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The Anti-Deportation Collective : Fighting the Machinery of Deportation in France in the 1990s

2025-03-26T22:29:00Z

In the following account, the author recounts scenes from the movement against deportations in Paris in the late 1990s. As Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their lackeys scapegoat the undocumented and kidnap immigrants who oppose genocide even when they hold green cards, it is a good time to study how people have resisted the violence of the state in other times and places.

This is adapted from the forthcoming memoir Another War Is Possible, narrating experiences from the global movement against fascism and capitalism at the turn of the century. If you’re interested in reading the rest of the book, you can back it on Kickstarter now.

Gare de Lyon: Paris, May 5, 1998

It’s early evening and Sophie and I are sitting in the long-distance-train waiting area of Paris’s Gare de Lyon, one of Europe’s busiest train stations. All around us are travelers scurrying to and fro. Stressed-out tourist families, a camera still flung around Dad’s neck, rushing their kids through the station mix with tired-looking businessmen waiting to get back home.

“You did a great job with your outfit,” she says to me as she looks me over from head to toe. I met Sophie at an action (or demonstration, or concert, or something of the sort) about a year ago, and we have been inseparable at political events since. She is my age, a student at Paris’s Lycée Autogéré (Self-Managed High School),¹ and if I didn’t know very well the context in which she’s making this comment, I might think she’s flirting with me.

“You’re looking pretty good yourself,” I respond in kind.

She has managed to transform herself into the spitting image of your perfectly forgettable average French teenage girl. Basically, she looks like a younger Sporty Spice in her Adidas tracksuit and sneakers. I, on the other hand, have gone with a significantly preppier look: khaki pants, polo shirt, nondescript jacket, and moccasins. She looks at me again, pauses, and slightly withdraws her compliment: “It’s not the most functional wardrobe, though. The khakis stand out and the moccasins probably aren’t great for running.”

I shrug. “I did what I could. I was mainly concerned with getting this far.”

While we are sitting among the tourists and businessmen, doing our best to look like a somewhat mismatched young teenage couple waiting for a train back to their city, we are in fact not travelers, and the correct term for our attire is not outfit but disguise. We are not here to take a train, but to stop one. A train that transports imprisoned human beings against their will every single night. The 21:03 to Marseille, otherwise known to us as the deportation train.

Our objective is to stop the Paris-to-Marseille overnight train, which the French National Railway Company, better known for its French initials SNCF, permits the French government to use to transport North African immigrants, usually of Algerian or Moroccan origin, by rail to Marseille. Once in the port city, they are expelled from French territory by boat. The attempt to block this train is an idea born of the Collectif Anti-Expulsions (Anti-Deportation Collective), and it was decided that if we were to have any chance of success, we should disguise ourselves as best as possible and infiltrate the station in small groups, since trying to march in there as a demonstration probably wouldn’t get us very far.

The Anti-Deportation Collective

The CAE, officially formed only a few weeks earlier in early April 1998, was an autonomous collective born in the heat of the movement of the sans-papiers of the mid-’90s, a French term meaning “without papers” that refers to the movement against the deportation of undocumented immigrants and in favor of their “legalization.” The collective’s broadly accepted guiding principles² were as simple as they were clearly steeped in anarchist modes of organization, thought, and action:

Practical opposition to deportations.
We are not “allies” to the sans-papiers, we struggle with them out of motivations and convictions that are our own.
These motivations vary among individuals, but are in all cases rooted in anti-capitalism.
The collective is autonomous and collaborates with sans-papiers collectives that are autonomous not merely in theory, but in practice.
Decisions are made by way of general assembly.

The plight of the sans-papiers had exploded into the public consciousness following a series of highly publicized church occupations in 1996 by undocumented immigrants themselves. This culminated on August 23, 1996 in a raid in which nearly two thousand police officers stormed the Saint-Bernard church, resulting in the detention of 210 undocumented immigrants.

After that, solidarity demonstrations with the sans-papiers in Paris regularly numbered in the tens of thousands, with the participants—and their demands and methods of action—representing the broad spectrum of the French center left and radical left. This included the Communist Party and the CGT union, but likewise the sizable anarchist blocs of the CNT, Anarchist Federation, Alternative Libertaire, SCALP, and everything in between. Importantly, the sans-papiers themselves were organized into several collectives and structures; they were active and leading participants in their own struggles. As with all communities, they were not a monolith. Within the sans-papiers organizations, one could find a similarly broad spectrum of ideas and strategies in regards to demands, objectives, and methods of action.

While the sans-papiers organizations, regardless of their politics, were limited in their methodology by the logical constraints of their situation—the fact that an arrest or identity control could quickly lead to a possible deportation with devastating, even deadly, potential consequences—the reformist organizations were unsurprisingly bound by the constraints of their respect for legality and their acceptance of the basic premises of states and borders and the idea that a human being should in some way or another be bound by the possession of a particular piece of paper, or lack thereof, based on their place of birth.

Or, even more absurdly, as is the case in France, their bloodline.

We anarchists, on the other hand, had no such constraints. Our solidarity with what were clearly some of the most oppressed and marginalized groups in society—workers, people of color, many of them women, escaping from what were some of the most horrendous conflicts in the world at that time—was immediate and instinctive. But through our position of unconditional solidarity with the sans-papiers and the assertion that in the world we are fighting for, no human will ever be illegal and freedom of movement will be for people and not just for commodities, we articulated a position of necessary rupture with the concepts of states and borders. If our demands could not be granted by the state and our objective could not be realized within the framework of its existence, then it naturally followed that we would not look to the state to grant those things.

Consequently, we were embarking on a concrete struggle to prevent deportations and make it possible for people to live where they chose and how they chose. The same stance toward the state applied in this struggle as in our abstract analysis: the state was our enemy, and we were determined to wage war against it within the appropriate context of the time and situation we found ourselves in, in hopes of preventing it from carrying out its objectives. The greater our success, hand in hand with those sans-papiers who were open to our solidarity and methods, the greater our collective power would grow as a movement and the greater the degree of agency, autonomy, and freedom we would be able to realize.

We were not making demands, but seeking to force concessions and create realities. Concretely, that meant that deportations are for stopping. To do so, we would attack the state’s machinery of deportation, its infrastructure, and the enterprises that collaborated with it and benefited economically from assisting with the hunting, caging, and expelling of human beings.

We did so out of solidarity, out of conviction, but also with the explicit understanding that despite our privileges and different realities, our struggle was the same as theirs. In fighting alongside the sans-papiers, as accomplices rather than allies, we were also fighting for ourselves:

“Their situation makes us all more precarious in labor relations, the repression and control developed against them will affect us eventually as well, the hardening of borders is also a barrier to our freedom of movement, because we are also foreigners to this world and we will be pushed further and further into clandestinity (by choice but also by necessity if we are to live our desires) by the constant evolution of the law and the states.”³

The 21:03 to Marseille

So there we are, sitting under the elegant industrial-era steel and glass roof so typical of venerable European train stations—a fittingly dramatic setting for the impending confrontation. We are waiting anxiously for the moment when an unknown number of cops will appear, escorting what I expect will be a handcuffed individual through the hall, at which point we are to spring into action and form a human chain to prevent them from loading him onto the train. Failing that, we are to do everything we can to prevent the train from departing. We are not pacifists, and while there is a general consensus that our side will avoid unnecessary escalations, there is an equally clear agreement that the priority is not optics, but accomplishing a concrete and tangible objective.

Nonetheless, I’m anxious about our chances of success. “Do you see any familiar-looking faces?” I ask worriedly. I’m scanning the hall as best I can and I don’t like what I see.

“No, I can’t even see Alan or Mary. I wonder if they made it in.” Mary is another Lycée Autogéré student and Sophie’s best friend, while Alan is slightly older and the token cliché-looking punk—complete with mohawk and faux leather jacket—in our little youth affinity group.

Not one of us is old enough to be a legal adult, yet the four of us already have a fair amount of experience getting into trouble with the state. We met at a Comité d’Action Lycéen (CAL, or “High School Action Committee”) meeting, a place that can only be described as a breeding ground for high-school-age anarchists.

We’re young, fanatical, and unencumbered by wage slavery enough to enjoy ample free time, which we use to be regulars at every demonstration, action, occupation, political squat, concert, debate, and confrontation within the greater Paris area. When we’re not doing that, we’re spending our nights together drinking, getting stoned, and listening to Ska-P’s “El vals del obrero” in the catacombs under the streets of Paris. Or at least the others are—myself, I’ve discovered Sergei Nechayev’s Catechism of the Revolutionist and concluded that my mind and body are weapons for revolutionary struggle, so I should keep them free of drugs and alcohol. This makes me lots of fun at parties.

Still, no matter how combative we may be, no matter how sharp I keep my proverbial weapons, if there are only twenty of us when the cops show up, this is probably not going to go well. “Fucking unions,” Sophie mutters under her breath. “What are they good for if they can’t even bring out fifty people for something like this?” Her complaint is directed at SUD, short for Solidaire, Unitaire, Démocratique (“In Solidarity, United, Democratic”), a small leftist union born in the aftermath of the 1995 general strike, whose railway branch had promised to mobilize for this action.

I shrug. “Who knows, it’s not like we know what they look like. Maybe it’ll work out.”

I’m trying to be positive, because this is the route we have chosen; if we’re at the ball, we might as well dance. It doesn’t seem like there are many alternatives available, anyway. A couple of weeks earlier, we were able to occupy the tracks, successfully delaying the train for a few hours. The cops eventually cleared the tracks via a liberal use of batons and CS gas, and when we returned a few days later, we found an army of police guarding the tracks.

“Look, look, right there!” Sophie points to one of the entrances to the hall, her voice trembling with a mix of excitement and anger. I’m just spotting what she is pointing at, a young man probably in his twenties being led by an escort of seven or eight cops, when immediately my concerns about our numbers today are erased. From every corner of the hall comes a loud burst of disapproving whistling, followed immediately by what seems like the entire crowded hall erupting in thunderous chants of “Non, non, non… aux expulsions!” amplified and rendered even more urgent by the echoes generated by the closed space in which we find ourselves.

The first few people rise from their seats, sprint over to where the line of CRS riot police are guarding access to the platform and the train, and link arms. A few more join them. Then dozens more. Friends and comrades appear from everywhere among the crowd. The chants declaring that no human being is illegal ring loud and constant as we too join the human chain. There are hundreds of us! There are so many of us that we form two lines across the opening to the platform—one facing the cops who were already stationed there to prevent us from attempting to get access to the tracks, and another facing back toward the hall, preventing the cops who are escorting a captive from reaching the train. Sophie and I find ourselves in the first of those two lines.

The next few minutes pass in an adrenaline-fueled blur. The sight of the person we are trying to protect from deportation right in front of us illustrates poignantly what is at stake, and the disconcerted looks of his police escort only embolden us. Clearly, they aren’t sure whether to push through or abort.

The police are familiar with resistance to deportations. We regularly show up at airports, informing passengers as well as airline workers about what is happening on their flights and what their employers are making them unwilling accomplices to, urging passengers to refuse to fly on flights that are simultaneously prisoner transports. We have had varying degrees of success. We’ve tried to disrupt and prevent deportations too, as we did a few weeks earlier at this same spot.

But we’ve never done this.

At least, never by the hundreds, never with the palpable feeling that we might actually succeed. I think the cops sense that, too.

The next scene is of an extreme and almost intimate violence. Clearly, the order has been given to clear access to the train. CS gas and batons fly all around us. We are not armed. We have no flagpoles, no helmets, not even the cloth of a banner to protect ourselves with. Masks cover our faces while linked arms keep us together, but this leaves us practically defenseless against the baton blows. With neither word nor warning, the riot cop directly to my right pulls out a metal retractable baton from the inside pocket of his jacket, and in one swift motion he extends it and brings it down with a thud against the head of a comrade next to me. I hear the crack and immediately see blood gushing from the wound at the top of his forehead. His arms go limp, and the best I can do is kind of release my arm, which I have linked around his, and push him backward as he slumps, so that he falls toward the line of comrades facing the station and not at the feet of these unhinged cops.

Before I can assess the wisdom of this course of action, I am already instinctively launching a kick at the stomach of the cop who has injured my neighbor. This cop has been sneering at us since we stood up, waiting for his moment to injure a “gauchiste de merde,” the French for “piece-of-shit leftist,” which is exactly what nationalists and fascists like to call us in Argentina, as well. Sophie yells for me to get back, but her voice barely registers on my radar. Comrades break the line to carry away the injured friend just as I broke ranks with my kick. Still others, blinded or unable to breathe due to the CS gas, also break ranks and retreat.

The young Algerian is forced onto the train. The following week’s edition of Le Monde Libertaire, the weekly newspaper of the francophone Anarchist Federation, later reported⁴ that the train

“departed with a delay of thirty minutes. […] The train would stop several kilometers farther, in Melun, waiting for another train transporting approximately half of its original passengers.”

The missing passengers had been unable to board due to the clashes between demonstrators and police.

“The train was again stopped at the Lyon-Perrache station around 2:30 am by activists there, but not before having made an unscheduled stop at L’Estaque station to disembark the prisoners and place them in the detention center at Arenc, as the cops were concerned about the possible actions of further demonstrators in Marseille.”

There are still two clearly defined fronts inside the waiting area. We are standing on one side, now about twenty meters or so away from the trains.

A small group of people start to leave—about twenty people, all wearing high-visibility vests. They are the SUD railway trade unionists, who had shown up to the action after all, but decided that with the departure of the train, their participation was over.

The rest of us still number solidly in the hundreds. In the grand scheme of things, that’s nothing. It’s poor attendance even at a third-division football match, barely enough people to fill a subway car. Even a strictly anarchist demonstration in Paris could number into the thousands. But in my eyes at that moment, these people are the whole world. Who cares about numbers, optics, or the opinion of sheep? I feel at home among these two hundred who have put their bodies behind the conviction that no human being is illegal, who have shown with their actions that the state and its agents are to be confronted head-on.

Rather two hundred ultra-leftists, adventurists, extremists, or whatever else they may call us than two thousand who will stand idly by because party or union discipline says now is not the moment and this is not the way—or twenty thousand who will march down the street with us proclaiming that no human being is illegal, only to placidly continue with their day while others are dragged, often drugged and bound, to prisoner transports. I’m grateful for the participation of the sympathizer, the unionist, the party member, the reformist. I understand we need them to exert political pressure. But I feel now that my place is with the militants and the fighters, no matter the numbers.

In front of us is a wall of riot cops, now too far to reach us with their gas and truncheons. The idea of police as the armed guards that enforce the dictatorship of capital through the state-sanctioned monopoly of violence gave way to a much more urgent feeling—a burning hatred of those who hurt my friends in order to perpetrate injustice. Whoever wears that uniform is the immediate means of our oppression and therefore my enemy.

Somebody has come back from another track with a backpack full of stones. As the chants against deportation continue to roar, a few dozen of us attack the cops. There’s sadness and frustration still, because we failed, but there is also joy. There is a feeling of collective refusal and liberation.

Too Much and Never Enough

As we finally make our retreat from the station, smashing security cameras, advertisement panels, and automated ticket counters along the way, I am already thinking about the young Algerian whose deportation we were trying to stop. Tonight wasn’t about making an abstract political statement against deportations. It wasn’t a militant yet still symbolic action against the machinery of expulsion and the barbarism that categorizes human beings based on where they happen to have been born. The objective was to stop the kidnapping of a specific human being. And while there is still some distant hope that comrades farther down the line, in Lyon or in Marseille, might still succeed, we, at least, have failed, and my mind is already focused on how I, or we collectively, can do more.

Despite my concerns that we didn’t do enough, the very next day, I am confronted with the press and the good citizens of Paris howling that we did too much. I pick up a newspaper on the way to school and find articles pontificating about the extremists at the train station, outraged at the disorder, condemning the supposed outbreak of violence. Too much disorder, too much violence—words coming from exasperated good citizens of Paris as they walk past me at the very same train station and see the smashed ticket-vending machines. The constant hand-wringing about “the extreme left, emboldened, becoming increasingly aggressive, violent, and dangerous” has only intensified since the election of the socialist and communist center-left government coalition.

What was damaged? As I make my way through the station, I take note of the “damage.” The only damage to the station is to the machines that hinder our freedom of movement and convert the need to get from one place to another into an economic consideration. To the advertising panels that pollute public space and turn any place where the human eye might rest its gaze into propaganda for the constant consumption of goods we don’t need. And finally, to the increasingly ubiquitous security cameras, ensuring that anyone who rejects this system of consumption and control can be more efficiently surveilled and criminalized.

What precious order did we disrupt? If the order they are referring to is this superficial peace and tranquility that has nothing to do with justice, then the problem is not that we were violent or disorderly but that we effectively disrupted the orderly procedures of oppression. The order of those who prefer the continuation of oppression as long as they can turn a blind eye to it—or worse, celebrate it in the name of nationalism or racism—to the turbulence of the struggle to end it.

Violence? We threw some stones, probably injured nobody. The injured were on our side, those who faced the armed forces of the state with not much more than our bodies and the occasional flying object. What is a few smashed ticketing machines and advertisements compared to the violence we witnessed? The violence that takes place constantly, unceasingly, in every immigrant neighborhood swept by kidnappers working for the state—during every ticket control in the subway that triggers a domino effect that ends in deportation—on flights leaving constantly with prisoners, often drugged and handcuffed, transported as human cargo against their will.

In regards to the life of this man, I don’t intend to shock or traumatize with speculations about what his fate might be, what his circumstances were, whether he was torn from a family, a partner, a project, his dreams. It doesn’t matter. I assert his freedom to live as he chooses and where he chooses because my anarchism demands this as a minimum condition of human dignity and a rejection of the system of states and borders that I seek to destroy. This violence, this war on individuals in the name of states and nations, is the only relevant violence here, the violence that is carried out in the defense of oppression.

It is a machine of violence built to protect and perpetuate the system of exploitation and human suffering that pits human against human in a needless struggle for survival. A machine that has colonized the minds of people to such an extent that they can only recognize violence at the point of impact—the fist striking a face, the rock striking the policeman’s shield—and only when it interrupts the order that ordinarily inflicts it.

This renders invisible the ceaseless unspeakable violence that flows from the system of nations, capital, and class society: death due to lack of access to health care, famine and hunger created by artificial scarcity, workplace accidents and deaths caused by the drive to skimp on safety measures in order to maximize profits, endless religious and nationalist wars. Immigrants drown in the seas around Fortress Europe or die of dehydration in the heat of the Arizona desert in desperate attempts to escape poverty and improve their lives. This systemic violence, the violence of oppression, barely even registers to most as such.

I make my way through the city, still lost in my thoughts as I exit the subway into the largely immigrant neighborhood where the CNT offices are. Two cops are parked outside the subway, nonchalantly checking people’s identification at random. “Papers, please.” The normality of everyday violence.

Faced with this reality, who cares about legality? Who cares about popular opinion? When there were few of us and we occupied the tracks, our action was completely peaceful. Yet the mercenaries of the state came and beat us without hesitation in order to achieve its objectives. Although they were able to accomplish this in a relatively “orderly” manner, due to our small numbers and tactical avoidance of violence, was that not the victory of an immeasurably greater violence? Would a greater violence on our end, for the purposes of liberation, not be justified? In what thought process does it follow that nonviolence represents the moral high ground, when adherence to nonviolence makes the perpetuation of human suffering and oppression possible?

There is a moment that I will never forget from the day we were beaten off the tracks a few weeks prior to the story I have recounted.

I can barely see him through the glass, his complexion and the reflection of the station lights against the train’s windows making it difficult to distinguish his features and facial expressions. Two cops are moving him through the train, one holding each arm behind him, his hands cuffed together in front. Suddenly, as they pass an open window we can clearly see as he turns to us. He lifts his hands and displays a victory sign with each, as he mouths “thank you” to us. There is sadness, dignity, and gratitude in his face. I don’t know anything about him, who he is, where he is from, what brought him here, what he is being sent back to. But I know that violence—life-changing and potentially fatal violence—is not taking place in the delaying of the train. Violence is what is being done to him inside it.

It’s not that we are too violent, but exactly the opposite. If we don’t employ the full arsenal of our capacity for collective revolutionary action, to be a force against the system of control that oppresses all of us, are we not as complicit as those who see it but choose to turn away?

What we are doing is not too much.

It’s not nearly enough.

It's Safer in the Front : Taking the Offensive against Tyranny

2025-01-28T22:57:33Z

Faced with intensifying repression and state violence, there is an understandable inclination to seek safety by avoiding confrontation. But this is not always the most effective strategy.

“Counterintuitive though it is, in a confusing situation, often the best, if not safest, place to be is the front lines, so you can get a clear visual grasp of what is going on around you.”

-“What I Do for a Living,” an account from the demonstrations against the 2003 European Union summit in Thessaloniki, published in Rolling Thunder #1.

My friend’s grandfather grew up in Germany in the 1920s. Being Jewish, he got involved in radical organizations and sometimes engaged in physical altercations with Nazis. In a memoir that he recorded for his family decades later, he describes the situation when the Nazis took power:

“In January 1933, Hitler became chancellor. I thought we would now start a revolution, but actually nothing happened. The communists defected—often en masse—to the Nazis and the social democrats held out a little longer but ultimately dissolved their organizations.”

In May 1933, when he was twenty years old, he learned that he was about to be prosecuted for having broken a Nazi’s nose in a street brawl. Rather than face trial in a judicial system controlled by Nazis, he immediately obtained a passport and boarded a train for Holland that same night at 8 pm.

Some years later, the rest of his family died in the concentration camp in Auschwitz.

This story succinctly illustrates a surprisingly common phenomenon. Had my friend’s grandfather not participated in open confrontations with Nazis from the very beginning, had he kept his head down and avoided trouble, he probably would have remained in Berlin and met the same fate as his relatives. By taking the offensive, he put himself in harm’s way—but paradoxically, in the long run, that worked out better than playing it safe.

Likewise, participants in the guerrilla underground of the Jewish resistance were among the only ones to survive the Nazis’ annihilation of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. In organizing to meet the Nazi threat head on, they developed a robust relationship to their agency, and this served them well when the only way out was to organize a daring escape from the besieged and burning ghetto through the sewer system.

For members of targeted groups, the initial impulse is often to withdraw, to go into hiding. Yet when it comes to both individual and collective self-preservation, it can be wiser to act assertively at the beginning, while it is still possible to influence the course of events. Even if this goes badly, it can be better to bring the conflict to a head immediately, before one’s adversary becomes more powerful. If nothing else, this strategy has the virtue of making it impossible to lull oneself into a false sense of security while the threat increases.

It doesn’t always work out this way, but sometimes, it’s safer in the front.

“There’s no reason to sleep curled up and bent. It’s not comfortable, it’s not good for you, and it doesn’t protect you from danger. If you’re worried about an attack, you should stay awake or sleep lightly with limbs unfurled for action.” Artwork by Jenny Holzer.

It was noon on April 20, 2001. My comrades and I had assembled alongside hundreds of other anarchists and anti-capitalists at Laval University in Québec City to march on a transcontinental summit intended to establish a “Free Trade Area of the Americas.” In the center of town, behind miles of protective fencing and thousands of riot police, George W. Bush and his fellow heads of state were plotting to override labor laws and environmental protections to enrich their patrons at our expense.

The sun was shining. More and more people were arriving at the departure point. One group even rolled up a catapult. The police were nowhere to be seen.

Still, I was anxious. Most of my experience of violence was subcultural—fighting skinheads, hardcore shows. I’d never taken on an army of police before. At a meeting the preceding evening, a local organizer had told us that it would be impossible to reach the fence around the summit—there were just too many cops with too much armor and weaponry.

As the crowd began to make its way out of the university towards the street, I consulted with a more experienced comrade. “Should we hang back and see what happens?” I asked.

“If we want to be able to see what’s happening, we’ll have to be in the front,” he answered, matter-of-factly.

We marched directly to the fence surrounding the summit and tore it down. The police could not stop us. The “Free Trade Area of the Americas” was never ratified.

Anarchists marching on the so-called “Summit of the Americas” in Québec City, April 2001.

My friend’s advice served me well four years later, on the day that George W. Bush began his second term. That night, following the daytime march against the inaugural ceremonies, a second march surged through the neighborhood of Adams Morgan, smashing banks and corporate businesses and attacking a police substation. Some participants dropped an enormous banner across a building façade reading “From DC to Iraq—with occupation comes resistance.” We were attempting to compel the Bush regime to end the occupation of Iraq, which inflicted countless civilian casualties and later contributed to the catastrophic rise of the Islamic State.

As the march dispersed, a comrade and I found ourselves among a number of people walking through an alley. Ahead of us, police officers appeared at the exit.

We could have turned around and run the other direction. But then we would have been at the back of the crowd, unable to see what we were running towards. “Run, run forward,” I said to my companion. We were already running.

We dashed past the cops just as they closed their line across the mouth of the alley. “Don’t let any more of them out,” I heard one bark to another.

We were the last ones to escape. The police had blocked the alley from the other side, as well. They forced the people behind us to kneel in the snow for hours. Years later, the detainees won a settlement from the city, but it was better to get away.

Washington, DC, January 20, 2005.

On August 25, 2008, in Denver, during the demonstrations against the Democratic National Convention, a couple hundred people gathered for a march that had been announced but never organized. We were still protesting against the ongoing occupation of Iraq and against capitalism in general.

Armored police were positioned in groups of a dozen each all around the park and the surrounding streets, outnumbering the young people sitting around with black sweatshirts in their laps. A vehicle was supposed to deliver banners, but a rumor reached us that police had detained the driver. Yet just when it seemed certain that nothing was going to happen, a few young folks pulled up their hoods and began chanting.

Who are these people? I recall wondering. What are they thinking, masking up and linking arms with hundreds of riot police surrounding them and undercovers at their elbows? What can they hope to accomplish?

Nonetheless, the other people who had gathered for the march regrouped with them and they began marching out of the park. They only made it as far as the road, where the nearest squadron of police formed a line blocking their path and showered them with pepper spray. No protest had occurred yet, I had heard no dispersal order, and already the police were using chemical weapons.

A comrade and I watched all this with dismay. There were still about two hundred of us, but the police were closing in from all sides and the crowd was disoriented and uncoordinated. It was a recipe for disaster.

We were at the back of the crowd. But the back can become the front—it’s just a question of initiative. My comrade began shouting out a countdown. Others joined in, instinctively. Counting together concentrated our attention, our expectations, our sense of ourselves as a collective force capable of concerted action. And then thirty of us were sprinting over the grass away from the police line.

Seeing this, the rest of the crowd fell in behind. In a few seconds, hundreds of people were running across the park to the intersection at the far side of the lawn, where police had not gathered yet.

Now the energy in the air was electric, in contrast to the malaise and uncertainty of a moment earlier. We passed through the intersection, into which some enterprising young people pulled a municipal sign reading “Road Closed”—and suddenly, we were approaching the business district.

The same principle served us well later in the evening when we saw a line of riot police fanning out across an intersection a block ahead. Without pausing to confer, my comrade and I bolted towards them. We reached the line of police and dodged between them before they could block our path. They had orders to create a barrier, not to chase us. We were safe.

Denver, August 25, 2008.

On the morning of January 20, 2017, another comrade and I joined the march in downtown Washington, DC opposing the inauguration of Donald Trump. In the decades that had passed since Bush’s second inauguration, police all around the country had militarized, receiving bigger and bigger budgets even as politicians claimed there was no money available for anything else. This time, the streets were crowded with 28,000 law enforcement personnel.

There was open conflict with the police as soon as the march got underway. The wail of police sirens, the deafening explosions of flash-bang grenades at close quarters, the acrid scent of pepper spray, the roar of police motorcycles, the sizzle of adrenaline—it was a terrifying situation, but the demonstrators around us were giving as good as they were getting. The idea was to set a template for resistance on the first day of the Trump administration, sending the message to everyone that no one should passively accept the intensification of tyranny.

The longer we were in the streets, the more dangerous it got. When we passed Franklin Square again, doubling back on our tracks, it was clear that it was only a matter of time before we were surrounded.

In downtown DC, between the intersections, the streets are like long stretches of canyon between the cliff faces of the buildings. I knew the police wanted to box us in and kettle us. Every time we passed through an intersection, I glanced at the intersections a block away on either side to see if police were shadowing us on the parallel streets, preparing to cut off our exit routes. Every time we moved out of an intersection into another stretch of canyon, I watched the intersections ahead and behind for police. Whenever we were moving between intersections, we were vulnerable.

As we approached 13th Street, police on motorcycles passed us on the sidewalk on our left, attempting to overtake us and seize the intersection ahead. We were still hundreds of feet from it. I urged my companion to run ahead with me, and we sprinted past front of the march, past the bike cops and motorcycle cops, who began ramming their vehicles into the people immediately behind us. When the cops saw that a few of us were already at their backs, they gave up trying to form a line and once again focused on racing ahead of us. Police hate to be outflanked—they can’t risk being surrounded themselves.

The clash at the intersection showed that the march was no longer in control of the territory around it. It was time to make our exit. We ran down an alley on our right shortly before the next intersection. A hundred others did the same. Those who continued forward were blocked by a line of police at the next intersection, and turned around only to discover a much stronger police line blocking them from behind.

For two long minutes, the crowd paused in confusion and dismay. Some people towards the back of the march had already taken off their gear and were hoping to pass as civilians in order to make their way out of the area, not realizing that they were already trapped from all sides.

The participants at the front of the march kept their gear on and linked arms. Someone called out “We’re going to do a countdown!” They counted down quickly from ten to one and charged directly at the police line ahead of them. The person at the very front of the charge held open a flimsy umbrella as they all ran blindly forward. Somehow, the umbrella protected them from the answering stream of pepper spray.

Fifty of them broke through the police line and escaped. The ones who lingered, waiting to see whether the charge would break through before joining it, remained trapped in the kettle.

Someone later posted a humorous comment on social media to the effect that the cheat code for the J20 Protest Simulator was to be always running at the cops holding a hammer. But there was something to it. Afterwards, watching police footage released to defendants in the subsequent court case, we saw that even after the police and National Guardsmen had tightened up their line, one enterprising individual had escaped simply by sprinting as fast as possible directly at them and ducking between two of them.

Everyone who was detained was charged with eight felonies apiece—up to eighty years in prison—for the crime of being mass-arrested in the vicinity of a rowdy march. A few took plea deals, but everyone else stuck together, establishing a collective defense plan and confronting the legal system head on. In the end, after two trials at which all the defendants were declared not guilty, all of the remaining defendants saw their charges dropped. Years later, all of them received payouts from the state to settle the resulting lawsuits.

It sounds like a metaphor, but I mean it literally as well as figuratively. Whether it’s a march or a court case, sometimes it’s safer in the front.

Washington, DC, January 20, 2017.

Several years later, I was in Atlanta for the Block Cop City mobilization. Protesters had been trying to stop the construction of a multi-million-dollar facility to further militarize the police. In retaliation, the police had murdered one person and arrested a large number of people at random, charging them with terrorism and indicting sixty-one of them on trumped-up racketeering charges.

Before the action proper, there were two days of deliberations at a local Quaker community center. Everyone was on edge. The goal was to try to march into the forest and occupy the construction site. Would we all be arrested? Would we, too, be charged with terrorism and racketeering? The discussions went in circles as people fruitlessly attempted to predict what would happen and negotiated their own risk tolerance.

It was decided that there would be three self-organized blocs within the march: essentially, the front, the middle, and the back. Officially, this distinction was not based on anticipated risk, because the organizers could make no promises about what the police would do. But no one was able to consider which bloc to join without panning back to larger questions. How much do I fear the violence of the police and the judicial system? What am I prepared to sacrifice for this movement?

Only the bold few who had made peace with their fears and committed to taking the front of the march seemed at ease. Even within the “middle” bloc, there was a lot of agonizing and bargaining going on. “I’ll be in the middle, but not at the front of the middle…”

That night, I explained to my family what to do if I didn’t come home from the demonstration. Both of my romantic partners, independently of each other, asked me whether it was really that important for me to participate in this particular march. Couldn’t I just leave it to the younger activists?

It’s safer in the front. I remembered this saying from earlier mobilizations—but thinking it over, I wasn’t so sure. How could it be safer to charge directly into police lines? The slogan distilled lessons drawn on my own experience, but heading into yet another dangerous situation, I was dubious.

On the morning of the mobilization, we assembled at the park. Despite a few festive flourishes, the atmosphere was somber: a few hundred people risking injury, arrest, and prison time for the honor of an embattled movement. Many people had decided to stay home at the last minute. We marched out of the park in a column, everyone assiduously sticking to their particular position in the risk tolerance spectrum. As long as we were marching down the narrow pedestrian walkway, this made sense, but it made less sense when we emerged onto the main road and advanced towards the construction site. We should have fanned out to present a broad front as we approached the lines of police and armored vehicles blocking the road, but no, the crowd stretched out into what was almost single-file line, like lambs lining up for slaughter.

Nonetheless, the ones at the front picked up speed, forming a V-shaped wedge with their reinforced banners and pointing their umbrellas forward to block the cops’ view as they charged directly into the shields of the skirmish line. The rest of us dragged along behind, holding the positions we had committed to holding—no less, and no more.

People assembling to begin the Block Cop City march, November 13, 2023.

The people with the reinforced banners pushed the first line of cops back until it was reinforced by a second line. Even then, they didn’t relent; they kept on pushing forward against the police. The cops lashed out with their batons, but went on losing ground. The bloc at the front of the march stuck together, protecting each other, acting deliberately. Maybe they were afraid, but it wasn’t fear that was determining their actions.

Looking on from behind them, I was terrified. I was grateful I wasn’t in the front, having to make decisions. Police batons are scary, jail time is scary, felony charges are scary, but the truly frightening thing is responsibility. People will accept a lot of negative consequences in their lives just to avoid responsibility. And unfortunately, it’s impossible: try as we might, there is no avoiding the fact that as long as we are able to make decisions and take action, we are responsible for ourselves. That is true whether you position yourself at the front or at the back, or even if you don’t show up at all.

I watched the front-liners ahead of me push both lines of police back until they reached a third line comprised of futuristic stormtroopers. No sign of the stormtroopers’ humanity was discernible beneath their military gear; not even their eyes were visible. They had withdrawn themselves from the human community completely.

The stormtroopers pulled out tear gas canisters. I watched in disbelief as they tossed the canisters one after another over the heads of the ones at the front into the middle of the march—into the midst of those of us who had hoped that others would run risks on our behalf, who had intended simply to be an appendage of others’ agency. Perhaps it would have been safer in the front, after all?

Then everything vanished in a poisonous white haze.

We staggered blindly back in disarray, choking and coughing. But the stormtroopers had gassed the rest of the cops, as well, and the other cops were not wearing gas masks. They, too, had retreated. Against all odds, the battle concluded in a draw.

In the end, the only person who was arrested that entire day was someone who had opted to play a support role far from the site of the action. They were detained in a vehicle near the park from which we had set out. No one was charged with terrorism or racketeering.

In all our anxiety, we had forgotten the greatest risk of all: that we might do nothing, that we would let ourselves be cowed into abandoning the streets. With so many people already facing outlandish charges, marching on the construction site was a risky proposition—but permitting the state to crush the movement would have set a precedent that would threaten other movements, emboldening the authorities to use the same tactics elsewhere against many others like us.

Sometimes you can only find out what the risks are by taking a chance. This time, we had gotten lucky. But in a way, we had also passed a test.

