Victory Before We Even Hit the Streets
It was almost a miracle, not to mention a victory for our movement, that the mobilization in Miami happened at all. Miami was one of the most repressive police states North America has ever witnessed; the $8.5 million security plan, funded by federal anti-terrorism dollars, fortified an already incredibly brutal police force. In the days leading up to the event, paramilitary police stood guard on every downtown corner, arresting anyone who looked like they might be a protester. The media engaged in a smear campaign of lies and slander about anarchists, lionizing the police force that was to protect the city from these invading beasts. Plans for the protest seemed to grow murkier rather than clearer as... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) On Saturday, November 13, a new and experimental infoshop in Winona, MN, opened it’s doors to the public. The Burrow is one of the first new infoshops to open since the controversial essay “5 Steps to Reviving Your Failing Anarchist Bookstore”, and at a time when long-standing infoshops are throwing in their towels, this account offers insight into the new models still unseen.
This story begins where our coverage of small-town organizing left off in Rolling Thunder #7. What follows is not only an account and recipe for a new type of space, but a possible intermediate step in anarchist organizing in long-term communities.
If You Build It …
Early on, the plan was to put a space in our home. Our friends and colleagu... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Let’s be clear: we don’t endorse shooting, stabbing, bombing, garroting, guillotining, or electrocuting the President of the United States. Yes, we’ve published a convincing argument that, if there were any justice in this world, “Donald Trump would walk across the desert on a broken ankle, pursued by helicopters and armed men with dogs, before dying of dehydration, terrified and alone, within miles of hospital facilities—as he has forced others to do simply in hopes of rejoining their families.” But we would argue strenuously against anyone attempting to inflict this fate on him. On the contrary, we hope Donald Trump will die of natural causes—and the sooner the better, before anyone gets any crazy... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) A burner phone is a single-use phone, unattached to your identity, which can theoretically be used to communicate anonymously in situations where communications may be monitored. Whether or not using a burner phone is itself a “best practice” is up for debate, but if you’ve made the choice to use one, there are several things you should keep in mind.
Burner phones are not the same as disposable phones.
A burner phone is, as mentioned above, a single-use phone procured specifically for anonymous communications. It is considered a means of clandestine communication, and its efficacy is predicated on having flawless security practices. A disposable phone is one you purchase and use normally with the understanding that it ma... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) We know that police violence is a real problem in the US, and it makes sense that people are strategizing ways to protect themselves and their loved ones from being assaulted or murdered by the police. Many who are concerned about this issue have begun advocating for police to wear video cameras on their uniforms. The idea is that cameras will prevent police violence, or at least hold officers accountable after the fact. Groups like Campaign Zero (a reformist Black Lives Matter offshoot) and the American Civil Liberties Union are advocating this measure, and even police departments themselves, after initial resistance, have signed on. But the idea that more cameras translates to better accountability (however we define this) relies on a fau... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Ten years ago, Hamburg, Rostock, and the woods around the tiny German town of Heiligendamm witnessed massive confrontations as anarchists and other rebels attempted to interrupt and delegitimize the summit of the world’s eight most powerful nations. As the 2017 G20 Summit looms in Hamburg this July, we revisit the demonstrations that took place against the G8 summit in 2007—to seek strategic insights, study how the terrain has changed, and illustrate what it is like to lead lives of passionate resistance.
Hamburg, May 28: Preludes to Summits
Finally, something was happening.
After linking arms in flanks for five hours straight in a huge permitted march, we were getting antsy. This was the first major demonstration in the buil... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Starting Monday, in response to draconian sentences imposed on politicians who promote Catalan independence, tens of thousands of people across Catalunya have engaged in sustained rioting and disruption. Although the majority of the movement remains pacifistic, a few thousand participants have rejected the leadership of political parties and organizations, opting for open confrontation with police. The various mobilizations are still taking place in confluence, however, making it very difficult for the police to control. Protesters have reportedly used caltrops, Molotov cocktails, and paint balloons to disable police riot vans, while keeping individual officers at a distance with lasers and slingshots and driving away helicopters with firew... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The supposed ceasefire announced by US Vice President Mike Pence is a deadly fraud. Its only purpose is to enable the Trump administration to wash its hands of the bloodshed that the Turkish military is perpetrating while shifting the discourse to blame the victims for continuing to resist. If anything, this fake ceasefire is a greater betrayal than Donald Trump’s original decision to give Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the green light to invade Rojava and carry out ethnic cleansing against the Kurdish people there in the same way he has in Turkey.
