Good afternoon, beloved -
Today — at the risk of some of this being inside baseball, for those of you who don’t follow the twists and turns of contemporary anarchist discourse — I want to explore some thoughts around Margaret Killjoy’s well-known dictum “Deëscalate all conflict that isn’t with the enemy,” and how it is we think about resistance in a time of fascism.
It’s the fact that we do live in such a time that lends this discussion its poignance and urgency, but, by the same token, raises its stakes sufficiently that the point I’m trying to make might well get lost in a blur of entirely understandable anxiety, fear and distress. I get that people’s lives are on the line, and therefore that they may be in no mood to entertain what might on the surface seem like a semantic quibble. Let me say, then, that I don’t think what I am about to propose is any such thing, but rather the result of some careful thinking on my part about the pragmatics of resistance to oppression.
Let me also make it clear that Margaret is someone I hold in an enormous amount of respect. She’s an anarchist, a writer of science fiction, a founder of the feminist black metal band Feminazgûl, and an indefatigable supporter of self-organized community preparedness efforts, which means I share with her a number of reasonably unusual commitments from the get-go. We vibe along multiple axes, have some perspectives in common that not a whole lot of people share. None of what I’m about to say, then, should be construed as in any way a criticism of her or her positions.
In her own words, Margaret is “probably best known” for the injunction against punching left — and, more broadly, against the schism and drama that so often cleave left communities, burning their energy and depriving them of effective power — that’s expressed in her dictum “Deëscalate all conflict that’s not with the enemy.”
When I first encountered this framing, I recognized Margaret’s intention instantly, and I’m pretty sure anyone who’s ever spent much time in left spaces will too. (There’s a reason that post did numbers, right? Left beef is exhausting.) A circumstance that many writers will be familiar with, though, is that the moment you succeed in expressing some complex understanding of the world with sufficient compactness and elegance for it to go viral, you realize that very compactness entails the risk of misrepresentation. The very nature of an aphorism of this sort tends to militate against nuance. And so it seems to have been for Margaret here, as regards the word and concept “enemy.”
Not long ago she returned to “deëscalate,” in an attempt to work through some of the tangles that have cropped up around it. (With apologies for the Substack link, here’s that thinking.) For Margaret in 2025, “anyone who wields the power of the state to destroy people’s lives is the enemy.” But there’s room for nuance here, in the notion that this “anyone” is not identical with the power they wield, which may well be an accident of history: “the short version is that accessing institutional power is a big part of what makes someone my enemy, and that ‘enemy’ must always be a non-intrinsic trait that people can leave behind.”
And here, of course, I want to shout “YES.” But why, then, identify individuals as “enemies” at all? Why confer that ontological status upon them, when we don’t have to? Maybe the quality of “enemyness” is something located in words, deeds, rhetorics, affects or policies, moreso than individual bodies.
Can that quality become stabilized in laws and institutions that are inimical to our survival? Surely. Can it be encoded in social structure and cultural expression? Absolutely; the writer Sophie Lewis gets at this, I think, in identifying the “enemy feminisms” that gives her most recent book its title. But I think there is something profoundly dangerous about the operation we perform when we define an individual person as an enemy, which is to say: someone so radically Other, and whose Otherness is so destabilizing, that their elimination is not merely authorized but commended to us, as a matter of our own survival.
But here I think I need to explain why I have a hard time with the “enemy” framing, and why I resist it so intensely.
First: for most situations, most of the time — even those involving some sharp contestation, with real material stakes — it’s an absurd bit of rhetorical overkill, plain macho chest-puffery. Here I incline to Chantal Mouffe’s view that the central task facing those of us who would aspire to a radically democratic way of being together is learning how to be agonistic without being antagonistic. You may well be my opponent or my adversary, on this issue at this time — but not my enemy, for chrissakes.
But we are not in such a situation, you will say. We are in a moment where the latent fascist tendencies of our society have breached the surface, have actualized in a way that threatens imminent harm. And you will be right. So let me explain why my reservations run far deeper still.
