit on the streets) with an image that connects to my post yesterday, focusing on the joy sparked by #AllCatsAreBeautiful. Who doesn’t love a good cat photo or video, even if the felines in question are just being their purr-fectly disobedient selves without a cop in sight? Because who doesn’t also love a good photo or video of joy-filled mockery being directed at the police?

This particular sticker, spotted on the stolen, commodified, and surveilled streets of Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal in summer 2025, celebrates one such moment. It turns a (in)famous photo of a cop right after being doused in pink paint by a protester during a riotous anti-NATO demonstration in that same city in November 2024 into a delightful #AllCanvasesAreBeautiful portrait. Its queerly bright colors, sense of stopping a cop in their tracks with mere paint, and repeated “ACAB” applause can’t help but bring pleasure to passersby. No doubt many of those who saw this sticker fondly remembered that day, whether as participant, or after seeing the original photo in a newspaper or on social media. Thanks to decades of now-multigenerational resistance in Montreal to everything from colonialism to capitalism to cops, and “thanks” to the city dramatically increasing its police budget and its willingness to engage in murder-by-police of late, that pleasure (at the police’s expense) is only exacerbated. Meaning what I appreciate about such public displays of #FTP as this is that they at once bring a needed smile to our faces and serve as DIY historical monuments to our own, hard-won (and sometimes humorously so) victories.

All to say, 7 days of #Fuck12 isn’t nearly enough. Yet may it serve as inspiration to keep going, whether organizing with your neighbors to kick cops off your block, to carving out larger autonomous police-no-go zones, to experimenting with ways to keep each other safer without the need of any kinds of police, to abandoning the notion that “peace police” are at all necessary at the next march, to filling up walls with your own creations.

I would never, ever (ever) equate “joy” with “cops.” Exactly the opposite! Yet never say never, right?

In scrolling through my thousands of still-unused photos of street art from over many time periods and many geographies—often taken while prowling alleys—it hit me that there is indeed joy in the #AllCatsAreBeautiful genre related to cops.

This feline form of #ACAB street art—of which I realized tonight, I have a hefty amount of photos “capturing” kitties who snarl at cops and purr at anarchists—seems to me to point toward the joy of a world without police. In thinking of cats raises a smile of comradely recognition at their ungovernability, for one. But more prefiguratively, it conjures images of playful abandon, abundant cuteness, cuddly tenderness, scrappy inventiveness (oh the things a cat can create from a simple cardboard box!), and lots of other warm-and-fuzzy feelings—the kinds that exude joy, yes, and also aid us in imagining how sweet life should and could be. (Who hasn’t asserted at one point or another, “If I’m reincarnated, I hope I come back as a cat!)

Plus cats, contrary to popular perceptions, are loyal and stick side by side with their human friends, thus they would never, ever (ever) talk to the police (they might yowl at them or loudly scratch the door, but refuse to open it, if the cops come knocking).

So here’s a small sampler of some street cats, as seen in Pittsburgh, Vienna, and Athens.

The world is pretty damn shitty—like the messiest of litter boxes. So it’s worth finding all the tiniest of joys, creeping quietly toward us on cat paws.

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

My book “Try Anarchism for Life: The Beauty of Our Circle” has leaped across borders, bodies of water, mountain ranges and valleys to find a second publication home in so-called Europe, thanks to the good folks at @activedistribution. Or rather, first, thanks to the good folks at @tangled_wilderness, a publishing collective that lives its anarchistic ideals. Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness not only published the gorgeous original version of “Try Anarchism” for distribution within and across Turtle Island; it has now kindly let Active Distribution create a specific edition for the European-Balkan side of the globe.

I just got my first glimpse of the cute-as-a-button Active Distro version, which came back from the press recently. Wow. I’m so humbled, honored, and enthused to have this version out and about now! (Distro links in the comments.)