The terms of the agreement between Turkey and the US follow this text as an appendix.
By declaring surrender unilaterally on behalf of the people who have been defending them... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) On Friday, August 11, a wide range of far-right groups from around the US gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia for a march the night before their “Unite the Right” rally. Hundreds of them carrying lit torches paraded across the town with very little visible police presence. The streets were largely empty, thanks to a request from Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe. When the march arrived at the foot of the statue of Thomas Jefferson ringed by a few dozen counterprotesters, the men with torches surrounded it and attacked them.
Until now, some of the participants have been coy about their politics. Now that they have all joined in explicitly fascist chants like “blood and soil” while many of them raised their arms in ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Since the revolt in Ecuador spread to Chili, the conflict has escalated rapidly. The government has called in the military and declared martial law, but people refuse to leave the streets, continuing to create an ungovernable situation. Despite the swift cancellation of the metro fair increase that first triggered the protests, their anger runs much deeper; many throughout the country are enraged by the dramatic disparities in wealth and power that capitalism has created and infuriated by the president’s decision to attempt to crush protest by means of the military—a strategy that recalls the military dictatorship of 1973–1990. Strikes and protests are taking place around the country today—in Punta Arenas, Concepci&o... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) So, you’ve decided to encrypt your communications. Great! But which tools are the best? There are several options available, and your comrade’s favorite may not be the best for you. Each option has pros and cons, some of which may be deal breakers—or selling points!—for you or your intended recipient. How, then, do you decide which tools and services will make sure your secrets stay between you and the person you’re sharing them with, at least while they’re in transit?
Keep in mind that you don’t necessarily need the same tool for every situation; you can choose the right one for each circumstance. There are many variables that could affect what constitutes the “correct” tool for each s... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Direct action, simply put, means cutting out the middleman: solving problems yourself rather than petitioning the authorities or relying on external institutions. Any action that sidesteps regulations and representation to accomplish goals directly is direct action—it includes everything from blockading airports to helping refugees escape to safety and organizing programs to liberate your community from reliance on capitalism. Here we present a step-by-step guide to organizing and carrying out direct action, from the first planning stages to the debrief at the end, including legal support, media strategy, and proper security.
There are countless scenarios in which you might want to employ direct action. Perhaps representatives of des... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Scientific consensus has finally emerged that global warming is taking place as a result of industrial capitalism and with dire consequences for life on earth. Corporate efforts to bribe scientists to argue otherwise are attracting fewer and fewer takers; this is especially telling in view of how many researchers depend on industry backing. But rather than engaging with the fact that capitalism itself is destructive, governments and liberal environmentalists are promoting corporate responses to the problems posed by climate change.
If we really believed what scientists are telling us about global warming, the fire engines of every fire department would sound their sirens and race to the nearest factory to extinguish its furnaces. Every hi... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Here’s an exercise to try at home. You will need a working stopwatch, or another timepiece that measures seconds. Before you begin, seat yourself in a comfortable chair and loosen your clothing.
Watch the second hand as it passes around the face of the clock. Picture the moment of your death, perhaps many decades in the future, or perhaps only a few years or months (who can know?). Wait for the second hand to reach the starting point at the top of the clock face, and then watch as it records the passing of one minute of your life. Now imagine the clock counting down the minutes of your life to the moment of your death. Try this exercise picturing this moment a few decades in the future, then repeat it picturing the moment next year. ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) On April 23, 2016, hundreds of people gathered to oppose a rally called by the Ku Klux Klan at Stone Mountain Park, Georgia. This convergence brought together a wide range of groups committed to shutting down the KKK. The crowd circumvented several blockades consisting of hundreds of local officers, riot police, and state SWAT teams to reach the parking lot where the white supremacists were assembling.