Anarchists at the May Day demonstration in Bandung, 2019. Photograph by Frans Ari Prasetyo.

It’s not really safer in the front. Staying home is safer—at least, it’s safer until the long-term consequences of abandoning the streets set in. Then nowhere is safe, and it turns out it would have been better to take some smaller risks earlier on.

The anti-fascists who went to Charlottesville in August 2017 to confront the “Unite the Right” rally were putting themselves in harm’s way. One of them was killed; several of them were severely injured. But if they had stayed home, if they had permitted fascists to establish control of the streets, the whole world would have become more dangerous. The likelihood that we may be forced to fight that same battle all over again today does not diminish the fact that they won us eight precious years of relative safety.

Even when all really is hopelessly lost, it is generally better to act boldly, sending a signal flare of hope across the generations, the way the Communards and the Kronstadt rebels did. In so doing, you at least preserve the possibility that others will be inspired to continue attempting to build the world you desire, so that one day, your dream might be realized—even if without you, at least due in part to your efforts.

But that’s not where we are today. We face powerful adversaries, but the majority of people, including many of their supporters, have good reason to oppose them alongside us. If we bring people together, if we demonstrate effective ways to fight back, putting our own risk tolerance at the disposal of larger struggles, many more people will eventually join us. There’s no reason to hasten into glorifying martyrdom or accepting defeat when the future is unwritten.

Not everyone can be in the front all the time, of course. It can be exhausting. But the front isn’t a spatial location. Understood properly, it doesn’t necessarily require a particular kind of physical ability or skillset. It’s a way of engaging with events, of remaining focused on our agency, taking the initiative wherever we can rather than just reacting to our opponents’ initiatives. Everyone can open up a new front of struggle by identifying a vulnerability in the ruling order and going on the offensive. The more fronts there are, the safer we all will be.

Facing the second administration of Donald Trump, many anarchists and anti-fascists don’t know where to begin. During the previous Trump administration, we fought hard against an adversary that was much more powerful than us, and won—only to find victory snatched from our hands by cowardly Democrats, who eagerly took over where the Republicans left off, disappointing so many people that Trump was able to return to power. But that is no reason to give up, this time around—it just shows that all along, we were right about the nature of power, and we owe it to the world to demonstrate a real alternative.

In countries ruled by fascism or other forms of despotism, the majority of people do not necessarily support the authorities; they have simply become dispirited, accustomed to passivity. Much more so than liberals, anarchists are used to being outnumbered and outgunned, to fighting against incredible odds. While Democrats make excuses for the fascists or even embrace their agenda, we should demonstrate that it is possible to take ambitious, principled action to resist.

If you feel despair, if you feel defeated, if you catch yourself dissociating or focusing on what our oppressors are doing rather than on what you can do yourself—that is territory that the enemy has claimed within you.

Give them nothing without a fight. Stay focused on your agency. Every hour, every day, wherever you are positioned, there is always something you can do. Take care of yourself and those around you. Keep your eyes out for opportunities and seize them. We are in a fight—but it is a fight that we can win. It’s safer in the front.

The umbrella charge on January 20, 2017.

Fell in Love with Fire : A Documentary about the 2019 Uprising in Chile

2024-10-21T20:49:38Z

Five years in the making, this hour-long film documents the uprising that swept Chile from October 2019 to March 2020, showing how everyday people sustained six months of rebellion by creating extensive networks of self-determination and mutual aid.

This is an inspiring portrayal of the tactics that gave demonstrators control of the streets, the organizing strategies that enabled the movement to act effectively while remaining leaderless, and the importance of time and space in revolt. It is also a cautionary tale about how the government used the promise of a new constitutional process to recover enough legitimacy to regain control. It chronicles a high point of action in a struggle that continues today.

October 2019 in Santiago, Chile. The president has called in the armed forces against the people for the first time since the country transitioned from dictatorship to democracy.

“Wait, I don’t get it. The advertisements are untouched. There’s not even graffiti. Not a single window is broken.”

“Yes. And?”

“I mean, the shelves are all empty. Did they just evacuate all the merchandise, or was it actually looted?”

“Haha what? Of course it was looted, the whole neighborhood looted it. Well, women and children first.”

“And no one destroyed anything?”

“Look, the idea isn’t to give them a bigger insurance check. Besides, if things keep going the way they are, that building may soon be ours.”

“That would be a serious step. I can’t imagine things ever reaching this point where I come from. Good luck with your struggle.”

“No! No, no, no, brother—our struggle. You’re here. You’re in this. Tell people.”

“I don’t even know how I’d explain this to anyone back home.”

“Explain it like this: neoliberalism was born in Chile, and here it will die.”

The basic argument of Fell in Love With Fire on a flier: “Hop the gate of the anti-life of paying to live, living to pay.”

On October 17, 2019, Chile’s student movement was on its heels, facing new legislation that put police in schools for the very first time. With the students’ normal organizing environment swept out of their control, the movement launched a campaign against a routine increase in public transit fare. With a right-wing billionaire in the presidency, the prospects for resistance looked dim.

Everything changed in a single day. On October 18, a small rush-hour protest at a metro transfer station triggered a stoppage of Santiago’s entire public transit system. As commuters were stuck in hot traffic, images of police beating students began to circulate on their phones.

Santiago exploded. In one weekend, over a hundred metro stations were attacked, with ten completely destroyed. A quarter of the Wal-Marts (the largest grocery chain) in Chile were looted or burned. The government declared martial law in response to civil disturbance for the first time since the 1973-1990 Pinochet military dictatorship—but the people would not back down.

Chile graffiti reel, 2019-2020.

Stories from the Making of

We decided to take a break from our country after I finally beat criminal charges resulting from participating in combative political activity. We had just crossed the border out of Ecuador when we heard reports about an uprising there. Peasants were marching on the capitol, choking off the highways to force the president to reverse proposed austerity measures.

You said, “We should go back.”

I said, “If it were Chile…”

Just two weeks later, it was.

I’m not from Chile, but I lived there for years.

We arrived in Santiago a week before everything exploded, and almost immediately encountered an evasión [a collective fare-dodging action] that students were staging. It was your first time in Chile, and I was excited for you to get a small taste of student rebellion. And, hey, getting where we were going quicker without having to pay the second highest transit fare in Latin America?

Evasion, 2019.

OK. But the best part was how fun it was. It was so fun that the following day, when we heard the shriek of students rushing down the escalators towards the turnstiles, that we ditched our free bus ride and rushed into the station. As if we had just scored the winning goal, the teenage rebels thrilled, chanting “If you don’t jump, you’re a cop!” as we hopped through the turnstiles they had liberated. We kept evading whenever we encountered fare-dodging actions that week, even if we didn’t really need a metro ride.

On October 18, I was supposed to give a talk at some friends’ anarchist ateneo [social center]. You were out on the town while I was back at my old apartment preparing. You WhatsApp’d me some videos of kids wilding out in the metro station. Was it really Los Heroes [a metro station]?¹ You were at the center of history? God damn. I just YeahYeahYeah’d you because I had seen Chilean riots before. “Oh I’m glad you got to see that. We have to get ready to leave though.”

You—somehow—got back to my old apartment where we were staying. Knowing what I know now, I don’t even understand how you got there in time. But you were always good at finding me in the streets over the coming months, even when things got chaotic. What should have been a 45-minute commute to the ateneo took two and a half hours. Time can be elastic in Chile, sure, but it really shouldn’t take that long.

Somehow, we got there. No one else did, though. Over the months that followed, the coolest people I met flattered me with, “Oh, I was going to come to your talk that day! But then, well…”

The CrimethInc. presentation in Villa Francia on October 18, 2019.

As we waited for an audience, I saw two ten-year-olds walking down the middle of the street with a children’s couch the size of a playpen.

“There’s no way they’re gonna do what I think they’re gonna do to that couch, right?”

They did. Right onto the fire at the end of the block. We started to piece it together: what you had seen, no one at the event, the heavy traffic, this flaming barricade. Santiago was going off.

We crossed downtown to our friend’s apartment, closer to the action, but it turned out the action was everywhere. The husk of a bus. Smoldering buildings. At one point, our cab driver wasn’t sure what to do because the intersection had cops on one side and fighting encapuchados [masked heroes] on the other.

I was still YeahYeahYeah-ing your wide eyes when I left the following day, despite all my friends’ insistence that this was something special. When I got to the anarchist book fair in Buenos Aires—to give my talk again—the whole book fair was cancelled. They managed to get through a couple of the time slots, but everyone was talking about Chile. Looking at their phones. Cheering for our team whenever we struck a blow and expressing outrage every time there was news about repression. It didn’t take long for the organizers to pack it all in and just open up the social center so the whole book fair could simply watch the news from Chile.

My friend, one of the organizers, walked over to me while I was wide-eyeing the events on the television. He whispered to me, “Dude, why the fuck did you leave?”

The third time I tried to give my ill-fated talk, it was in the middle of the revolt, both temporally and territorially. Some anarchists had opened up a squat in one of the looted and abandoned businesses right by the main protest plaza. Enough people said they still wanted to see my talk—even though I didn’t understand why they would be interested in anything other than what was going on around us—that I decided to organize a presentation at the squat. Plus, I loved the space and wanted to keep it active. During talks there, one would regularly hear the uproar of revolt just outside the door, although we occasionally had to tuck our heads into our knees and wait out the wafting clouds of teargas.

Nobody came. The host had been optimistic, but after waiting a couple of hours, he informed me that the legendary 1970s Basque punk band, La Polla Records, was playing in a stadium that day.

Fifty years of punk rock in the middle of an insurrection: “No rest, no peace!”

“I don’t really like punk rock, so I didn’t mind opening up the space for you. But I guess everyone’s there.”

But I do like punk rock. So I grabbed my loosies and hopped on my bike.

Almost ten years ago now, five punks died in Santiago when bouncers violently beat back a rush of poor punks who were trying to get into a show where the British crust band Doom was playing. Wanting to avoid a similar situation—or simply intimidated by the uncontrollable, pay for nothing, fight for everything spirit that was consuming Chile—the security at the stadium would simply allow you to walk in without a ticket. I even took my bicycle in.

Inside the stadium, 15,000 punks were letting their hair down. Out in the plaza, every sector of the oppressed was present, and while we gave the cops our worst, we tried to be on our best behavior with each other because survival depended on our collective bonds. For example, a fragile truce existed during those months between the different soccer hooligan barras bravas so that they could fight the police together. On the rare occasions that fights did break out between demonstrators, everyone would chant “If you fight, you’re a cop! If you fight, you’re a cop!” Wild anarchist idealists went to the plaza with their most polished pitches to promote the values we believed would deepen the revolt.

Inside that stadium, however, the pressure was off. The plaza always had an element of carnival, but the La Polla Records show felt much more like a celebration of how far the anarchy had gone. If you know, you know, and everyone there got it—all punks—and we could just be bad because being bad together was so good. We didn’t need justifications or explanations, we could just enjoy the environment of collective, chaotic rebellion. While we had to mind our interactions on the frontline (“If you recognize me behind my mask, no you didn’t”), lest buchón sapo [Argentine, then Chilean, for “snitch”] plainclothes track our social connections, here in the stadium, those of us who had maintained a professional candor with each other in the streets could embrace and see the whole of each other’s faces erupting in radiant laughter.

Demonstrators snap a photo of the declaration of intra-hooligan, anti-police unity. It reads, “We lost too much time fighting among ourselves,” with each word atop the colors of a different team.

Everyone was sharing alcohol and weed and whatever else they had. A skinhead hooligan had hacked the stadium’s sprinkler system and was spraying mist over his section of the crowd under the hot summer sun. People climbed onto the sound tower and the roof of the stadium to hang banners in solidarity with the prisoners of the revolt and the Mapuche struggle or to dance silhouetted against the setting sun.

Here, the audience was in control—except the audience was totally out of control. Just a few songs into La Polla Records’ set, they had to stop in the middle of a song because too many enthusiastic hooligans had gotten on the stage and one had fallen into the drumset. They weren’t trying to stop the show, really. They were just excited.

A few more songs of the same, and one fateful fight between a bouncer who tried to suggest to a fan that he shouldn’t grab the singer’s neck in order to sing along, and the whole thing fell apart. Altogether, La Polla Records played something like five songs before abandoning the stage. As dusk came on, the atmosphere shifted from enthusiasm to anger.

15,000 punks rule! La Polla Records in Chile, February 2020.

15,000 grumbling punks and anarchists and hooligans and skinheads filed out of the stadium. Honestly, the amount of inward-facing frustration was so high that the most strategic choice the police could have made that evening would have been to allow the infighting to take its natural course. However, when there are thousands of punks occupying the road outside the stadium drinking and destroying traffic infrastructure, the pigs just can’t help themselves.

And neither could we. The most beautiful, glorious street battle of those six months unfolded before my eyes. We could see the police descending from up in the hills, so their arrival was anticipated. There was an air of “Here we go…”

Brightly colored mohawks bounced in and out of visibility amid clouds of tear gas. The most wildly dressed peacock punks engaged in feral smashing of beer bottles against police, while boom boxes provided a fast-paced tupa-tupa-tupa soundtrack to the riot. We didn’t see the best practices of gas masks, goggles, and gloves that the frontline used in the plaza. This was pure fuck you energy.

I had made a friend earlier that night while standing around selling cigarettes—but our befriending quickly accelerated when we realized we needed to rely on each other to get out of there safely. Even though they had, let’s say, much more reason to avoid capture by the police, on our first attempt to extract ourselves, they grabbed my arm and said, “Can we just watch it though?”

Yeah… except no! They were shooting shit at us! Dozens of punks rushed past us and, behind them, mechanical faceless stormtroopers advanced out of the gas clouds, arms drawn. We turned and ran.

In those six months, I mastered a whole audio taxonomy of booms—deep ones for the spent spray paint cans thrown into street fires, three different mid-level frequencies for different police projectiles, and the most piercing booms, fireworks. With the cops at our heels, we heard—BOOM—and instinctively I told my friend, “Jump!” No shit, a smoking canister hurtled under our feet. BOOM BOOM! Instinctively, again, “Duck!” This time, they went right over our heads.

“We absolutely have to get out of here.” We turned down a side street and wandered to the home of a friendly but ribbing communist who was excited to share his plan to subvert either the anarchist circle-A, or the constitutional process—I couldn’t tell which—by making a circle-A logo for the “Apruebo” (Approve) campaign for the constitution.

“Stop prohibiting so many things, I can’t keep up with disobeying them all.”

Over the last five years, I’ve had the honor and privilege of sharing the material from this documentary in live presentations. In the days that this film depicts, every time I organized a talk, it was interrupted by the fiercest street confrontations in decades, or a people’s insurrection just across the border, or an uncontrollable wave of rioting punks. I wish that was still happening today. It’s better to do than to watch.

Since those days, I’ve presented the live version of Fell In Love With Fire within autonomous territory held in defiance of state power—in Weelaunee Forest, at a Los Panchos community in Mexico City, in People’s Park, where the audience sat on a trashed excavator left from the last riots to retake the park in 2022. It is my hope that this videozine, this documentalgo, can serve as tool to bring those kinds of spaces onto the map of other projects of rebellious self-determination across the globe and across time.

Please, don’t limit your use of this video to isolated viewing, nor to sterile, polite, seated events to raise funds. Use it to raise hell.

Their side.

Our side.

You can download the English .srt subtitles file here to translate the subtitles into another language for us.

Los Héroes is not far from La Moneda, the metro stetion where kids dropped a televisión onto the tracks—shutting down the metro and setting off the chain reaction of revolt. ↩

Anarchist Techno Attacks : Remembering Reclaim the Streets

2024-06-18T22:26:00Z

To celebrate June 18, the anniversary of the historic Carnival against Capitalism that kicked off the movement against capitalist globalization some twenty-five years ago, we revisit Reclaim the Streets, a viral model for the joyous transformation of urban space.

Party as Protest <—> Protest as Party

“I will dance!” I declared; “I will dance myself to death!” My flesh felt hot, my heart beat violently… To dance to death—what more glorious end!

-Emma Goldman, Living My Life

“Mom, can I go to a protest?”

“No… I’m sorry, but no.”

She was worried. A month earlier, a plane had slammed into the side of a pentagon-shaped building just down the road from our house.

“OK. Uh, can I go to the homecoming game?”

“Well, sure!”

“But like, I’m new at school so… can I just go by myself? So I can make friends?”

“Of course, honey.”

I couldn’t believe it worked. My high school was right next to a metro station—I was obviously just going to hop on the train and go to the protest.

“I hope we win.”

“Me too! I’ll pick you up at 8.”

When I got off at the Dupont Circle stop, my punk rock role model older-sister-figure who always tempted me to skip school for cool shit was already waiting for me.

“So…what are we protesting? Bush? The World Bank? The war?” I asked, not caring too much as long as we got to fuck shit up.

“Cars.”

“Cars?”

“Yeah, we’re taking over a street.”

“What do you mean ‘taking over’?”

“Like, with couches and DJs and stuff.”

“DJs?!”

That did not clarify things for me, especially because people in the march that scooped us up were carrying placards decrying all the evil institutions and people I had mentioned. But once we hit 21st and P, a black-masked affinity group, moving with purpose and apparent planning, ran out of the crowd to a nearby alleyway and pulled out orange cones stenciled with an image of bellbottomed dancers inside a diamond-shaped traffic symbol. They lined up the orange cones on either end of the block. Unlike other marches I had been on—in which the point was to keep moving so that an affinity group could break out, quickly destroy the windows of a bank or Starbucks, then disappear among the mass again—the point of this demo seemed to be just to be here.

Someone handed out flyers with the same bellbottomed dancers traffic symbol, saying something about streets not belonging exclusively to cars, about reinventing public space as a wonderland of joyous community instead of an artery for capital.

Another affinity group quickly established good relations with the workers at a local café, who let us use the bathroom and get water throughout the afternoon. This happened so quickly that there must have been some prior, behind-the-scenes organizing with the workers. A bunch of them did have piercings and funny hair.

As I stared at the café, marveling at all the moving parts in this troublemakers’ Rube Goldberg machine, a cheer erupted behind me, drawing my attention back to the crowd. A junker car—presumably acquired especially for the occasion—was rolled out of its parking spot, tagged up with “Reclaim the Streets!” and a circle A, and flipped over. Some genius found a pole to lay inside its wheel well and people pulled couches all around it so that anyone could chill and watch the skaters grind the spectacle of destruction.

The Reclaim the Streets action in Washington, DC in October 2001. A photograph by the author, aged 14 at the time, digitally restored for this publication. Note the white van to the right.

That’s when the final party favor opened its doors: in the middle of the block, a white work van in an alley became a DJ booth playing techno. BOOM BOOM. And loud! Vibing my body down to its core. I live chasing that feeling: the loss of control, the impossibility of remaining unmoved, the need to get down. I had a Fatboy Slim CD at home, but I had never heard techno this loud, or around this many other people. I scanned the crowd once more—it wasn’t just bigger now, it was transformed. The protestors with their placards and the anarchists with their black masks were still there, but out of nowhere there were way more party freaks: JNCOs, goggles, candy necklaces, frost-tipped hair.

I overheard a couple of the ravers talking.

“Yo, I’ve never been to something like this.”

“I know bro. I’ve heard of outlaw parties before, but this is wild.”

Another archival photograph from the Washington, DC Reclaim the Streets action of October 2001.

Just as this departure from traditional protest tenor mesmerized me, it was also a captivating deviation from the routine techno party. The alchemy of underground scenes kept cooking gold—the sun was setting and the party was just getting bigger and bigger.

“What are the party people going to do if the cops come break this up?” I thought to myself. Before long, I had my answer. The familiar sight of faceless stormtroopers lined one end of the block, preparing their assault. People pulled the gear inside the DJ van, shut its doors, and escaped down the alley in it. Of course, the black bloc rushed towards the police, eager for confrontation—but to my surprise, so did much of the candy crowd. Did they learn this from defending their illegal warehouse parties? Were they just excited to add a new kind of rush to their rave repertoire?

“I hope those goggles are rated for tear gas.”

As I scurried out of the conflict zone, so as not to miss my 8 PM pick-up, I wondered who got the word to all of those ravers, and how? I knew how the anarchists got there—the night prior, Positive Force punks had handed us flyers for the march at the Wilson Center’s last show, an enormous DIY punk occasion. Had there been a rave somewhere in the city the previous night, too, simultaneously promoting the protest? On the subway, I reflected on the hidden size and strength of the underground. Punk rock was my own niche, but I had realized that ravers could also throw down and defend their temporary autonomous zones. How many more rebel communities were out there, each with its own style and soundtrack, ready to crew up and take down the imposed boredom of capitalism?

Another archival photograph from the Washington, DC Reclaim the Streets action of October 2001.

Music for the Jilted Generation

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

Reclaim the Streets was founded in the UK in 1991 to combat car culture. The group was just one current in the wave of anti-roads protests that kicked off all over the UK after Margaret Thatcher’s government approved an infrastructure project to build hundreds of new roads. In response, a constellation of occupations and campaigns sprang up throughout the 1990s, blocking construction sites and organizing under monikers like “Earth First!”

One of the largest nodes in the anti-roads movement was the “No M11 Link” campaign in the suburbs of northeast London. For a year and a half, anti-roads activists used barricades, phone trees, tripods, treehouses, lockdowns, and building occupations to defend thousands of trees and hundreds of homes from destruction. The campaign culminated in December 1994, when over a thousand police were sent in to evict Claremont Road, the entirety of which had been squatted. The 500 residents and defenders fought back for five days as techno music blared in the background.

Claremont Road.

In its first year, Reclaim the Streets only organized small-scale stunts, like painting bike lanes on roads without permission. In 1992, Reclaim the Streets brought London traffic to a halt with its first street party, which was broken up when police arrested several participants. After that, the organization laid dormant until the British government proposed the 1994 Criminal Justice Act.

In addition to curtailing traditional civil liberties—for example, the right to remain silent was altered so that judges could draw certain inferences from a defendant’s silence—the Criminal Justice Act was a direct assault on rave culture. In clumsy language, the bill specifically criminalized gatherings of ten or more people enjoying “sounds wholly or predominantly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.” In addition, one of the bill’s twelve parts was entirely dedicated to criminalizing collective trespass. In one fell swoop, the British government formed common cause between squatters, new age caravan travelers, ravers, anti-road activists, hunt saboteurs, and football hooligans—all of whom enjoyed lifestyles and strategies of resistance based on collective trespass.

The Prodigy song “Their Law” was written in direct opposition to the bill.

Formal coalitions of civil liberties groups and sound systems¹ organized three mass demonstrations ahead of the vote on the bill in London. The first was on May Day 1994 and drew 20,000 people. Two months later, nearly twice as many people attended the second demonstration. In October, over 100,000 people fought and overpowered police in order to move two large sound systems into Hyde Park and dance in joyous defiance of the law.

In the end, the Criminal Justice Act was passed, but the alliances built around opposing it did not disappear or slow down.

Police threatening a demonstration in Hyde Park against the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill, October 1994.

“On 14 May 1995, two automobiles collide in the city of London. Their drivers, overcome by histrionic rage, get out of their vehicles and start to destroy them. In reality, it is all theatre. The cars, which are second-hand, have been bought especially for the occasion by members of Reclaim the Streets. Stuck in the middle of the road, their debris blocks motorized traffic, leaving crowded Camden High Street free of cars. The street fills with people and sound systems start to work, using electricity generated by the constant pedaling of bicycles. The ‘repetitive rhythms’ of rave can be heard and some three hundred people throw themselves into dancing in the first party [of the reborn Reclaim the Streets movement].”

-Julia Ramírez Blanco, Reclaim the Streets! From Local to Global Party Protest

Reclaim the Streets takes the M41 motorway with stilt-walkers and jackhammers on July 13, 1996.

Whereas around 300 people attended the May 1995 Reclaim the Streets party, by the July party two months later, attendance had increased tenfold, with nearly 3000 people reclaiming the London neighborhood of Islington to rave and revel. The following year, Reclaim the Streets launched what was probably its most glorious offensive, when over 8000 people broke through police lines to dance for nine hours on London’s M41 highway.

“The sight of thousands of people running onto an empty motorway shut off by large tripods is an image that stays with you… Thirty foot ‘pantomime dames’ [stilt-walkers] glided through the party throwing confetti. Food stalls gave away free stew and sandwiches; graffiti artists added color to the tarmac; poets ranted from the railings; acoustic bands played and strolling players performed. At the height of the festivities, beneath the tall panto dame figures dressed in huge farthingale Marie Antoinette skirts, people were at work with jackhammers, hacking in time to the techno, to mask the sound from the officers standing inches away, digging up the surface of the road until large craters littered the fast lane… to plant seedlings from the gardens smashed by the bulldozers at Claremont Road.”

-“Reclaim the Streets Rewild the M41 Motorway, Shepherds Bush

Never mind the ballots—reclaim the streets.

In 1997, an anti-election rave in Trafalgar Square—“Never Mind the Ballots, Reclaim the Streets”—transformed the exterior of the National Gallery into a bombed-up graffiti wall. Prosecutors charged a group of DJs from the event with attempted murder for driving their van too close to police lines, indicating the state’s impatience to suppress the growing movement.

In early 1998, Reclaim the Streets activists went to Geneva for the first-ever meeting of People’s Global Action, an international coalition of radicals and revolutionaries responding to the Zapatista’s call for a different kind of globalization: global resistance to capitalism. People’s Global Action’s first International Day of Action included a 200,000-strong demonstration in India against the World Trade Organization, a 50,000-person march led by landless peasants in Brazil’s capital city, and over thirty Reclaim the Streets parties from San Francisco to Sydney to Toronto to Lyon to Berlin. In Birmingham, England, 5000 Reclaim the Streets partiers contributed to the Day of Action by paralyzing the city center in opposition to the annual G8 meeting.

“There were some great comic scenes of police incompetence, including them surrounding the small sound system (disguised as a family car) and escorting it into the middle of the party. They never once asked why the ‘frightened family’ inside wanted to escape by deliberately driving the wrong way around the roundabout towards the crowd. By the time they realized their mistake, it was all too late… the decks were under the travel blankets, boys. What threw you off the scent? The baby seat, or the toys?”

-Do or Die, “Down with Empire, Up with Spring!”

With the success of People’s Global Action’s first worldwide day of protest, the so-called anti-globalization movement stepped into the ring like an underdog boxer with an untz untz untz entrance song, ready to knock out the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund—putting global capitalism on its heels.

As word of the successful actions in Britain spread across the Atlantic, punks and anarchists in North America began organizing Reclaim the Streets actions—not only in urban centers like Washington, DC, but also in rust belt cities like Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and smaller towns like Greensboro, North Carolina. For young people who had been chiefly active in subcultural contexts, the model offered a way to leverage subcultural connections to immediately enter the field of disruptive public action. Cutting their teeth with such events, the participants quickly moved on to confronting global capitalist summits. The movement gained momentum steadily until the attacks of September 11, 2001 shifted the discourse, though Reclaim the Streets actions continued around the world for years afterwards.

Another archival photograph from the Washington, DC Reclaim the Streets action of October 2001.

A 1998 Reclaim the Streets pamphlet offers a glimpse into the era:

Single issue? Just against the car?

For all of the mainstream media’s attempt to define [us] as such, for those involved it expresses much more. The street party, itself reclaimed from the inanities of royal jubilees and state “celebrations,” is just one recent initiative in a vibrant history of struggle, both to defend and to take back collective space. From the Peasants’ Revolt to the resistance to the enclosures, from the land occupations of the Diggers to the post-war squatters, on to the recent free festivals, peace camps, land squats and anti-roads movement. Everywhere, extra-ordinary people have continually asserted not only the need to liberate the commons but the ability to think and organize for themselves.

For the city, the streets are the commons, but in the hands of industry and power brokers the streets have become mere conduits for commerce and consumption—the economic hero of which is, of course, the car. A symbol and a symptom of the social and ecological nightmare that state and capitalism create, the car which promises individual freedom ends up guaranteeing noise, destruction and pollution for all. For Reclaim the Streets, the car is a focus—the insanity of its system clearly visible—that leads to questioning both the myth of “the market” and its corporate and institutional enforcers.

With a metal river on one side and endless windows of consumerism on the other, the streets’ true purpose, social interaction, becomes an uneconomic diversion. In its place, the corporate-controlled one-way media of newspapers, radio, and television become “the community.” Their interpretation [of] reality. In this sense, the streets are the alternative and subversive form of the mass media. Where authentic communication, immediate and reciprocal, takes place.

To “reclaim the streets” is to act in defense of and for common ground. To tear down the fence of enclosure that profit-making demands. And the street party—far from being just anti-car—is an explosion of our suppressed potential, a celebration of our diversity and a chorus of voices in solidarity. A festival of resistance!

Time Keeps on Slipping…

“Insurrection is a party. We take joy in the din of their defeat.”

-Communique #13: We Attacked the British Embassy (Fuerzas Autónomas y Destructivas León Czolgosz)

In America in the year 2024, the closest thing we have to street reclamation in the spirit of the history recounted above is the takeovers and sideshows model—celebrations of cars that seem to run counter to the values of the 1990s Reclaim the Streets movement. However, beyond superficial aesthetic preferences regarding motor noise, there is a deeper contrast between these two models of temporary autonomous spatial reclamation: for a full decade now, anarchists have celebrated, analyzed, and (to some degree) participated in sideshows without infusing those efforts with broader militant politics or harnessing their power to spread instances of ungovernability beyond their dedicated subculture. What would it look like if the anarchist fascination with drifting cars charted a course like the one of rave music in the UK, in which the networks and sound systems behind the scene decided to utilize their resources to catalyze massive and widespread combat with the state?

The history of Reclaim the Streets shows not only that militant, revolutionary struggle can also be joyous—something that anyone who hit the streets during the summer of 2020 knows—but also that the skills and bonds developed through underground subculture (how to scope out a spot, set up a generator, get the word out without blowing up the scene) are powerful tools for crafting other kinds of temporary autonomy that are not just clandestine, but openly confrontational.

Good music doesn’t make the party. Good drugs don’t make the party. People make the party. When the party draws together people who seek to break with the imposed limits of their society, a clever mix of songs or an ecstatic experience can suggest other creative possibilities, liberation of a larger scope. In contrast to the way a conqueror plants his flag in the ground to claim territory, loud dance music can fill an area with freedom, making it a blank canvas for the expression of forbidden desire. Illegal desires.

If most techno music takes place in licensed clubs with admission costs and pricey drinks—or worse, in isolation through streaming platforms—this says more about how capitalism homogenizes the way art is consumed than about the essential character of the music and subculture.

Techno’s history is one of…

underground innovation: it developed and evolved in squats and illegal parties;
collective endeavor: the management of sound systems involved collective decision-making, while organizing raves required cooperation and federation between sound systems and party crews;
direct action: not only was techno music the soundtrack to the British anti-roads movement, it was also essential to 1990s German anti-fascism, the powerful Dutch squatting scene in the 1980s and 1990s, and countless other combative movements for autonomy and freedom.

Techno’s future is…

up to you.

A Virtual Tour of Priamukhino, the Bakunin Family Estate and Museum

2024-05-30T23:43:25Z

To observe the 210th birthday of the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, we present a photoessay and virtual tour of his birthplace and family home, Priamukhino, including the museum documenting his life and the lives of his relatives and friends. Owing to the unfortunate conditions prevailing in Russia today, it is not easy for many of us—including many Russians—to visit. This is a misfortune, because Priamukhino has served as a gathering place for anarchists since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

An old photograph of the Bakunin family house.

Mikhail Bakunin’s revolutionary ideas did not spring forth fully-formed like Athena from the skull of Zeus. They emerged from an environment of participatory dialogue and collective education. His sisters were among his earliest and most passionate interlocutors; later, Russian writers including Vissarion Belinsky, Ivan Turgenev, and Leo Tolstoy spent time at Priamukhino with his siblings. This makes it an important focus of study for researchers in a variety of historical, philosophical, and literary fields. We hope that this photoessay will be of use to those who cannot themselves visit—and that the political situation in Russia will change soon.

Mikhail Bakunin.

Mikhail’s equally fierce sister, Varvara Bakunin.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, anarchists began gathering at Priamukhino—some to participate in the Priamukhino Free Artel,¹ tending to the land and buildings, others for annual conferences. Some came from as far away as Italy, the United States, and Brazil.

For those who wish to learn the history of the Bakunin family, John Randolph’s The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism offers a good starting place. To provide more context for this photoessay, we present a short preface by the photographer.

Plan of the Pryamukhino estate, created on the basis of the “Geometric Special Plan” of the estate from 1797; the buildings that have survived into the present day are highlighted in black. 1 - Manor house; 2 - Church; 3 - Bell tower; 4 - Factory; 5 - Barn; 6 - Gardener’s house; 7 - Consumer co-operative; 8 - Library; 9 - Crypt; 10 - Rotunda; 11 - Gatehouse; 12 - Chapel at the holy spring; 13 - Dam (XIX century); 14 - Hospital; 15 - Dam (XVIII century); 16 - Bolshaya Street; 17 - Sadovaya Street; 18 - Grandfather’s Hill; 19 - Children’s Alley; 20 - Decembrist Oak; 21 - Stable; 22 - Animal Farm; 23 - Cemetery; 24 - Chapel; 25 - Riga (Turkish bath); 26 - Hill named for A.A. Bakunin; 27 - Parterre glade; 28 - Bathhouse; 29 - A gazebo designed by Lvov: 30 - Kutuzovskaya Hill; 31 - Elm Hill; 32 - School; 33 - Spring named for I.M. Bakunin; 34 - Upper new pond; 35 - Batyushkin (sterlet) pond; 36 - Lower new pond; 37 - Artificial pond; 38 - Swimming pool; 39 - Mother’s Pond; 40 - Pond under the garden; 41 - Bath; 42 - Church slope; 43 - Beautiful hill; 44 - Little Grove; 45 - Circle of larches; 46 - Greenhouse; 47 - Greenhouse; 48 - Main village street; 49 - Road to Korostkovo; 50 - Brick factory road.

Weekend at Priamukhino

Finally, I got to see the legendary Priamukhino!

I have been hearing about the “Priamukhino readings” for many years since I became an anarchist. Anarchists have been coming here since the moment that the Soviet Union loosened its grip on political dissent. People used to come to Priamukhino for a few days every year to live collectively, working together to renovate what remains of the Bakunin family mansion and forest, and also to read and discuss anarchist texts outside the distractions of urban life. The Priamukhino readings had been interconnected with the artel work since the 1990s, but they ceased in 2018 due to differences within the Priamukhino Free Artel.

The work of the artel continues, however. The forest around the village beside the Bakunin family mansion needs regular maintenance, and the mansion itself needs renovating.

No active anarchists live in Priamukhino itself, but at least one used to live close by. In addition, there are people in Priamukhino who sympathize with anarchists; since the 1990s, they have undertaken a tremendous effort to preserve the village’s historical heritage and affirm the anarchists’ agenda. Relations with the other villagers are generally good, as well. The only strained relation in the village is with the priest, who openly denounces anarchists. Many villagers prefer to attend church services elsewhere.

What I found in Priamukhino this year was quite different from what I expected. Likely owing to the situation in Russia, only a few people came to join artel work, none of whom I knew from before. Nonetheless, I received a very warm welcome.