This version contains all the same content—what I hope reads as poetic, poignant prose that aspires to draw out the beauty of anarchism as an idea and practice, reminding us longtime anarchists of our utopian strivings, and holding out a welcoming embrace to “baby” anarchists and/or the anarcho-curious about why they’d actually want to be and stay an anarchist for life; and sharing some 26 inspiring pieces of artwork by 25 artists, all attempting to illustrate the beauty they each see in their anarchism. It’s a style that I fondly call “picture-prose”: with me supplying the container (which almost quite literally fits in one’s hand, as you can see in this photo with a pen for size comparison) and prose, and those who can draw far, far better than me, providing the art.

I’ve said this time and again: The word “hope” seems ill-suited to this christofascist period; instead, I find “anarchism of despair”—clear-eyed assessment—far more generative, leading me to continually seek out “promise” amid the perils we face. We desperately need to lean into the promise we can find, meaning the beauty of anarchistic practices, be they community self-defense, social solidarity, or collectively grieving well via rituals of resistance—precisely as counterpoint to what christofascism offers: death, versus the life we assert and sustain.

To order copies—for 3 pounds or about 4 euros each—in Europe+Balkans:

https://www.activedistributionshop.org/product/try-anarchism-for-life-2/

https://sjakoo.nl/en/product/try-anarchism-for-life-a6-active/

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/206113462308

And/or encourage your fav radical bookstores to carry it!

#AlwaysCarryABook
#TryAnarchismForLife

A few years ago, my dear friend @sl0wriot asked if he could borrow some of the many (many!) photos I’d taken of #ACAB sightings in the wild over the years, on the streets of many a city built on the bones of stolen lands and stolen lives. He wanted to use a variety of them on a page in his forthcoming book, which now has been in print for a few years. The collection of essays and images, which I highly recommend reading if you’re an anarchist—even if you think you aren’t interested in design—is titled “Design Against Design: Cause and Consequence of a Dissident Graphic Practice,” written and designed by Kevin Yuen Kit Lo, and published by @setmargins. If memory serves, numerous ones of my pictures of others’ ACAB street art accompany an essay related to exploring the power of asserting in writing, anywhere and everywhere, that “all cops are bad/bastards/brutal.”

Of course, on their own, four letters scrawled on walls, sidewalks, dumpsters, and the like won’t abolish police and policing. Yet it’s the repetition—ad nauseam and in your face—that when combined with social conditions and social struggles, becomes the fertile ground for social outcry, social uprising, and potentially social transformation. One needs to repeatedly, continuously cultivate the soil, so that when cops are particularly cruel and murderous, and of late, their actions are caught on film from multiple angles and shared widely on social media, there’s already numerous “post-it notes” of sorts in people’s minds and hearts. Even if on the subconscious level, they remember seeing lots of public notices that all cops are indeed barbaric.

All the more reason, I’d contend, to make the already-ubiquitous “ACAB” tags, stencils, stickers, and so on, even more prominent across the landscape—if only to make police feel uncomfortable no matter where they go, seeing how much everybody (or most people) hate the police.

Here, I’m sharing just a small, small fraction of the many ACAB photos still buried in my unshared collection of them. These were taken over the past several years in various cities, large and smaller: Montreal, Asheville (NC), Madison (WI), Lansing (MI), New York, Vienna, and Athens.

Over this past week, I’ve been walking through a neighborhood in a city with a centuries-long history of antisemitism (as in hatred of all things Jewish/Judaism), among other deadly “isms.” The ghosts crowd-out the present-day populace on my strolls. So when I stumbled on some street art that I thought was “against antisemitism,” as it claimed, my heart leaped. I shared an image of it with some Jewish anarchist friends, and they observed, correctly, that the sticker was targeted against Jews who have no love for nationalism or statism, including a version based on zionism; it had been pasted over a Yiddish-language sticker asserting instead “doikayt” (hereness), a no-borders sentiment about making home with others wherever we diasporic rad Jews find ourselves. Suddenly, I wished that I could “unsee” the sticker-on-sticker in this neighborhood that time and again, saw the policing, displacing, and even extermination of Jews.