This was just one of many events in the wave of black-led revolt since the eruption in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014 following the murder of Mike Brown. To understand the context of what happened in Stone Mountain, we have to pan back across the struggles of the preceding years. In this report, we recount the demonstrations that led up t... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Following the popular rebellion in Hamburg during the 2017 G20 summit, the German state has sought to crack down violently on dissent. In August, the police shut down the most widely used German-language platform for radical politics. In September, the neo-fascist party Alternative für Deutschland secured seats in the German parliament. On December 5, police carried out 24 raids on leftist and autonomous infrastructure across Germany, seizing laptops, cell phones, and other means of communication. On December 18, the police published photos of people they accuse of participating in the G20 protests. Four days later, an anonymous threatening letter arrived at various autonomous centers around Berlin. Together, these events indicate a ra... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) On June 4, shortly after Jeremy Christian murdered two people who intervened when he was harassing two teenage women of color on a Portland commuter train, nationalists organized a rally in downtown Portland, inviting “patriots” such as Kyle Chapman to come speak in favor of carrying out violent attacks on anti-fascists and others. In response, anarchists and other opponents of fascism converged in downtown Portland, despite a massive police operation to reserve the space for nationalists. In this account, one participant offers a full report on the day’s events.
My crew and I were nervous going into the protest against the nationalist “Patriot Prayer” rally in Portland on June 4. We had talked in advance abo... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Our anonymous interlocutor traces the prehistory and development of contemporary Israeli anarchism, touching on the origins of punk and the animal rights movement in Israel and presenting a critical analysis of the trajectory of Anarchists Against the Wall. He concludes by reflecting on the function of nonviolence rhetoric in the conflict between Israel and Palestine. We strongly recommend this interview to anyone interested in the Israel/Palestine conflict or, for that matter, in the strategic challenges of formulating an anarchist opposition in adverse conditions.
Is there any continuity connecting the contemporary Israeli anarchist movement to currents preceding the countercultural surge of the early ’90s?
None whatsoever, unfort... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) How many hours a day do you spend in front of a television screen? A computer screen? Behind an automobile windscreen? All three screens combined? What are you being screened from? How much of your life comes at you through a screen, vicariously?
Is watching things as exciting as doing things? Do you have enough time to do all the things that you want to? Do you have enough energy to? Why? And how many hours a day do you sleep? How are you affected by standardized time, designed solely to synchronize your movements with those of millions of other people? How long do you ever go without knowing what time it is? Who or what controls your minutes and hours? The minutes and hours that add up to your life? Are you saving time? Saving it up for ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The following text appeared yesterday on the French platform lundimatin; they describe it as the best sociological and political analysis to date on the yellow vest movement. Although we are no more optimistic about the “non-ideological” character of the first phase of the yellow vest phenomenon than we are about the antiquated methods of organization it supplanted, the movement itself has become a battleground to determine what form the next wave of opposition to neoliberal austerity will assume—and no one can afford to stand aside. This text concludes with a cool-headed appraisal of the risks and possibilities before the gilets jaunes and all who will follow in their wake.
“I’ll end up becoming a commun... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) This is a brief statement followed by personal accounts detailing the events of a controversial disruption that happened at the end of the CrimethInc. Convergence in Pittsburgh this July. These texts have been written by some anarchist people of color who participated in the convergence and were present the night of the disruption. There has been some discussion about it on the internet, but we hope to offer people more context from our perspectives about that night. Still, mostly questions remain about how to proceed. Hopefully at least, these accounts will provoke honest, open, humble conversations about all of the issues raised, so that we can figure out how to move forward as radical communities in struggle.
There is so much ground to ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) submitted by CWC supernumerary B. Traven, on behalf of the Far East cell
Inveterate comrades and enemies—
It’s been a full three years since our last outlandishly ambitious project, and you may be wondering what became of us. Sure, we started a magazine and did a couple Green Scare benefit projects, but that hardly compares to the high-water mark of our activity in the past. Have we finally accepted that we will not change the world? Are we out of ideas?
We’re excited to report that over the past year, while we seemed to be slowing down, we were actually preparing a new wave of activity—which will commence at the end of this month with the publication of our next book. The projects we are about to debut are by far... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) AK Press has just published a collection of interviews with anarchist authors who write fiction, entitled Mythmakers and Lawbreakers. The interviewees include Ursula Le Guin, Derrick Jensen, Alan Moore, Starhawk, and an anonymous CrimethInc. ex-worker. The interview references two children’s books, The Secret World of Terijian and The Secret World of Duvbo, that are neither published by nor available through CrimethInc. Far East.