We spent the next two days cutting fallen trees, carrying wood, washing monuments, taking out trash, and digging out hogweed, which was invading the whole forest. We also cut the grass to clear paths in the forest around the mansion and the Decembrists’ Oak—an oak that two Decembrists, the brothers Muravyov, planted there in 1816, which was destroyed by lightning in the 1970s. Another oak has been planted there in its place, and nearby, there is another small oak tree planted by anarchists. We worked up to four hours each day and spent the rest cooking food, talking, watching movies (among them, W. Allen’s Love and Death), swimming in Osuga river, and taking walks around Priamukhino’s beautiful scenery of forests, village roads, and river banks. We also took a trip to Kuvshinovo, a nearby town named after the capitalist Julia Kuvshinova, to see its architectural features.

It was interesting to walk the little roads and paths through the forest, to touch the mighty old trees that witnessed the childhoods of all eleven of the Bakunin siblings in the 19th century, to imagine young Mikhail walking here as well, conversing with his sisters and friends. It makes one reflect on how environments and circumstances can influence our lives. Who would imagine that the son of a family that lived in a mansion maintained by more than a hundred serfs could become a world-famous revolutionary, hated and feared by those who own mansions? The mosaic of life’s circumstances can give rise to the most surprising results.

I am honored to visit a place that holds a part of this legacy, where so much love and work has been put into it, connecting anarchist history to one more place on Earth.

A map of Priamukhino in a booklet about the estate.

We attended the Bakunin family museum located on the edge of Priamukhino. The museum is run by a kind old woman who gave us a tour. It documents the history of the family, focusing on each Bakunin starting with Mikhail Bakunin’s father. A significant part of the museum is given over to Mikhail Bakunin himself, exploring his involvement in revolutionary history.

I also encountered some publications about Bakunin that I hadn’t seen before: N. Pirumova’s Bakunin, published in 1970; M.P. Dragomanova’s Critical-Biographical Note on Bakunin, published in 1906, a copy of which was given to the museum by a descendant of the Bakunins; Memories of Bakunin by M.P. Sazhin (Arman Ross), published in 1926 by the publishing house of the All-Union Society of Political Convicts and Exiles, section Library of Exile and Hard Labor. I took the opportunity of being alone in the museum to take some of them out from under the glass and take pictures of them.

I also looked through the samizdat publications of “Priamukhino Harmony,” a zine that anarchists have been producing during the Priamukhino Free Artel and Priamukhino readings. Apparently, in all the years since it first began to appear in the 1990s, this paper has not been photocopied or digitalized, and the only originals were kept in the village. That worries me, because at any time something could happen to them and they would be lost to anarchist history. I hurriedly photographed all of them.

In addition, I recorded a sort of virtual tour of the museum.

A video walkthrough of the museum at Priamukhino. The music is Alessio Lega’s “La tomba di Bakunin.”

The Frogs of Priamukhino

I took this picture of a frog near the Bakunin family house. The frogs at Priamukhino have been part of the legend of the place since at least 1995, when anarchists renovated the ponds that they inhabit. Subsequently, in place of a red star, anarchists put a red frog on a black banner, which has become a symbol of the anarchist project in Priamukhino.

Russian anarchists in 1995 displaying the “kvakanya” red frog banner associated with Priamukhino.

This picture shows volunteers and locals just a couple years ago, displaying the same banner.

Museum

Museum of the Bakunin family.

A map showing some of the places Mikhail Bakunin was active.

A bust of Mikhail Bakunin with books and a torch behind him.

A bust of Mikhail Bakunin.

Another bust of Mikhail Bakunin, showing books and a torch behind him.

The back of the second bust of Mikhail Bakunin, showing books and a torch behind him.

A desk in memorial to Natalia Mikhailovna Pirumova, who contributed a lot to the preservation of Priamukhino and supported the activities of anarchists in the village.

Certificates from descendants of the Bakunin family and various civil institutions expressing gratitude to the Bakunin museum for its cultural and educational work.

Some people who contributed to creating the museum.

A plaque in memorial to Vladimir Ivanovich Sisoyev, a writer, local historian, and activist for the preservation of the Priamukhino estate’s cultural heritage.

A desk observing the 70th birthday of Vladimir Ivanovich Sisoyev.

Mikhail Bakunin as a young man.

The picture in the upper right shows Mikhail Bakunin at the close of the 1840s.

An image of Mikhail Bakunin and depictions of the Dresden uprising of 1849, for which he was condemned to death before being handed over to another country that was also seeking to execute him.

More photographs of Bakunin’s family.

Mikhail Bakunin in 1869.

An invitation to the event in Paris in 1847 at which Mikhail Bakunin made a famous speech in solidarity with Polish people resisting Russian rule, for which he was exiled from France.

A map of the Priamukhino estate and its environs.

The Bakunin family house.

The Bakunin family tree.

Mikhail Bakunin and his sisters Tatiana and Lyubov.

Portraits of Mikhail Bakunin as a young man, his parents, and others.

Portraits of Mikhail Bakunin and the thinkers Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose philosophy influenced his.

Portraits of two of Mikhail Bakunin’s sisters.

Another model of the Bakunin house.

Mikhail Bakunin in his youth.

Mikhail’s sister Varvara Bakunin, among others.

A photograph of the Decembrists’ oak in 1967.

A bust of the French author Voltaire. When she lived in Berlin, Varvara Bakunin displayed busts of Friedrich von Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Voltaire in her apartment—German romanticism interrogating French rationalism.

“Penal Servitude and Exile”: Memories about Mikhail Bakunin, by M. P. Sazhin (Arman Ross). Edition by the All-Union Association of Political Convicts and Exiles, Moscow, 1926.

Tatiana Bakunin.

A book written by N. Pirumova about Mikhail Bakunin and his family.

A small concert hall in the museum.

Another room in the museum.

Bakunin, a biography by N. Pirumova.

A part of the room with literature and other items related to Bakunin family.

Editions of Mikhail Bakunin’s works and brochures and books about him.

In the bottom right, a photograph of Giuseppe Garibaldi, Italian revolutionary Republican and socialist and colleague of Mikhail Bakunin.

A portrait of Yekaterina Mikhailovna Bakunina (1810-1894), a Russian nurse during the Crimean War, who contributed to the establishment of nursing in Russia.

Memories of Mikhail Bakunin by M. P. Sazhin (Arman Ross). Edition by All-Union Association of Political Convicts and Exiles, Moscow, 1926

Photos of an Italian delegation to the Bakunin museum. Alexander Bakunin, Mikhail’s brother, fought in Italy in the army of Garibaldi for three years.

A gift to the Bakunin museum from a Bakunin family descendant. Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin. A Critical Biographical Essay, by M. P. Dragomanova. Printing house of D. M. Gran, Gostinodvorskaya Street. Kazan, 1905.

One part of the museum documents the friendship of Mikhail’s brother, Alexander Bakunin, and Leo Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace.

An exhibit showing the connections between the Bakunin family and Leo Tolstoy, who visited the family estate.

A part of the museum dedicated to Leon Tolstoy and his relationship with the Bakunin family.

A couch from the Bakunin house on which Leon Tolstoy and Aleksandr Bakunin, both veterans of the defense of Sevastopol, once sat together.

A black flag with Kvakunya, a frog that inhabits the ponds in Priamukhino that anarchists cleaned in 1995. The flag rests on the couch on which Leo Tolstoy once sat while visiting the house.

A picture of a painting made in 1883, hung a church in a Tazovo village in the region of Kursk. The painting is titled “Tolstoy in Hell,” apparently in response to the decision of the Church to exclude Leo Tolstoy.

Kutuzov Hill

The former Beautiful Hill, now Kutuzov Hill, is named after the Russian military leader who defeated Napoleon at the beginning of the 19th century. The legend goes that Aleksandr Bakunin, Mikhail Bakunin’s father, was friends with Mikhail Kutuzov and the latter stopped at Priamukhino for a day. There is no official evidence confirming this besides the fact that Kutuzov’s regiment once stayed very close to Priamukhino for a day or two for no apparent reason. Aleksandr Bakunin renamed the hill after the defeat of Napoleon.

“Larches grown by Alexander Mikhailovich Bakunin from seeds donated by N.A. Lvov in 1793. A group of trees was planted around the so-called ‘beautiful hill,’ later named ‘Kutuzovskaya Gorka’ [Kutuzov Hill], as well as in the park area behind the Osuga River.”

A monument to Mikhail Kutuzov.

This stone is a memorial stone for Kutuzov. During the Second World War, if I’m not mistaken, there was a military hospital in Priamukhino. The story goes that while Soviet soldiers were making a campfire under the stone, the stone cracked and part of it rolled down the hill and either stayed there or was taken elsewhere. What remains of the stone is still on the hill, as you can see.

The South Wing of the Bakunin House, the Barn, and the Forest

These photos include the Decembrists’ Oak and the ruins of one of the wings of the original Bakunin house.

A map of the area.

“Oak of the Decembrists: At this place in 1815, in memory of their stay at the estate, the Bakunin relatives, the Muravyov brothers (A.N. Muravyov, N.N. Muravyov-Karsky, and M.N. Muravyov-Vilensky) planted an oak tree. At the end of the 1970s, during a thunderstorm, the tree was damaged and collapsed. In 1989, the descendants of the Bakunins planted a new oak tree on this site.”

The sign reads, roughly, “Do not enter! Dangerous to life—collapse!”

A depiction of the Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno.

A depiction of an anarchist sailor, perhaps associated with the Kronstadt uprising.

A depiction of Leo Tolstoy having tea with Alexander Bakunin in 1891. Alexander is depicted in a red Garibaldi shirt on account of his participating in Garibaldi’s campaign in Italy. Tolstoy and Alexander Bakunin both fought in the Battle for Sevastopol in 1885; they met at the Bakunin estate for tea in 1891.

“Manor house (second half of the 18th century to first half of the 19th century). The Pryamukhino estate was purchased in 1779 from the Shishkov nobles by Mikhail Vasilyevich Bakunin (1730-1803) in the name of his wife Lyubov Petrovna. The middle wooden part of the house has been preserved from the previous owners. The Bakunins’ son, Aleksandr Mikhailovich (1765/68-1854), made extensions on both sides and built a two-story outbuilding on the south, in one of the rooms where there was a chapel. On the north side, the outbuilding was one story, and the outbuildings, connected to the main house by brick one-story passages, were decorated with four-column Doric porticoes. There was a ground clearing in front of the house in the park.”

This memorial plaque reads “In this house, Mikhail A. Bakunin was born and spent his childhood and teenage years—a famous militant of the international revolutionary movement, one of the founders of and a theorist of anarchism, a Russian thinker. 1814-1876,” then lists some of the many historical figures who visited the estate.

19th-Century Church

When you enter Priamukhino via the bridge over the river Osuga river, one of the first things you encounter is the old Bakunin church, where you can also find the Bakunin family memorial.

“Bell tower built by Alexander Alexandrovich Bakunin (1821-1908, a famous Tver zemstvo participant and lawyer, and a participant in the defense of Sevastopol during the Crimean War and the famous ‘Expedition of the Thousand’ with Giuseppe Garibaldi in 1861. Built according to the design of the Tver provincial architect V.I. Nazarin in 1903-1907. In place of the old wooden one, the bell tower became the last building built on the estate by the Bakunins. In 1996, a descendant of the Bakunins installed new bells in the bell tower.” Coincidentally, the underground paper that Mikhail Bakunin’s comrades Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Ogarev published was called Kolokol, “the Bell.”

Cascade of Ponds

This cascade of ponds was made in the 19th century. By the 1990s, it was in a horrible state, until anarchists renovated it.

“Cascade of Ponds: A cascade of three ponds was built by the owner of the estate A.M. Bakunin in the first half of the 19th century. Upper pond (containing underground springs and springs that provide water), Sterlyazhiy or Batyushkin pond (in memory of A.M. Bakunin’s father, Mikhail Vasilyevich Bakunin) and Lower pond. Near Father’s Pond, there was a bathhouse and a swimming pool.”

Priamukhino Village and Administration

The Environs of Priamukhino and Lopatino

Walking in the village of Priamukhino and its surroundings.

The road sign for Lopatino. The village of Lopatino is right across the bridge over the Osuga River, a fifteen-minute walk from Priamukhino.

A bridge over the Osuga river.

The Osuga River.

The road sign for Priamukhino.

A Soviet memorial for Priamukhino villagers who went to the front in WWII and didn’t come back.

For More Information

There is a Telegram channel for the Priamukhino artel.

A movie about Priamukhino made by a Swedish visitor.

In prerevolutionary Russia, an artel was a cooperative association of craftsmen living and working together. ↩

Steal Something from Work Day 2024 : It's Time to Even the Score!

2024-04-15T11:53:28Z

Once again, it’s April 15—Steal Something from Work Day! Every April, millions of workers around the world observe this day as a chance to settle accounts with those who are profiting off their labor. For us, it represents an opportunity to reflect on why so many people steal from their workplaces and what it would take to create a world in which that was unnecessary.

Feared by right-wing hacks like Glen Beck, Steal Something from Work Day is celebrated from Bulgaria to Greece, Spain, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands. You can learn about Steal Something from Work Day on the official site, or listen to this podcast about it, or watch this charming video.

Or just, you know, participate.

A dishwasher uses a sink as a shield during clashes with police in Santiago, Chile on November 8, 2019. Let’s turn the roles that capitalism forces upon us into weapons against the system itself.

The United States Department of Commerce estimates that every year, “businesses lose $50 billion as a result of employee theft.” Let’s zoom in on that word, “lose.” They aren’t saying that $50 billion just disappears; it isn’t simply mislaid, nor willfully destroyed. They mean that $50 billion ends up in the pockets of the workers, rather than in the bank accounts of corporate executives. In other words, the problem is that the money ends up in the hands of the people who are doing the work that produces it.

Is this a problem, really? Even if you are an avowed proponent of capitalism, the market needs people spending money to function. Workers who are struggling just to pay their rent and put food on the table are going to put that money right back into the economy. Corporate executives would more likely sit on it, or use it to buy up more real estate, making it even harder for the rest of us to afford rent.

Of course, if you’re not invested in capitalism as a good in and of itself, if you value equality and human life above the “health” of the market, there are even stronger arguments as to why the workers should be the ones to go home with this money, not executives and investors.

Let’s be clear that when we talk about workplace theft, we’re not talking about a self-seeking criminal minority enriching itself at everyone’s expense. Apparently, three quarters of all employees have stolen from their employer at least once. Workplace theft is arguably the most widely practiced form of wealth redistribution. It might also be the most effective—though we can aspire to come up with even more effective models.

What if workers in the United States took home $50 billion less every year? The richest 1% of United States citizens now own more wealth than the entire middle class. The top 10% control more wealth than everyone else added together. The combined wealth of the billionaires in the United States has almost doubled over the past half decade, reaching $5.529 trillion—that’s all money that they have accumulated from other people’s labor.

This chart from 2017 tells a different story about who is committing the most theft in the workplace. Even according to the laws that are currently on the books, which overwhelmingly favor employers over employees, it is employers who commit the majority of theft in this society, both in the workplace and outside of it.

Now imagine taking another $50 billion away from workers in the United States every year. Imagine plunging families further into poverty, making it even harder to afford groceries, rent, utilities bills, car insurance, tuition. In fact, employers aim to do precisely that—that’s why they are investing in surveillance technology, security guards, and new inventory systems rather than paying the people whose labor enriches them. If there is a self-seeking villainous minority out there, it is not those who steal from their employers, but the capitalists who want to hoard even more of the wealth of our society in their hands.

This is why a growing anti-work movement has begun to question the foundational premises of capitalism and exchange economics. Labor unrest is ramping up, but the majority of workers in North America lack labor organizations that are capable of asserting their interests with the firmness that they deserve. It’s time to reimagine what the tactics of a previous era, such as the general strike, could look like today in our current conditions. At the same time, we can look at the activities that the vast majority of workers already engage in—including workplace theft and other informal or clandestine forms of resistance—as points of departure for new strategies.

In the following narratives, two authors from different parts of the Midwest recount their experiments with stealing from their employers—one individual, one collective.

(Yes, the header photograph at the top of this page is a real stock photograph about workplace theft. The horror!)

From 1830 to today, we must weaponize the ordinary conditions of our daily lives if we are to defend ourselves against our oppressors.

Attack the Gas Station

During the last few months of my senior year of high school, when I stopped attending class, a friend got me a job at a gas station convenience store after my car went on strike and refused to deliver any more pizzas. The morning after graduation day, I moved into a two-bedroom apartment with a couple of friends.

A two-bedroom apartment with a couple of friends. In other words, I was staying on the couch in the living room.

At the time, I cared about very little besides hanging out with my friends, riding bikes, reading fantasy novels, and drinking beer. I needed money to pay my rent, pay for food and beer, pay for gas and car insurance, and so on, but it was possible to squeeze by with a terrible minimum wage job.

The gas station was owned by a typical franchise owner. He was mostly hands off, except when he was hands on. We all worked five ten-hour shifts by ourselves every week. Working alone meant that we had to take bathroom breaks as fast as possible, between customers. At that time, it was possible to pump gas without paying for it, so we had to hope that someone didn’t pull up and pump gas while we were in the bathroom. It wasn’t as if I cared if someone stole gas, but gas was one of the few items that was actually tracked by the inventory system, and we would catch hell if the gas numbers were off.

The upside to this situation was that tons of other merchandise was not tracked in the inventory, and the CCTV surveillance system didn’t work. I’ve worked dozens of jobs in my life, and I don’t think a single job I’ve ever worked has succeeded in preventing me from stealing something from them while I was on the clock. But this job failed to prevent me from stealing a whole lot of shit while I was on the clock.

For most of each of my ten-hour shifts, I had nothing to do. There is only so much time you can spend stocking and straightening the shelves, making pots of foul coffee, and staring out the window at gas pumps. I started eating and drinking the stock solely in order to pass the time. Pretty soon, every shift, I was drinking several bottles of juice and eating countless snack cakes, bags of chips, packs of cookies, candy bars, and terrible deli sandwiches.

Then I started taking food and beer home to share with my roommates. It wasn’t like there was good food available at a Midwest gas station, but we were in a thieves-can’t-be-choosers kind of situation. While one of my roommates had a regular manual labor job, the other had no job at all; he was surviving off of small-scale weed dealing and the kindness and generosity of his roommates. At the end of pretty much every shift, I would load up my car with a grocery bag or two of food and a couple boxes of beer. I tried to take a variety of stuff in the course of each week in order to make it less obvious what was being stolen, but ultimately, I wasn’t as subtle as I thought I was.

All of my underage friends and acquaintances started coming in, hoping to get beer without being carded. I saw another opportunity here. Beer was another item that wasn’t easily tracked by the primitive inventory system, so it was easy to avoid ringing the beer up in the register and just let people hand me cash for the beer at a steep discount. After I realized this, I put it together that pretty much any item that was likely to be paid for in exact change (like a 50 cent newspaper) didn’t need to be entered in the cash register. I would wait to ring them up until I could see whether the customer had exact change. Soon, I was taking home between $50 and $100 at the end of every shift, at a time when I paid $125 a month for rent.

One day, the friend and co-worker who had gotten me the job told me that the manager had asked him if he knew whether I was stealing from them. Apparently, they didn’t realize that he was my close friend. He told them that he was positive that I would never do such a thing, and they left it alone. Looking back, I’m sure that the vague inventory numbers must have looked incredibly suspicious, but they had no way to confirm what was happening.

Eventually, I wound up quitting that job to take another job that was less horrible in some ways but nowhere near as lucrative—aside from the free late-night access to the office photocopier. A couple weeks later, that gas station went out of business. I was sure that my efforts had something to do with it. If a full accounting were to be done, the owner of that place probably stole more hours of my life than I stole from him, but I did my best to even the score.

In the years since then, my politics have become more sophisticated, and so have my ways of striking back at the employing class. You could say I’ve become more ambitious. But just as every prisoner is a political prisoner, every cashier in every gas station is a fighter in the class war. People steal from work because it is demeaning, because their workplaces don’t engage their creativity, because they want to share things with others, because it’s bullshit to have to waste time just to turn a profit for a boss.

And lots of people steal from work because they need to. If more advanced inventory systems have made it more difficult for cashiers to steal from their employers, that only means that life is even harder for workers and those who depend on them. Better anti-theft technology is one of the factors that are contributing to escalating inequality, as capitalists concentrate more and more wealth in their hands relative to the rest of us. Stealing from our employers is the very least we ought to do in this situation. Attack every gas station.

The Team

I live in a second-tier Midwestern rust belt city with a deep legacy of poverty and segregation. Historically, there has been a lot of lawlessness and social rebellion here. This city is busted, broke, and broken.

Despite the challenges, we built a network of anarchists here, an informal community cultivating an ethos of rebellion. A gang of aspirational dreamers, scrappy squatters, and profound thinkers who took the question of how to create and push social struggles seriously. One advantage of this city is that it is possible to live very cheaply here, compared to other parts of the country. This afforded us the chance to experiment with different forms of daily life.

At the time this story took place, most of us were service industry workers: cooks, servers, bakers, bartenders, cab drivers, baristas, home care workers, grocery store clerks, things like that. We often found ourselves on the lower rungs of the job ladder. We would work the tedious and unpleasant jobs that offered us some degree of flexibility and the freedom to live our weird lives.

We set out to make the road by walking. We believed that we could build with those around us, drawing on our shared interests and common anguish to create the conditions for rebellion on a broader scale. Many of us shoplifted and stole from our workplaces. Someone in our community had the idea to try to make these secret individual acts into a point of connection.

I don’t remember exactly how it first started. A photocopied flier titled “The Team is Real” circulated, presenting a proposal. A small button accompanied each flier, like the buttons you get at punk shows. Someone in the punk scene had a button maker and was putting it to use.

The flier set out the proposal:

Step one: Wear the button when you’re at work. Hook people up (discounts, freebies, extras, etc.).

Step two: Wear the button when you go out. Get hooked up. Remember to ask your teammates where they work.

Step three: Build the team. Talk to your friends and trusted co-workers. The more people on the team, the better.

You can read the whole manifesto here.

The proposal was basically to make a union of thieves that could expand beyond the limits of camaraderie, political alliance, and friendship, as a way to widen our connections with others based on our mutual material conditions and needs. It was a very simple system. If you don’t have access to the kind of button maker we used, you could use other types of pins, patches, shirts, hats—any type of common identifier. Of course, you have to be careful that word does not get out to anyone who can’t be trusted.

The idea spread through our subcultural community and across the lines that separated us from other scenes. It reached our peers and co-workers.

At the high point of our experiment, I could go out and visit a variety of establishments without ever spending money. I could get sandwiches, coffee, ice cream and gelato, and sometimes groceries from one of the fancy local grocery stores. Sometimes the people hooking me up were people I didn’t even know.

That was good. But the flier described bigger ambitions:

In our fantastical visions of the near future, we see ourselves reclining on patio furniture while savoring lattes, stocking our larders with the finest of produce from local markets. We are enveloped in sensations of pleasure foreign to our proletarian tongues as we drink freely of the bourgeoisie’s wine. When we travel, we are greeted by friends and strangers with gifts of bounty and luxury. And when guests are received by us in turn, we show them a night on the town like no other. A cornucopia of goods, freely taken and given, all at the expense of those who would exploit our lives, all in the spirit of the negation of capitalist relations.

Our experiment could have gone further. It didn’t end up reaching far enough or lasting long enough to make a really deep impact on the tangible conditions of our daily lives. It did generate some conversations among coworkers, and that fostered a spirit of solidarity, or least insubordination. But materially, it was limited by what each of us was able to get away with in the workplace; we only had access to small quantities of what was available to us in our immediate environments. The real stockpiles of wealth are stored far from the outlets of the service economy.

I think this model could be more effective in a geographically smaller place—for example, a college town where there is a central concentration of cafés and stores. It also could be interesting to try it out in a place that is experiencing active rebellion, or in a time of widespread unrest like during the George Floyd uprising. In a situation like that, it could be way to extend the energy in the streets into other forms of experimental resistance. When we’ve experienced rebellions like that here, we’ve often wondered how we could expand and extend them into ongoing social and class war. The “great resignation” that followed the COVID-19 pandemic saw anti-work sentiment reach new heights; some people interpreted that as a continuation of the uprising. Maybe something like “the team” could have opened up a new front then.

We are all fundamentally exploited in our daily experiences as workers under capitalism. We need new ways to experiment and spread class struggle outside of formal structures like unions, which aren’t available to some of us. Any gift shared freely heartens and encourages us, but if it is stolen back, it’s all the sweeter. Everything for everyone!

“The routine of robbing banks is no replacement for the carnival of storming them en masse. Something that holds true for many “survival” acts: better to loot than shoplift, to ambush than to snipe, to walk out than to phone in a bomb threat, to strike than to call in sick, to riot than to vandalize… Increasingly collective and coordinated acts against this world of coercion and isolation aren’t solely a matter of effectivity, but equally a matter of sociality—of community and fun.”

-War on Misery #3, summer 2008

A Moment of Illumination

2024-04-01T15:51:02Z

In the following narrative, our correspondent casts light on a little-understood episode of history.

“In fact, almost all the major breakthroughs are unexpected. It used to be we’d get bright people and just let them do whatever they want, and then suddenly, we’ve got the light bulb.”

-David Graeber, interviewed by PBS

Fiat lux. In the beginning, there were three of us—the communist, the insurrectionist, and I, your humble narrator. It was the turn of the century and we were wandering in darkness.

In a vacuum, light moves at a velocity of 299,792 km per second. We were moving considerably slower, not only on account of our ignorance of the metric system but also because we couldn’t see two feet in front of us in the abandoned warehouse. We had been forced to abandon our headlamps with our backpacks when we fled the train yard.

Some people abandon warehouses, other people abandon backpacks. That’s how it is under capitalism.

The Hungarian feminist filmmaker Ildiko Enyedi completed her masterpiece My Twentieth Century in 1989, a pivotal moment in history. The film opens in Menlo Park, New Jersey, as Thomas Edison demonstrates his new invention, the electric light bulb. To the rapture of an enchanted crowd, a display of light bulbs arranged throughout the branches of the trees glows like a scale model of the heavens. Enyedi affords the viewer a glimpse of a man with a visage not unlike Errico Malatesta—who did indeed greet the opening of the 20th century in New Jersey—contemplating one of these miraculous inventions.

Then the scene shifts and we see the stars of the true heavens. The cosmos always exceeds our clumsy imitations.

We found a stairwell and ascended through the gloom. The communist was grumpy. He always attributed our misfortunes to a lack of proper discipline. The insurrectionist was peevish. As she saw it, when things went wrong, it showed that we weren’t being brave enough. Myself, I was just thanking my lucky stars that we had gotten away from yard security.

Visible light is a kind of electromagnetic radiation—specifically, it is comprised of the wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation that fall within the range that the human retina can perceive. White light consists of a roughly equal mixture of all visible wavelengths. But there was no light of any sort in the hallway at the top of the stairs. We crept into the murk, hands before our faces, a single step at a time. Tenebrosity, that’s the literary term for what we were experiencing. Total darkness.

I was in the front. Space changes when you lose your ability to visually map it from a distance. When you have to feel every inch of it by hand, it expands. In the few tentative steps from the stairwell to the first door, it felt as though I covered as much ground as we had on the freight train over the past three days.

I fumbled through the door and made my way around the room. It was roughly square, without any doors other than the one I had entered, and apparently windowless.

“Even if there is a security guard outside the building, they won’t be able to see us in here,” I argued.

“Let’s post up here, then,” said the insurrectionist. “We can sleep until shift change, then go try to recover our packs.”

“I wish we had a light to read by,” said the communist. Every night, to catch up on the day’s news, he read a few pages of Das Kapital. Apparently, he’d brought it with him when he abandoned his pack.

I resumed my blind groping along the walls of the room. Eventually, I found a light switch and flipped it. No luck.

“What if the light bulb is just burned out, though? We don’t know for sure that the electricity is off.”

“Are you just walking around with a spare light bulb on you?” I demanded.

“There could be a utility closet,” answered the insurrectionist.

“That’s a good idea,” agreed the communist. “Where do you think that would be?”

“Do I look like a motherfucking theorist?” asked the insurrectionist from the darkness.

The insurrectionist and I stumbled back out into the hallway. I took one side of the hallway, she took the other, and we traced our fingers along the walls until she reached another door. She swung it open. “I feel shelves.” She had found the utility closet. “I found something! I think it’s a light bulb!”

We groped our way back to our room. But in the darkness, we couldn’t reach the ceiling to find the light fixture.

“How many anarchists does it take to change a light bulb?” I asked.

“We’re not here to change things for people,” said the insurrectionist. “The light bulb has to change itself.”

“‘Communism is not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality has to adjust itself,’” quoted the communist. “It is ‘the real movement that abolishes the present state of things,’ which is to say, the darkness.”

“So if we change the light bulb, it was communism that did it?” objected the insurrectionist. “Talk about gaslighting.”

“Lenin says ‘Communism is Soviet power plus the electrocution of the whole country,’” the communist answered.

I crept back into the hallway and resumed my search. Past the closet, I found another door. It, too, was unlocked. I stepped through it and immediately stubbed my toe on something in the murk. I reached out and felt something at hip level. A swivel chair.

I rolled the chair back down the hall into our room. The insurrectionist held it still while I stood on it, flailing my arms over my head in slow motion. And sure enough, there it was—the light fixture. I unscrewed the glass hemisphere that concealed it and lowered the glass to the insurrectionist, who passed me the light bulb from the hall closet in return. There was already a light bulb in the socket above me. I unscrewed it and handed it down to her.

“You know you can fill these with paint and throw them at police officers,” she informed me.

Gingerly rotating the new light bulb into the socket, I held my breath, hoping against hope. What were the odds that the power was still on in this abandoned building?

Light consists of energy quanta called photons that behave like particles in some cases and like waves in other cases. Sometimes we are atomized individuals, doing our lonely part to contribute to the collective struggle. Other times, we become something that transcends the sum of our parts. We become a wave of change.

And suddenly, everything was illuminated. In a flash, I could see the ceiling over me, I could see the room around us, I could see the dumbfounded faces of my comrades squinting up at me from below. I was Prometheus, stealing fire from our corporate overlords to light our dismal way. We had accomplished the unthinkable. Let there be light!

The communist got out his book. The insurrectionist started looking for things to steal. Flushed with success, I went back out into the hall.

Navigating by the ray of light from our room, I returned to the stairwell. I could see, now, that the stairs continued up. I ascended them two at a time, landing after landing. At the top, there was a ladder reaching up to a trap door.

The view from the top of the building was breathtaking. The whole city was laid out before us in all its excess. A hundred thousand households sleeping side by side, oblivious to their collective potential. Capitalism had left this building dead, but we had brought it back to life. If three of us could accomplish that, what could all of us accomplish, together?

Suddenly, the insurrectionist was at my side. We stood there, looking out across the city. We were not powerless individuals. We were the froth on the edge of a wave of change, about to crash across an unsuspecting society. Raising our eyes from the electric lights of the sleeping city to the canopy of stars above, we knew in our hearts that our story had only just begun. If we could change a light bulb, we could change the world.

“A light bulb came on.”

-“Performing Folk Punk: Agonistic Performances of Intersectionality,” Benjamin D. Haas

The 2024 Zapatista Encuentro : A Report-back with Footage of a Play about the Movement to Stop Cop City

2024-01-18T10:50:20Z

On January 2, 2024, members of the Weelaunee Solidarity Collective—an ad hoc group of US-based forest defenders and revolutionaries—presented a play about the history of the movement to Stop Cop City at the encuentro celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Zapatista uprising. The play recounts the recent history of Weelaunee Forest and the struggle to defend the vision of life it embodies against the militarized world of police and prisons represented by Cop City. The play was creative, playful, and amateur: all endearing qualities that characterize the cultural productions that Zapatistas presented throughout the gathering, at which collective participation in narrating history was valued as an end in itself.

In the following account, participants in the Weelaunee Solidarity Collective describe their experiences at the gathering and their reflections about what the ongoing Zapatista project can teach aspiring revolutionaries elsewhere around the world. We also share footage of the play they performed at the encuentro in memory of Tortuguita, who was murdered one year ago today.

In 1994, the Zapatistas refuted the claim that humanity had reached “the end of history” by carrying out an uprising in response to the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The proponents of neoliberal market economies had prematurely declared victory over the last remnants of the worker’s movement, hoping to consign the dream of a dignified life in common (which Zapatistas refer to as Lekil Kuxlejal) to the dustbin of history. The Zapatista uprising and the decades of autonomy it secured are living proof that history itself is not over—that the present, like the past and the future, remains a site of contestation and struggle.

In 2023, in defiance of a society bent on destroying life itself—a society that is responding to the crises produced by capitalism by redoubling investment in police, borders, plantations, prisons, extraction, and militarized control—a group of militants traveled to Chiapas from the so-called United States of America to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the 1994 uprising.

Nearly a year after Georgia State Patrol murdered our friend and comrade Tortuguita, we arrived in the Lancandon jungle with Tort in our thoughts. While Tort was murdered far from the cloud forests of southern Mexico, they inhabited a landscape of revolutionary possibility that the Zapatistas had helped to create. Tort often spoke of the Zapatistas. We placed a portrait of Tort on the memorial altar lining the front of the stage at the encuentro, alongside photographs of murdered Zapatistas and other freedom fighters.

“We placed a portrait of Tort on the memorial altar lining the front of the stage.”

While not all of us knew Tort, we have all been involved in the struggle to defend the forest over the past several years. We did not travel to Chiapas as passive observers, but as active revolutionaries who find ourselves on the same side of the global civil war as the Zapatistas, striving to defend a dignified collective life. We know that for a revolution to be possible, we will have to weave together our struggles across the Americas, recognizing each other as combatting different heads of the same capitalist hydra.

In the movement to stop Cop City, we have come to a point at which we are facing serious repression: the murder of Tortuguita, comrades facing charges that could mean decades in prison, the loss of the forest as a space of life, assembly, and experimentation. All of these have contributed to a state of stagnation and disorientation, posing challenges to those who aspire to see the movement develop a mass character. In attending the encuentro, our intention was to share the stories of our struggle and to learn whatever lessons the Zapatistas could share with us on the basis of decades and centuries of resistance. We arrived curious about recent Zapatista communiqués describing the difficulties caused by narcoviolence and announcing a new reformulation of their structure of autonomous government. In the face of total devastation—”the great storm,” as they call it—we must not succumb to resignation.

Over the past few years, Zapatista communities have begun to contend with narcotrafficking, a new regime of violence in Chiapas’s already contested terrain. This has led to necessary reconsiderations regarding how the Zapatistas can maintain their way of life against the incursions of the state and wealthy landowners, which are now deeply entangled with the area’s competing cartels.

Many of us living in the United States have been impacted by crises caused by some of the same forces. There is a crisis along the US border, justified by a police state that has no intention of doing anything to diminish the violence resulting from a criminalized drug trade that it has contributed to creating. At the same time, a crisis has emerged out of the criminalization of drug use in the United States, involving a wave of overdoses intensified by unsafe supply, alongside cyclical and racialized incarceration. Some reduce this to an oversimplified formula: narco violence in the Global South is fueled by the consumption habits of the Global North.

Speaking to those facing the threat of narcoviolence in their territory, we found it important to present an alternative framework emphasizing the interconnected nature of these crises and the repressive forces that purport to engage in “crisis management.” If we are to forge paths toward an internationalism that is capable of connecting struggles across ever more militarized border regimes, it is especially important to unearth the links between our unique contexts.

