2025: The Year in Review

With a Complete Accounting of Our Efforts

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Congratulations on surviving 2025 and welcome to our year in review report! What did we accomplish this year? Let’s review!

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In the United States, the year 2025 arrived like a nightmare. Danger. Terror. Hatred. All of the worst elements of humanity had taken power and were preparing to use the institutions of the state to inflict tremendous harm. War was already raging in Ukraine, genocides underway from Palestine to Sudan. How much worse could it get?

We, at least, were not taken by surprise. Four years ago, looking back on the debacle of January 6, 2021, we anticipated Trump’s return; when Elon Musk bought Twitter, we pointed out that his purchase resolved the fundamental conflict within the capitalist class, between Silicon Valley and Trump’s authoritarian nationalism; by summer 2024, we sensed what was coming:

Donald Trump will win the election. Then all the institutions that centrists have counted on to protect them—electoral politics, the court system, the police, ordinary citizens’ inclination to obey the law and respect the authorities—will become weapons in the hands of their enemies. Of course, many of us already experience these institutions as our adversaries. Biden’s supporters will have to ask themselves whether they are willing to work alongside us against them, or if, in fact, they prefer fascism to freedom.

Despite these warnings, the opening months of Trump’s second administration shocked many people who had foolishly expected a rerun of Trump’s first presidency, not the sudden arrival of a much more destructive and cynical strategy of governance. Others remain in denial to this day, assuring themselves that however bad things have gotten, they cannot possibly continue to get worse at such a pace.

On the contrary, we remain convinced that only grassroots action can change the trajectory we are on.

First, they came for the immigrants. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement mercenaries.

Not everyone had the good fortune to survive 2025. Police officers murdered well over 1200 people in the United States in 2025. Dozens more perished in ICE custody. Hundreds of thousands of people have been brutally snatched from their communities, held in abominable conditions, and deported. The cuts that Elon Musk and his flunkies made to aid programs have reportedly already inflicted many hundreds of thousands of deaths. Countless more will follow as the autocrats continue to “streamline” the state to play a purely repressive function.

Nonetheless, as we have documented, the assault has reached a plateau, if not yet an impasse. It is time to get our bearings, identify the vulnerabilities that our oppressors have opened up by demolishing the concessions that their predecessors made, and launch a counterattack that could propel us into an entirely different future.

For a full accounting of the struggle in the United States throughout 2025, consult our retrospective, “At the Turning of the Tide.” For more background, revisit the events of 2024.

Getting Oriented

We began 2025 with two foundational texts proposing how to come to grips with the rise of autocracy.

“It’s Safer in the Front: Taking the Offensive against Tyranny” makes the case that, facing ascendant fascism, it is more dangerous to try to avoid confrontation than it is to go on the offensive. Bringing together a series of anecdotes from the front lines of a quarter of a century of anarchist mobilizations, this text also offers a brief overview of the ways that repression has ramped up since the 20th century.

The second text, “Become an Anarchist or Forever Hold Your Peace,” argues that, rather than powerlessly accusing Donald Trump and his cronies of lawlessness, our best hope is to organize concrete acts of resistance on a horizontal and participatory basis. In other words, to become anarchists.

In June, we followed these with a third text, “Mutual Aid, the Commons, and the Revolutionary Abolition of Capitalism,” revisiting the distinction between charity and mutual aid in hopes of unlocking the revolutionary potential concealed within the latter.

We concluded the year with the aforementioned analysis, “At the Turning of the Tide.”

If you only have time to read a few things we’ve published this year, start with these four.

From “Mutual Aid, the Commons, and the Revolutionary Abolition of Capitalism.” Click on the image to read the essay.

Fighting ICE

Early in 2025, we published a report on the student walkouts in Los Angeles, one of the first signs of life from what became a powerful movement.

Over the following weeks, we published a text from a bus driver facing austerity measures, titled “The Only Immigrant Trying to Steal My Job Is Elon Musk,” followed by a reflection on the federal kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil.

When a wave of resistance to ICE gathered momentum in June, we published reports from participants in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Austin, Texas, Chicago, and Seattle. In fall 2025, when ICE concentrated their violence on Chicago, we published a report from the blockades at the Broadview holding facility, followed eventually by reflections on the efforts to target that facility.

When ICE agents returned to the Twin Cities, people confronted them once more.

By the end of the year, the student walkouts had spread from Los Angeles to Charlotte, North Carolina.

Ongoing Struggles

In March, we published the final installment in our series chronicling the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, Georgia. In July, as Stop Cop City defendant Ayla King prepared to go to trial, we published an overview of the absurdly tenuous case against Ayla and the other RICO defendants. Almost all of the charges have since been dropped, though the threat of future state persecution still hangs over the heads of the accused.

