We present a Portuguese-language zine collecting accounts from two tours in which participants in CrimethInc. projects traveled to launch publications and promote discussions on anarchism and anti-capitalist struggles in various parts of the world. Altogether, we visited 72 cities in the United States, Mexico, and Brazil.

The first tour brought together participants from struggles and social movements from six countries talking about their local experiences to audiences in 59 events, passing through 57 cities in the United States and Tijuana, Mexico in the course of 65 days. The speeches accompanied the launch of the pamphlet and campaign To Change Everything—An Anarchist Appeal. In the second tour, three people visited 15 cities in seven Brazilian states to launch and publicize the book Da Democracia à Liberdade, promoting 21 events with discussions on the topic and its relationship with current revolutionary struggles.

Edited by Brazilian comrades, this publication expands on reports previously published here in 2015 and 2019, reporting on our experiences with social centers, occupations, cooperatives, popular movements, and organizations that work to build a world free from the oppression of patriarchy, racism, capitalism, and the state, and to extend solidarity beyond all imposed borders.

Visiting those spaces and communities and learning from the life experiences of the participants can be inspiring for anyone seeking alliances and reference points regarding how to organize both locally and in international networks to confront this degrading system.

In order to build an international network that extends across borders, we must seek collective, bold and ambitious ways to work together, keeping our connections alive and active and always seeking and exchanging new challenges and solutions.

From South to North

“The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.”

–Marjane Satrapi

The reports in this collection aim to reverse a common trend in the exchange between the global north and south, which privileges the flow of information and knowledge from the north—Europe and the USA—towards the global South and the peripheries of capitalism. These reports describe the places of struggle we visited and that mark the history of the struggle of oppressed peoples around the world, such as Haymarket in Chicago, which gave rise to May Day, and the street of the Stonewall Inn bar, where the Stonewall uprising in 1969 marked the LGBTQI+ pride day.

Without a doubt, it is incredible to be able to enter those spaces and be entered by those stories. But we also have to talk about the memory of territories and traditions such as the Quilombo dos Palmares in northeastern Brazil or the Día de la Juventud Combatiente in Chile. How many dates and territories of our struggles should symbolize something greater not only locally but globally? It is possible that this debate will not end any time soon—if it should end. Perhaps it will only change with the struggles yet to come, the struggles that will decide the future of the oppressed classes, capitalism, and life on the planet as a whole.

As Marjane Satrapi states, the differences between peoples and their own governments are much greater than the difference between the American people and the Brazilian people. We must start from the similarities between peoples in struggle if we are to build international collaboration towards the end of society divided into classes, nations, and governments along with all forms of oppression.

We edited this collection while we were still living in a world dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic with no vaccines on the horizon—when traveling and face-to-face gatherings were off the table and spaces like the ones we had visited were focusing on organizing solidarity efforts to keep their communities active and healthy.

We hope that these modest travel reports can inspire you and your community in your projects—whether those include a social center, a cooperative, a collective, a union, a day of action, a book, a documentary, or a tour seeking ways to collaborate with others to build a different life and a new world from the rubble of this one.

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Appendix I: Our “Reach” in the Digital Age

In times when more and more people are focused on producing content for the internet, relying chiefly on corporate social media for reach, to say that we spoke to audiences comprising a total of 2000 or 3000 people on these tours may convey the impression that we were content with little. Although the accounts of our movements and collectives have tens of thousands of “followers,” we rarely have face-to-face and real contact with a number of people close to that.

It is essential to study the struggles of other times and places. But going there to experience these stories and these beautiful and scary places firsthand, taking a bit of our homes with us to offer something of our own in return, cannot be compared to the spectacular world that is offered to us by corporate media, social media, school courses, or books.

If we hadn’t hit the road, we wouldn’t have heard the song of the O’odham people to welcome us to their territory, we wouldn’t have heard the first-hand accounts of immigrants facing the terror of borders anonymously, we wouldn’t have witnessed the forests, deserts, mountains, nor the interior of the social centers that offered infrastructure for the uprisings in Baltimore and Ferguson. We wouldn’t have met Eronildes or learned that Brad Will is honored by the community for which he risked his life when he recorded the horror of an eviction carried out by the military police.

The virtual world that is expanding steadily into our lives, into our subjectivity, is shaping the way we see the world and act in it, so that we seek an image of what does not exist, an abstract representation. This is conditioning us to the idea that our actions themselves have meaning chiefly as images of struggle—not as change itself. We can use media as a tool to publicize events or protests, share books or articles, circulate photos or videos. But it is a mistake to imagine that this is enough. Only daily, collective, real work can guarantee us any progress: rolling up our sleeves and stepping on the ground, looking our comrades in the eyes. Immediate yet mediated global communication, digital and print media, can only complement concrete struggles.

That explains what we were looking for on those tours. We forged real connections that enabled us to return home to our movements—to our occupations, our collectives, our communities—and build another life.

We hope that this report motivates you not to be satisfied with the text, with the map, with the image—to seek real struggle in real worlds. See you on the road… or at the barricades!

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Appendix II: Audio and Video Footage

Here follow two videos from our 2019 tour of Brazil, in English with Portuguese subtitles. You can also hear a live audio recording in English from our 2015 tour of North America here.