After a long, crowded ride from San Cristobal in a combi, during which we passed military bases and the silent streets of towns struggling with the incursions of the cartels, we were greeted by banners welcoming us to the Caracol of Dolores Hidalgo. An autonomous enclave in the heart of Zapatista territories, Dolores Hidalgo is in a large valley surrounded by breathtakingly beautiful mountains and cloud forests. This valley had been a hacienda until the Zapatisatas redistributed it after the 1994 uprising. Dotted throughout the valley are many Zapatista communities, each with parcels of land being worked communally.

“Welcome to the Caracol of Dolores Hidalgo.”

The Zapatistas built an entire village to host the encuentro, welcoming thousands of strangers and neighbors. In the center was a massive field where plays and performances took place daily. As we arrived and looked for a spot to rig up our massive tarp, we passed Zapatistas from the caracol of Oventik who were reenacting the centuries of servitude on the hacienda, the indignities of forced labor and sexual exploitation. Such plays function as a form of storytelling and political participation for the Zapatistas, enabling their communities to engage in historiography and to pass on shared memory. Coming from a land where the memories of struggles barely last a single generation, we bore witness to these acts of collective retelling, inspired by the struggle to wrestle the memory of the past and the rebellious lessons it contains from those who would prefer to consign them to oblivion.

Performances of many kinds filled the days, both on the field and elsewhere around the site. Music rang out continuously throughout the encuentro, with brief silences between 4 and 6 am. Even in that silence, one could still hear the low hum of daily life: conversation, the cries of a baby, laughter, animals stirring.

Surrounding the central field were thousands of bicycles carefully maintained, covered, and guarded by EZLN militants. One could not get within a few feet of the bikes without being asked to back up. Why there were so many bikes and what they are going to do with them remains a mystery to us. Even the EZLN guards seemed at a loss regarding the purpose of the bicycles. Were they a demonstration of their increasing focus on hyper-localism? A feminist praxis? An environmentalist gesture? There is an entire communiqué dedicated to a video of their new bicycle fleet so you can wonder for yourself.

Beyond the bikes, on the edges of the site, were spaces to eat, receive medical treatment, sleep, wash your clothes, shower, and more.

There were many little worlds within the world of the encuentro. The world of the Zapatista-run restaurant for visitors, where people from all over stood in line for over an hour to order from a large menu that was almost always limited to a single item; the world of the cocina para visitantes, a free kitchen, if you could find it, where there were no lines; the world we created under our large tarp, where twenty of us slept on the hard and slanted earth, sliding into each other, staying up late into the night talking about revolution and discussing our situation in the United States while EZLN militants silently marched past us in lines, carrying bowls of beans and cups of coffee up to their camps on the hill above; the world of play, involving us and children and even the dogs; the world of the encounter we shared with a group of Germans who asked us to be in a photo with a banner reading “Freedom to those underground and on the run,” in solidarity with a group of anti-fascists who have recently gone underground to evade the charges brought against them after a fascist gathering in Budapest. Our discussions with them illuminated parallels between the RICO charges in Atlanta and paragraph 129, a similar law increasingly used in Germany to prosecute political organizing as criminal conspiracy.

All of these worlds were worlding together in a robust ecosystem, on the basis of shared life and land in common—a defining element of Zapatismo. Indeed, if there was one word that was repeated over and over again, it was commons. The Zapatistas understand the commons as sites of insurgency. The foundation of revolution must be the commons—to share life in common is to revolt together, and to share work in common is to refuse alienation and the isolating effect empire has on life. The commons are an interruption of capitalism. As sites of insurgency, they are antagonistic to capital’s rapid flows. Insofar as time itself has become a function of capital flow today, the commons slow down time. Where time is slower, one can attend to intention—in laughter and joy, discovery and death, play and performance.

To us visitors, this intentional, communal action was apparent everywhere: the infrastructure and arrangement of the site, the way ordinary tasks were carried out, the breaking of a piñata. A swarm of children formed a large circle around the piñata, which was decorated as a Yankee monster with an American flag hat, terrifying eyes, and a monopoly spirit. The master of ceremonies let the children take turns swinging as the piñata bounced up and down. Eventually, it cracked open—but to our surprise, no candy fell out. We Americans were accustomed to a downpour of treats and the ravenous race to get what you can—”you better be quick, or it will all run out.” What we saw, instead, was the opposite of competition rooted in a false sense of scarcity and an accelerated temporality. After the piñata broke, the kids were all handed candy in an egalitarian manner; there was enough for everyone, and the kids understood this.

This moment illustrated how every ritual conceals the possibility of changing worlds. At the encuentro, it felt as if every action was directed at the development of a historical consciousness as the resilient unfolding of life. This awareness and intentionality is necessitated by the commons and the commons necessitate it. The people and the earth have become reified as opponents alien to each other. The commons represents the reunion of the two in reciprocal liberation.

In the worlds sustained by the bad government, children are relegated to school, away from the serious adults who are focused on the details of their own exploitation. The elderly are imprisoned in senior centers or else often left homeless, deteriorating in the abyss of isolation, taking with them memory and potential wisdom. This makes it difficult to intentionally shape a collective consciousness according to aspirations that are informed by a time frame that extends deep into the past and future. Likewise, when children are not able to participate in memory-making, it is easy to forget about fantasy and possibility. The processes of making history and making memory are intertwined.

In Zapatista territory, the youthful and the old are not excluded from social life. A healthy forest includes both old growth trees and saplings, which often grow out of decaying logs alongside their mycelial relations. In this regard, Dolores Hidalgo felt like a healthy forest, creative and alive.

As visitors, we borrowed some of the imaginative practices that the Zapatista children shared with us and put on a play of our own. The Zapatistas have always incorporated an internationalist framework. They performed the stories of their struggle for us because they want us to know them, but they also invited all visitors to share in our own ways so that we could learn from each other. We decided to share our struggle via the same mode of communication they were using to share their struggles with us. This meant stepping outside our comfort zones. It challenged us to construct a performance involving a large group of people.

In writing the play, we rediscovered how easy and spontaneous collaboration and art making can be. One does not need to be a professional playwright, director, or actor to put on a play. Anyone can do it by maintaining a childlike playfulness and focusing on the most crucial elements of the story. At first, when we were brainstorming, we wanted to include every detail of the struggle: the spiraling of offensive time with weeks of action, the strategy of targeting contractors, and all the different ways people exerted pressure, including home demos, office demos, call-in campaigns, and sabotage.

We eventually simplified our narrative to a few key points: we fought the police and protested for Black lives, then we lived communally in the forest to protect it from destruction, then the police raided, ripping a forest defender from their tree house and murdering Tortuguita. At this point in our performance, we lifted up Tortuguita’s body, representing the carrying on of their spirit, and then they walked with us on the path forward. Our bodies, cloaked in black t-shirt balaclavas and carrying branches, became the trees, the animals, the forest defenders, our fallen comrade, and eventually, the fire that burned down the beginnings of Cop City on March 5, 2023. We became the living memory of history, oral history against specialization. Our play ended with everyone, arms linked, in a tight circle facing outward to represent our solidarity in the face of repression. As we slowly moved outward and apart, we beckoned the audience to join us, as our narrator concluded, “This is not an end to our story. The movement continues.”

Footage of the play that the Weelaunee Solidarity Collective performed at the Zapatista encuentro.

Two nights before we performed our play, we celebrated New Year’s and the 30th anniversary of the Zapatista uprising with the thousands of Zapatistas and others who had gathered in Dolores Hidalgo. Shortly before midnight on New Year’s Eve, over a thousand EZLN fighters in full army fatigues marched in formation, tapping along to the beat of Como Te Voy a Olvidar by Los Ángeles Azules. This time, they were marching with sticks, not guns. Thousands of spectators watched. Most had traveled many hours to be there; many of them were recording on their smartphones.

The demonstration was serious yet playful, something the Zapatistas have become known for over the years. The women of the EZLN marched in first, and the men followed, facing towards them. Then the women militants broke out of formation into a skipping dance, waving their arms in invitation, spiraling all around the open field. The performance ended with the men moving simultaneously outward, linking arms to create a perimeter surrounding the entire crowd.

“The women with rebel dignity—EZLN.”

The procession did not display military power, per se. Rather, it attested to the Zapatistas’ continuing ability to organize.

As the Zapatistas advanced in their not-so-military formation, we reflected on their saying: lento pero avanzo. Paso a paso, step by step, slowly but advancing, so we can continue our struggle for another ten, twenty, thirty, fifty years.

Lento pero avanzo. Slowly, but we advance.

Some of us left the Lancandon jungle with more questions than answers. However, we left with the faith that we had helped to foster deeper connections with the Zapatistas and others around the world. For the friends who had the time to stay, more intimate conversations will be possible in the days following the encuentro.

The Zapatistas are able to offer access to land, food, healthcare, education, and a justice system as immediate existential benefits for participating in life in common. This is the recruitment pitch. Sustenance, education, continuity in collective memory, a dignified and communal life.

This challenged us to reflect: What are we able to offer? Friendship, cultural events, adventure, collective purpose? If the most that a struggle can do is to temporarily counter our loneliness and alienation, this may not be sufficient to sustain it. If that is all we have to offer, we are only competing with other subcultures to play the same role. On the other hand, we are living in a time when obtaining housing, food, and health care is once again becoming a real struggle for many of those who live in America. Perhaps making some of these necessities available was an important element of what the Weelaunee forest occupation offered. While there are strategic disadvantages to holding space that is vulnerable to attack from all sides, and at worst, occupations may hinder the broadening of a movement beyond a specific location, the loss of the forest as a commons leaves us with the task of creating a commons elsewhere. The question is how.

The “how” will necessarily be messy, complicated, and contradictory. That’s the nature of struggle, of operating within a field of forces pushing and pulling in different directions. Zapatista territories are territories in struggle; they are not free of market influence. Zapatistas drive cars, drink Coca Cola, operate roadside stores, use smartphones and social media; we suspect that there is a corner of Facebook where one can find long threads of comments in Tsetal beneath videos of young EZLN men dancing with internationalists. Autonomy is not a question of purity; it is an ongoing practice. It means making breaks from capital and becoming the collective authors of our shared destiny, starting now.

The Zapatistas began this process forty years ago in clandestinity, drawing on decades of consciousness raising and cultural practices that predate capitalist systems altogether. Sometimes these breaks may not look clean. The Zapatista network is not entirely severed from capitalist networks and supply chains; it is a constellation of liberated territories, collective projects, support bases, and flows of information, people, and materials. All the elements of the constellation have varying degrees of relation to capitalism, yet they nevertheless form part of the constellation of struggle. The liberated communal lands, the health clinics, the Zapatista stores in San Cris selling Zapatista-made goods, the pizza restaurants, cinemas, and bars operated by support bases, all of these form part of the constellation that is a community in struggle. This is the reality of the struggle today, in a world in which capitalist relations have colonized every part of the planet.

Because struggle is dynamic, and the terrain on which we struggle shifts according to the strategies of our enemies and our own accomplishments and failures, any enduring struggle must be capable of transforming itself. It must be fluid, mutable, flexible, modular, and non-dogmatic. This has been one of the most inspiring elements of the Zapatista fight for life: their continuous ability to reinvent their struggle. This does not mean refusing to set attainable concrete goals, nor does it mean declaring an effort a success when it fails to achieve its goals. Strategies should be falsifiable. It does, however, mean being flexible, always thinking about how to turn each situation to the advantage of the movement, even when it may represent a failure by the original metrics.

During the encuentro, we struck up a conversation with an older Zapatista man, likely in his seventies. He told us he had been involved with the organization since the days of clandestine activity. We asked him how he got involved. “At that time, they were just going door to door, one by one,” he said. Someone came to his door asking if he wanted to join the organization and he agreed. He shared that he has a wife and six children, none of whom wanted to become Zapatistas. The rest of his family are partidistas—they vote for and support the political parties in Mexico’s electoral system. His decision to join the struggle remains a point of contention in his family. He told us that this kind of division is common in Zapatista families. We asked him if, after everything he has been through, he is happy with the state of things for the Zapatistas today. “I’m very sad,” he answered. He explained that for him, the days of being clandestine never ended—that he still cannot go into the city because he is a known Zapatista organizer, that he still sees himself as clandestine.

This was just one conversation, but it illustrates something that many internationals don’t realize: for many, the aspirations of the 1994 uprising were much greater than what Zapatismo has become today. Subcomandante Moises echoed this in his speech on New Year’s: “We are as alone now as we were thirty years ago.” When the Zapatistas rose up in 1994, they asked others to get organized and rise up with them, but no one did. While they received a great deal of support and solidarity in the following years, both nationally and internationally, no one took up arms alongside them to overthrow capitalism. Consequently, they did the best they could with the situation they found themselves in.

In many ways, this very situation led to the new and creative forms of autonomous organizing that continue to inspire many internationals today. It provides us with an example of what it means to think strategically and dynamically, adapting to changing conditions without losing sight of our goals or setting aside our convictions. It also makes us wonder how things might have turned out if other people had risen up with them, and what hopes and aspirations were never realized by those who fought and died for their revolution. (For further reading on Zapatista organizing and aspirations before the uprising, we recommend John Womack’s Rebellion in Chiapas.)

Through the trials and tribulations, across the shifting terrain of struggle, the Zapatistas continue to attract new participants by relatively simple means. They offer a real alternative to the existing capitalist and state systems. They offer people land and health, the fundamentals for a dignified life. Questions of land have always been at the heart of the Zapatista struggle. They recovered large amounts of land after the 1994 uprising, which provided fertile soil for growing crops.

In addition, the Zapatistas offer a communal form of organization to manage the land and formal processes for dealing with land disputes. They also operate autonomous health clinics in each of their caracoles. These clinics are often the closest place to get healthcare in rural areas, for Zapatistas and non-Zapatistas alike. This care is free, apart from the cost of any medication prescribed, which is sold at cost. This means that, especially for rural people, Zapatista autonomous health clinics are often the most affordable option accessible.

The way they attract new people to their ranks, then, is by offering alternatives to the life that capitalism can provide. This challenges us to ask ourselves: what do we have to offer people? How can we provide viable alternatives to the ways of living offered by the capitalist system?

We recommend reading the entirety of the newest series of Zapatista communiqués, all of which can be found here. You can read a foundational primer on the Zapatista rebellion here.

Getting There : The Road to the Zapatista Encuentro

2024-01-17T09:17:35Z

In the following account, a CrimethInc. agent describes a series of adventures on the road to the 2024 Zapatista Encuentro, a gathering celebrating thirty years since the uprising that established an autonomous zone in Chiapas.

Tomorrow, we will follow up with more reporting from the encuentro itself.

The banner in the above photograph welcomes people to the Zapatista encuentro, reading, “Land belonging to no one. Land belonging to all. Here we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the armed uprising against forgetting, against death, against destruction.”

Getting There

“It would be safest if you went with the caravan.”

“The caravans always fall apart.”

We were asking about how to get to the Zapatistas’ New Year’s encuentro. Whether we asked at the anarchist social center, around the autonomous Panchos¹ neighborhood in Mexico City, or by emailing the contacts listed on the Zapatista website, we always received one—or both—of these replies.

A gathering in rebel territory is always something special, but this year marked the 30th anniversary of the debut of the EZLN [Zapatista Army of National Liberation] in an armed uprising against NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994] and, more broadly, against capitalism itself.

Much has changed for the Zapatistas since those days. The charismatic Subcomandante Marcos has stepped away from both lens and pens. While they still defend their territorial autonomy, the armed aspect of the EZLN’s military operations has been outshined by the construction of schools, clinics, and a new politics for their people.² In November, to the shock and dismay of radicals worldwide, the Zapatistas announced the dissolution of their autonomous municipalities, leading many to speculate that narco-capitalism and paramilitaries have become as much of an obstacle for the Zapatista project as the Mexican government and neoliberal megaprojects. However, one thing has not changed: their welcoming internationalism towards those in solidarity with their struggle for the land to be held in common by all who work it.

December 28

The GPS routes me through Mexico City’s glorietas and bulevards to what I’m told is the office from which the caravan will leave.

Except it’s not exactly an office. It’s not really a social center, either. Wait—I remember you! The Convergence Center? Is it really you??? It has to be—the snack station at the front, the registration tables for the buses, “Comrade, where’s the bathroom?” I knew it was you! It’s just been a minute. How long has it been? Since Seattle? Prague? Genoa? Cancún? J18, A16, J20? Too long, that’s for sure.

And you’re still full of backpacks. Look at all those backpacks! A recently landed extraterrestrial—this is an intergalactic encuentro, after all—here to register her UFO in the caravan might easily misunderstand the Zapatistas as a movement of 40-liter hiking packs that use humans as their workhorses.

Oh, I remember this part, too—my affinity group’s weird plan doesn’t fit in with the public-facing structure. That’s okay. Time to do what I always do: step into the densest mass of comrades standing around and shout my question into the void: “Is anyone else taking their own car?”

Crickets.

“…so we can, uh, coordinate?”

Uncomfortable stares.

Even the alien knows what this means: it’s just me and the tour buses. Like a giddy, oblivious puppy in a parade of elephants.

“So, like, how often will the buses be stopping for gas?”

“Gas? We filled up. We won’t need to stop for gas.”

“But like, bathroom breaks?”

“There are bathrooms on the bus…”

The trip is 14 hours long. Mostly highway. I will need to stop for gas, and for relief. Will I lose the caravan?

“…but there is a truck stop where we will regroup because the caravans always fall apart. After that point, the highway can get a little hairy, so it would be safest if you went with the caravan. I’ll text you the name. They’re open 24 hours and have tamales and coffee.”

I gather the affinities and we’re off. I’ve never thought of the van as fast, but between our head start and the sloth with which the massive buses grind into gear, I figure we’ll make up for our refills and rest stops.

December 29

Besides spewing the road with all of my fancy LucasOil additive because I neglected to tighten down the oil pan screw, the first leg of the drive is fairly uneventful.

There are five of us from four different countries, so there’s a lot to talk about, whether up front with the pilot and the jam box or in the back lounging on the bed. The stories about revolts that have reached us across national borders. Secrets, traditions, and magic from our respective territories. This song, that movie. It’s a road trip.

There’s silence, too. The silence is good for a cigarette. And after the smoke, “There’s this other thing I don’t know if you know about…”

It’s 2 am, truck stop o’clock. About half of the tour buses pull in right after us. The other half are stuck behind an accident a hundred kilometers away, so we wait.

After a couple more hours, the sun is rising and I’ve drunk way too much coffee.

We’re still here.

They’re still stuck behind that accident.

“The caravans always fall apart.”

“I think we should just go on ahead. It’s light now, and I know somebody we can crash with in San Cristobal de las Casas. Who knows how long we’ll be stuck here waiting?” says an affinity who knows the route. Now the plan is to go to the registration site outside of San Cris on our own and wait for the caravan there.

On my phone:

“Hey, I’m with the human rights observers at Puente Chiapas. When you cross the bridge, stop and say what’s up. I’ve got some information for you.”

In the harsh light of day, our chatterboxes have wound down. It’s not unfriendly, but there’s a lot more grunting. We’ve been on the road for twelve hours now. The lack of conversation is offset by the gorgeous tropical wetlands, rivers, and majestic vistas that we zoom through while rounding the hills and valleys of Veracruz and Chiapas. Foggy clouds stretch over the canopies like the hammocks of God.

Will we make it to a gas station before we run out of fuel? There hasn’t been anything but road and jungle for a long time.

“Oh shit, look, it’s Puente Chiapas.”

“Nah, that’s not the bridge your friend meant,” says the affinity who knows the route.

“What do you mean? It says Puente Chiapas right there.”

“Yeah, but there’s another Puente Chiapas, closer to San Cris.”

It’s easy to convince me to give up looking for the human rights observation team and let my gaze wander back to the lush islands in the middle of the river crossed by the bridge. An hour later, my phone signal kicks in and I get a message from an hour earlier:

“Dude, I just saw your van cross the bridge. Why didn’t you stop?”

It was that Puente Chiapas. Opa.

Now it’s noon. We’ve been driving for 16 hours. Originally, we were supposed to arrive two hours ago, but instead, there are still a few hours left before we get to San Cris.

When we finally arrive, we spill out of the van and zombie crawl, each in a different direction: food, cigarettes, pharmacy. I take advantage of the solitude to siesta in the back of the van. My phone vibrates and I’m back:

“Hey, can you fit my two friends from Mexicali? The buses just left Puente Chiapas. The Mexicalis know where the buses are meeting up in San Cris.”

It’s time for an affinity group meeting.

“Can we fit two more in the back?”

“Shouldn’t we go crash at my friend’s? You’ve been driving forever.”

“Comrades, I too can drive. We should at least see what the buses’ plan is, because from here on, it’s small, rural roads and it would be safest if we went with the caravan.”

“If you can drive, then I’m OK cramming in the back with two more punks. I can also make another seat up front out of the jam box.”

“But the jam box!”

“OK, I can make it out of the snack crate.”

”But the snacks!!!”

We pick up the additional passengers and they tell us where to park. As soon as we pull in, the tour buses start arriving. Hundreds of backpacks trot out atop their human steeds. Out come the tortillas, the bagged beans, the queso and avocados and oranges. People pass around tobacco and ibuprofen along with the details of the sternly hashed-out meeting between the coordinators and the drivers.

“They’re waiting for one more bus to arrive.”

“The drive is only four hours, so we’d get there by 10.”

“They don’t know if it’s safe because there were reports of shooting between two communities on either side of the road we’d be taking.”

“It’s either drive up tonight or find somewhere for everyone on the buses to sleep. That’s a lot of people.”

“Is that even fair to the drivers? They’ve been at it for almost 24 hours now.”

In our group, we reach a consensus. We’re exhausted—but if the buses go, we go.

The last bus arrives and we’re off.

Right away, at the first turn off of the road out of town, a Mexican military checkpoint photographs each vehicle in the caravan, including our out-of-place eyesore of a van. This happens again twice over the following hour. The sun is setting and as we hit the 24-hour mark from the time of our departure, we’re smack in the middle of the buses at a steady 10 miles an hour. Lento, pero avanzamos.

We pass through tiny remote villages on roads with potholes big enough to be hot tubs. It’s poor here, really poor, and I try to wrap my head around what kind of profit margin could possibly make it worth the gas, let alone the wear on the vehicle, to deliver basic goods to these sparsely populated distant reaches. These areas are clearly not served by capitalism. As I’m calculating gas prices and soda sales for villages of a hundred, a crisp, clean sign with balloons attached to it catches my eye. But it’s no birthday party—it’s a meeting for someone’s Herbalife club, the food supplement pyramid scheme.

“Oh yeah, those are everywhere in Mexico.” One of the affinities tells me, responding to my audible gasp.

But this isn’t just Mexico. We’ve already passed signs for one Zapatista caracol: “Territory in rebellion against the Mexican government.” And Herbalife isn’t the same as Pokemon, BTS, or whatever the latest capitalist consumer fad may be—it’s a pyramid scheme that turns the exploited and desperate into agents extending the profit-driven logic of their own exploitation. Sure, there are countless capitalist evils you could plug into this equation. But we are talking about the juxtaposition of one of humanity’s longest-standing current examples of anti-capitalist struggle with an industrial supplement scheme that rewards whoever can most effectively prey on those around them by recruiting them to be salespeople—here on the very land that the Zapatistas fight to hold in common and whose lush, bountiful, organic harvest sustains their autonomy from the capitalist marketplace. I know which side of that conflict I’m on, and my allegiance is anything but casual.

As the contrast between the half-finished cinderblock buildings and the cheery Herbalife promotional materials recedes out of sight, I vow my own private war on Herbalife. I am a Vandal, and Herbalife is my Roman Empire.

A mural reading “It is preferable to die with honor than to live with the shame of having our lives dictated by a tyrant.”

December 30

It’s midnight. 28 hours since we departed Mexico City. We must be close, right?

“We were supposed to be there two hours ago. Que pedo guey.” Under her breath, barely louder than a whisper.

“Oh good, another checkpoint.” I grunt.

This time, the soldiers are caught off guard, scrambling to get out the cameras and stop the buses. They must have been napping.

The soldiers take one look at our little van and urge us to get out of their way so they can document the caravan, which they assume consists of buses alone. Why would there be a single van in the midst of a convoy of buses, anyway?

I cackle deliriously. Fine then! Hasta la vista, baby!

We pull over down the road and wait for the buses to get through whatever bullshit the military is subjecting them to.

After the buses pull up and park, it’s time for another meeting.

“So, how far are we now?”

“Four hours.”

“Four?! How???”

I debate in my head whether to double the four hours to eight or to add fourteen to four, making it eighteen, since our supposedly fourteen-hour trip has already taken twenty-eight hours. I split the difference and figure that we’re thirteen hours out.

“There’s a caracol just outside of town that can host us. We’ll keep going in the morning.”

“OK, we’ll follow you.”

“It’s only 20 minutes away.”

It takes an hour, but that’s all right. I’m on my fourth wind from the euphoria of evading the military control and I’m fully saddled in the seat of time’s curves. Giddy-up.

As we pull into the caracol, signs inform us that we are entering rebel territory in defiance of Mexico’s bad government. Murals of masked guerrillas welcome us, declaring “it is preferable to die with honor than to live with the shame of having your life dictated by tyrants.” The residents spring into action, barely even wiping the sleep out of their eyes, opening up the bathrooms, dormitories, and the collective store known as “the seed of the rainbow.” One of our hosts recommends the very parking spot under a tree that I was eyeballing when we pulled in. I like it here.

The collective store known as “the seed of the rainbow.”

Apparently, a tumultuous storm followed the aforementioned events. Everyone is talking about it in the morning, but I seem to have slept right through it. In a shadowy, muddy shack, a team of women are cooking up the tastiest coffee I’ve ever had in the largest cauldron I’ve ever seen. It’s free.

We pull out with the buses and bounce over four more hours of speed bumps before pulling in through lines of Zapatista soldiers standing at attention on either side of the road. Each soldier is suited in boots, green cargo pants, a brown long-sleeve shirt, a red bandana, a black balaclava, and a green cap. This goes on for at least a kilometer—either an impressive welcome or a sophisticated security system to deal with unwanted arrivals. For the final few hundred meters, we’re surrounded by bright, colorful murals on either side of the road, depicting Zapatista life, history, and values.

We pull in near the entrance of the caracol and park the van.

I exhale. We made it.

The Encuentro

The first thing we have to do is register. At the registration table, they ask what collective I am with. The compas in charge of registration have heard of CrimethInc.; they ask if I am there to provide counterinfo coverage of the event. I’ve thought about it, even discussed it with the podcast collective, but after they told me I would have to attend an orientation, the 36 hours of driving caught up with me. “No, that’s alright.”

Next, we have to find a place to park and rest. We are told that the internationals have dormitories in another caracol, 20 minutes away… “20 minutes.” I have not come all this way to go on driving. We snag a parking spot between the buses and Zapatista family camping. Over the following days, soldiers in balaclavas will guard my van every night. It doesn’t need guarding, but it’s a generous gesture. Thank you!

The caracol hosting the encuentro is relatively new—only three years old. But in only three years, the compas have made a lot of progress. The caracol has ten kitchens—again, with the largest pots you’ve ever seen—that stay busy cooking beans and rice over wood fires. There is an autonomous healthcare building, dormitories with bunk beds, all the showers you could possibly hope for, and bathrooms. I don’t remember ever waiting in line for the bathroom at any point during the whole encuentro.

The land is on a hilltop nestled among other Lacandon peaks. In the morning, mist settles into the trees like cotton candy strung between your fingers. It is green everywhere, and at night the sky glitters with stars. The center of the festivities is a field, about the size of four football fields side by side in a row. The field is surrounded by benches and hundreds of brand new bicycles under tarps. On one end of the field, there are basketball and volleyball courts, and on the other end of the field, a stage.

In front of the stage, there is a memorial for martyrs who died in struggle.

In front of the stage, there is a memorial for martyrs who died in struggle. It’s adorned with branches, flowers, candles, and messages. To the side of the stage is an area for musicians, with a 1970s-Jamaican-style gaggle of speakers frankensteined together by Chiapas’ most brilliant and resourceful sonidista. During the day, the field is filled with theater—mostly morality plays conveying warnings about selling the land to speculators, the honor of rebellion against the bad Mexican government, and stories about the legacy of resisting colonialism and capitalism. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen theater performed on a stage that is so many times larger than the area for the audience. The scale alone gives pause.

Toward sunset, there are speeches from the stage and military formations on the field. The soldiers are not displaying firearms, however—each is equipped with two batons and a machete.

The largest military ceremony takes place on January 1, marking thirty years to the day since the EZLN launched their first military operation, seizing San Cristobal de las Casas, proclaiming territorial autonomy and declaring war on the Mexican government. After the military ceremonies, there is music! Cumbias, rancheras, mariachis. The soldiers dance all night long, a sea of bobbing green caps.

I only saw one EZLN soldier partially raise his balaclava to smoke a cigarette. Most smoked through their masks.

As the encuentro proceeds, I hear more and more Mayan spoken. The speeches and theater pieces are in Spanish, but all the conversation around me is in Maya. It drives home that the anniversary encuentro isn’t just a commemorative event. The caracoles and Zapatistas communities may all be located within the same state of Chiapas, but, as our journey showed me, they are in remote pockets of the mountains that are difficult to reach. The encuentro is a rare chance for the participants in the Zapatista project to gather as a whole—to share, to encounter each other, to commune.

Afterwards, someone tells me that the Mexican media focused on how small the gathering was in comparison with previous years. Perhaps this is a result of waiting to publish the invitation until just a week before New Year’s. On the other hand, by any measure, it was a huge event. Thousands of people from dozens of countries attended. Worried speculation surrounds the recent Zapatista communiqués about their civil-political reorganization. I can’t shed any light on what this process will bring—I promised that my conversations in Chiapas would stay in Chiapas.

But I can tell you this: the Zapatista project is far from over, and a new year has just begun.

Los Panchos (Francisco Villa (Pancho Villa) Popular Fronta, FPFV) is a sort of urban corollary to the Zapatistas. Named after the other famous Mexican revolutionary, the Panchos also launched their project in 1994, taking over land on the outskirts of Mexico City and establishing territorial autonomy in which police are excluded, collective economics comprise a significant part of life, and people practice horizontal politics. While not anarchists, they have shown solidarity to anarchists in heightened episodes of struggle, like the 2006 siege on autonomously held Atenco. For more information about Los Panchos in English, you could start here. ↩
The Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona summarizes the events via which the Zapatistas burst onto the world stage: “We grew tired of exploitation by the powerful, and then we organized in order to defend ourselves and to fight for justice. In the beginning there were not many of us, just a few, going this way and that, talking with and listening to other people like us. We did that for many years, and we did it in secret, without making a stir. In other words, we joined forces in silence. We remained like that for about 10 years, and then we had grown, and then we were many thousands. We trained ourselves quite well in politics and weapons, and, suddenly, when the rich were throwing their New Year’s Eve parties, we fell upon their cities and just took them over. And we left a message to everyone that here we are, that they have to take notice of us. And then the rich took off and sent their great armies to do away with us, just like they always do when the exploited rebel—they order them all to be done away with. But we were not done away with at all, because we had prepared ourselves quite well prior to the war, and we made ourselves strong in our mountains. And there were the armies, looking for us and shooting their bombs and bullets at us, and then they were making plans to kill off all the indigenous at one time, because they did not know who was a Zapatista and who was not. And we were running and fighting, fighting and running, just like our ancestors had done. Without giving up, without surrendering, without being defeated.” ↩

2023: The Year in Review : A World on the Brink

2023-12-29T21:41:00Z

Happy new year! Congratulations on surviving. Let’s take stock of where we are.

In our 2022 year in review report, we documented the ebb phase of social movements that followed the upheavals of 2019 and 2020, as the strategies that had previously been successful produced diminishing returns and the authorities learned from their defeats. It remains a defining feature of our era that even the fiercest struggles have largely failed to achieve their intermediate demands. Apparently, those who administer the increasingly fragile social order some call late capitalism are not in a position to give ground. Rather than offering concessions to the desperate and unruly, governments across the political spectrum are investing in repressive technologies and doubling down on their dependence on the police.

Overseas, the consequences of this were already clear a year ago:

The invasion of Ukraine continued a process of militarization and displacement that had already gotten underway in Syria. Amid ecological collapse and war—the side effects of capital accumulation and its consequences—more and more people are being forced into exile around the world.

The invasion of Ukraine is likely an indication of things to come. Over the past several decades, governments worldwide have invested billions of dollars in crowd control technology and military equipment while taking precious few steps to address mounting inequalities or the destruction of the natural world. As economic and ecological crises intensify, more governments will seek to solve their domestic problems by initiating hostilities with their neighbors.

Unfortunately, the events of 2023 have borne out our fears. While the Russian invasion of Ukraine has given way to a grinding war of attrition, civil war broke out in Sudan, Azerbaijan invaded Nagorno-Karabakh for the purpose of ethnic cleansing, and now the Israeli government is carrying out ethnic cleansing in Gaza. These are not aberrations, but glimpses of the future if we do not manage to change course.

This shows what is at stake in our awkward efforts to change the world. In these circumstances, if it is not possible to win intermediate demands, it may be easier to pursue revolutionary transformation outright.

Fortunately, we are not the only ones concerned with these questions. This year, we have been inspired by the tenacity of participants in ongoing struggles such as the fight to stop Cop City—by the empathy that has moved people around the world to act in solidarity with the residents of Gaza—by the bravery of rebels from Ecuador to France. Our experiences coming together in demonstrations, mutual aid projects, concerts, book fairs, and passionate discussions have sustained our faith in the potential of humanity. This story is far from over.

2024 will probably be a roller coaster ride. In the United States, the election season is shaping up to be chaotic indeed, and that will spill over into social conflict on the streets. It’s up to us to show that, rather than choosing between fascists and centrists determined to preserve a self-destructing system, people can come together in networks based in solidarity, mutual aid, and a more ambitious vision of what our lives could be.

This is the best way to prepare for whatever is ahead.

Here, we’ll review our own efforts over the past year—the coverage we have provided from within social movements and the projects we have contributed.

The Ongoing Tragedy in Palestine

On October 7, militants from Hamas and other Palestinian groups breached the Gaza border fence and carried out a series of attacks, killing 1139 people. The Israeli government seized the opportunity to pursue ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip. They had massacred well over 21,000 Palestinians by the end of 2023, two thirds of whom were women and children.

In response, the United States has seen a surge of protest and direct action. At the beginning of November, we published a text from the Fayer collective, a Jewish collective that has participated in the struggle to Stop Cop City in Atlanta, explaining why they are committed to solidarity with Palestinians and what they believe it will take to halt the assault of the Israeli military. Over the following weeks, we published reports from anarchists who participated in blockading the Port of Tacoma, a Raytheon facility, and various Amazon locations in order to interrupt the flow of weapons and money to the Israeli military.

As we enter 2024, stopping the ethnic cleansing in Gaza remains one of the most urgent challenges before us.

A demonstration at the Port of Tacoma in Washington on November 6, 2023.

