Gentle reader, if you share our interest in long-term and effective struggle against the powers that be, let us direct your attention to The Center for Strategic Anarchy, a frequently updated online resource. The Center is a think tank dedicated to identifying and commenting upon important developments in global economics, culture, and politics, to equip anarchists to think strategically when choosing where and how to take on the status quo.

To quote the Center themselves:

This blog exists to bring matters of note to the attention of those seeking the destruction of hierarchy and the institutionalized perpetuation of misery, along with germane commentary and suitable analysis.* Most of these items are drawn from readily available mainstream news sources, which are chock-full of valuable information since our enemies can afford to make their strategies public—such is their hegemony and/or stupidity, depending on the enemy. There will also be some items drawn from the anarchist/radical press, when they detail matters of particular interest, but our goal is to provide a service not available elsewhere rather than to duplicate the anarchist media, so expect only occasional, relevant posts on “internal” news.

It is our hope that the Center’s efforts will help make strategic thinking the norm, a reflexive part of planning and formulating our projects, a way of thinking that posits us as players in an international geo-political struggle—rather than as idealists, beautiful idiots, or true believers who refuse to light a candle in the darkness because of a romantic insistence that faith alone will guide us.

The Center has already put forward several insightful analyses. Long before the Blackwater scandal, the Center published a report on Private Military Firms, arguing that in the post-9/11 series of wars capitalism is phasing out the nation-state as the primary enforcer of its projects and shifting its force into the hands of corporations—whose private contractors now outnumber government troops in Iraq, for example. In High Pressure, Low Pressure, the Center explicates the shifts taking place in America’s socio-economic landscape and the implications for anarchists seeking sites for intervention and resistance. And in Disasters: Now and Forever, the Center contributes to the post-Katrina dialogue on how anarchists can best equip themselves to deal with the consequences of large-scale disasters.

We commend this effort and hope to see more of our comrades engage in nuanced, ambitious projects like this.

*Editor’s note: Not balking at a nihilism that calls even for our own annihilation, we CWC ex-Workers too seek the destruction of “germane commentary and suitable analysis,” though that’s probably not what our friend at the Center was getting at in this unusually structured sentence.