Following up last year’s campus occupations in solidarity with Gaza, we covered a daring Palestine solidarity occupation at the University of Washington in May. In October, we published a statement from a participant in the Thousand Madleens to Gaza flotilla, followed by an account of the direct action campaign that shut down Elbit Systems—Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer—in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Finally, as we do every year, we observed Steal Something from Work Day—this time, by celebrating employees who shared company goods with the general public during a time of need.

The weekend of the Festivals of Resistance was the anniversary of the brutal police murder of Tortuguita, a participant in the movement to Stop Cop City. Mourners courageously redecorated this billboard in the middle of New York City in Tortuguita’s memory.

Organizing

At the end of December 2024, we called for people to organize “Festivals of Resistance” the weekend immediately before Trump was to take office, in order to share skills and prepare for the onslaught. Over two dozen cities hosted events in response to this call. Afterwards, we published reportbacks from some of them.

We published a call to take action on May Day, as well, and a call for anti-authoritarian blocs at the October 18 “No Kings” demonstrations around the country. Afterwards, we reached out to participants in a dozen cities and towns to learn how their efforts went and published a collection of their reflections.

Finally, we published a reportback from the Florida Abolitionist Gathering.

Anarchists at one No Kings rally led the entire crowd off the sidewalk and on a spirited march throughout the city.

How to

Early in 2025, we published a short guide titled “Eight Things You Can Do to Stop ICE.” Copies of the trifold version appeared everywhere—for example, during the disruption of a US Customs and Border Protection recruiting event in Chicago.

Ten months later, drawing on the experiences of Chicago organizers, we followed up with “Standing Up to ICE,” a guide spelling out the steps a community can take to stand in the way of ICE kidnappings on a large scale.

In between, we published “A Demonstrator’s Guide to Operational Security: Fighting Back, Staying Free,” a comprehensive guide to maintaining your anonymity while engaging in street actions, as well as “A Demonstrator’s Guide to Reinforced Banners” and “A Demonstrator’s Guide to Lockdowns and Blockades.”

In addition, in response to Donald Trump’s cartoonish announcement that his administration would be designating “Antifa” [sic] a “major [?!] terrorist organization,” we circulated “Safeguarding Our Movements against Repression,” spelling out steps that organizations, activists, and others who oppose fascism can take to be ready to endure an authoritarian crackdown. If such a crackdown has not yet taken place, we owe that chiefly to the resistance that has tied down federal mercenaries on other fronts, as we argued at the end of the year:

If federal agencies have yet to move with full force against a target other than immigrants, it is only because people have fought so hard to obstruct ICE. This drives home the true meaning of solidarity: the best way to protect ourselves tomorrow is to protect each other today.

Demonstrators outside the Broadview holding facility. They’re in there for us, we’re out here for them.

Worldwide

Between May and July, we published a series of texts from the Mideast, including a reflection on what the Rajaee Port disaster in Iran revealed about the systematic racism that Baluch ethnic minorities face; a statement from Iranian, Kurdish, and Afghani feminists arguing against reductive positions in regards to the conflict between Israel and Iran; and an analysis of what the decision of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK) to lay down their arms means for the whole region.

In August, a wave of protest against austerity spread across Indonesia, then escalated dramatically in response to the police murder of Affan Kurniawan, a 21-year-old delivery worker. While the Indonesian government managed to reestablish control, a few days later, a similar eruption toppled the government of Nepal, setting a template for what became known as the “Gen Z uprisings,” a series of revolts from Madagascar to Peru.

We published an interview with anarchists in Nepal who participated in the revolution, followed by an article by another Nepali about the new horizons it opened up. The following month, we published an interview with participants in the subsequent uprising in Morocco, as well.

While conditions in the United States and Europe have been grim, these distant fires suggest that the age of uprisings is not over. The plumes of smoke rising from the horizon today hint at events that could break out much closer to home tomorrow. It is urgent to think through what lasting gains movements can achieve during such surges of activity in an era when the apparatus of the state has proven incapable of reform.

Indonesia.

History

Our most ambitious historical project of the year was “Anarchists in the Movement against Police and White Supremacy,” tracing anarchist contributions to uprisings against white supremacist policing from the Los Angeles riots of 1992 to the George Floyd Uprising of 2020.

We also published a collection of reflections from participants in the Seattle Solidarity Network on their seventeen years of organizing to support laborers and renters in their struggles with bosses and landlords.

Seeking to equip people for the urgent struggles of 2025, we published a text about the General Strike of May Day 2006, one of the high-water marks in the fight against the oppression of immigrants in the United States, and two articles about how people organized to shut down the machinery of deportation in France in the 1990s. Both of the articles were adapted from the newly published book Another War Was Possible, a firsthand account of anarchist street action at the turn of the century, to which we contributed the preface.