Stop Cop City, Defend the Forest

Over the past two years, the movement to stop Cop City and defend Weelaunee Forest has become one of the fiercest struggles in North America. Utilizing a variety of strategies, opponents of the proposed police militarization facility have repeatedly destroyed equipment and forced contractors to withdraw from the construction. In retaliation, the authorities have set new precedents in repression, murdering one forest defender and pressing outlandish racketeering charges against 61 more, including the members of a legal support collective. The first of those defendants is scheduled to stand trial beginning in early January 2024.

We have published an array of perspectives from various participants in the movement, including material about the values that inspire them to keep fighting. In the latest installment of our comprehensive history of the movement, we trace its trajectory across the second half of 2023, exploring how the movement has sought to maintain a participatory and confrontational character even under tremendous pressure.

We understand the fight against Cop City as a bridge between the George Floyd rebellion of 2020 and the movements of the future. In seeking to overcome the limits that the uprising of 2020 reached, the participants have set an example that will be of use next time large numbers of people are catalyzed into action.

The Cop City construction site on March 5, 2023.

Europe

In January, we published a photoessay documenting the showdown between thousands of police and protesters in Lützerath, where the German government set out to evict an ecological encampment.

In February, we published an article about the imprisoned Italian anarchist Alfredo Cospito. By then, he had been on hunger strike for over 100 days, demanding to be released from solitary confinement. We argued that Alfredo’s strike was a warning—a message about the conditions being prepared for all of us in a society that increasingly treats human life as cheap.

In March, we covered the movement in France against the pension reform as it escalated into a major conflict. In June, the streets of France exploded once more after the police murdered 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk. Unfortunately, as one of our contributors observed afterwards, over the past few years, different segments of the population of France have revolted successively, rather than all at once, enabling the authorities to weather the storm.

Further east, we covered the mutiny of the Wagner private military company against the government of Vladimir Putin from the perspective of Russian anarchists. As we see it, such internal conflicts are the inevitable consequence of the militarization of society and the increasing centrality of armed force in the pursuit of state policy. In Russia, as in Sudan, the government armed mercenaries to do their dirty work, setting the stage for an armed conflict. In Sudan, the resulting civil war has been catastrophic for civilians.

Elsewhere, we reported an inspiring story about solidarity between refugees and exiles, in which Russian anarchists living in exile in Armenia sought to support Armenian squatters. When Azerbaijan invaded Nagorno-Karabakh, we published the perspectives of Armenian anarchists on the events.

Finally, we explored how the Greek government’s decision to evict the self-organized refugee camp at Lavrio represents the intersection of the Turkish government’s war on Kurdish people, the Greek government’s war on autonomous spaces, and the European Union’s war on migrants.

What goes up most come down. France in spring 2023.

The Mideast

In honor of March 8, International Women’s Day, we published an account of the genealogy of the slogan “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” (“Woman, Life, Freedom”) showing how it spread from the part of Kurdistan that is ruled by the Turkish government to Iran and elsewhere around the world. Shortly afterwards, in response to the earthquake that wracked Syria and Turkey in February, we published statements from supporters of liberation movements in those regions showing how the Turkish and Syrian governments not only failed to protect their subjects but took advantage of the catastrophe to blockade and even bomb them.

Later that month, we published a report from an Israeli anarchist exploring how Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to consolidate power and the protest movement that emerged in response to it represented a conflict between competing elites and their respective colonial models, neither of which offered any real proposal to address the oppression and displacement of Palestinians. In October, the day after the October 7 attacks, we published a widely read interview with another Israeli anarchist, Jonathan Pollak, discussing the escalation of violence in Palestine and the repression the Israeli government metes out to those who act in solidarity with Palestinians.

We followed that up with a perspective from a Palestinian in the part of Palestine occupied in 1948, describing life under colonial rule and emphasizing the importance of grassroots organizing and solidarity in the struggle for Palestinian liberation.

Latin America

In Brazil, 2023 began with a clumsy repeat performance of the incident on January 6, 2021 when Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol in hopes of keeping him in office. At the same time, in Peru, a tumultuous protest movement culminated in a march on the capital city of Lima. We spoke with Peruvian anarchists to get insight into those events.

The year ended with Javier Milei taking power in Argentina. We conducted an interview with anarchists from Rosario in order to understand the decades of social struggle and economic restructuring that created the conditions in which Javier Milei came to power.

Barricades surround the presidential palace on December 20, 2001 immediately before President Fernando De la Rua fled from the rooftop in a helicopter. The last time a government tried to impose unbridled capitalism on the population of Argentina, it ended like this.

History

Our history publishing this year focused mostly on the early 21st century. We chronicled how anti-fascists won the “battle of York” in Pennsylvania in 2002, comparing that pitched struggle with the much grimmer situation two decades later. We explored the history of the queer anarchist organizing umbrella Bash Back! ahead of a new Bash Back! convergence. Finally, to offer a historical reference point to those seeking to take action against arms traffickers today, we revisited the Smash EDO campaign in Britain a decade ago.

This coming year, we hope to publish more work about the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The vantage point of a police officer in Sainte-Soline in spring 2023.

In Memory

In January, police murdered Manuel Terán, known as Tortuguita to their fellow forest defenders. Tortuguita had been occupying Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta for months, and bravely chose to reoccupy it after a police raid the previous December. The thousands of people who have participated in the movement to Stop Cop City have kept Tortuguita’s memory alive in defiance of the forces of repression and erasure.

Manuel Terán, known as Tortuguita.

In February, our longtime friend Jen Angel was killed in Oakland, California. Jen spent her life building infrastructure for anarchist organizing, publishing, and relationships.

Jen Angel.

On April 19, 2023, three anarchists were killed in battle near Bakhmut: an American named Cooper Andrews, an Irishman named Finbar Cafferkey, and a Russian named Dmitry Petrov. We published a biography of Dmitry. Over the course of a decade and a half, he had participated in revolutionary struggle in Russia, Belarus, Rojava, and Ukraine against a backdrop of intensifying tyranny. The story of his life offers insight into the recent history of the former Soviet Union. It is also an inspiring example of all the things an anarchist can accomplish, even in adverse conditions.

Dmitry Petrov.

Active Distribution has published a small book collecting our biography alongside some of his writings and those of his comrades. PM Press is distributing these books in the United States now.

On December 6,¹ anarchist insurrectionist and author Alfredo Bonanno passed away. Bonanno proposed the refusal of work and the pursuit of joyous revolt as revolutionary measures in the struggle against all forms of domination and despair; his ideas played an influential role in the development of our own collective projects. We prepared a short history of his life.

Finally, we want to give thanks for those we feared we might lose in 2023 who are still with us today. It was easy to imagine that Alfredo Cospito might not survive his hunger strike, but he did. Likewise, a participant in the confrontational demonstration in Sainte-Soline, France remained in a coma for many days because a police officer had attempted to kill him by firing a grenade at his head. Thankfully, Serge recovered.

“Tortuguita lives; the struggle continues.” A banner displayed at a memorial march in January 2023 during which a police car caught fire.

Public Events

In 2023, we participated in book fairs and presentations in the United States from Boston and New York to Sacramento and Oakland, as well as in Canada, Mexico, Ecuador, Brazil, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Germany, Slovenia, and elsewhere.

One of the most exciting events of the year was the worldwide anarchist gathering in Saint-Imier, Switzerland. This festival celebrated the 151-year anniversary of the founding congress of the federation known as the Anti-Authoritarian International—the continuation of the International Workingmen’s [sic] Association, one of the most important European labor organizations of the 19th century. Drawing a reputed 5000 people—mostly from central Europe, but also from as far away as Chile and Australia—the gathering in Saint-Imier may have been the largest exclusively anarchist event of the year.

With the assistance of participants from Germany, Russia, Belarus, Finland, the United States, and elsewhere around the world, we published a thorough report on the gathering, and followed it up with a memoir reflecting specifically on dynamics and discourse around gender and sexuality at the gathering.

A sticker seen during the gathering in Saint-Imier.

Posters

This year, to celebrate the umpteenth reprinting of our classic gender poster, we released a 2023 remix of that poster addressing the current threats to gender self-determination and the countervailing forms of solidarity and collective self-defense. Alongside those, we published a discussion of the ways that the battle lines in discourse about gender have shifted over the two decades since we debuted the original. It’s one of the more thoughtful and reflective texts we have completed this year.

Our new “gender remix” poster in action.

In addition to those, we prepared posters in solidarity with Palestinians and with those who seek to defend the forest in Atlanta and elsewhere around the world. All of these are available to download, print out, and paste up on the walls of your community.

Another of our posters in the wild.

Zines

This year, we released fully five zines about the movement to Stop Cop City, covering the history of the movement in detail, the various strategies that participants have employed, the RICO charges, and more. These have been distributed in Atlanta and at support events all around the United States.

We also published zines offering a perspective from Palestine, discussing the fight for gender self-determination, describing how to survive a felony trial, and recounting the lessons of the “green scare,” the federal operation targeting ecological activists.

To make printing easier, we introduced a new “ink lite” option for printing our zines when you are short on toner.

A street in Atlanta following a clash between police and Stop Cop City demonstrators in November 2023.

Audio

After a lull in our audio efforts, we pulled together a new team to prepare audio versions of our articles. This year, we released 20 such “audio zines,” including five about efforts towards Palestinian solidarity and five about the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta.

You can listen to all of them here.

Languages

Over the course of 2023, we published dozens of articles in Spanish; over a dozen in French, Italian, and Polish; and several articles each in Basque, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, German, Greek, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Turkish. We also added texts in Danish, Dutch, Japanese, and Kurdish. We’ve published posters and zines in many of those languages, as well. You can find a comprehensive guide to our non-English content here.

We’ve recently added a Turkish version of our introduction to anarchism, To Change Everything. It’s now available in a total of 34 languages.

We are grateful to all the translators around the world who have worked with us to help us make our work accessible to more people. If you can help us translate anything we have published into any language, please contact us!

Police and protesters face off in Lützerath, Germany in January 2023.

Motion Pictures

In honor of the life of Alfredo Bonanno, we made a short film dramatizing the final section of one of his best-known works, Armed Joy.

We also published a short video to celebrate Steal Something from Work Day, drawing on the work of Yugoslavian director Dušan Makavejev.

Finally, we invite you to participate in a holiday tradition by watching the 2023 edition of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.”

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, 2023 edition.

And More!

That hardly scratches the surface of everything we’ve accomplished this year—the adventures we’ve embarked on, the relationships we’ve nourished, the art forms we’ve shared. The most exciting parts rarely enter the public record!

As always, all of our efforts are copyright free, produced and distributed by volunteer labor. We’re not trying to concentrate power in our own hands, but to establish reproducible models and put resources at the disposal of horizontal movements. This explains why we rarely pester you with fundraising requests. If you wish to support us financially, you can do so here—but the very best thing you could do for us is to undertake your own projects in the same spirit, or participate in our efforts.

Thank you for sticking with us through another year. We look forward to what is ahead.

December 6 happened to be the anniversary of the murder of Alexandros Grigoropoulos, which set off the Greek uprising of 2008. The way that the uprising in Greece unfolded arguably vindicates some of Bonanno’s arguments in favor of confrontational organizing and autonomous structures. ↩

Let's Be Done with Waiting : A Film in Memory of Alfredo Maria Bonanno

2023-12-19T23:07:41Z

On December 6, 2023, Alfredo Maria Bonanno passed away after more than half a century of anarchist activity. In his memory, we present the following short video, Let’s Be Done with Waiting, dramatizing the final section of one of his best-known works, Armed Joy.

Let’s Be Done with Waiting. Sound on to hear the voiceover.

We hope that this will help to introduce Bonanno’s work to a new generation of anarchists. When some of us read Armed Joy in the 1990s, it opened new vistas before us, proposing the refusal of work and the pursuit of joyous revolt as revolutionary measures in the struggle against all forms of domination and despair. Some of the material that later appeared in Days of War, Nights of Love emerged in the process of our efforts to extrapolate what those proposals could mean in our own lives.

Below, we offer a short overview of Bonanno’s life and works.

On January 26-27, the Ex-Worker Podcast will be hosting a film festival in Tijuana, Mexico at the first International Gathering of Anarchist and Anti-Authoritarian Practices against Borders at which to present this film and others like it. Feel free to submit your work.

Text from a chapter of Armed Joy, as it appeared on a CrimethInc. flier more than twenty years ago.

Scenes from the Life of Alfredo Maria Bonanno

Alfredo Bonanno was born on March 4, 1937 and passed away on December 6, 2023. He was 86 years old.

Bonanno began his academic career by studying economics; in the mid-1950s, he began to study existentialist philosophy. In Turin, he contributed to the Corriere di Sicilia, an Italian periodical originally founded by the revolutionary Republican Giuseppe Garibaldi. Bonanno later gathered these essays in the collection Essays on Existentialism. He obtained his degree in philosophy with a thesis on the work of Max Stirner.

In the 1960s, he read Hegel and became more actively involved in the anarchist movement. According to one obituary, he worked for almost eleven years for the Banco di Sicilia and then for another seven as a manager at a pharmaceutical company, in the ophthalmology sector.

Later, he described how the political upheavals of the late 1960s drove him to shift course:

A great explosion of vitality and beauty occurred starting from the May 1968 uprising in France. In fact, even a person like me, who worked as an industrial manager in those years, was so shocked by that extraordinary event that I was quickly forced to abandon my job and see reality differently… At the time, I was over thirty years old and therefore I felt with greater difficulty the wind of diversity that was blowing everywhere.

He didn’t dwell on this decision in his later writing, but it must have informed his arguments that the rejection of work is an essential aspect of revolt.

In December 1969, police commissioner Luigi Calabresi and two other police officers were involved in the murder of the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli during an interrogation. Bonanno had met Pinelli. He attended Pinelli’s funeral and later wrote poignantly about the experience:

If such an event happens, if you are there too, along with many others like you, who you know are living through the same traumatic experience, and you see them, big men with calloused hands, kids trying to be cool, mature women who remember the war years, their murdered sons, young people who see the love that they conceal like a sign of the purity of the world almost dirtied by so much arrogance, and you see them, all with tears in their eyes, impotent but with tensed muscles, if such an event happens with you in it, it is no longer just any event, a fact like so many others (millions of people die, killed barbarously, and are taken hurriedly to the cemetery), but that event has a different charge, it carries with it a tension that will not leave you be, it wakes you up in the night in a sweat and, sitting on the bed, you ask yourself what you are doing in bed, and if perhaps it is not you who is dead and turning in the grave, while it is precisely Pinelli who is alive.

In May 1972, police commissioner Luigi Calabresi was shot and killed outside his home.

In October 1972, the Italian police arrested Bonanno and charged him with subversive action on account of articles published in the journal Sinistra Libertaria. He was convicted and incarcerated in Catania prison.

Beginning in 1975, he edited the publication Anarchismo.

In 1977, he was arrested again, this time for writing Armed Joy, which presented a framework for understanding the refusal of work, the repudiation of calcified organizational structures, and the participation in insurrectionary rebellion as interrelated measures following from the rejection of the logic of capitalism.

The search for joy is therefore an act of will, a firm refusal of the fixed conditions of capital and its values. The first of these refusals is that of work as a value. The search for joy can only come about through the search for play.

The joy of the revolutionary act is contagious. It spreads like a spot of oil. Play becomes meaningful when it acts on reality.

Hurry to play. Hurry to arm yourself.

-Alfredo Bonanno, Armed Joy

In 1978, he faced charges for reprinting The Religious Menace, written by Johann Most in 1880, and at the same time drew the wrath of noted existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre for provocatively publishing a work by the nineteenth-century anarchist Joseph Déjacques under Sartre’s name. On November 30, 1979, Bonanno was finally sentenced to 18 months in prison for authoring Armed Joy.

In March 1980, prosecutors used the testimony of an informant to accuse Bonnano of participating in Azione Rivoluzionaria, an underground armed group active during the pitched social struggles in Italy during the late 1970s. The authorities used this opportunity to carry out a crackdown on Anarchismo and some of Bonanno’s other associates, including Jean Weir and others involved with the British publishing project Bratach Dubh. They were released a few months later and cleared of charges in April 1981.

In the early 1980s, Bonanno and his comrades participated in the struggle against a military base that was to house nuclear weapons in Comiso, Sicily. The decentralized and autonomous organizational structure of this movement served as a reference point for Bonanno’s advocacy of informal organization and what he called “autonomous base nuclei.”

In 1988, during the anti-militarist congress in the town of Forli, Bonnano and his comrades were expelled from the congress by adherents of the anarcho-syndicalist tendency within the Italian Anarchist Federation—a conflict that precipitated further such conflicts.

Arrested in February 1989 during a robbery at a jewelery shop, Bonanno spent two years in prison. As he recounted while under house arrest seventeen years later,

As soon as the inmates learned of my degree in philosophy, they immediately asked me if I could give them some lessons. It can be said that there was no prison, among the dozens where I served my many sentences, where I did not receive this request. Even though I also have a degree in economics, no one has ever asked me to give economics lessons.

On June 19, 1997, the police carried out raids on anarchist social centers and homes all around Italy, arresting Bonanno and many other anarchists. This was part of a government effort to fabricate an invented clandestine anarchist group, the “Insurrectional Anarchist Revolutionary Organization,” as a means of repression.

Undaunted, in July 1999, Bonanno testified as a witness for anarchist Nikos Maziotis, who was accused of placing a bomb at the ministry of industry and development in Greece. In 2001, anarchists participated in fierce unrest in Genoa in defiance of police efforts to protect the G8 summit.

The attempt to fabricate a conspiracy in which to implicate Bonanno and many other anarchists culminated in the Marini trial, which was later recognized as a farcical miscarriage of judicial procedure. Initially, however, Bonanno was sentenced to six years in prison on the grounds that he was the “ideological leader” of the invented organization.

Three months after the end of the Marini trial, the Italian authorities tried again, with operation “Cervantes,” carrying out dozens of raids and searches in houses and squats around the country. Once again, the arrestees were charged with “subversive organization with terrorist intentions,” this time accused of participating in the Federazione Anarchica Informale, an anonymous group that had claimed responsibility for a series of attacks.

In May 2005, the police carried out well over a hundred raids on houses and squats, arresting 22 people on a variety of charges including “constitution and participation in a subversive organization with terrorist intentions.” Throughout these tumultuous times, Bonanno continued to advocate for informal organization and for attacking the infrastructure of capitalism and the state.

In October 2009, at the age of 72, he was arrested on charges of participating in a bank robbery in Greece that almost netted 46,900 euros.

In December 2013, Bonanno spoke at the Jornadas Informales Anárquicas in Mexico City and in Argentina. He attempted to enter Chile, but was rejected on account of his police record.

As often occurs, Bonanno’s proposals possessed nuances and depths that were not always reflected in the ways that his adherents interpreted them. Although we published a critique of the ways that people in the United States mixed his ideas together with those of The Invisible Committee and other groups, his writings are worth reading on their own merits.

For example, while Bonanno came to be associated with a doctrinaire rejection of formal organization in favor of informal, affinity-based structures, he wrote eloquently in 1998 about his own experience of meaningful collectivity:

The essential thing, that exceptionally important strength that comes out of many people who feel the same emotional sensations, prompted by very similar feelings (none identical, for heaven’s sake, I know well), they feel attracted to each other to constitute a homogeneous whole that does not need written or spoken agreements or contracts to constitute itself. Suddenly, this collective force emerges and is there, tangible, I can touch it, I can hear its voice, I can let myself be taken by its suggestions, direct my gaze where it tells me to look, see with its eyes made of a thousand pupils what my poor shortsighted eyes cannot see, remember what my poor mind alone cannot remember.

Although dozens of his essays are available in English, a tremendous amount of his work—including monographs on early Christianity and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra—has yet to be translated. You can order a collection of some of his better-known works in English from Detritus books.

His last wish was for his ashes to be scattered in the Ionian Sea of his Sicilian birthplace, Catania.

It is not our intention to write an obituary, that dreadful word that reminds us of the inescapable mission that our dead often silently leave to us and which we have always failed to accomplish… We don’t want to remember, we want to live.

[…] This is our way to secure a memory, our way of respecting a will that sought to escape the limits that enclose humanity and its all-too-human vicissitudes of fortune, a revolutionary will that sought to transform the world.

-Alfredo Bonanno, Love and Death

Gender and Sexuality in Saint-Imier : A Memoir

2023-08-25T01:19:33Z

In the following narrative, a participant in the worldwide anarchist gathering that took place in Saint-Imier, Switzerland in July 2023 explores political practices and discourse around gender and sexuality in the contemporary anarchist movement.

Lest the following text occasion any conflict with the residents of Saint-Imier, rest assured that any controversial details are surely exaggerated. For a discussion of how struggles around gender have evolved over the past two decades, you could start here. For a discussion of anarchist approaches to accountability, start here. The illustrations are by Aubrey Beardsley.

I have done some sleazy stuff in my life, sure. But hooking up with a stranger on a Zamboni in a dark hallway in an ice-skating rink amid a hundred other queer anarchists? That’s up there.

It almost didn’t happen. Don’t get me started on the weird rigidity of anarchist culture these days, especially with regards to the erotic. Sure, we’re all non-monogamous (are we?), everyone’s queer now (are they?), and we are serious about things like queer and trans liberation, positive consent, abortion care access, and so on. Well, as political issues, at least, if not as pathways towards transforming our actual lives.

Is this me being “lifestylist,” suggesting that how we live our lives today actually matters? And that sex is a terrain worth fighting on, that sexual liberation is worth fighting for? Or let me rephrase that—forgive my overly militaristic metaphors, you can chalk it up to the anarcho-patriarchy. Is sexual liberation worth living for? Living differently? Living as if our bodies and our pleasure really matter? Could breaking free from the stilted ways of relating that both our dominant culture and our counter-cultures are stuck in have the potential to open up broader forms of freedom?

But I’m getting ahead of myself. To be clear, I didn’t come to Saint-Imier to find dates. Probably a lot of people did, and that’s perfectly valid, as far as I’m concerned. Let’s stop pretending that our motivations for participating in revolutionary struggle aren’t erotic, too, along with all the other things they are. But for me, I’m a little older than the twenty-something oogle romantics who made up a large part of the gathering. I came to get inspired again, to network with anarchists—especially queer anarchists, but really with anyone working on interesting projects—from all over the planet, to sling books and zines, to do the sort of serious grown-up anarchist stuff that we do at conferences and book fairs.

That’s who I am these days, I guess. In the workshop, behind the book table, in the breakout discussion, I am an earnest, serious anarcho-anarchist.¹ I call people “comrades” unironically. When solicited, I express measured opinions on topics ranging from Ukrainian armed struggle to the excesses of appelistes and their critics. I salivate over first editions of Luigi Galleani in the original Italian. I’m on a first-name (or at least nom-de-guerre) basis with militants from Anarchist Black Cross chapters in over a dozen different countries. I fit in. I’m among my people, for better or worse.

I’m also a queer pervert, sure. I let my freak flag fly alongside the black one. But after many years of trying to integrate the queer/trans, collectively erotic, and anarchist aspects of my life, resulting in a few successes and more disappointments, I’ve largely let those spheres of my life diverge. When I’ve been on anarchist speaking tours, I’ve waited until all the other earnest comrades have gone to bed to sneak out to the leathersex club, returning at sunrise to snatch a couple hours of sleep before getting up to discuss publishing projects over breakfast. At the play parties, Faerie gatherings, and dungeon nights I seek out to scratch my itch for bacchanalian excess, I’m not usually comparing notes on Bakunin translations with my fellow revelers. To my chagrin!

While I wouldn’t say I’ve given up, exactly, these days I don’t prioritize trying to bridge the gap between theory and practice around anti-authoritarian sexual liberation. So when I came to St. Imier, my mind was on other things.

When I became an anarchist long ago in the anti-globalization days—remember those?—not many anarchists were queer, even fewer were trans, and the term non-binary wasn’t yet in circulation. Yes, you read that right. In the years before Bash Back!, before trans “tipping points,” before the onslaught of right-wing culture war laws targeting trans and non-binary youth, anarchist subcultures were pretty heteronormative, and if not exactly conventionally gendered, certainly not as expansive as they’d later become. Outside of a few urban centers and the mass mobilizations where “pink blocs” or queer affinity groups temporarily popped up, it could be pretty lonely to be a queer anarchist.

Today, the situation has totally changed. What I saw in Saint-Imier confirmed that. A few years ago, I began to notice that at book fairs and in other anarchist spaces, queer and especially trans and non-binary young folks were making up an increasing proportion of attendees and participants. Was this just a North American trend? Absolutely not, it turns out.

One of the most stunning aspects of the experience of being at Saint-Imier for me was seeing how profoundly and radically the spectrum of anarchist gender and sexual identities has expanded. Every space was full of visibly gender-non-conforming folks, creatively adorned with patches in many languages decrying patriarchy and promoting trans and queer liberation. There were workshops, discussions, meet-ups, social events, and campsites specifically themed around trans and queer experiences. While younger people predominated in the visible trans and queer blocs, as they did at the gathering as a whole, plenty of anarchists from all generations were creatively challenging gender and actively messaging around trans and queer themes.

For me, observing this all around me at the gathering was a constant source of joy and wonder. I can’t claim any credit for this shift myself, despite my modest efforts in my younger years, but it warmed my queer little heart to think that some of my lonely efforts to queer anarchism and anarchize queer scenes back in the day have finally bore some fruit. Or at least, that I have lived long enough to see them superseded by an assertive new anarchist generation that’s queering things up far beyond my wildest dreams at the time.

Well, let me dial that back a little. Just because so many people were visibly claiming trans/queer identities or challenging gender aesthetically doesn’t necessarily mean that my vision or version of queerness held any particular sway. That’s as it should be, of course—we’re all anarchists here—but in my view, there are limits to the dominant currents of queer and trans politics that seemed to be in circulation in Saint-Imier. Here are a few examples.

Navigating gender frameworks proved a difficult and illuminating part of the gathering, and an ongoing site of contestation. Translation was an ongoing challenge, both between and within languages as well as between overlapping and clashing frameworks for understanding gender. The acronym du jour, courtesy of the German contingent, appeared to be “FLINTA”—roughly translating to women, lesbians, intersex, nonbinary, trans (not sure if they asterisk in German), and agender folks. In other words, not cis men, more or less. A variant, “TINA”—apparently coined by someone not versed in North American gay drug slang—excludes all cis people, including women and lesbians. A complex array of interventions into the gathering’s infrastructure were intended to ensure “non-mixed” (that’s originally a French term, I believe) spaces and times, including certain sleeping areas, workshops, and toilets.

I arrived at the shower space with towel and soap in hand one morning to find that, according to a handwritten sign by the doorway, I’d have to wait half an hour unless I claimed membership in the FLINTA category. Now, I’ve done my time in the mines of gender dysphoria, and I can check the right boxes if necessary. But I was exhausted in advance by the idea of having to assess everyone else assessing me and my naked body to determine whether I qualified properly for that year’s acronym. I’ll stick to the occasional hours when there’s no gendered gatekeeping in the shower, thank you. And—unpopular opinion here, but whatever—I actually find it quite pleasant to be around naked, dripping cis men, so that works.

I wasn’t involved in the organizing, so I can’t speak to how these arrangements were made. Some were certainly imposed by fiat via the time-honored anarchist tradition of taping up a piece of cardboard with a message scrawled in marker on it that then becomes collective policy, at least until the next act of autonomous initiative in which someone tears it down or writes over it. Personally, I wish we could have had broad, inclusive conversations about the different gender frameworks we were bringing from our home territories; some of my most interesting conversations during the gathering centered on struggles to translate our ideas about gender and liberation into the various languages we speak, as well as the practices we prefer in our collective spaces.

Some workshops were on the schedule covering some of these topics, including one specifically on the “FLINTA” framework, couched in apologetic language that led me to guess that critiques had already been levied. But alas, I couldn’t make it.

It seems that these hard conversations about gender, safety, inclusion, identity, and organizing are happening everywhere in the world, and unsurprisingly there’s no anarchist consensus on how best to approach them. While not all of the practices I saw in Saint-Imier engaging with gender and space resonated with me personally, it was encouraging to see us all collectively wrestling with them, debating them with each other, and trying out different things. I’m especially interested in the process by which we make collective decisions on the fly around unavoidable questions relating to bodies, space, and collective organization. How can we respect individual initiative in proposing or insisting on certain approaches—Yaas queen, put up that cardboard sign!—while also recognizing that, like it or not, other people aren’t bound by our decrees?

A couple of days into the gathering, another cardboard sign went up on the walkway leading to the food service area declaring that if people wanted to be served, they would need to be wearing a shirt, per demands of the kitchen crew. It explained that, since we live under patriarchy, which imposes different consequences for different genders when they go shirtless, everyone had to keep their shirts on if they wanted to be fed.

Indeed, patriarchy is still a force in our society, and in any case, the kitchen crew who worked so hard to feed thousands of us for those days could make whatever demands they want, as far as I’m concerned. But I scratched my head at that approach. To me, as an anarchist, there are two kinds of privileges in a hierarchical society:

things that are a problem because no one should be able to do them but some people can (for example, taking up disproportionate space in conversations or feeling entitled to the labor of others)
things that are a problem because everyone should be able to do them, but not everyone can (for example, walking around safely at night or being taken seriously in meetings).

These different kinds of privileges call for different strategies: the former requires abolition, while the latter requires generalization. I think going around shirtless should be in the latter category. Coming out of a queer/trans experience, it has been profoundly liberating to be in spaces where people of all bodies, not organized by gender, can move freely with or without clothing as they please. Seeing folks with chests of different shapes, top surgery scars, no nipples, tattoos and piercings of infinite variety, bras or binders or tank tops or nothing at all, all bared to the sun—this has massively expanded my sense of gendered possibility. I know it has been even more liberating for folks who’ve historically been prevented from or punished for doing so.

Of course, as you’ll likely have gathered already, this analysis comes from—or to use the hegemonic identity politics formula here, I am speaking as a—non-binary male-assigned faggot anarchist with aspects of transfeminine experience. I’m eager to center the needs and experiences of women, femmes, and FLINTAs that differ from my own in this regard, though I like to be part of the conversation when I can. But I’m hopeful that as general principles, maximizing freedom and autonomy and pointing towards prefigurative and transformative horizons might take priority in our approaches. Strategies that impose further regulations on how we use our bodies, in addition to contradicting those principles, are also less likely to succeed, even when they’re well intentioned: nobody likes being told what to do, least of all anarchists, and (as I saw in Saint-Imier) people are likely to disobey or at least mock rules they disagree with and had no part in determining. Also, even though the Swiss nights got pretty cool, in the afternoons, the sun blazed and it was extremely hot standing in those lines waiting for plates of bread and shredded carrots.

In this environment, even as I wound my way through days of earnest anarcho-anarchist chatting and networking, I wondered how sexuality might or might not figure in the gathering. In my experience in anarchist conference and mass mobilization settings, the primary focus has been on prevention and response around sexuality weaponized or gone wrong, chiefly via discussions of consent and infrastructure for response to people who assault or cross the boundaries of others. This is critically important, and in Saint-Imier, an active but beleaguered care team was on hand to address a wide range of conflicts as well as issues relating to sexual assault and consent. So many other challenging issues arose that by the final day of events, the care team went on strike in protest against their overwork and mistreatment by the other participants in the gathering.

Anecdotally, I didn’t hear of issues arising at the gathering around consent or assault, though in many conversations with comrades from various regions, I learned that the conversations that have been a staple of North American anarchist scenes for many years around transformative justice, accountability, and consent are widespread across the global movement as well.

Also, at Saint-Imier, anarchists identifying as asexual were becoming visible and making efforts to network and organize. Asexual critiques of compulsory sexuality and its consequences have proved an illuminating challenge to notions of sexual liberation (anarchist and otherwise) that don’t pay careful attention to how sex and power actually work in our world. Asexual meetups and workshops took place alongside a handful of workshops on perennial questions of anarchist interest: polyamory and non-monogamy, struggles over abortion and DIY approaches to sexual health care, etc. But these themes were fairly minor relative to other concerns in the programming.

Despite a substantial presence on the landscape of queer/trans identities, it might have seemed that the focus of earlier anarchist generations on sexual freedom and liberation just wasn’t on the agenda in the same way.

But—with so many kinky, flirty queers wandering around for five days, perhaps it was inevitable that other currents would come to the fore. To the organizers’ credit, ample space was available for autonomous initiative, and in addition to the pre-arranged program, a tremendous amount of self-organized activities took place on the fly. I didn’t have the bandwidth to pull something together, but a fierce non-binary weirdo with whom I chatted about mutual queer anarchist interests mentioned that they were planning a queer cruising space at the gathering. I kept my eyes open and my expectations moderate.

Then it appeared: a handwritten sign—of course!—near the food line declaring that a queer party would be taking place Friday night. At 20:00, a sort of meet-and-greet, chill hangout space, followed at 22:00 by… I forget the euphemism, but some sort of more intimate relating. You could read the sign and totally miss that this was intended to be a sex/play party. But still, it was a call to converge—the seed had been planted. I couldn’t wait to see what would unfold.

I turned up around 21:00 after wandering to and fro in search of the appointed place (“next to the church,” I’d been told—kinky, right?). There was a building where film screenings and child care had been taking place, outside of which sat a little square full of stone steps and benches… and it was swarming with people! In a dozen different circles and clusters, people were chatting with each other. Can all of these anarchists be queer and here for the party? I wondered. If so… wow.

Asking around, I learned that this was a semi-structured icebreaker; people had broken up into groups and were discussing some questions. I’d been in discussions all day and wasn’t so keen on this, so I decided to double back to the social center where a Colombian anarcho-punk band was slated to play soon, figuring I’d head back for the sexy part of the evening.

Ears ringing and suitably pumped up, I stepped out of the mosh pit an hour or so later ready to ramble. As I arrived back at the little square between the church and the film screening building, I saw that throngs of people were walking past me in the direction I’d come from. There were still some knots of people sitting around chatting in the square, but the building was locked and dark inside. Where was the party? I looked around in vain for someone I knew. Then I saw—yes—a handwritten sign taped to the wall of the church: “KINKY QUEER CRUISING BEHIND THE CHURCH 0:00.” Sounds good to me. I looked at my watch. It was midnight.

Feeling the tingle of erotic anticipation, I wandered around the centuries-old stone church to a dimly lit stone walkway flanked by a grassy slope, where I found… nothing. No one. Totally deserted. Hmmm. Did I misread the sign?

I wandered back to the square, where only a handful of people remained, smoking and chatting. The sign was still there. I lingered a while, lurked around a bit, feeling a bit creepy in a not-so-fun way. Well, what now?

Back in front of the church, I ran into a friend who had been one of the organizers of the event. They gave me an anguished update. Tons of people had turned out, great energy, lots of conversations, then they had gone into the building to take the party to the next level, but—there had been a misunderstanding with the organizers, “Sorry, the space is closing now, everyone’s got to go.” People complied, and before long the building was locked up and the queer cruising party was locked out. A proposal to cruise around/in the church was floated, the sign was posted, but others thought it might be disrespectful to the local community (well, yeah). So everyone had drifted off, and now—my agitated friend concluded—“I don’t fucking know! Aaargh!”

I commiserated. We wandered in a little knot of queers back down the hill towards the ice skating arena where the book stalls were housed. As we walked, I chatted with folks from various countries about how the anarchist scenes where they live engage with eroticism, collectively and politically. The conversation was interesting, but I could notice my body shifting as I retreated into the comfortable, familiar register of political discussion and away from the embodied, sensorily attuned, tense and tingling mode I’d slipped into in my failed effort to cruise around the church.