Which got me thinking re: my theme this week: #FTP, #Fuck12, and so on (as a way to use some of my too-many photos of street art proclaiming such abolitionist views).

What would some “intelligent life” that arrived on our imperiled earth many centuries from now think of the folly of the currently rather unintelligent, as a whole, species called humans when it stumbled on our remaining street art symbols? Particularly if almost no human beings remained to offer insight into our weird ways: that people actually devised something called “police” and thought it was a good (aka life-giving) idea.

Maybe, if we and they are lucky in the intervening years, policing as an institution+concept will have been abolished—and generations after would slowly but surely lose all sense of “cops.” (Of course, police abolition goes hand in hand with the abolition of all forms of hierarchy.) Perhaps if their feet brought them to an #ACAB and #1312, they were furl their brows, if they had them, and smile at the many wordplays they could share with each other: “always carry a critter,” “all constellations are beautiful,” “all crustacean are abundance,” etc.

One can hope. And meanwhile, keep walking in that direction.

(photo: my feet finding tags, Athens 2025)

One could read “double trouble” in this enormous example of graffiti, sprayed with bold precision on a walkway wall under an overpass in Vienna: both #FTP (fuck the police) and #ACAB (all cops are bastards/bad)—aka, cops always bring trouble, they don’t protect or defend people from it. And that’s a good and legit read, pointing in two acronyms or seven letters to the countless reasons why police must be abolished. Reform just paints a lighter shade of blue on the inherent brutality of policing.

Yet as a prefigurative-minded anarchist—and thus, it should go without saying, abolitionist—I feel it’s our task to always offer our own, nonhierarchical double trouble—the good kind of trouble aimed at shaking up this death machine of a social order via social critiques and social visions. That is, not merely asserting what we’re against (here, cops) but also, always, concurrently, proclaiming and especially experimenting with what we’re for (in this case, a world without police).

So in this #ArtOfResistance, I see the double trouble of a liberatory counternarrative: #FreeThePeople (FTP) and #AutonomousCommunitiesAreBeautiful (ACAB). I see glimpses across this imperiled planet—of which we humans are only one small (yet too often dangerous) part/guest—of how forms of freedom and self-governance, even in what might seem modest ways, are put into practice every day, including and especially these days, in using solidarity as a weapon (our best one) against the occupying, often militarized police forces trying to control too many cities and lands around the globe.

ICE in airports. Liberals believing TSA is somehow the downtrodden underdog. Increased numbers of cops now “guarding” Jewish and Muslim spiritual and community spaces in the United States and Europe in light of increased antisemitism and Islamophobia as an ugly impact of Trump-Netanyahu’s war machine, as if anyone’s safety comes from those in blue. Signs in hospitals asserting “violence against health care workers will not be tolerated … or we’ll call the police” on you, as if policing was somehow nonviolent or at least neutral. Militarized kidnapper cops and orange “safety vest” peace police. …

All to say, with a huge backlog of #ACAB, #FTP, and #1312 street-art images burning a hole in my “saved” photo collection, and with increasing ire (if that were possible) for how the world’s police—bad cops and “good” ones—are daily, second by second, murdering off life and cutting off possibilities, I’ll do my best to share at least one “no love for cops” rebel tag for the next seven days—this one seen recently in Vienna. After all …

You don’t hate Mondays, you hate cops. Doesn’t everyone?