In political science, the word is most closely associated with the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, who in his 1932 book The Concept of the Political, famously argued that all politics boils down to the essential distinction between friend and enemy. As Schmitt would have it, not every form of contestation or agonism requires the physical destruction of the enemy — that would be “absolute enmity” — but what cannot be magicked away is that the enemy, in every facet of their being and cultural expression, constitutes an existential threat to one’s own way of life. The designation “enemy” always already carries, folded up within it, the possibility, and maybe even the wisdom, of dispensing with the person or group designated as such, to secure one’s own continued existence. It unavoidably opens onto a zero-sum, frankly eliminationist conception of the world.
For me, this means that defining someone as an enemy already constitutes a kind of microfascism to be avoided. In terms of perception, it is an opacity; in terms of moving energy through the body, a stuckness. It makes the world a worse, a more difficult and a more dangerous place for everyone. It can produce no beneficial outcome.
Yet the fact remains that we are under bodily threat — and some of us more acutely than others. What do we do with this knowledge? How are we supposed to act upon it?
Well, maybe an analogy is useful? Out of the desire to avoid the staticness and unproductive fixity of identity politics, it’s often enough said that anarchism is something you do, rather than something you are. Similarly, I’ve always felt uncomfortable describing myself as “a Buddhist,” and prefer to say instead, when asked, that I “practice Buddhism.”
So let me propose that enemyness is not a property that attaches to any individual. What constitutes “enemyness” is an intention toward harm. And here I remember something I once read about the great masters of aikido, something that they derived from their practice of Zen Buddhism (and, more distantly, from the Taoist cosmology that gave Zen its ontological grounding) that related to their understanding of physical combat. The essence of it is having sufficient compassion for the adversary that you will not permit them to harm themselves, or anyone else, by enacting whatever intention to harm they harbor within them. it is the intention toward harm that one seeks to eradicate in combat – or better yet, redirect in such a way that it dissipates harmlessly – and not the body bearing it.
So, yes, I get why it might appear to be the worst sort of cluelessly smug liberal privilege to say “I have no enemies.” But surely nobody would have accused the aikido masters of naiveté or sentimentality. I wouldn’t commend their way of thinking were it not also hugely, pragmatically effective — and if it did not ultimately portend better things for the conduct of our own being.
Once again: I understand that the “enemy” distinction speaks to a deadly serious set of conditions, and one that is clearly deadlier for some of us than for others. People’s lives are on the line — maybe, indeed, you have concrete reason to feel yours is. But the stakes are always high, and have never not been, requiring us to think, speak and act with the greatest possible clarity. Here I’m reminded of the words the late American Zen teacher Robert Aitken tells us were called out to the assembled sangha, just before retiring for sleep in the evening:
I beg to urge you, everyone:
life-and-death is a grave matter,
all things pass quickly away;
each of you must be completely alert:
never neglectful, never indulgent.
For me, that “complete alertness” includes perpetual openness to the possibility of recuperation, however remote. There are people who mean to do us harm, lethal harm, and that intention is odious. Our job must always be to neutralize the intention, and to deprive those who think of themselves as our adversaries of the means of enacting harm, without rancor, but with genuine compassion for whatever blockage it is in them that causes them to be this way. The point isn’t merely to avoid staring overlong into the abyss of their fear and enmity. It is to avoid becoming-abyssal ourselves.
There, that’s it. I’ve said my piece on the matter, and hopefully made my feelings clear. I hope you think no less of me for believing such things, but I cannot help it if you do. More broadly, I hope you find these reflections in some way useful or generative, for that’s the spirit in which I intend them — but that however you receive them, you and those you cherish are and remain safe from harm, before the enmity of those who would destroy us.
§ Right now I’m reading The Kindly Ones, which I can best characterize as “a Nazi Catch-22 narrated by an incestuous Hannibal Lecter”; Didion & Babitz; Matthew Ingram’s wonderful The Garden: Visionary Farmers and Growers of the Counterculture; and Stewart Home’s frustrating, disappointing Fascist Yoga; listening to the new Panopticon, the new Wrekmeister Harmonies and the new Malevich; and watching the entire season of Black Mirror at once.
That's it for now. As always, I hope that you are well, that you have your feet planted solidly on the good Earth, and that you are taking care of those who need you, taking care of yourself, and letting others take care of you. You have
all my faith,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 147 of Tuesday, 9 September 2025, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