Finally, we shared a eulogy for Karl Garside, a lifelong participant in the animal liberation movement.

A scene from the uprising of 2020.

Audio and Video

This year, via our Ex-Worker podcast, we released audio versions of a handful of our articles, including “It’s Safer in the Front,” “Become an Anarchist or Forever Hold Your Peace,” “Mutual Aid, the Commons, and the Revolutionary Abolition of Capitalism,” “Safeguarding Our Movements against Repression,” and our coverage of the origins of the wave of resistance to ICE in Minneapolis to Los Angeles.

We also collaborated with subMedia and the Coordinadora Anarquista Tejiendo Libertad on a video and poster campaign to counter ICE recruitment.

MERCENARIES: A Video and Poster Campaign to Counter ICE Recruitment

The Arts

We published a work of speculative fiction, “Survival: A Story about Anarchists Enduring Mass Raids.” We also designed a poster in homage to Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, the “street gang with an analysis” that introduced the concept of the affinity group to English-speaking anarchists in the 1960s.

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In 2025, we released our first record in over a decade—the album “Hope against Hope” by Catharsis, long known as one of the world’s most extreme and uncompromising underground hardcore bands. The first pressing of the LP sold out immediately, but we will have a second pressing available soon. You can read an array of reviews of the record here, or read Kim Kelly’s interview with members of the band.

Catharsis supported the album with tours on the East Coast of the United States and in Europe, and has further tours scheduled in 2026. The vast majority of the other music we have released over the past thirty years is available here, all of it free of charge.

Catharsis: “Hope against Hope.”

We also published a text written by the surviving members of the Russian hardcore band Sandinista! in memory of their bandmate, Timur Kacharava, on the twenty-year anniversary of his murder at the hands of fascists.

Finally, we reprinted our Contradictionary, alongside other print projects.

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The Tally

Here follows a more or less comprehensive list of the zines, posters, and articles we published in 2025 in different languages, organized from most recent to oldest.

Zines

Published in 2025

Click on the image to download the zine. Click on the image to download the zine.
Click on the image to download the zine. Click on the image to download the zine.
Click on the image to download the zine. Click on the image to download the zine. ([Español](/zines/siete-estrategias-para-derrotar-a-la-migra))
Click on the image to download the zine. ([Español](/zines/es-fascismo-actua-contra-el-desde-ahora)) Click on the image to download the zine.
Click on the image to download the zine. Click on the image to download the zine.
Click on the image to download the zine. Click on the image to download the zine.
Click on the image to download the zine. Click on the image to download the zine.
Click on the image to download the zine. ([Español](/zines/8-cosas-tu-puedes-hacer-para-parar-ice)) Click on the image to download the zine.

Translations of Pre-2025 Zines

Español

Bahasa Indonesia

Italiano

Русский

Posters

Published in 2025

Click on the image to download the poster. ([Português Brasileiro](/posters/mercenarios-1), [Español](/posters/mercenarios-2025), [Español](/posters/mercenarios-a3)) Click on the image to download the poster.
Click on the image to download the poster. Click on the image to download the poster.
Click on the image to download the poster. Click on the image to download the poster. ([Español](/posters/demandas-mas-fantasticas))
Click on the image to download the poster. ([Italiano](/posters/may-day-significa-resistenza)) Click on the image to download the poster.
Click on the image to download the poster. Click on the image to download the poster.

Translations of Pre-2025 Posters

Français

Ελληνικά

Română

Articles

Published in 2025

Translations of Pre-2025 Articles

Български

Dansk

Deutsch

Español

Français

Ελληνικά

Italiano

Polski

Português Brasileiro

Русский

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Related Articles

Adventure

Sailing for Gaza

A Message from a Wayward American Yachtpunk in the Thousand Madleens to Gaza Flotilla

Catharsis: “Hope against Hope”

A New Full-Length Record from an Uncompromising Hardcore Band

Another War Was Possible

Revisiting the Movement against Capitalist Globalization from Our Dystopian Present

Analysis

At the Turning of the Tide

How to Fight Our Way out of the Trump Era

Resisting ICE in Chicago

Reflections on the Protests at the ICE Facility in Broadview

We Shut Elbit Down!

Reflections from the Cambridge, Massachusetts Campaign Against Elbit Systems

History

Sandinista! To Our Friends, 20 Years Later

In Memory of Timur Kacharava, Russian Anti-Fascist

“The One the State Missed”: Karl Garside, Animal Liberationist, 1966–2025

A Life Lived Freely in Defiance

Making Sense of the PKK’s Self-Dissolution

What Does It Mean for the Middle East?