Down by the rink, we stood in a knot, chatting and camping it up and lamenting our woes as would-be sexual liberationists all dressed up with nowhere to go. We considered throwing an orgy in the showers—high-school locker room fantasies, anyone?—or just going to bed.

Just then, another knot of people found their way into a back room inside the arena and started putting up impromptu decorations, tweaking the lighting, finding a speaker for music. I shuttled between groups of people outside, hyping up the new location. By the time I stepped back inside, the little space had transformed. Dark electronica was pulsing under dim mood lighting. Whatever chairs or boxes were lying around had been pushed to the side and a throng of queers was dancing enthusiastically in the middle of the room. Somehow, a mattress had appeared towards the back of the room, and on it two people writhed enthusiastically in the darkness, next to the wheelchair in which one of them had arrived. I grinned. From the jaws of defeat, we’d managed to snatch a weirdly sexy queer victory.

The fairly sizable room offered space for chatting, flirting, dancing, and so forth, plus a few dark nooks. But at the back of the room, a doorway and a wooden ramp led down into a dim corridor where the cruising intensified. The narrow hallway led into the bowels of the ice rink, only a few feet wide; on the right-hand side, under a sloping ceiling beneath the rink’s bleachers, piles of gym mats were stacked under dusty tarps. Here in this musty darkness, pairs and clusters of bodies filled the space with moans. In this space, a big queer paint marker had crossed out the familiar coordinates of gender, sexuality, and identity; here, we redrew the map, scrawling onto terra incognita new landmarks of bodies and desire.

In the larger room, I strode through darkness that crackled with the night’s electricity, the pent-up eroticism of the past days surging through my veins, my pores exuding black flag pheromones. A lovely trans creature who’d been part of the group with whom I’d walked down to the arena smiled across the darkness at me. I grinned back. We stepped towards each other. Our hands extended. Our mouths met.

Fingers twined, we passed through the threshold into the dark corridor. We passed a dozen bodies writhing in various combinations, identities indeterminate, pleasuring each other in infinite combinations. Finding an unoccupied nook, we slithered up onto the pile of mats and pressed our bodies together. “Does that feel good?” “Yum!” “Can I sniff your armpit?” “Oh, fuck.” “Not quite so hard. That’s… there, that’s perfect.” We rolled and pressed and sniffed and snarled and laughed, taking pleasure in each other and in the sounds echoing along the corridor from the nooks nestled throughout the darkness.

Minutes, hours, days passed. At some point, a lovely stranger was pinning my wrists to the mat and whispering into my ear while I purred and arched my back. At another point, seeking a bit more space in the increasingly crowded cruising zone, I wandered to the back of the corridor and found a little storage area with a Zamboni. I straddled the machine while another lovely stranger straddled me. Not exactly a lifelong bucket list fantasy, but where else would I get the opportunity? Listening to the sounds of comrades from countless nations growling in the darkness in many languages, smelling sex wafting through the Swiss skating rink, feeling my body shudder with pleasure as I leaned back against the yellow plastic seat of the Zamboni, I thought to myself: Now this is anarchy. This is the anarchy I’ve been waiting for.

There are so many questions to debate about sex, gender, sexuality, identity, safety, care, and much more. We’ll never come to a consensus, but we can keep struggling together, learning from each other, and doing better. Yet for all the different approaches and priorities we bring from our different cultures and political perspectives, I believe—I insist, I demand—that collective eroticism is a critical part of what anarchism can be. May our desire for freedom and our desire for each other intertwine, each nourishing the other. The secret is to really begin. Let every skating rink host a secret orgy. To change everything, start anywhere—even on a Zamboni in a dark corridor with your anonymous comrade.

Your humble author was once at Bound Together Books in San Francisco as a shy young anarcho-queer, looking at the star-shaped enamel pins on display and fingering the black and pink one, while a grumpy, wizened older man in a black T-shirt with a plain black cap watched from his perch behind the counter. “And that’s another thing!” he ejaculated, unprompted, with his arms folded. “All these hyphens these days! I can’t take it! Anarcho-syndicalist, anarcho-primitivist, anarcha-feminist, anarcho-queer, anarcho-this, anarcho-that.” His eyes rolled to the ceiling, his voiced soured with mockery. “And each one has to have their own color, their own flag for their own little niche. Well, not me!” he thundered, pointing a thumb at himself to emphasize his point. “Me, I’m an anarcho-anarchist! My flag is black on black!” He nodded fiercely, refolded his arms, and settled back into his chair. Chastened, amused, but not convinced, I bought the black-and-pink pin, but I’ve thought of him many times since. ↩

Memories from Saint-Imier, 1872 to 2023 : Accounts from a Worldwide Anarchist Gathering

2023-08-22T18:52:48Z

One month late, we are finally back from summer vacation with a report from Anarchy 2023, a worldwide anarchist gathering in Saint-Imier, Switzerland. This festival celebrated the 151-year anniversary of the founding congress of the federation known as the Anti-Authoritarian International—the continuation of the International Workingmen’s [sic] Association, one of the most important European labor organizations of the 19th century. Drawing a reputed 5000 people—mostly from central Europe, but also from as far away as Chile and Australia—the gathering in Saint-Imier may have been the largest exclusively anarchist event of the year. Here, we offer a variety of accounts and appraisals.

The gathering comprised five days of activities distributed between 12 venues scattered across the town, not counting improvised events in public spaces. There were over 412 workshop sessions, 48 concerts, 36 film screenings, 11 theater performances, and 7 exhibitions, as well as a book fair including almost 100 tables. Despite this dizzying array of programming, the majority of these activities were standing room only.

Photographs were discouraged throughout the whole of Saint-Imier, though corporate media photographers surreptitiously took some. You can see a short photoessay by Greek anarchists here.

A sticker on the streets of Saint-Imier in July 2023.

From 1872 to 2023

First, let’s set the record straight about the event that anarchists came to Saint-Imier to commemorate.

Before the Paris Commune revolt broke out in spring 1871, tensions had been brewing for years within the International Workingmen’s [sic] Association, Europe’s chief revolutionary labor federation. At that time, there were at least four currents within the International; we can roughly summarize them by association with the figures Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Louis Auguste Blanqui, Karl Marx, and Mikhail Bakunin.¹ Proudhon’s adherents sought to change society by forming worker-owned labor cooperatives; Blanqui’s, by conspiring to seize dictatorial state power; Marx’s, by forming political parties to compete in elections. By contrast, Bakunin and his colleagues aimed to use revolutionary tactics to attack both capitalism and the state, aiming to mobilize the general population on a horizontal basis.

At that time, there was no anarchist movement, formally speaking. Some individuals identified as anarchists (Proudhon had famously done so in 1840), but there was no distinct organizing body advocating permanent opposition to all forms of the state and capitalism.

After the Paris Commune, when most of the participants in that uprising were in prison, in hiding, or buried in mass graves, Marx convened a closed meeting of the General Council, the central coordinating body of the International Workingmen’s Association. With the support of a recently added Blanquist member, and over the objections of representatives of rank-and-file sections of the International, the General Council declared that “the working class cannot act, as a class, except by constituting itself into a political party,” unilaterally imposing Marx’s preferred political strategy on the entire federation by fiat.

This was widely understood as an authoritarian power grab. Members of the International in Switzerland condemned this in a statement known as the Sonvillier Circular: “If there is one incontrovertible fact, borne out a thousand times by experience, it is that authority has a corrupting effect on those in whose hands it is placed.”

The next congress of the International took place in the Hague in September 1872. In order to ensure a majority, Marx and his colleagues used the authority of the General Council to manipulate the process via which delegates received their credentials; the Italian sections of the International boycotted the congress completely. Blanqui’s supporters joined Marx’s supporters in ratifying a controversial program of centralization and authoritarianism, expelling Bakunin in absentia and trying to do the same to his supporters. To everyone’s surprise, however, Marx then pushed through a decision to move the location of the General Council across the Atlantic to New York City—effectively attempting to kill the International rather than letting it escape his control.

On September 15, 1872, eight days later, delegates representing Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States² gathered in Saint-Imier to reorganize the International. Although the majority were anarchists, they established an inclusive structure, inviting all revolutionary socialists to organize on a horizontal basis rather than answering to a centralized, dictatorial cadre. (“The Congress denies in principle the legislative right of all Congresses,” reads the statement they drew up; “the destruction of all political power is the first duty of the proletariat.”) This is the event that the 2012 and 2023 gatherings in Saint-Imier commemorate.

A year later, in September 1873, delegates from England, France, Spain, Italy, Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland gathered in Geneva to continue the International, picking up where the 1872 Saint-Imier congress had left off. J.G. Eccarius, formerly Marx’s right-hand man, was among them. César De Paepe and many other longtime participants in the International also continued to participate.

Even anarchists are often unclear on this history. For example, in his coverage of the 2023 gathering for the Marxist paper Junge Welt, Gabriel Kuhn belittles the St. Imier congress, describing Saint-Imier as a “retreat for the anarchists who had been expelled from the First International at the Hague Congress” and claiming that

“the anti-authoritarian International was to be an anarchist alternative to the First International, which was classified as dictatorial. The success was modest.”

In truth, following Marx’s Pyrrhic power grab at the Hague Congress, the vast majority of the members of the International broke with Marx’s faction. The latter perished immediately. The Marxist historian G.M. Steklov emphasized this:

at best, its continued existence was barely perceptible to an outsider, and was nothing more than a long-drawn-out death agony… Attempts to revive the corpse were fruitless.

Meanwhile, a large number of the organizations that had comprised the original International Workingmen’s Association adhered to the reconstituted International that emerged from the meeting in Saint-Imier. They continued to work together, holding annual congresses over the following half decade despite intense state repression.³ Steklov, himself no friend to anarchists, documents all this in his History of the First International.

The narrative that the Saint-Imier International represented a minoritarian departure from the International Workingmen’s Association is historical revisionism, largely spread by Marxists who don’t read their own historians. What Steklov later called the “Anarchist International” was not, as Kuhn implies, an “alternative” to the International Workingmen’s Association—it was simply the continuation of it, liberated from a cadre of authoritarians who had unsuccessfully tried to hijack it. Anarchists were not a fractious sect within the labor movement of the 1870s and 1880s; they were a central current within it.

For more background on these events, you could start with Robert Graham’s We Do Not Fear Anarchy, We Invoke It: The First International and the Origins of the Anarchist Movement and Wolfgang Eckhardt’s The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin vs. Marx in the International Working Men’s Association. Graham himself has published a short history of the Saint-Imier congress and the continuation of the International thereafter.

A painting on the side of a building in Saint-Imier celebrates the watchmaking heritage of the town and the local anarchist movement of the 19th century.

And in 2023?

A great deal has changed since 1872.

Anarchism, established in 1872 as a formal movement, has spread across the world, been completely destroyed by repression, and reemerged and spread once more, again and again. Elsewhere, we have explored how the economy has changed over the past century and how that should inform contemporary revolutionary strategy. Here, it is enough to say that although those who gathered in Saint-Imier in 2023 were mostly workers of one kind or another, in today’s volatile context, sharing a profession or workplace is no longer a reliable starting point for building a long-term practice of collective resistance.

Hence, in place of labor federations, we have looser networks based around communications infrastructure and held together by ideas.

It is characteristic of our era that more and more people are turning against capitalism, the state, and other forms of oppression at the same time that those forces are rendering the old models of organizing and solidarity unsustainable. It is not surprising that there were more attendees at this gathering in Saint-Imier than at the last such event in 2012; likewise, it is not surprising that there were fewer membership organizations with long-term programs and formal organizing processes. We should not view this as a failure of the organizers, nor of the movement as a whole; there are structural factors at work here that are bigger than any one organizing group, milieu, or ideology.

Likewise, we should not imagine that those who can easily travel across the world to participate in such a gathering are representative of the contemporary anarchist movement as a whole. The attendees were disproportionately younger and from comparatively privileged backgrounds; structural challenges prevented many anarchists from attending, especially from outside Europe.

Nonetheless—if we want the anarchist movement to shape history rather than simply being a product of our times, it is up to us to establish new long-term anarchist infrastructure projects and networks that can rise to the challenges ahead of us and to make sure that these transcend the boundaries of privilege and geography. The fact that thousands of people made the effort to come together in Saint-Imier last July indicates how urgent this work is.

It is encouraging that a small number of organizers without any financial backing succeeded in creating a robust event in which virtually everything was available for free. This shows that anarchist models can succeed on a larger scale. It only remains to expand them.

To offer a multifaceted account of the gathering in Saint-Imier, we’ve assembled a collection of impressions here, composed by anarchists from Germany, Russia, Belarus, Finland, the United States, and elsewhere around the world.

Local newspaper coverage of the gathering in Saint-Imier.

Anarchist Infrastructure

We spend the first morning in the book fair area, where we are responsible for adjacent literature tables. When mealtime approaches, we delegate N— and B— to look into the food situation. They go off to figure out where lunch is being served.

N— comes back a few minutes later, dispirited. “There’s no way. I’ve never seen so many people in a line.”

“Did B— stay?” I ask. “Is he in the line?” I’m starting to get quite hungry, myself.

“He’s a goner,” N— answers. “There’s a thousand people in that line. It stretches all the way past the building and up the hill. I don’t think we’ll ever see him again.”

Five minutes later, B— appears, cheerfully balancing several full plates of food in his arms. “What happened?” I demand. “Did they have food set aside for people tabling?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that. It was just surprisingly quick.” He looks almost dazed.

I go out to get a look at the line myself. I have to walk quite a distance to get to the back of it. Several times, I think I’ve reached the end, and it turns out that I’m still somewhere in the middle. Finally, I get in the queue. I must be hundreds of feet from where food is being served. If this line moves as slowly as the lines at the toilets, I’ll still be standing in it at nightfall.

But the line is moving quickly indeed. I’m accustomed to standing in line, but in this line, we’re walking forward the whole time. Maybe people ahead of us are giving up and leaving? But no, we keep advancing in a steady pace.

After a couple minutes, I can make out two rows of tables ahead of us. The queue breaks in two and passes between them. On the other side of each table, there is a furious whirlwind of activity. I’m used to one volunteer languidly spooning potatoes onto a plate. What I see, instead, is a half dozen volunteers preparing plates of food in rapid fire, placing them in rows on the tables. The slowest part of the whole operation is the diners picking up the plates. You can take as many plates as you can carry and no one looks askance at you. It’s really an incredible operation.

After I eat, I take my dirty plate and go in search of a dishwashing station. I’m expecting to wash my own dish in a dirty tub of greywater that smells like bleach. Instead, there is a whole dishwashing operation going on involving what appears to be dozens of people. I can’t even fit inside the freestanding shelter they have set up—there’s too many of them. They insist that I deposit my dish in a pile and leave it to them.

The following night, I discover that my comrade has missed dinner. According to the schedule, it has been several hours since the kitchen team stopped serving food. All the same, just in case, I go over to the serving area to see if I can find anything she can eat. I’m picturing a leftover chunk of bread, or something.

There’s no one anywhere near the food serving area. At least, not on the receiving side of it. Things don’t look promising.

But when I get up to the tables, I see that there’s someone behind one of them, still piling food onto the dishes and lining them up on the table. It looks like a different menu than what was served for dinner. There are 5000 anarchists in this town, but here, no one else is around, just the two of us.

“Do you know if these are earmarked for some specific group or event, or something?” I ask, gesturing at the full plates of food he is putting out.

“I have no idea,” he answers without stopping his work. He has an embattled but determined air, the way I imagine the Kronstadt rebels. “They keep giving them to me, so I keep putting them out.”

“They who? Is there someone who can answer my question?”

He gestures behind him. Approaching from some distance behind the table is a kitchen worker, coming to replenish his supply of lentils.

“Is this food for some specific group or event, or something?” I ask, again.

“This food?” the kitchen worker answers, serenely, gesturing at the rows of full plates of food accumulating on the table. “No, this is for everyone.”

Anarchy works. Or at least—if the gathering in Saint-Imier was any indication, no one would go hungry in an anarchist society.

Local newspaper coverage of the gathering in Saint-Imier.

A Daring Experiment

Anarchy 2023 was a brave and risky experiment in self-organization. The gathering drew more than twice the number of inhabitants of the village. I was told that the initiative group of the gathering comprised around ten people, so most of the organization was left to the collectives and individuals invited, who were mostly completely strangers to each other. Nonetheless, the organizers all took a very idealist anarcho-communist approach to everything. No one was paid for their efforts; no one was charged anything more than a voluntary donation to participate and receive resources like food and accommodations; and no one was in charge. Anyone could announce a workshop and declare a space for it.

The organizers tolerated a very wide range of views, including some polar opposites. I noted that some discussions aimed solely at openly criticizing other existing anarchist projects were dropped from program, but there were still lots of events in the program that were doing that just a bit more subtly.

I do not know if the event was a financial disaster, but as for the daily functioning of the gathering, I would say it was a great success. Especially the organization of food was astonishing and completely scalable: I never had to wait in line for longer than 20 minutes, even though thousands of the people were flooding into the queue. Food was provided for those with specific dietary needs such as celiac disease; there was even a special section for people who still want to use masks and maintain social distancing.

Due to the huge number of topics and presentations, it was hardly possible to get a general picture of the events, and I was mostly kept busy pursuing my own field of interest—meeting activists from Eastern Europe and planning common projects with them. Probably most of the other attendees were busy in the same way. This means that it was not really Anarchy 2023 but rather Anarchies of 2023, not one movement but countless different movements that just happened to intersect in time and space but with little actual connection.

I never had a chance to meet any anarchists involved in the movement before the Second World War, so I was very happy to listen to Ben Morea, who has had a tremendous impact on the formation of the modern anarchist movement, for example by coining the English-language term affinity group.

A clock tower in Saint-Imier celebrates the city’s history as a watchmaking hub.

Anarchist Initiative

The first workshop I go to, it takes twenty minutes to walk to the building where it is scheduled to take place. When I arrive, it takes ten more minutes to push through the tight crowd thronging the entrance and make my way up to the second floor. There, I discover that two events have been double-booked for the same room. Looking online doesn’t help—in the official schedule, both events are listed with the same room number.

The attendees of both events are crowding into the room. It’s not big enough to accommodate all of them; many more people are trapped out in the hall, further congesting foot traffic.

I am not the one making this presentation. But I want to see it, and decades of anarchist organizing have given me a robust sense of my own agency. “We’re going to need one of the presentations to move to a different room,” I declare, hoping this will help me figure out who the presenters are.

“We can’t leave,” answers someone involved in the other workshop, the one I am not trying to attend. “We already put our visuals up on the walls.”

An industrious Finn who, like me, has only a tenuous connection to the presentation we are both trying to attend goes out to see if there are any empty rooms left. “Nobody leave, we are going to find another location!” I announce.

This gives one young person the mistaken impression that I am in a position of authority. “Can you tell me when it is going to start?” he says. “It’s already five minutes past the start time.”

“Listen,” I answer, “I’m not in charge of this event. I’m just trying to make sure that it can happen. This whole kerfuffle is not my idea.”

In the end, the Finn returns, having secured another room, and the event begins just a few minutes late.

The next day, I am scheduled to present a workshop myself. Drawing on my experience, I make sure to get to the room a full forty minutes early. To my surprise, it is almost empty.

I open up my computer and start trying to figure out how to connect it to the projector. I’m not what you might call technically inclined.

As I am struggling to find a cord, a very serious Latin American gentleman approaches me.

“I want to be clear,” he says. “I’m not in a position of responsibility here. I’m not in charge of the events in this room.”

“That’s fine—do you know who is?”

“No one is.”

“Oh, well, that’s great,” I say, despairingly.

“Now, do you have an HDMI port?” he continues, briskly. “If you want to appear on the livestream, we will have to set up the camera in this position, but if you prefer to remain anonymous, we’ll move it over here, so it only shows the screen, and it will be up to you to remember not to venture across this invisible line. Do you need access to a podium? How many of you are there, and when will your comrades arrive?”

This sign in one of the buildings hosting events during the anarchist gathering in Saint-Imier seems to imply that some of the discussions were announced as booby traps to force unsuspecting attendees to organize themselves.

What Gives Me Hope

A pair of giant skeleton puppets bobbing through a packed dance floor. An indoor ice-skating rink transformed into massive literature distribution hangar. A pop-up pizza tent where you can obtain vegan pizza made by comrades—provided you are willing to wait. People sprawled in the empty pastures around the village, talking and napping in the sun. The longest line I’ve ever seen for the kitchen, but also a surprisingly efficient and fast-moving one. All the bikes locked up outside the main show space, because we might not even trust each other. A hall packed full of hundreds chanting “Siamo Tutti Antifascisti!” and everyone meaning it wholeheartedly. Stumbling upon an art show on a rooftop patio, complete with bubbles and potato crisps in the shape of teddy bears, where prints made by some of the children are displayed. Holding hands and gazing at the Milky Way, making wishes on shooting stars until the dawn creeps blue on the horizon, beckoning the coming day.

I arrive late at night and the first thing I see is the countless little tents and caravans stretched out in vacant cow pastures. Walking through the night, I head to the main show space, embrace a dear love, and catch the last few songs of a Colombian punk band. I’ll return to this hall over the coming nights to talk with friends and revel to a hip-hop duo and witchtrap DJs, dancing myself back into my body, dancing myself home.

During the days, I scan the schedule, looking for the sweet spot: workshops I’m interested in in languages I understand. A presentation on Gustav Landauer, a 19th-century anarchist poet mystic, catches my eye—but unfortunately it is scheduled at the same time that I have a prior commitment. I go about my day and check the schedule again later, only to find the Gustav Landauer talk has been moved to the early evening. I make my way up the side of the mountain, intending to drop in on a somatic experiencing workshop on the way. I stop in and do some breathing and grounding exercises led by a presenter who alternates between English and French. Then I make my way across the packed square, where people have gathered to listen to a rousing presentation.

Giant skeleton puppets at a hip hop performance during the gathering in Saint-Imier, July 2023.

Above the din, I swear I can faintly hear singing. It draws me. Making my way back across the crowded square away from the location of the Gustav Landauer talk, I trace the sweet sound around the corner, where a group of anarchists are assembled in a church courtyard. A dear friend had alerted me to the fact that there would be an anarchist choir here—and now I have stumbled on them.

In delight and awe, I stand and listen. I chime in where I can, looking over the shoulder of someone with an anarchist songbook.

At length, I tear myself away, intent on catching at least a tiny bit of the Landauer presentation. I walk back through town and scale flights of stairs to catch the last few minutes. The punchline is that it turns out the talk was really about Spinoza, or rather, Gustav Landauer’s relationship to Spinoza’s work.

At one point, though, the presenter remarks that Landauer wrote that when someone becomes a comrade, you gain twice: first, by making a new friend, and second, by having one less enemy. This gem alone made it worth attending.

My time in St. Imier was heady and full. It felt like time stretched out, then concertinaed back in. A day felt like many days, two days like a week. Like many other people in this world, I consider myself a lost child, divorced from a fulfilling cultural heritage and stripped of a relationship to the land. I strive to rebuild the latter in my daily life; the former, I build and lose and build again. I went to St. Imier, in part, to connect to the anarchist lineage that binds me to history, linking me to both the past and the future, which has helped me make sense of my life for the past twenty-five years.

In a small Swiss village with a street named Rue Bakounine, I could feel the tug of belonging, the thread that keeps pulling me home. It’s not that these temporal spaces make me feel young so much as that they make me remember who I am. The thing that was most notable, in a tiny town filled with thousands of anarchists, was not who was there, but who was absent. Because despite the many, many anarchists who were there, I know there are so many more around the world who were not. And that—that gives me hope.

An anarchist songbook, used during choral singing at the gathering in Saint-Imier.

The Inspiration We Need

I came home from the gathering in Saint-Imier with a lot of new motivation and strength. Walking down the streets of Saint-Imier, passing self-organized workshops and discussions in different languages at almost every corner, showed me once again what becomes possible when people come together in self-organized spaces.

Exchanging ideas and experiences, discussing strategies, meeting old comrades and friends and making new ones, a book fair filling a whole ice arena (I mean, how crazy is that?)… Being surrounded by thousands of anarchists from all around the globe sharing similar ideas and connecting the different struggles we fight… all this inspired me a lot. The kind of inspiration that we desperately need to continue our struggle.

On the other hand, the gathering left me with a lot of open questions regarding how to deal with conflicts and contradictions within our movement. What is needed for us to be willing to listen to each other so that we can learn and grow together? At what point does solidarity become an empty phrase? How do we live up to our ideals across borders in times of war? How much formal or informal organization do we need? What do we consider victory to mean in the struggles we are engaged in?

Imagine the Authoritarian International

Corporate reporters discussing the gathering in Saint-Imier trotted out the usual clichés about anarchism. “Much of what is offered here is contradictory,” declared one journalist. Criticizing a sparsely attended talk at which an elderly German parroted some pro-Russian talking points about Ukraine, the same author crowed:

“This would be unthinkable in a curated, moderated programme. But that would also require more authority than most anarchists would like.”

Many people who have not previously been exposed to anarchism take it for granted that “more authority” is the solution for every problem. The question, of course, is how to decide who gets to wield that authority. In Russia, in which one can arguably find more authority than Switzerland, the authorities are the very ones pushing the talking points to which this journalist took exception.

For perspective, let’s imagine a comparable gathering for the opposing side. Picture the Authoritarian International, an event welcoming everyone who passionately believes in the importance of authority as a value unto itself. Would such a gathering be less contradictory, less disputatious?

What location and anniversary would the partisans of authority choose? Every nationalist would propose the capital of his own country; every monarchist would argue for the date of the founding of his favorite royal line. Perhaps the city of Rome could satisfy almost everyone: republicans for the Roman Republic, imperialists for the Roman Empire, autocrats for the coup that turned the former into the latter, Catholics for the Vatican, Nazis for the March on Rome that brought fascism to power. But which date would they pick?

Even if they could agree on a place and time, think how bitterly they would squabble, united only by faith in the importance of hierarchy, centralization, and domination. Proponents of religious theocracy, military dictatorship, corporate oligarchy, and constitutional republic would shout each other down, each striving to force the others to obey his preferred despot or legal code. Devotees of Ayn Rand would bicker with Stalinists; Trump-voting Klansmen would brawl with earnest Norwegian social democrats.

How would technocrats and militia leaders resolve their differences over how to apportion authority? Voting? A rigorous job application process? Brute force?

Capitalists would vie to fleece each other. Food, housing, and other necessities would be available only at market prices—or worse, if some magnate or state agency managed to establish a monopoly. (What is a monopoly, if not “more authority” in the realm of economics?)

Rather than disagreeing over how to end the war in Ukraine, attendees would contend to cash in on it or to emulate Putin’s strategies for suppressing protest movements. Rather than debating COVID-19 safety protocol, some would discuss how to create artificial scarcity in access to medical treatment as a means of increasing profits while others studied how to use lockdowns as a pretext to crush dissent. For a considerable fee, attendees could choose between workshops with titles like “Stage Your Own Coup” and “The Iron Rule of Law.”

Let’s stop here before we accidentally reinvent the League of Nations or the New York Stock Exchange. Looking through this lens, the various groups and discourses that converged in Saint-Imier look surprisingly coherent. Taking the simple idea that inequality and oppression are bad things as our point of departure will not resolve all the questions before us. But it will put us on the right track.

The CrimethInc. table in the book fair area in Saint-Imier—one of nearly one hundred anarchist publishing projects that were represented there.

Something Was Missing

It is hard to evaluate the festival in Saint-Imier. Thousands of anarchists from different parts of the world (mostly from western/southern Europe) created so many parallel worlds that no one could say something about most of them. From theater performances and concerts to the book fair and hundreds of workshops/presentations/meetings, the diversity of the anarchist movement was there, but at the same time something was missing…

For the event that celebrates one of the very important steps in the emergence of an organized anarchist movement, there was little space that could bring us further on the matter of international organizing. Talking about this with some comrades, I was told that those were the wrong expectations to bring to an event that presented itself as a festival and not as a congress or something like that.

As a festival, the event in Saint-Imier stands—there was enough entertainment and serious programming to keep you busy. The infrastructure was there to consume and participate in volunteer structures. But beyond consumption, the revolutionary ideas of the 19th century seem to have disappeared from parts of anarchist movement in the same way that they have disappeared from the heads of Swiss watchmakers.

With the decline of the anarchist movement in some parts of the world, the question remains: do we need more festivals with completely open programs, hoping that there is cooperation going on somewhere behind closed doors? (I’m quite sure there was some cooperation in St.Imier, at least on the level of individual groups.) Or is the internationalist anarchist movement missing something more important to keep the ideas alive and continue supporting each other across borders?

Street art in Saint-Imier featuring a quote by Hélène Cixous.

Village Life

The international anti-authoritarian gathering that took place in the little town of Saint-Imier built a sort of parallel village life.

This 5000-anarchist village displayed an intense rural life with its rumors, its intense conflicts and mutual aid, its patterns in which we would meet the same people at every corner every day yet fail to find some people even once in the course of five days. Some people were irritated by the format; they could not understand whether it was a gathering or a festival or something in between.

The veterans of earlier gatherings at Saint-Imier reported that such fierce debates have always taken place, but the topics change. In comparison to the last big meeting (in 2012), this year was much queerer and there were no debates about whether to eat meat—this time, everything was vegan with different kitchens for gluten-free food and an extra kitchen for people with allergies. Wonderful! Amazing supplying efforts. And no meat-eaters’ riots.

It was an amazing space where you could bring together people from Chile and Belarus to compare notes about their experiences participating in uprisings and enduring repression. On one day, at the same time, you could choose between the “DIY abortion” workshop and “happy birth giving” workshop.

Some of the points of controversy this year included:

There were some talks on the “corona dictatorship” and vaccination “obligation,” which irritated a lot of people due to the conspiracy theory direction. A few people brought up their anti-vaccine talking points even at workshops that had nothing to do with the subject.
Anti-racist critique (for example, a critique of a Sea Punks presentation to the effect that it reflected a “white savior” attitude).
There was a big brouhaha about an attack on one book table, where some books which the attackers considered Islamophobic were destroyed.

For us, the biggest clash was on the topic of the war in Ukraine. It exploded on the second day at a round table discussion about Ukrainian resistance to the invasion. The organizers were not interested in discussing “whether” to support Ukrainian resistance; they wanted to talk about “how.” Certain self-proclaimed anti-militarists did not accept this; in the end, they screamed about censorship, saying things like “You don’t know what anarchy is!”

Several so-called anti-militarist events took place during the week, as well, and those were not disrupted by those who support anti-authoritarian fighters on the front in Ukraine. But at the panel discussion about anti-authoritarian perspectives on support for the Ukrainian resistance, some calling themselves an anti-militarist group tried to sabotage the event. There was screaming and shoving, which retraumatized people from Ukraine who were on the podium to speak. They laughed aloud during a minute of silence for our comrades who died fighting against Putin. It was ugly and contrary to solidarity, or even human decency. But still, at the end of the day, there were many more people ready to listen the experiences of anarchists directly affected by the war and Putin’s imperialism. There were many voices of solidarity from all over the world, and that was empowering.

The nicest thing we heard about was a workshop on anti-fascist yodeling, where even people who resist singing opened their minds and mouths and found a mutual relaxation moment in voice pitching.

On the last night, we met on the street some local people who were talking about the gathering. One was telling the other that it was good that this event was taking place: finally, there was some activity in the village. This, despite all the graffiti, blocking of streets, and train cancellations.

The Saint-Imier gathering… it was diverse, emotional, vibrant, and loud.

P.S.: On Sunday evening, after the event was over and people were cleaning up and going home, a strong thunderstorm hit the town. The news reported that there was a meter and a half of water in the central square, but that no one was hurt. We hope that everyone stayed safe!

“Please don’t have political conflict.” A satirical sign in Saint-Imier.

Some Complaints

The DPA [Deutsche Presse-Agentur], the largest press agency in Germany, reported on the anarchist meeting with the remarkable conclusion that there was even a street named after Bakunin in St. Imier, but that it was a dead end.

Of course, this is not my assessment of anarchist ideas. Yet I too have to shake my head at some developments in the anarchist subculture. My feelings range from amused amazement to sad resignation.

For example, in the absence of any other communication infrastructure capable of reaching a comparable number of people, the organizing team tries to reach the participants by making megaphone announcements at the food lines. People should cross the tracks only at the official railroad crossings, we are told, or else the Orgateam will be charged enormous fines. And if the façades of the houses are painted, then the collective cashier will have to pay for the cleaning and, in addition, the lack of sympathy in the village will reduce the chance that such an event can take place here again.

Where should I start? Should I note that the death of Sébastien during the Castor transport in France in 2004 taught me to step on train tracks only in very well-planned actions? That I have absolutely no idea of the Swiss legal situation and therefore do not know whether the crossing of tracks by event participants can be charged financially to the organizers? That I would have been interested in this information? That the announcements are centrally about money and not about the sense and nonsense or dangers of crossing the tracks? That it seems to me out of place to carry out subcultural debates with lacquer paint on house walls in Saint-Imier?

But my first impulse is another one: disobedience. And I think it’s because of the form of communication.

I had the feeling of having been treated as condescendingly by some of the people who made these announcements as the authorities treat me elsewhere. Their appeals seemed to assume that “we” would want “the same” without question. What is this “same” conveyed in the subtext? A meeting that receives positive reports in the media? A municipality that is not opposed to hosting such an event again in ten years? Whether I personally share these goals is irrelevant to my discomfort. It is the matter-of-factness with which other views are branded as undesirable deviations that bothers me. Because the answers could be different and those positions deserve their space as well.

“Please don’t put up signs if you’re not an organisator.” An ironic sign.

A History of Criticism

People tend to view the past through rose-tinted lenses while focusing on the negative aspects of the present. Anarchists are no exception. Comparing the 2023 gathering with the one in 2012, for example, some participants complained that the 2012 gathering was a serious political organizing event, whereas the 2023 gathering was just a big party.

I wasn’t at the 2012 gathering, but I read the reports that appeared afterwards. Attendees charged that there was not enough meaningful political content, that the discussions were superficial, that there was insufficient engagement with race and gender and a lack of accommodations ensuring accessibility. There was controversy over the pieing of a politician who had apparently denounced militant anarchism. Vegans carried out an intervention against attendees who were cooking meat.

The organizers of the 2012 gathering also faced criticism for attempting to curate the program themselves. One critic grumbled, “If another international gathering is called in the future, it would be great to see anarchist principles of co-operation and shared responsibility at the forefront of the organizing.”

Arguably, the organizers of the 2023 gathering overcorrected, creating an almost entirely open process via which anyone could announce an event. And yet, surprisingly, this experiment was more or less successful on its own terms. Next time, we can anticipate that organizers will overcorrect again, reacting against the shortfalls and critiques of this year’s gathering.

Criticism is an essential part of organizing. But the proper role of criticism is to inform our own active efforts, not to marinate in negativity, nor to bully others into doing things the way we want them to. We should not be distracted from the tremendous things our comrades have accomplished by the fact that there is still room for improvement.

Likewise, let us not imagine that the anarchist movement can accomplish the things we desire it to without our own active involvement.

The ghosts of the past: a skeleton puppet at the gathering in Saint-Imier.