Call for 3-5 more contributions to my next curated zine:

“Pandemic Care without States: Prefigurative Practices in Supplying Well-Being from Below”

Length: prose, @ 75 to 250 words
Due: by or preferably before Friday, February 27
Email to: cbmilstein {at} yahoo {dot} com

See my Jan 29 “call” for prompts. But to help inspire you, here are excerpts from stories I’ll be using in this zine:

“For over a year, my incarcerated partner and I have been running what’s essentially an ‘inside-outside mask bloc.’ Prisons are perfectly designed to facilitate disease spread. They’re places where people are actively prohibited from taking steps to reduce infection risk. Despite this, incarcerated folks still have agency when it comes to helping mitigate the effects of the ongoing pandemic and caring for each other. … My partner finds out who in their prison has family needing PPE, and I mail them their masks.” (—Bee)

“This year, our local anarchist bookfair changed from ‘masks required’ to ‘strongly encouraged.’ This might seem inconsequential, but it can make all the difference if you can’t risk a COVID infection. (And who can?) … So we made a plan to approach individual unmasked attendees and directly ask them to wear a mask, which we would provide. We informed the organizers, who asked us to desist. We refused. Our plan was barely disruptive: just talking to people.” (—knotweed and varved clay)

“In 2023, a friend and I launched a project called Sick Comrade. … We’ve done things like put out a collective zine, create a series of riso print “sicko” posters that we’ve circulated for free, and initiate a survey for sick and disabled folks to guide our ongoing mutual aid efforts. … I’ve been building a DIY pharmacy with all the meds I’ve managed to shake out of doctors for the coming disasters (and the disaster we’re already in). Taking down the barriers to accessing medication is also sick comradeship.” (—Elias)

(photo: “autonomize health care” tag, Athens hospital; loving anarchist circle, Athens wall, 2025)

@foundseed@spore.social If it ties into the title and framing of my “call for contributions,” yes, consider submitting a potential piece for this zine!

(Revised) call for contributions to the next curated zine in my series aimed at resisting christofascism and modeling the world(s) we desire:

“Pandemic Care without States: XX Prefigurative Practices in Supplying Well-Being from Below”

Length: prose, approx. 75 to 250 words
Due: by or before Sunday, February 8
Email to: cbmilstein {at} yahoo {dot} com

My initial “call” wasn’t clear enough to get the kinds of submissions I’m seeking. So I rewrote the title+subtitle, and created a list of what I’m looking for. I want stories that fall under one or more of these prompts—pieces that:

* describe tangible practices and especially projects that anarchists (you!) kicked off since 2020 or later, including ones that are still ongoing

* share promising, tangible, anarchist(ic) practices, projects, or ideas that emerged at the start of the pandemic that pointed toward what communal and public health care could look like—without hierarchies such as states, capitalism, or nonprofits, or at least at cross-purposes with them

* offer tangible anarchist visions for how we could have radicalized and expanded on the organic forms of collective care that emerged when the pandemic began, or could have more robustly responded to and actively countered the statist/capitalist/liberal/fascist responses, including to do better in the future (and now)

Contributions can include feelings and/or personal experiences, yet I want them to highlight how we prefigure (i.e., model in the here now; live as if we were already free) the kinds of “well-being from below”—communal care, social solidarity, mutual aid, rebellious love, and so on—that we aspire toward for everyone, always.

If it helps, definitely feel free to DM me with your ideas before you turn them into a draft!

And please share this “call” widely, but particularly with folks you know who have done and/or are doing innovative forms of anarchist-oriented pandemic care—whether or not they are dealing with COVID-related illnesses (yet).

(Photos: “authority is the worst virus” tag, Athens; circle A well-being, Athens; anti-ableist action” sticker, Vienna; healing offerings on Alexis’s memorial, Exarcheia)

[PLEASE reshare widely, via text, email, and/or socials]

New zine version of my essay “Stitching Together Other Worlds,” written for my edited anthology “Constellations of Care: Anarcha-Feminism in Practice” (Pluto Press, 2024). Buy the book. Read/print/distro the zine freely!

Thx to Casandra (pdf), @nobonzo@kolektiva.social (art)

DM me for PDFs of the zine—readable and print-ready versions. Please include your email. 🖤🩷