Abolition Media, a popular counter-info site in the American anarchist space has had an interesting editorial presence since its founding. The site has focused almost solely on armed struggle and militant direct action while ignoring less risky anarchist praxis often covered by established anarchist media operations like It’s Going Down and Crimethinc. Because of Abolition Media’s emphasis on violent struggle, statements and analysis from allied authoritarian communists, such as incarcerated Black Maoists and Maoist guerillas fighting ISIS & the fascist Turkish state in Rojava were published alongside anarchist content without much criticism. However, as the years have gone on, Abolition Media is publishing less-and-less anarchist content, and increasingly more authoritarian propaganda.
In 2022, Abolition Media sympathetically interviewed a member of the Communist Party of the Philippines and uncritically published dozens of official National Democratic Front communiques while completely ignoring Filipino anarchists who rightly reject the NDF vanguardists for their collaboration with the State, murdering of their own cadre and a union leader, and nationalism.
If you have checked Abolition Media in the past six months, you will have noticed much of the site’s content is either official communiques from Palestinian resistance groups or analysis from Al-Mayadeen, a capitalist-owned, pro-Assad, pan-Arab news outlet.
To highlight Al-Mayadeen’s distance from anything resembling an abolitionist politic, let’s look how they defended the Iranian regime with rote campist talking points about 2022’s popular feminist uprising against the state:
As radicals, we often have to rely on reactionary media to understand the world and build our arguments (as I have done in this piece), but doing so is not the same thing as uncritically republishing their content within radical spaces.
The other chunk of Abolition Media’s Palestine coverage are direct statements by various Palestinian resistance groups. A recent from the Islamist group Tulkarm Brigade, based in the West Bank, and published by Abolition Media calls for Palestinian “traitors” to be “handed over to the police security apparatus” or face execution. Carceral statements like these highlight the contradiction between Abolition Media’s stated goal of being “a tool for movements dedicated to anarchist, abolitionist, and revolutionary perspectives” and a vulgar anti-imperialism that seems to drop any critical inquiry of any groups macho enough to hold a gun. Why is an anarchist/abolitionist counter-info site publishing a police statement? The slippery slope of valorizing armed struggle over all else has led Abolition Media to ignore that many of the groups they promote are trying to take over the nation-states they are struggling against, and if successful, will be in charge of new police forces required to maintain these new states. These new police forces will require abolishing, just as the current ones do. This is a very basic anarchist position that should not need repeating, but as Abolition Media’s own About page acknowledges, there are no good nation states. The seeds of nation states, even in the form of anti-imperialist tankie and Islamist groups that combat monsters like Benjamin Netanyahu and Bongbong Marcos, are still not our allies and don’t need a platform in anarchist spaces.
In March 2024, Abolition Media republished a RedStream Media article about Maoist guerrillas in Colombia. RedStream Media is a rebrand of RedFish, an English language subsidiary of the Russian-state controlled propaganda outlet RT. RedStream regularly praises Stalin and recently published a fawning revisionist history of the Communist Party of Peru – Shining Path that papers over the Maoist cult’s massacres of Indigenous peasants, queer people, and women in an attempt to “[rescue] the history that many have tried to censor.”
Similarly, Abolition Media recently republished a bootlicking puff piece about the authoritarian Cuban state, originally from Al-Mayadeen. Abolition Media’s republishing of this statist propaganda does not include any editorial note about the Cuban state’s repression of Anarchists(1,2,3), Afro-Cubans (14), and queers(15).
In my brief search, I even found a recent article that Abolition Media republished from the right-wing Libertarian magazine Reason. Reason is infamous for publishing Milton Friedman and Murray Rothbard, some of the worst authoritarian monsters in modern history who hold played a large role in building the current imperial landscape.
Despite their claim that they “stand in stark contrast to corporate and capitalist media, which push the disastrous agendas of nation states,” Abolition Media publishes more statements from authoritarian groups that are fighting to govern nation states, and news outlets that are either controlled by nation-states such as RedStream, or capitalist funded with strong alignment to specific nation-states, than they do statements from or about anarchists.
We should all study perspectives from different ideologies and milieus than our own, but to uncritically publish statements from authoritarians and state-aligned capitalist media under the banner of an “anti-state” and “anti-capitalist” counter-info site is at best deeply unprincipled, but is more than likely a more sinister form of tankie entryism to get anarchists to waiver from our anti-authoritarian principles. Whatever their intentions, Abolition Media’s clear editorial position on supporting armed struggle regardless of politics suggests a reactionary belief that ‘might makes right.’
I encourage all principled anarchists to cease contributions to Abolition Media and be careful to investigate what you’re actually reading when you’re on Abolition Media. More than likely it was written by individuals or groups that are or will be hostile to us. Abolition Media is flooding anarchist aggregator sites like Anarchist Federation with content written by people who seek to govern us and would throw us in prisons if given the chance.
Unravel is an american anarchist counter-info site that also hosts an up-to-date list of other counter-info sites that can be contributed to. It’s Going Down also hosts user submitted content, but no longer publishes spicy report backs.
As further reading, I recommend Always Against The Tanks for a deeper dive into the dangers of authoritarian communism.