Accompanied by the Spirit of Mary Shelley

We found ourselves in the Jura mountains experiencing some sort of phantasmagoria brought on by jet lag and heat exhaustion. Upon reaching Saint-Imier, we employed the few French words that hadn’t evaporated from our minds as spells to summon espresso to lift us from the fog. With each espresso, we became more aware of what was actually happening. We were increasingly impressed by the food logistics and increasingly fascinated by the crowds. Every day, more people arrived from Latin America, the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and, for whatever reason, so many from Leipzig, Germany in particular.

Although it was largely a linguistic sea of French and German with splashes of Italian or Spanish, our US accents cut through the currents and reached curious ears. In one instance, a UK anarchist began to chat us up at the stream beside the ice arena hosting the book fair. We compared notes about the currents of transphobia and recuperation of trans struggle in the name of consumer identities in our respective contexts. Bemoaning the climate nightmare, we explored the related possibility of dark horse wineries coming out on top. The we reviewed our respective regions’ anarchist book fair drama and commiserated about experiencing dire economic situations while also being located in the imperial core.

Another such encounter occurred behind Espace Noir. We sat in the thick smoke, alone in a crowd, discussing various things for a while, but when one of us mentioned Chicago and another mentioned the gorgons, an older Swiss woman interjected, “What’s this about gorgons?”

“Gorgons used to be guardian figures,” one of us answered. The conversation wandered from monsters as portents to Frankenstein’s monster as a depiction of “the abject” and “the excluded,” and from there to the revelation that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein while on a train in the Jura region, quoting her friends’ poetry throughout. We all got a big laugh at “Schützengarten” beer, which then opened the door for the gun conversation, with us being surprised by the sporting gun culture in Switzerland and the Swiss women being surprised that we routinely do a version of trap shooting that includes firing beer cans out of a legally augmented AR15 lower so we can shoot them out of the air with a sporting shotgun. This conversation left us thinking about generational gaps in US anarchism and what it would be like to pursue more affective encounters rather than more regimented ones.

This “pursuit of the affective” didn’t go so well in practice, with one of us getting their glasses broken in the pit the night before our talk, but on our second-to-last night in Saint-Imier, we successfully hunted down the source of the gabber and hardtek music that had been lulling us to sleep from far away each evening. We started from the fried snack stand (where the music wasn’t the right bpm) and passed by the cheese vending machine. Finally, we found a mini-rave in a clearing by a train bridge. As soon as we saw their sound system, the logistics were immediately intelligible to those of us with audio know-how, which gave us a myriad of ideas to bring back home.

Before we left the region, we headed to the lakeside city of Neuchâtel. Alongside the beautiful blue water of the lake and the colorful Prussian statues, the walls of the city were decorated with graffiti—the good ol’ three arrows covering up NS tags, “ZAD Partout!,” and “Nique la Police.” Fittingly, we saw some words by Mary Shelley written on the wall, a through line for our reverie.

Street art in Saint-Imier: selections from Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “Drunken Boat.”

The Choir

The last thing we experienced before leaving was a choral ensemble in the city square of Saint-Imier, comprised of various revolutionary choirs from around Europe singing century-old anarchist songs together. The voices of the past, addressing us in the present. It was deeply moving.

Trends, controversies, even individual anarchists come and go, but the spirit of what we are doing is greater than us, older than us, and it is an honor to witness its transmission from one century to the next.

An anarchist songbook open to a classic song in Saint-Imier, 2023.

Painting with a broad brush, we can characterize the politics associated with these currents thus: Proudhon (pro-market, anti-state, anti-feminist, anti-insurrection), Blanqui (anti-capitalist, pro-state, anti-feminist, pro-insurrection), Marx (anti-capitalist, pro-state, pro-feminist, anti-insurrection), and Bakunin (anti-capitalist, anti-state, pro-feminist, pro-insurrection). ↩
The two American sections of the International were represented at the Saint-Imier by Gustave Lefrançais—a participant in the Paris Commune and, incidentally, the person to whom the lyrics of the revolutionary anthem “The Internationale” were dedicated. ↩
Bearing in mind that the International had been founded in 1864, the five years of activity of the “Anti-Authoritarian International” between 1872 and 1877 compare favorably enough with the eight years during which Marx was involved before that. The latter part of the history is less known simply because the vast majority of the history of the International has been passed on by Marxists. ↩

In Memory of Dmitry Petrov : An Incomplete Biography and Translation of His Work

2023-05-03T20:01:26Z

On April 19, 2023, three anarchists were killed in battle near Bakhmut: an American named Cooper Andrews, an Irishman named Finbar Cafferkey, and a Russian named Dmitry Petrov, known to us until then as Ilya Leshy. People in our networks have shared undertakings with all three of these comrades over the years.

You can read about Cooper’s motivations in his own words here and consult a eulogy from his comrades here. You can learn about Finbar’s lifelong activism here, read an interview with him here, and listen to a song of his here. In the following eulogy, we explore the life of Dmitry Petrov, who also went by the noms de guerre Ilya Leshy and Fil Kuznetsov. For background, you should start by reading the statements from his comrades in the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization, the Resistance Committee, and Solidarity Collectives, as well as Dmitry’s statement from beyond the grave, all of which are available here.

A few weeks before the war began, Dmitry participated in an interview that we included in our coverage of the unfolding situation. On the first day of the Russian invasion, under what must have been challenging conditions, Dmitry took time to speak with us about how anarchists were responding. Throughout our exchanges over the following year, we were impressed by his humility, the earnestness with which he approached his efforts, and his sincere desire for critique.¹

When Dmitry was killed, his comrades revealed that he had been involved in some of the most significant anarchist initiatives in 21st-century Russia, including co-founding the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization. Here, we will provide an overview of his efforts as a snapshot of the past two decades of struggle in the post-Soviet world, concluding with translations of two of his texts, “To Be a Revolutionary” and “The Mission of Anarchism in the Modern World,” and another text about him from the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization.

No one in our collective believes that state militarism can bring about the world we desire to live in. We are internally divided over the issue of anarchists participating in military resistance to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Some of us believe that serving in a state military formation can never advance the anarchist cause. Others believe that the decision to do so can only be understood in view of the brutal autocracy that prevails in Russia, in which committed anarchists like Dmitry had tried virtually every other approach. If we reject state militarism, it is an open question how else to respond to imperialist invasions—and we will be better equipped to approach that question if we understand the life trajectory of Russian anarchists like Dmitry. For a discussion of the complexities of formulating an anarchist anti-war strategy that does not effectively cede the field to state militarism, you could begin here.

Volodya Vagner writes, “I took this photo of Dmitry a spring day in 2018, as he showed me around the Moscow offices of the PKK’s representation in Russia. He’d been spending time there since the battle of Kobanê in 2014, studying Kurmanji and organizing events about the revolution in Rojava… he struck me as kind and modest, a sharp thinker committed to putting his convictions into action.”

A Life in Combat

One of our contacts in the Russian anarchist movement recalls that Dmitry was an active participant in anarchist activities in Moscow starting when he was a teenager, as early as 2004. According to a eulogy in Novaya Gazeta, Dmitry

became interested in anarchism at school. Together with comrades, they published the anarchist newspaper “Heretic.”

As a child, he was strongly influenced by his father’s stories about the Makhnovist movement during the civil war in Russia. For the first time, his father brought him to the Falanster store (the oldest independent bookstore in Moscow), where Dmitry discovered the [Russian anarchist] magazine Avtonom. “My first acquaintance with the movement was participation in the Bespartshkol, a rather interesting circle of lectures and discussions that took place many years ago in the Moscow Jerry Rubin Club.” From the age of fifteen, he began to actively interact with the organization of “revolutionary anarcho-syndicalists” and to “write articles for their samizdat.”

Dmitry became known to other comrades as Ekolog (“ecologist”) on account of his environmentalism, organizing against the construction of incinerators and for the defense of Bitsevski Park in Moscow. He also participated in Food Not Bombs, the anarchist MPST union (“Interprofessional Workers’ Union”), and a variety of other initiatives. You can read about his activities during this period here.

Like many Russian anarchists, he participated in the anti-fascist movement, fighting Nazis on the streets of Moscow and defending concerts and lectures against Nazi attacks. According to the Novaya Gazeta eulogy, Dmitry was a member of the affinity group of Ivan “Kostolom” Khutorsky, a well-known anti-fascist who was later murdered in his stairwell by a member of a neo-Nazi gang.

Indeed, while Dmitri was becoming more active in the anarchist movement, fascists and police were escalating their violence against it. They had begun maiming and killing activists and journalists and even their lawyers; Fedor Filatov, Ilya Borodayenko, Timur Kacharava, and Anna Politkovskaya were only a few of the many casualties. In January 2009, the lawyer Stanislav Markelov and the journalist and anarchist eco-activist Anastasia Baburova were murdered in downtown Moscow. The previous summer, Dmitry had fought alongside Anastasia Baburova to defend Georgian refugees from Abkhazia who were staying in Yasnyi proezd in Moscow.

The following month, Dmitry took part in a clandestine action claimed under the name People’s Retribution. According to one account, this was a landmark event in Russia:

The first anti-cop arson of a new generation of anarchist rebels took place on the night of February 19-20, 2009. The next day, a video was published on the internet on behalf of the group People’s Retribution, showing anonymous people throwing Molotov cocktails at police cars. “People’s Retribution” announced the destruction of two cars and called on “every self-respecting person… to stand up against the arbitrariness and despotism of the police, secret services, and bureaucracy.”

Afterwards, Dmitry participated in establishing an anonymous platform for reporting such clandestine actions, the Black Blog, which began publishing in May 2010. When the anonymous editors announced the end of the Black Blog in March 2019, they alluded to the burning of the police cars on February 19, 2009: “More than ten years have passed since we threw our first Molotov cocktail at the police.”

One of the flashpoints of conflict around Moscow at that time was the Khimki forest, which anarchists and ecological activists were defending against corrupt officials and loggers and the fascists in their employ. On July 28, 2010, the fight over Khimki came to a head when hundreds of anarchists and anti-fascists marched on the local municipal offices in response to a fascist attack. We don’t know what Dmitry’s precise involvement in these events was. The anonymous report we received from Russian anarchists seems to bear the work of a familiar hand; but in an interview, an anonymous representative of Black Blog denied that they had participated in the demonstration at the municipal offices.

According to the Novaya Gazeta eulogy, Dmitry distinguished himself as a particularly considerate comrade in the course of his participation in ecological sabotage around this time.

“Once, we wandered through the autumn forest at night, disabling construction equipment,” recalled Svyatoslav Rechkalov, a political refugee in the case of the anarchist organization Narodnaya Self-Defense. “And one girl lost her sneaker. She just stepped on the ground and it swallowed her leg. She pulled her leg out, but the shoe remained somewhere underground. Well, Dima took off his shoes, gave her his sneakers, put bags on his feet, and went on like that.

“People asked him, are you not cold? Do you want to change eventually? He said: if it becomes unbearable, then we will change. But he ended up walking around in the bags all night. That’s who he was.”

Over the months following the march on the municipal offices of Khimki, the authorities detained and tortured over 500 anarchists and anti-fascists. Several were forced to flee the country. Nonetheless, this was not enough to suppress what was at that time a powerful movement. According to the aforementioned account of the movement of that time,

“2009-2012 was the peak of anarchist resistance in the history of the post-Soviet region of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. Something happened almost every day, especially in the Moscow region, day and night.”

By summer 2012, over a hundred arson attacks had taken place targeting police stations and vehicles, military enlistment offices, cars belonging to state officials, and construction equipment intended to destroy forests. The Black Blog reported many of these actions, including some claimed by additional groups that Dmitry reportedly participated in, such as Anti-Nashist Action (countering the pro-Putin youth group, Nashi) and ZaNurgaliyeva (likely an ironic reference to then-Minister of Interior Rashid Nurgaliyev, a former KGB functionary).

On June 7, 2011, for example, an improvised device exploded beside a traffic police post at kilometer 22 of the Moscow Ring Road. The Anarchist Guerilla group claimed responsibility with a video of the explosion on the Black Blog. According to the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization, Dmitry participated in this action.

In a subsequent interview, pseudonymous participants in the burning of the police post described the action in detail. Here is an excerpt:

DENIS: We are descending from the crossing over the Moscow Ring Road. It’s almost light now. Some pensioner is already here walking his dog. I must say, according to our experience of night outings, this category of citizens is one of the very first to appear on the city streets in the morning. They say that in old age people sleep very little. Although our faces are covered, I still feel anxiety—after all, a witness can remember something. Of course, this is complete madness—to return to a failed bomb, and even in the light, in full view of the whole neighborhood. But so much effort has been expended—it is impossible to leave with nothing.

Let’s return to the post. Everything is the same as we left: a basin with coal and a cylinder stands between the fence and the booth. Alexei goes to the edge of the concrete ditch, lights a phosphorus match, and throws it into the basin. Nothing happens. Has the gasoline burned away? Discouraged, we slowly walk back to the bridge. “Listen, did you definitely see the match fall into the basin?” I ask Alexei. “Yeah, it looked like it.” “But you can’t say for sure?” “No, I’m not sure.”

Last try. We return, I climb over the ditch, approach the fence, light a match, throw it right into the basin and… a bluish flame spreads over the coal. It happened! Now we are running, our hearts are beating—what if the explosion catches us in a conspicuous place? But the joy of success drowns out the anxiety.

BORIS: It was starting to get light. I noticed an incomprehensible movement behind the booth. I looked closely, I realized that it was the reflection of fire on the trees. It was burning!

But suddenly a car quickly drove into the parking lot, illuminating the booth with its headlights. A traffic cop ran out of the car, took out a fire extinguisher, and began to put out the flames. Unsuccessfully. On the contrary, it seemed that the fire flared up more and more. The traffic cop ran into the post and came out with another fire extinguisher, a larger one. Again, failure—the flame only blazed more and more. Apparently, having decided not to risk it, the traffic cop returned to his post. The flame, meanwhile, rose above the booth—but there was still no explosion. The camera I was using stopped recording for the second time; I pressed “record” again. Police cars began to arrive at the post.

And then there was an explosion.

Everything was lit up by a flash, a bright orange flame shot up about fifteen meters. We continued filming. Cars began to drive away from the traffic police post, and just then our comrades returned. Alexei nervously shouted: “What are you doing, they are coming after us!”

According to a post by the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization, the one who returned to try again with one more match—the one called Denis in the above account, if it is to be credited—was Dmitry.

The account concluded with an admonition characteristic of Dmitry’s later writing:

You cannot seize power and impose anarchy on people from above. You cannot make a revolution for them and force them to live in a new society. Anarchist ideals will win only when people realize their strength, taking responsibility for their own lives and each other’s. Therefore, the main thing is to restore people’s faith in their own strength.

The same social tensions expressed in these clandestine actions eventually came to a boil in mass participatory events. Across Russia, hundreds of thousands of people participated in the opposition movement of 2011-2012. On May 6, 2012, the “March of Millions” ended in clashes with the police in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square. Once again, according to the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization, Dmitry Petrov participated in the events in Bolotnaya Square, alongside the anarchist Alexei Polikhovich and others who were subsequently imprisoned for attempting to defend demonstrators from armored riot police.

That was arguably the high-water mark of political possibility in Russia. Over the years that followed, Putin’s government managed to establish a stranglehold on the country, systematically destroying or assimilating all forms of opposition. When we interviewed the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization last August, they traced the beginning of the process that eventually led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the defeat of that movement:

Perhaps, in theory, the political crisis of 2011-2012 could have ended Putin’s rule, if all the opposition forces had acted more cohesively and radically. The anarchists tried to radicalize the protest, but our forces were not enough, and the authorities decided to launch the first serious waves of repression.

After the clashes on Bolotnaya Square, Dmitry continued to participate in both clandestine action and public organizing. As the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization related to us in the aforementioned interview,

“We are aware of examples in which some comrades have managed to balance between public activity and the underground for quite a long time, and to be quite active in both.”

In 2013, a protest movement broke out against the pro-Putin government of Ukraine, culminating in the Ukrainian Revolution of February 2014. Although nationalists elbowed out anarchists and other anti-authoritarians to take a prominent place in these events, that outcome was not foreordained; things might have turned out differently if anarchists had been more numerous and better prepared. The Yellow Vest movement of 2018-2019 in France offers an example of a social movement in which nationalists initially had an advantage, but anarchists and anti-fascists managed to outflank them.

While the outcome of the Ukrainian uprising was still up in the air, Dmitry Petrov traveled to Kyiv to participate in the struggle on the Maidan, the central square of Ukraine’s capital city. According to Vladimir Platonenko,

In February 2014, Ekolog [Dmitry] spent about ten days on the Maidan, having come to Ukraine specifically for this. He took part in the arrangement of Ukrdom [the “Ukrainian house,” a staging point for anarchists and anti-fascists during the uprising, which was burned on February 18], delivering food to positions, and even in the battle on February 18. But at the same time, he constantly tried to develop an anarchist component in the general popular, complex, and heterogeneous Maidan protest movement. He participated in an attempt to create the “Left Hundred,” created an “anarchist regiment” (with anarchist literature) in the library of the Ukrdom, told the Maidan participants about the protests in favor of the uprising that had taken place in Moscow and about the reasons for the defeat of the protesters. He did not go with the flow; rather, he participated in determining the flow of events to the best of his ability.

In his reports from the Maidan protests, Dmitry describes his dismay about the militarization of the movement and the introduction of reactionary structures:

I can’t help but appreciate that everything is organized so seriously. However, this situation also has a drawback, perhaps more significant than its advantages. The presence of professional (or quasi-professional) military men inevitably means the collapse of any kind of democracy in the movement, since, by decision of their commanders, these people can impose this or that order on everyone else in an organized way by force. In addition, according to my subjective feelings, these people are unlike those who came here at the call of the idea, and even if I am wrong, their values and goals most likely have little in common with mine. A thick atmosphere of the right of force, the power of a man with a gun (or club) hung there. This is a problem that requires reflection and solution. The contradiction, the conflict between the “military” and “civilian” Maidan, is very clear.

In his last report, Dmitry described in detail his part in the battle of February 18, when many people were killed or severely injured:

Let’s try without great poetics, but in essence. This may be useful when you happen to be in a similar situation, dear reader. It is important to use your fear: so that it helps you to avoid getting into certain troubles, but does not flow into panic and flight. Personally, I had an incessant fear that a bullet or a grenade would hit me. I have long known that I am far from being a daredevil, and I say that without a hint of coquetry. Now, for the first time, I became interested in the essence of such a feeling as courage. What is it, anyway? Fear forced me to stay closer to people, not to stick out too much, not to run out in front of the crowd. There was a petty feeling: there are a great number of us here, the chance that they will shoot at me is small. There was a childish feeling: “Wow, I saw it on TV during the riots…” But that was the least of it. Next to fear, there was a feeling similar to emptiness—a silent obligation to stay and act. It is almost never formulated verbally. It just is. Maybe courage is just about that? Further, it is important to begin to act meaningfully, and not just to stand or stupidly rush back and forth. Here, the first stones are flying, the first bullets of the cops and flash-bang grenades…

The situation in Ukraine was never simple. In the final entry on the Black Blog, dated February 2015, the editors describe the debates among themselves regarding whether the arsons in Ukraine that were reported to their platform represented genuine anti-state activity or pro-Putin authoritarian activity. Rather than present a facile or sanitized narrative, the authors summarized both views so that readers could draw their own conclusions—but that was the last update to the Black Blog. This debate foreshadowed the later controversies about how anarchists should position themselves in the war between the Russian and Ukrainian governments.

In the years following his participation in the Ukrainian uprising, Dmitry maintained an online journal chronicling his travels to sites of natural beauty and historical interest, including parks, forests, and museums around Russia. In 2016, he obtained a PhD in history; his dissertation was titled “Sacred geography of the eastern parts of the Arkhangelsk region.” He engaged in anthropological studies as a researcher at the Center for Civilizational and Regional Studies of the African Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Inspired initially by an article written by David Graeber, Dmitry went to Rojava while the war against the Islamic State was at its fiercest. He spent six months there. Afterwards, in 2017, he discussed his experiences in this interview and participated in the research project Hevale: Revolution in Kurdistan, which published multiple books.

Later, he contributed articles to the Ukrainian leftist site Commons about the impact of COVID-19 in Rojava and the conflict between confederal and imperial models in Kurdistan.

According to Ukrainian anti-fascists, “He studied the revolutionary experience of the Kurds deeply, and while he was critical, he respected it and sincerely tried to convey its most valuable lessons.” By his own account, Dmitry aimed “not only to tell the Russian left about the social revolution in Kurdistan, but also to share the anti-authoritarian worldview with the Kurds themselves.”

Dmitry served as a link between the Russian anarchist movement and the social experiment in Rojava.

In 2018, Dmitry left Russia. By that time, Putin’s regime had tamed the violent fascist movement of the preceding decade and moved on to crushing all other social movements. It was becoming standard practice for the Russian Federal Security Service to round up suspected anarchists and anti-fascists and torture them via electrical shock and other horrific methods in order to force them to sign false confessions admitting to participating in invented “terror networks.”

As Dmitry later told the news site Doxa,

I avoided leaving the country as long as I could, but I left when I learned that the security forces were interested in my modest person.

He chose Ukraine as his point of destination, considering its government to be the least successfully authoritarian of the post-Soviet countries. In the Doxa interview, he described his activities upon arriving there:

In Ukraine, we had initiatives among anarchist emigrants from Russia and Belarus, a kind of diaspora. And so it was a lot of different things: from the cinema club and discussions to street actions. But the main thing was to establish ties and an attempt to form systematically operating structures.

As we have noted elsewhere, it is becoming more and more important to find ways to center the agency of refugees as wars, state repression, ecological catastrophes, and economic crises force millions into exile. Yet at the same time that he was getting situated in Ukraine, Dmitry continued organizing with anarchists in Russia from afar. The Telegram channel Anarchist Combatant appeared that same year, in 2018.

According to the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization,

Dima [Dmitry] was a participant in all the processes of creating the BOAC [Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization]—its theoretical work, practical training, and the organization of training and combat actions. But his chief merit—and we think this will not surprise anyone who knew him—was his ability to establish ties with other people, with comrades both at home and abroad… He was always open to new people. He always believed in the best in them—he was mistaken more than once, but he continued to believe and seek.

In 2019, the editors of Black Blog announced the conclusion of the project. It had been four years since the last post had appeared. They emphasized that they remained convinced of the value of the strategy they had embraced in 2009:

We have sown our seeds and we are already seeing sprouts. Our enemies—the oppressors and their henchmen within the “power structures”—could not stop us, no matter how hard they tried.

We do not do these things to feed our egos. Everything we do, we do not for personal ambition, but to advance the struggle for freedom and justice. We are convinced that we have succeeded. And now, ten years later, we declare to you, as we did before, that we believe that our anti-authoritarian ideas are correct and the radical path we have chosen is correct. The fight continues.

On June 10, 2020, at the high point of the George Floyd uprising in the United States and in response to police violence in Ukraine, anarchists set fire to the Investigative Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Kyiv, sending a communiqué that appeared on the Anarchist Combatant website. This should address any lingering doubts about whether Dmitry sought to make peace with the Ukrainian authorities.

That summer, when an uprising broke out in Belarus, Dmitry illegally crossed the border to participate. According to Belarusian anarchists,

During his stay in Minsk, he took part in dozens of marches, helped organize an anarchist bloc at demonstrations, and even managed to pelt cops with their own stun grenades. At night, when many Belarusians were resting, Leshy [Dmitry] and other comrades took to the streets of Minsk and destroyed the surveillance cameras that played an important role in the infrastructure of repression… In the fall of 2020, he prepared several materials for our website. If you’ve ever marched through Minsk beside an anarchist column, chances are that you’ve walked shoulder to shoulder with this incredible man.

The uprising in Belarus was ultimately crushed; many of the anarchists who participated remain in prison today, underscoring the considerable risks of insurrectionary activity in the post-Soviet sphere. In September 2020, a blog post appeared from the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization: a communiqué from a clandestine partisan action in Belarus.

Surveying this trajectory, it is possible to interpret Dmitry’s path from the Black Blog through the uprisings of 2012, 2014, and 2020 to the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization as the continuous development of a single strategy. Blending public activity and clandestine organizing, he sought to create a model suited to the volatile and dangerous conditions of the post-Soviet countries, a model that could serve both to take advantage of moments of possibility and to survive periods of intense repression. As state violence and surveillance intensify, activists in other parts of the world may find that they need something similar.

Starting before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Dmitry joined Ukrainian and Belarusian anarchists in attempting to put together an explicitly anarchist and anti-authoritarian military unit. One function of such a unit was to ensure that the participants would not have to fight side by side with fascists, who are indeed present in the Ukrainian military. In addition, Dmitry saw participating in the defense of Ukraine as an opportunity to gain credibility for anarchist ideas in the eyes of the general public in Ukraine, and to continue his own longstanding fight against Putin’s regime.

During the first phase of the Russian invasion, Dmitry and his comrades participated in the territorial defense of the region around Kyiv, becoming integrated as an independent unit in the Territorial Defense Forces. After this, their “anti-authoritarian platoon” became mired in military bureaucracy, putting the status of the non-Ukrainian members in limbo and keeping the entire unit away from the fighting.

In July 2022, Dmitry wrote an analysis of the first four months of the “anti-authoritarian platoon,” discussing its internal structure and evaluating its successes and failures. This is an important historical document for those who are curious about the extent to which the military model developed in Rojava can be reproduced in other circumstances. It will be instructive for anyone who wants to discuss anarchist involvement in military affairs, whether they seek to improve on it or to critique it.

Dmitry and others in the platoon were eager to get to the front. Eventually, the platoon disbanded, and they succeeded in going to the front in a different formation. When last we heard from him, he told us that he was about to leave that unit, in hopes of trying once more to establish some kind of explicitly anti-authoritarian unit.

We will leave it to others to debate whether Dmitry’s persistent attempts to establish an anarchist military unit represent the honorable continuation of his lifelong anarchist project, a misguided departure from it, an error arising from some preexisting flaw within it, or a courageous attempt to grapple with an almost impossible situation. Those who wish to hear his own thoughts on the matter may choose from an array of interviews. It must not be forgotten that in addition to fighting in Ukraine, he continued to support sabotage and other forms of subversive activity in Russia through the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization, and he continued to emphasize the importance of autonomy, horizontality, and direct action to the anarchist struggle.

The sincerity of his effort, in any case, is beyond question.

My dear friends, comrades and relatives, I apologize to all those I hurt with my leaving. I appreciate your warmth very much. However, I firmly believe that the struggle for justice, against oppression and injustice is one of the most worthy meanings that humans can fill their life with. And this struggle requires sacrifices, up to the complete self-sacrifice.

The best memory for me is if you continue actively struggle, overcoming personal ambitions and unnecessary harmful strife. If you continue to fight actively to achieve a free society based on equality and solidarity. For you and for me and for all our comrades. Risk, deprivation and sacrifice on this path are our constant companions. But be sure – they are not in vain.

-Dmitri Petrov’s final statement

Dmitry Petrov (left), in Moscow at the presentation of the book Life Without a State: Revolution in Kurdistan, the second book he helped publish on the topic.

In an interview published in December 2017, Dmitry said “In general, almost everything that is created by human hands is the fruit of the labor of countless people.” In that spirit, we do not seek to hold Dmitry up as an exemplary figure. Rather, his life affords us a glimpse into the lives of many Russian anarchists, illuminating their courage and the challenges they have faced.

Above all, Dmitry’s life is a testament to how much is possible even in the most difficult conditions. Under a brutal dictatorship, faced with mounting adversity, he repeatedly found ways to continue organizing and fighting for the future he desired.

None of this is intended to glorify death in battle. As the 21st century progresses, life is becoming increasingly cheap—witness how the Wagner Group has intentionally used prisoners as cannon fodder. Anarchists should be in no special hurry to risk our lives—soon enough, there will be chances aplenty to die in the service of a variety of causes, or for no cause whatsoever. Rather than seeking to prove our commitment by our deaths, let’s express our passion for freedom in the way we live every moment of our lives.

Yet as authoritarianism rises around the world and war spreads from Syria to Ukraine, from Ukraine to Sudan, we too may have to answer the questions that Dmitry confronted when Russia invaded the country to which he had fled. If we are to be prepared for that situation—especially if we want to propose other answers to those questions—we need to study what has taken place in Russia. It may be that there is still time for things to turn out differently in other parts of the world, if we act boldly enough—but time is growing tight.

When an anarchist dies, it is up to those of us who survive to put that comrade’s experiences at the disposal of future generations. We can’t know for sure which perspectives those who come after us will need most. Seeking to do our part, we have translated the following two articles by Dmitry, and another article about him.

Appendix I: To Be a Revolutionary

This article appeared on the Anarchist Combatant website on May 29, 2018.

Being an anarchist is not at all as easy as it might seem. It is significant that among those who consider themselves anarchists, not everyone will call himself or herself a revolutionary, and even fewer anarchists seriously consider what it means to be a revolutionary. But it’s impossible to be an anarchist and not to be a revolutionary. We are talking about deep convictions, and not superficial sympathies and passion.

A revolutionary is a person whose desire for fundamental social change is embodied in the corresponding life path—revolutionary struggle. A serious approach to this struggle requires the development of a number of personal qualities. What are the characteristics of a revolutionary?

Belief in Victory

Perhaps this is where it all starts. In order to engage in any activity successfully, it is necessary to believe that it can result in success. Otherwise, a person simply has no reason to make a proper effort. Lack of faith in one’s ultimate success is tantamount to alienation from one’s activity.

I want to remind all pessimists that there are no “objective” reasons for considering the social revolution and the triumph of anti-authoritarian ideas to be reserved for an indefinitely distant future. The speed and unpredictability of social change in the modern world teaches us one important lesson: everything is possible. Including freedom and justice.

It is normal to have doubts. All thinking people doubt. And yet, lest doubts prevail in the end, resurrect in your soul the strength that your convictions were originally filled with. Feel the tremendous scale and significance of your goal, feel the dignity and fullness of the meaning of your chosen path—the path of the revolutionary. We are sure that faith will show the way to escape from the darkness of any doubt. And let’s go further. We talked more about faith in victory in the text “Make a Revolution!”

Revolutionary struggle is such a gigantic task that all who consider themselves to be a part of the revolutionary movement should perceive the fight as the chief occupation of their lives, their foremost task and vocation, whatever hardships and lures might pull them away from it.

Discipline and Responsibility

By discipline, we mean the readiness to take on tasks related to the pursuit of the struggle, and more importantly, the capacity to meticulously fulfill the tasks one commits to. Discipline begins with small things: do not be late for meetings, and fulfill the decisions made at those meetings according to the proposed timeframe. In fact, it begins even a bit earlier—it begins inside oneself, with the internal desire to work systematically and without sloppiness in order to develop the movement and the struggle.

Discipline is a very broad concept, intersecting with many different aspects of our lives. For example, it intersects with psychological restraint. The ability to remain calm in crucial moments while confronting the risk of repression, arrest, or physical confrontation with a political enemy or while participating in direct action is a manifestation of discipline.

It is also associated with ethics. Discipline is the understanding that “everything personal is political,” that each of us is the face of the movement we participate in. This, in addition to pure ethics, is an additional reason not to violate anarchist principles in your daily life. This is a discipline of life conduct.

Finally, discipline is manifested in devoting due time and energy to self-development, both individual and collective: acquiring knowledge and cultivating practical skills, physical training, thinking, and analysis.

We know that the word discipline is not always welcome in the anarchist community. And yet, we hope there are only few who will brand the understanding of discipline that we describe here as “authoritarian.”

Willingness to Endure Hardship

Participating in the fight against the oppressors draws the ire of the state machine, the capitalists, and their servants. Revolutionary activity involves problems and hardships. This is nothing new: it always happened thus for all who have fought against evil. We discussed self-sacrifice in the article “Giving One’s Life: What Did Zhlobitsky Remind Us?” —I don’t want to repeat myself. We can summarize that anarchists will most likely have to pay a price for their worldview and life choices—some less, some more.

And we should be ready to.

Loyalty and Devotion

One of the most important qualities that is often forgotten by current participants in the movement is loyalty, which could also be called devotion. Devotion to your comrades, to your affinity group, to your obligations, to your chosen path of struggle.

Today, in the anarchist milieu, one can often see how people easily change priorities and positions (and the reference to the “ideological search,” as a rule, is only a mask for changing superficial hobbies). Such activists don’t want to solve the problems that arise with colleagues, and prefer to make scandals in order to waive their obligations.

This behavior is often presented as part of an anarchist understanding of freedom, as if affection and loyalty are attributes of possessiveness. However, this is not the case. Inconstancy is a manifestation of the liberal ideology and liberal lifestyle of the era of consumer capitalism (in which people and ideas are beginning to be treated as disposable goods). Impermanence and lack of devotion correlate with egoism and the inability to feel or to deeply love the comrades and the cause one once identified with.

The anarchist understanding of freedom is different: anarchist freedom does not exist without brotherhood and sisterhood. Therefore, anarchist freedom cannot be the freedom to renounce your own comrades. Anarchist freedom involves the responsibility to make an active contribution to the common cause, to maintain equality, including within the collective, neither to submit nor to subjugate, and also not to abandon.

Finally, in a revolutionary struggle (and all my life experience confirms this), it is very important to be able to rely on a comrade, on the immutability of his or her basic values and life priorities and the readiness to make common cause. Without constancy and devotion, one cannot rely on anyone, just as one cannot fully trust anyone. As a result, without trust, it is impossible to fight. Consequently, freedom understood in a liberal way as the right to constant inconsistency makes resistance to the monster of the state and to capitalism impossible.

Even when discord and conflict arise with comrades, and you think that they are seriously mistaken or do not want to overcome their weaknesses, it is your duty as a comrade to make all possible efforts to help them by your criticism and, ultimately, to come to an agreement or at least to a compromise.

Here, it is appropriate to recall the lines of Alexander Nepomnyashchy:

And we’ll remain goats,
Broken on the doorstep
Of our faithful home
Of May’s peaceful silence,

If we don’t understand and don’t endure
The endless roads
From monstrous freedom
To saving love.

And also, Oleg Medvedev:

If you’ve chosen the ground, stand on it.
Don’t change colors if there’s no luck.
Let those who follow you change their place…

Checking the Results

It is sad to see people who have devoted dozens of years to stewing in a political subculture by performing ritual actions that imitate a political struggle (for example, internal scandals or “dialogue with the masses” via leaflets and publications written in a language that the latter obviously cannot understand).

A true revolutionary, as a person who sincerely wants to achieve victory over the system of injustice, always evaluates the results of his or her own actions, subjecting his or her tactics and strategy to sharp critique, constantly rethinking and correcting them without falling into inertia.

After carrying out a direct action, study how people react and how widely the information spreads. This will help you to evaluate the effectiveness of your action and what could have been done better. If you stay in a narrow circle for years, look for new ways to recruit people, make new connections with other groups and initiatives. These are specific examples of how to assess the results on your path towards making the revolution a reality.

The principle of monitoring results also applies to learning useful skills. Too often, we stop halfway, without having mastered a skill thoroughly. For example, sometimes we are ready to be satisfied with a hundred readers for our site, when a simple set of promotional activities could bring us a thousand. This attitude is deeply mistaken and too unambitious for a revolutionary. You need to master the technique of promotion and strive for greater success. This principle applies to every other area of anarchist activity.

And a Bit of Magic

A convinced revolutionary is bound to elicit a response in the hearts of those around him or her. This is because the convictions that have been hardened in the torments of doubt and searching fill the revolutionary personality and pour over the edge, outward.