CrimethInc. is a collective entity that invites open participation: anyone can write, organize, and publish under the name. For the past decade or so they have turned out an incredible body of books, in many ways revitalizing the world of anarchist publishing. Their books are high quality, available quite ch... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Crimethink can be reached from the subway station only by means of a daring double somersault. It is only a multiple orgasm away from the checkout counter of the grocery store, and a mere lobbed brick distant from the witness bench of the courtroom, but it is much harder to access from the closed playpens of your homes, schools, workplaces, and punk rock clubs—only a mystical revelation or masterless revolution will suffice. Crimethink riots rather than diets, so as to love itself body and soul.
Crimethink cannot be captured by the cameras of the photojournalists. Crimethink dies on its feet before it lives on its knees, but it’s more likely to be found on the run in between… just like you, perhaps.
Crimethink is the bu... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Intellectuals have quite an aptitude for displacement — when they suffer from the ennui of their dry, disembodied existence, they respond to this suffering not with action but with more desiccating and disembodying. All too often their real discontent ends up being diverted into theory and abstract analysis, and from there back into career and status… and thus, more status quo.
Ideology creeps quickly into any language, languages that seek to oppose it no less. It might well be that the language of radical theory, dreary and unbearable as it was with so many academic code words and so much talk about “responsibility” and self-sacrifice and the inevitability of history, would have died out on its own (and right on t... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Today, April Fool’s Day, 2006, we announce the third printing of our free anarchist primer, Fighting For Our Lives, which is once again available from us in bulk throughout North America. This printing of 150,000 brings the total print run of this pamphlet to 500,000 copies, the target we set for this project three and a half years ago.
A half million copies of a paper is a lot in some circles, but in our eyes, this is the very least we can do to help keep the anarchist alternative accessible. We would like to see a similar level of activity from all other anarchist groups, whether that takes the form of outreach, artistic expression, community infrastructure, labor organizing, mass mobilizations, sabotage, or other means of struggle... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) If we are to stand a ghost of a chance of surviving the increasingly imminent catastrophe our culture is hurtling toward, we must learn to adapt to new habitats. We must be able to migrate with the seasons, to intermingle with unlikely allies and long lost cousins, to hunt for opportunities to gather momentum as if our lives depended on it. This is a true story about a time when we did some of these things with a measure of success.
We received a spectral smoke signal of nybbles and bytes requesting our presence in the cold plains of Oneida, New York. Not knowing what to expect, our hearty band of improbable and impermissible white wanderers from the flatlands of the South journeyed to the snowy plains of Oneida. Following directions hasti... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Remember how differently time passed when you were twelve years old? One summer was a whole lifetime, and each day passed like a month does for you now. For everything was new: each day held experiences and emotions that you had never encountered before, and by the time that summer was over you had become a different person. Perhaps you felt a wild freedom then that has since deserted you: you felt as if anything could happen, as if your life could end up being virtually anything at all. Now, deeper into that life, it doesn’t seem so unpredictable. The things that were once new and transforming have long since lost their freshness and danger, and the future ahead of you seems to have already been determined by your past.
It is thus t... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) “Dear citizens, this is your police,” proclaimed a loudspeaker from behind a line of armored water cannons on Friday afternoon, July 7. A handful of unarmed young people dressed in bright colors were playing with an inflatable protest prop in the middle of an intersection on Willy-Brandt-Strasse over a kilometer away from the site of the G20 summit. A moment later, the water cannons attacked, knocking people down under the force of the blast. This scene played out again and again throughout the week, as over-equipped police bullied and terrorized the population of Hamburg. These are your police.
The next day, during Saturday’s peaceful, permitted demonstration, the police once more could not restrain themselves. After the... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Support and solidarity! We’re inspired by the occupations on Wall Street and elsewhere around the country. Finally, people are taking to the streets again! The momentum around these actions has the potential to reinvigorate protest and resistance in this country. We hope these occupations will increase both in numbers and in substance, and we’ll do our best to contribute to that.
Why should you listen to us? In short, because we’ve been at this a long time already. We’ve spent decades struggling against capitalism, organizing occupations, and making decisions by consensus. If this new movement doesn’t learn from the mistakes of previous ones, we run the risk of repeating them. We’ve summarized some of ou... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)