Perhaps no one will agree with you at first. I’m sure many will argue with you. But the ideas that you have expressed, the ideas you sincerely believe in, as well as your life example, will make people think what they have not thought before and feel what they’ve never felt before. To be the spark that ignites a flame—this is truly a magical ability. If you have not experienced such a feeling yet, it undoubtedly awaits you ahead. This property is the revolutionary’s reward for enduring hardships that cannot be avoided.

We have described only some of the features that seem fundamental to the personality of our revolutionary comrade-in-arms. Of course, it is impossible to create step-by-step instructions regarding “how to become a perfect anarchist.” That requires a creative approach. Still, in this text, we have touched on problems that we all face.

Comrade, you can no longer live like cattle. A revolution cannot be an imitation, it cannot be a game of make-believe. The qualities of a revolutionary are not given to anyone at birth. They are fostered by like-minded people in themselves and in each other.

Our day has already come. Our duty is to achieve our declared goals in full. The road appears under the feet of those who walk.

Phil Kuznetsov [Dmitry Petrov]
Anarchist Combatant

Dmitry Petrov—or someone close to him—originally chose to illustrate this article with this classic drawing from a record by the Danish anarchist punk band Paragraf 119, which we colorized in 2021.

Appendix II: The Mission of Anarchism in the Modern World

Published on June 17, 2020 via the Anarchist Combatant Telegram channel.

It is not a new idea that today the great projects of rebuilding the world are in decline. In the twentieth century, mighty movements mobilized millions of people to storm the heavens, politically speaking, and carry out “great constructions” [in the sense of Soviet-era projects aimed at reinventing society]. But over the course of the last century, one after another, they went bankrupt both ethically and practically and soon lost relevance. Here, first of all, fascism and communism of the Leninist variety come to mind. Even the seemingly triumphant liberal project, in fact, simply dissolved into the global capitalist system and geopolitical game, in which the mechanics are hardly liberal.

Of the ambitious ideocrats who dare to rebuild the world in accordance with their convictions, perhaps the voice of the jihadists is the only one that rings out loudly today. Yet Islamic fundamentalism is obviously not the sort of project that a person with an anarchist worldview can get behind.

Ill-fated global plans at the end of the twentieth century gave rise to deep pessimism and paralysis in regards to the idea of transformation. However, the first decades of the new century have clearly shown that the “end of history” is cancelled. Growing instability, rebelliousness, and ungovernability have manifested themselves. The number of anti-government demonstrations under a variety of slogans and flags has increased by several orders of magnitude compared to the previous era.

At the same time, there is an acute need for fundamental change on the widest possible territorial scale. We still need a new world, just as we did before. Almost everything that exists in society is unacceptable and cannot serve as a framework for the present or the future.

But what will the transformed reality be like? There are unpromising prophecies of a “brave new world” ruled entirely by elites of post-humanity, or, conversely, of a new feudalism and a great schism accompanied by a surge of brutal cruelty. These pictures are accompanied by the prospect of a global ecological catastrophe. But in parallel with these varieties of gloom, a different trend is becoming more and more apparent: the desire for direct democracy, for egalitarian collectivity, for the eradication of inequality and oppression, for a harmonious coexistence with nature. This trend is still “sprinkled” across many different social currents, which have not yet formed into a united stream. Nevertheless, it brings the relevance of anarchism back to life.

At a time when all other missionaries have shown themselves to be deceivers or maniacs, the time has come for anarchists to remember their mission and reassert their global project. What might its common features be?

Dismantle the Megamachine

Modern mass society is crowded into gigantic urban agglomerations. The lion’s share of human life is controlled and directed by the laws of states, as well as by capitalist relations in the sphere of production, exchange, and consumption. As a result, modern man finds himself in the position of an object manipulated by gigantic machine-like forces. At the same time, we are immersed in constant turmoil. The modern world is characterized by the sleep of reason and the suppression of deep feelings, replaced by momentary, externally controlled desires. This state is repugnant to human nature; it causes dissatisfaction, followed by a longing for something different.

But the monstrous scale of the state fills us with fear and doubt: could we ever get out from under its iron heel? The endless buying and selling that fills our daily lives along a million different vectors aggravates our dependence and, even worse, corrupts and twists us as if from within.

Yet the very course of life pushes a person to rebel—and a wealth of historical evidence shows that even the most seemingly omnipotent social systems eventually collapse like a house of cards, sometimes quite unexpectedly. These are the starting points of our struggle against the prevailing order. To crush and dismantle the megamachine is the ambitious task before the anarchist movement.

New Community

Today we see a progressive atomization and weakening of collective ties. Neighbors know less and less about each other, and sometimes they completely avoid each other. Noisy family gatherings are becoming rarer and more forced.

The causes of this are complex and it is not easy to single out the main ones. There is the growing sphere of individual entertainment, the general trend towards individual comfort, which is always threatened by “excessive” intimacy, and the notorious egoism, organic to capitalist market society, which transforms any relationship into a temporary interaction between two consumers for mutual benefit. The word “partner” is becoming more and more conventional; in Russian, it suggests alienation, functioning as a kind of antonym to terms like beloved, friend, comrade…

We consider the crisis of collectivity, of the joint existence of people, to be one of the most catastrophic consequences of capitalism and state power. In addition to moralizing of a purely ethical nature, the anarchist revolution also has concrete institutional instruments for creating what we might call a “new communality.” These include popular assemblies, gatherings, collective self-governing bodies, and economic entities. When the parasite of the system, which has penetrated deep into the social fabric and separated us from each other, is ripped away from the body of society, we will be faced with the necessity to restore warm horizontal bonds and connect together in bonds of solidarity.

The collective creation of social life will stand in stark contrast to contemporary social practices. Just look at the current initiative of the Russian authorities to organize voting by mail—now even the imitation of choice will not draw together a crowd of strangers at the ballot box.

Yes, we plan to get together to make decisions, to prepare food in crowded and noisy kitchens instead of receiving it in sterile delivery bags, to introduce our children to their peers on the street instead of just sitting them down to watch a cartoon alone… The degradation of humanity that is unfolding before our eyes can stop. It must be stopped.

The Economy

Managing people for the purpose of personal gain, perceiving everything in the world—both living and inanimate—as raw material with which to make a profit, the pathological luxury of a tiny minority at the expense of the deprivation of the vast majority: these are just a few of the most striking illustrations that characterize the modern economic model. Its essence is diametrically opposed to what we consider just and right. All the reasons to reject capitalism can be boiled down to two main theses: 1) This economic system is unethical, unjust, and degrading; 2) It fails to provide a decent standard of living for all.

Cash and commodity relations, wage labor, investments, bank loans, and interest rates are so deeply rooted in our everyday life that sometimes it seems as if it would be impossible to get rid of them—as if without them, there would be immediate famine and decline.

But we do have something to oppose to them: it is the human labor force (many thousands of people today waste their labor on useless work, doing what are called “shit jobs”); it is the labor experience of workers, which will enable them to maintain a boss-free economy; it is technology, which will enable society to regulate its production and distribution system according to its needs and values… This should be enough to transfer the economy from the hands of the elite to the control of society as a whole, to ensure the equitable management of production by laboring people and realize the principle “From each according to ability, to each according to need.”

The mission of the anarchist movement is to root in society, by word, deed and example, an understanding of the principles of economic justice and, having overthrown the state and the capitalists, to “clear a space”—to create the social and political conditions for its realization.

The Elimination of Discrimination

Modern society is filled with discrimination on a variety of grounds. People experience discrimination on the basis of a wide range of attributes and characteristics. The reasons for this include prejudice, whether centuries-old or new; the principle of collective responsibility; and the way that people are alienated from each other in a world permeated by capitalist relations.

Prejudice and collective responsibility are skillfully manipulated by unscrupulous politicians.

Gender oppression is one of the oldest and most harmful forms of discrimination. Although in Eastern Europe, as well as the “Western World,” the situation has changed significantly compared to the openly patriarchal past, women remain oppressed. This is confirmed by data regarding domestic, sexual, and gender-based violence and by the difference in average incomes. Practices and patterns of behavior that denigrate woman retain their force. Take, for example, the attitude that “Politics is not a woman’s business.” There are many such invisible cultural obstacles in our social reality that obstruct women from exploring their full potential.

And there is another detail that often goes unnoticed, although it is one of the most important. Relationships between all people in general are poisoned by gender stereotypes and the mutual consumer attitude and selfishness rooted in them. Because of this, even the most seemingly intimate connections cause people pain and unhappiness. The capitalist and authoritarian worldview prevents true intimacy from emerging.

The mission of anarchism is to achieve genuine sisterhood/fraternity between people over and above any group identity. We have a variety of tools at our disposal to pursue this:

1) the collaborative practice of building and managing society, which requires equal cooperation and mutual warmth among all participants in the process;

2) a revolutionary political culture, which requires the conscious active involvement of representatives of all oppressed groups in social effort together;

3) finally, a program of education and developing literacy, which helps people to leave prejudice behind.

Thus, the ambition of the anarchist project is, in eliminating discrimination, to improve interpersonal relations and, however naïve this may sound, to bring the love of the neighbor back into our lives. Capitalism and authoritarianism stand in the way of this, but they are not insurmountable obstacles.

Resolving National Conflicts

Since time immemorial, human society has been shaken and terrorized by violent confrontations motivated by ethnic or national cultural differences. Additional criteria have been invented and added alongside those, including religious and racial differences. Inter-national and inter-ethnic conflicts reached a new intensity in the era of nation-states, which remain the chief form of political organization to this day. With their emergence, the question of which nation has legitimate right to rule a particular state began to be raised with extreme urgency. Which land “rightfully belongs” to which national group? The result has been the immeasurable suffering of millions of innocent people: forced assimilation, mass deportations and, finally, brutal acts of mass murder. Yet after all this, national conflicts still flare up all over the world.

Hardly any other imaginary contradictions in the history of mankind have had as horrific consequences as ethnic conflict. National conflicts are often based on the interests of national political and economic elites and state bureaucracies, as well as the most ignorant prejudices and distorted ideas about their own neighbors—the Other, representatives of other national groups.

At the root of the idea of national conflict lies the question, “Us or them?” Anarchism offers an alternative: “Both we and they, together and as equals.” By rejecting the nation-state, which is nothing more than an instrument of oppression and injustice, anarchists open the way to confederation: the equal cooperation of peoples in all territories. The same land can be both Serbian and Albanian, Armenian and Azerbaijani… the list is endless. Equality and self-government, the social pillars of anarchism, are the indispensable conditions for fruitful and mutually beneficial dialogue between cultures. The need for this dialogue has not diminished—on the contrary, it has intensified in the twenty-first century.

Reharmonization with Nature

It has long been a commonplace that capitalism in particular and the ever-expanding economy and consumption in general have an extremely destructive effect on nature. Likewise the understanding that this vector of development threatens to destroy humanity and the planet we call home.

We would like to take a deeper look at the problem. The anthropocentric worldview that dominates today and the way of life conditioned by it is a particular case of a hierarchical attitude to the world and toward being as a whole. Nature is “the workshop of Man”… This view is not natural, ethical, or acceptable. The true emancipation of humanity cannot take place unless we overcome our alienation from nature and finding harmony with it.

What ecological measures can anarchism offer? Modern technology should be reoriented from maximizing profit to conserving and restoring nature, as well as providing decent material living conditions for all. Ideally, we should put an end to the extensive expansion of human destructive influence on nature. The knowledge and capabilities humanity has accumulated should make it possible to fulfill this task, or at least to advance toward its fulfillment.

It is of utmost importance to reorganize living space, getting rid of the monstrous megalopolis as a form of human dwelling. The settlement must be proportionate to the person, no matter how subjective this may sound. The lifeless anthropogenic landscape, which cuts people off from natural processes, must give way to the harmonious inclusion of the settlement in the natural landscape, the intertwining of the natural and the human.

Here and Now

The intolerable state of our present situation… and the outlines of a renewed world, like prophetic dreams, stir our minds and hearts. These are the points of mobilization that keep us from giving up and accepting. That is why we are ready to make efforts, to take risks, to make sacrifices in order to create a new society. An organized revolutionary struggle is the path by which we will reach the goal outlined in this text. Victory is possible—and therefore, we must win.

Phil Kuznetsov [Dmitry Petrov]
Anarchist Combatant

A book Dmitry Petrov participated in publishing about the experiment in Rojava.

Appendix III: “Dima Ecolog’s Partisan Path”

On May 8, 2023, after we published the above memorial, the following statement appeared on the Telegram channel of the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization. We have translated it in full because it offers additional valuable context, especially on Dmitry’s youth.

It was his public activities which brought Dima to his first steps on the partisan path, when he was fighting against gentrification. In the process, he repeatedly ran into a situation in which the tenants were all trying to take the easy route of legalism (and there was no shortage of people calling on others to take this approach)—writing complaints to the administration that went directly to the trash cans. Tenants didn’t respond very enthusiastically to calls to block construction equipment and roads—and as a result, the police arrested the activists again and again while the construction continued.

Hence the natural impulse to stop the construction physically. Destroy the construction equipment. Destroy the building materials. Damage the lighting wiring and fencing of the construction site. And, most importantly, to do it in such a way as to stay free and continue to help people.

That’s where the partisan journey began.

His first action, if we’re not mistaken, was an attack on the gentrifying housing construction on the site of the radioactive waste dump in southern Moscow (which we then returned to several times to carry out additional actions).

Compared to the other actions that followed, this was a pretty easy action, with some anti-construction propaganda graffiti on the fence, a flare pistol fired at a sign describing the site, and a film of the fence enclosing the construction site set on fire.

But that morning, we were pleased to see some pictures of the fire extinguisher foam that was used to put out the fence. It was lying around like snow that had suddenly fallen in the warm time of the year.

That was just the beginning.

At first, we were inexperienced. Some recipes were suggested by other comrades; some we found on the Internet ourselves and tested on various construction sites that were contributing to gentrification.

And Dima always kept trying to expand our struggle—to bring in new people, to develop our methods and tactics.

The killing of our comrades Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova in the center of Moscow by neo-Nazis was a turning point. We felt strongly that it was not just neo-Nazi aggression, but a direct attack by the state, which was fostering and supporting our enemies.

Starting then, we decided to move on to more serious targets.

The first of these attacks was the attack on the police parking lot near the police security force building in the south of Moscow.

More precisely, we planned to attack the building—I remember going with Dima on a reconnaissance mission, and it seemed that it was very close. But when in the end we climbed the garages (from which the Molotovs was thrown), it turned out that it wasn’t so easy to throw all the way and hit the building. We took responsibility for this action as a group called “People’s Retribution.”

Dima came up with the idea of claiming different types of actions on behalf of different groups. For example, against the police—on behalf of the People’s Vengeance (and the group “ZaNurgalieva!”—referring to [Rashid] Nurgaliev’s statement, which became a meme, in which he said that people have the right to fight back if police officers break the law, so that the phrase “Nurgaliev allowed it!” became popular). Against pro-government movements—as “Anti-Nashist Action,” and so on. [Nashi was a state-backed pro-Putin youth organization somewhat reminiscent of the Hitler Youth.] The idea was that other groups should carry out actions under the same names to confuse the enemy.

And a lot of actions took place. Now, looking back, one can’t comprehend how we had time for everything. Literally, sometimes one or two weeks passed between actions—we did an attack, went on a reconnaissance trip, told our comrades about it, went to the next one.

On the dates when the military draft started, we attacked military registration and enlistment offices. In response to the persecution of [Soviet dissident Alexander] Podrabinek [who was targeted by Nashi in 2009], we visited the Nashists. For the elections, we attacked the offices and administration buildings of United Russia [the ruling party of Russia]. And we lost count of how many times we burned the police—on March 8 (the attack on the reception room of the Interior Ministry in the center of Moscow), after the arrests of comrades in other cities, and so on. In response to the abuse by the traffic cops, we burned their facilities.

And all of this under a new group name every time, covered through new sites and blogs.

Yet gradually, we concluded that it takes too much effort to disseminate the information on behalf of a new group every time. And other groups preferred to conduct actions under their own name instead using ours. Therefore, as the next step, the concept of the Black Blog was born. Not an organization, but an aggregator of actions carried out by all the anarchist partisan groups—including ours. Although with time, the Black Blog began to be seen precisely as the name of a group (and sometimes the subtitle of the site, “Anarchist Guerrilla news,” was used as such, and we began to be called the Anarchist Guerrilla group after it).

By the way, the site address (as well as the name in English) was deliberately chosen as blackblocg.info—both a reference to Black Bloc and a reference to the fact that we have a blog chronicling the guerrilla struggle (for the same reason we chose the .info domain).

Only some isolated, especially vivid episodes flash in memory. The arson of the reception room of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Moscow region—in response to [police officer Denis] Yevsyukov’s shooting of people in a supermarket.

How the flames run beautifully through the car when the police cars caught fire near Ostankino and at that moment, from the loudspeaker in the parking lot, we heard a voice yelling “Fire! Fire!” (Later, we made a beautiful music video of the Electric Partisans’ song “R.A.F.” for this attack.)

How after the arson of the police cars near the Chechulin street police station (the attack in which we’d first used an IED made from acetone peroxide with ammonal—Dima played the leading role, pouring the mixture and then throwing the grenade while sitting on the fence—and the explosion threw him right to the ground), a man who introduced himself as a police officer from that very station posted a comment to our site complaining that the chief of that station, lieutenant colonel Telelyuev, was very good—and now he was in trouble because of us. Dima immediately wrote a song in response:

“It’s cold and dark in the burnt office…
Lieutenant Colonel Telelyuev is writing us a letter.”

How in honor of all partisan anarchists Vadim Kurylev (Electric Partisans) released the song “I am a Fighter of the Black Blog.” [See below.]

And, of course, the blowing up of a traffic police post on the Moscow Ring Road—organized as a protest against the numerous abuses of the law by the officers of that very agency.

We told about that action in detail in the past. We will only add that the comrade who returned to the failed IED, risking his life and freedom to complete the action despite the problems, was Dima.

Actions continued after that explosion, such as setting fire to the police department’s parking lot in Troitsk, attacks on [the political party] United Russia, and environmental actions like setting fire to the logging equipment in Khimki forest and to luxury cottage villages under construction near Yakhroma.

We know hardly anybody doubts it—but there was practically not a single action in which Dima did not actively participate.

However, a situation gradually developed in which, on the one hand, we no longer had any objects to attack (at least, that we could target with a high level of security with only a small group)—and at the same time, we realized that the hope to bring a revolution via disconnected affinity group actions did not seem to be justified.

And it was time to rethink things on the basis of experience—both our own experience and those of other successful revolutionary groups, not only anarchist ones. Dima gave us the idea of organizing a discussion club in which we studied the works of [anarchist Peter] Kropotkin and [authoritarian communist Vladimir] Lenin, works on the psychology of the masses, the works of [French revolutionary syndicalist Georges] Sorel on myth and its role in revolution, and conducted an analysis of the revolutions of the Arab Spring and [“nonviolent” democrat] Gene Sharp.

And this work led us eventually to what Dima rightfully calls our brainchild, the creation of the Combat Organization of Anarcho-Communists.

This, of course, was a long undertaking—and the story is just beginning. But we can’t help noting that Dima was a participant in all the processes of creating the BOAC [Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization]—its theoretical work, practical training, and the organization of training and combat actions. But his chief merit—and we think this will not surprise anyone who knew him—was his ability to establish ties with other people, with comrades both at home and abroad. Finding new people for the organization—and organizing field camps in the Moscow region for foreign comrades. He was always open to new people. He always believed in the best in them—he was mistaken more than once, but he continued to believe and seek.

Among other things, this work took him to Kurdistan, where he participated in learning both the principles of a liberated society and in combat training.

And there’s another important detail about his character. Dima stayed in Northeast Syria for several long months, communicating with his family and us very irregularly and only by email.

But when it was time to return—practically when he was already on his way home, a few days before his flight—we learned that the FSB was seriously interested in him.

And in this situation—missing his family and home, having a science career in Russia that was waiting for him—he decided (albeit not without the agony of choice) not to return home, but to go to Ukraine. He did this partly because he understood that if he returned and was arrested, not only he but other people as well would be at risk, along with his life’s work. So he chose the path of a professional revolutionary—denying his personal desires for the sake of the common cause, for the sake of the ideas he believed in.

Ever since, Dima has been moving our common cause forward, developing our organization from abroad. And no distance has diminished his contribution and his assistance in this.

Appendix IV: “Black Blog Fighter” by Electric Partisans

“Black Blog Fighter” by Electric Partisans.

Russian musician Vadim Kurylev wrote this song, “Black Blog Fighter,” for his band Electric Partisans in 2012. The lyrics are as follows.

Tonight, when the city is quiet,
There’ll be an explosion and flames will burst out
My devices are flying through the broken window and the special forces are on alert
They’re making a big fuss, the minister’s on the phone
But I’m already gone in the city at night
I put up videos and links and fill new bottles with cocktails

I’ll let the cops’ lair burn, and let their souls be gnawed by anxiety,
Not to find a needle in the middle of a haystack,
Nor in the city a Black Blog fighter
I have a lot of work to do here, let the honest citizenry not judge me harshly
I have my own way to the truth, I’m a Black Blog fighter.

It’s convenient for you to make me out to be a bully,
But you’re pissed off, you’re living a life of deceit
I want you to learn this truth: you humiliate the people, you get a vendetta in return.
Better go dig in the dusty archives,
And you’ll understand how often you’ve been defeated.
Let historians argue about the ways of society’s development,
But my anarchism is stronger than your logic.

Appendix V: Archives

A memorial site for Dmitry
“Nine Lives of the Anarchist Petrov“—a biography (in Russian)
“Dmitry Petrov: The Path of an Anarchist“—Antti Rautiainen explores the details of Dmitry’s development as a young anarchist
A Collection of Dmitry’s Writings in English—Courtesy of the Anarchist Library
Here are some of Dmitry’s articles in Russian: “The Political Science of Violence,” “People of Russia: Two Roads to Nowhere and One Hope,” “To Be an Independent Force,” “An Active Minority…”
Dmitry speaking at May Day 2009 in Moscow (starting at 5:23)²
Dmitry speaking at the Ukrainian House (UkrDom) during the Maidan, in February 2014. (At this meeting, Dima spoke about the experiences of Russian protesters, drew parallels between the liberation struggle in both countries, and proposed the idea of people’s power as an alternative to vertically organized power represented by professional politicians.)
You can read Dmitry’s reports from the 2014 uprising in Ukraine in full here: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, Part X
“Social revolution in Kurdistan“—A lecture with N.L. Gadaeva on March 30, 2017
Red and Black Devils—A news article about anarchist arsons in Ukraine
Life without a State: Revolution in Rojava—A book Dmitry participated in, published in 2017
Kurdistan: Real Democracy in Conditions of War and Blockade—Another book Dmitry participated in
Sarah: My Whole Life Has Been a Struggle—Another book Dmitry helped with
“Anarchists in Ukraine Against War“—An interview Dmitry did with The Final Straw podcast under the pseudonym Ilya on February 24, 2022
“Conversation about Ukraine“—A sort of graphic novel depicting the artist’s correspondence with Dmitry in 2023.

One of Dmitry’s virtues, at least in our communication with him, was that he retained a humble, open-minded approach to strategy while nonetheless acting decisively. This stands in stark contrast to the strident voices on every side of the debate about the Russia-Ukraine war who lecture each other from a position of absolute certitude without ever having set foot in either country. In the interview we published at the beginning of 2022, asked how he might answer those who charged that participating in the military defense of Ukraine would make anarchists into accomplices of the Ukrainian government, Dmitry responded, “First of all, I would answer them—thanks, this is a valuable critique. We really need to evaluate how to intervene so as not to just become a tool in some state’s hands.” In the last message we received from him, in March 2023, he concluded, “If you have any questions, if you have any advice, any thoughts, any analysis to share, I would be super happy to hear it, and super interested.” This is a remarkable thing for a person who is risking his life daily to say to people far away in conditions of relative safety. ↩
Here is a transcription of the fragment of Dmitry’s speech that appears in this footage: “Just a few days ago, we all learned that a police major, the head of the Tsaritsyno police department, was drunk and shot several people dead and wounded several more. All the television channels talked about it, but no one said anything about the fact that this was no accident. That the authority, which is given to law enforcement officers, which is given to many other people, corrupts them, that it makes them real maniacs. And that’s why the cops, being completely crazy, can allow themselves to get shitfaced and shoot someone with a gun. This is not the only case. Serious crimes involving police officers…” ↩

Steal Something from Work Day 2023 : Take Matters in Your Own Hands

2023-04-15T12:10:53Z

Welcome to Steal Something from Work Day 2023! Every year, we observe this day as an opportunity to reflect on the individualized forms of anti-capitalist resistance that millions upon millions of employees engage in on a daily basis, and to imagine forms of collective action that could take that resistance as their point of departure.

Today, we’ll zoom in on a particular variant of workplace theft: the leak.

Cheers to Yugoslavian film director Dušan Makavejev and hip-hop duo Test Their Logik.

Leak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace

There are many things you can steal from work. You could steal money, time, goods, raw materials, access to specialized equipment. Another thing you could steal is information. For this year’s Steal Something from Work Day, let’s talk about the last of these.

In the information age, knowledge is power. The circulation of classified information is integral to the lattice of repressive institutions that maintain the prevailing order. Information is the blood in the bloodstream of the beast.

Controlling which information circulates and which does not has always been central to statecraft. But in the heyday of social media, this is arguably the most determinant aspect of rule itself, even more so than military force.

“In a digitally interconnected world, whoever has the most robust networks, the right relationship between visible and opaque channels, and the most persuasive narrative will triumph. Communication and coordination trump brute force when any clash can draw in a potentially infinite number of participants on either side.”

-Canary in the Coal Mine: Twitter and the End of Social Media

In a globalized economy in which work has penetrated into every corner of our lives, practically every worker is accustomed to inhabiting multiple identities and being subject to conflicting loyalties. The battle lines of social conflict now cut directly through the heart of every ordinary civilian. One weapon in these battles is the information leak.

Information leaks can serve a variety of agendas. On the one hand, they can destabilize established power. For example, embassy cables published by Wikileaks played a role in catalyzing the revolution that brought down president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, sparking a global wave of uprisings that lasted from 2011 through 2014. On the other hand, defenders of the prevailing order can use leaks to circulate cherry-picked information, as well. Intentionally or not, the advance leak of the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe vs. Wade arguably served to defuse resistance, giving the general public a chance to get used to the bad news before it was confirmed and ensuring that those who might otherwise have been shocked into action joined predictable liberal demonstrations.

Still, as a persistent strategy aimed at the reigning power structure, leaking information has considerable advantages. The less that the various institutions of repression can trust each other and their own employees, the more difficult it becomes for them to respond rapidly and coordinate with each other. We saw this in the administration of Donald Trump in 2017, when a series of leaks eroded trust within the regime. If information is the blood in the bloodstream of the security state, persistent leaks coagulate that blood.

Today, it is widely understood that our society is headed directly for economic and ecological disaster, but the authorities have yet to take meaningful steps to change course. When millions are complicit in structures that they know to be destructive and doomed, this creates the conditions in which formerly complacent employees may choose to carry out individual acts of subversion from within the halls of power.

This is not the first time that such conditions have developed in the American workplace. At the end of the 1960s, the Vietnam War contributed to an erosion of faith in the United States government and associated corporations and industries. In late 1969, with the assistance of his former RAND Corporation colleague Anthony Russo, Daniel Ellsberg secretly made photocopies of a number of classified documents that became known as the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg set out to reestablish contact with anarchist poet Gary Snyder, with whom he had previously debated US foreign policy, and put the Pentagon Papers into circulation.

Inspired by by Daniel Ellsberg’s action, former National Security Agency employee Perry Fellwock revealed the existence of the NSA and its worldwide covert surveillance network. Peter Buxtun, an employee of the United States Public Health Service, revealed the existence of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment in 1972. Many more revelations followed, impacting the nuclear power and petroleum industries as well as various government agencies.

Three decades later, the Iraq War created a similar erosion of faith. When US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning discovered that she was, in her words, “actively involved in something that [she] was completely against,” she began bringing rewritable CDs to her job:

I would come in with music on a CD-RW, labelled with something like “Lady Gaga”… erase the music… then write a compressed split file. No one suspected a thing. […]

You had people working 14 hours a day… every single day… no weekends… no recreation… people stopped caring after three weeks.

Exemplifying the spirit of Steal Something from Work Day, Manning “listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ while exfiltratrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history.” Chiefly owing to faulty security culture, Manning was eventually caught and imprisoned. (To quote the aforementioned song, “I shoulda left my phone at home, ‘cause this is a disaster.”) Nonetheless, she set a precedent that was echoed by Edward Snowden, Jesselyn Radack, Thomas Drake, and others, all of whom ultimately concluded, as Manning had, that “Information should be free—it belongs in the public domain.”

These events still lingered in recent memory at the opening of the Trump administration, when government employee Reality Winner saw a document that she believed should be public information. She printed it off the classified server, hid it in her pantyhose, and sent it to The Intercept. Unfortunately, the printed document was digitally watermarked, The Intercept refused to take her safety seriously, and Winner caved in under the pressure of interrogation. All of those setbacks underscore the importance of proper operational security when it comes to carrying out workplace theft in the public interest.

Of course, leaks alone can only do so much. Unless it is accompanied by concrete opportunities to act, information can desensitize people, accustoming them to injustice and inactivity. One risk of celebrating whistleblowing in a vacuum is that it tends to position the same institutions it critiques as the solution to the problems it identifies; another is that it tends to frame those who hold privileged positions within the system as the agents of change, sidelining those who do not work for the NSA or the military.

It follows that we need a more inclusive and engaged model for what could constitute employee information theft in the public interest. Our colleagues at Unicorn Riot have demonstrated some examples of what this might look like by publishing a series of smaller-scale leaks compromising fascist groups as well as government agencies. These hint at an approach to information leaks that could draw on the information that many ordinary workers have access to every day, eventually giving rise to an open-source intelligence ecosystem that could serve a broad range of movements for liberation.

So here is our challenge to you, begrudging employee. It’s one thing to steal cash or toilet paper—it’s another thing to take steps to topple those who keep all the other resources we need to themselves. If we’re talking about Stealing Something from Work, the best thing you could do would be to take something that could equip us all to get free together. The same capitalist economy that keeps you chained to your work station runs on the information that passes before your eyes every day. The brutal mercenaries whose violence keeps you from creating a better life for yourself depend on that same information.

At some point, something may cross your field of vision that could be useful to someone who is engaged in the struggle for a better world. It could be the location of a meeting, the address of a wealthy tycoon, the involvement of a corporation in a construction project, or the day job of a participant in fascist street violence. Make a note of it and figure out how to get it to those who can use it. Focus above all on actionable intelligence.

Keep your eyes open. If you see something, say something.

Defending Abundance Everywhere : A Call to Every Community from the Weelaunee Forest

2023-03-02T17:55:30Z

In the following text, participants in the movement to defend Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta, Georgia describe some of the values that animate this struggle. For background on the movement, start here.

This is a collection of short essays reflecting on the abundance that exists in our communities and in the more-than-human world, and how we not only can practice gratitude for this abundance but embody it as a way of approaching the world.

We dedicate this work to our friend, Tortuguita, who was part of these conversations. Georgia State Troopers killed Tortuguita on January 18, 2023 at the forest they loved so dearly. This piece is for them and for all past, present, and future Warriors defending and loving the Sacred Web of Abundance everywhere.

With profound love and admiration,
The Weelaunee Web Collective: Abundia, Jesse, Jordan, & Mara

Introduction

The threads of our lives have been slowly woven together through meals cooked communally, organizing meetings, bonfires and late conversations, foraging, harvesting, taking care of each other, and, lately, mourning a fallen comrade and friend. We all came together to protect Weelaunee Forest: the trees, waters, people, and all beings of this land. We came together to Stop Cop City and the violent military occupation of police in our communities, especially the Black and Brown ones, in Atlanta, Georgia. We came together amid COVID, when we felt the loss of closeness with our people, knowing we had to find creative ways of fostering community. We have come together to build the world we want to live in, even as we recognize we are all swimming in the extractive and oppressive systems of colonization, white supremacy, and capitalism, programmed for convenience and quick rewards. We keep coming back together, gathering with each other, to live in the joy and rest and wellness of community care.

The topic of this piece is the Sacred Web of Abundance (SWoA). The larger Sacred Web of Abundance is the sum of the vast, intricate system that sustains all life on this planet. Your Sacred Web of Abundance is the place that you live, the ways in which it sustains you, and the ways in which you sustain it. We are here to be part of this web and invite in others who are on the same land. What we have found is that the Sacred Web of Abundance, with her billions of years of wisdom, is there for us, waiting for our gratitude, delight, offerings, rituals, and ceremonies—waiting to build a relationship with us.

These unique ways of considering abundance emanate from a particular place, the South River Forest, known as the Weelaunee Forest on old maps of Georgia. These ideas come from conversations among a group of people as they adapt to living in that place.

Often overlooked, we feel that the Sacred Web of Abundance is a powerful idea for radical organizing. It is here for us as a force for liberation—as it has existed since time immemorial—and to help us fix the mess we are in by reclaiming our community power and centering it around the land that the community inhabits. In these times, we are all called to create new forms of organizing and direct action; new language, perspectives, and modes of being; and infrastructure for healing, care, and safety that centers the SWoA as key praxis for autonomous communities to build on.

Abundance points to the interconnected reliance on both self and community to provide for all; therefore, re-creating and reconnecting to our Sacred Web of Abundance are both essential collective actions for a new political project aimed at freedom and autonomy. Abundance is here, already, alive around us, if we open ourselves to its presence. We do not take this reliance on abundance for granted, as we did with the gift of human contact and proximity pre-COVID. Instead, we want to nourish and be nourished in its care, find inspiration from it to build new mutual aid infrastructure, gather strength to defend it from extractivism and capitalism everywhere, and create new cultures and ways of being and relating to each other and all the members of the SWoA.

The Sacred Web of Abundance

The Mvskoke’s main religious ceremony is Pvsketv (Green Corn), a millennia-old multi-ritual revolving around the harvest of new corn at the height of summer. Pvsketv aims at the renewal and balancing of relationships between humans, land, animals, spaces that humans inhabit, and spirit. In conversations with Mvskoke language scholars, I was told that to them, the concept of abundance as a single word does not exist. Reverend Rosemary McCombs Maxey, a Muscogee Creek citizen of Oklahoma and Mvskoke language educator, shared in her class the phrase enhoyv vcake sulke tos, which translates as “webs that are precious are many.” This resonates deeply with us and our experience of the Sacred Web of Abundance.

We understand the Sacred Web of Abundance as a living entity with intricate and ever-changing processes and systems. These webs have been woven collectively and continuously for more than 4.5 billion years by all that are part of it, from flora and fauna to fungi, elements, and humans. In the case of the Atlanta SWoA, the weaving of human species was done first by the Mvskoke people.

The Sacred Web of Abundance is always in flux, renewing and healing itself through what we call regional ecosystems, or microclimates, and it’s always nurturing the species connected to it through a series of processes that contain limitless knowledge. From the SWoA, we can take all of our cues to reimagine the future and make everything anew, in each community and even the world. We can reflect or mimic the SWoA when creating new mutual aid infrastructure, culture, accessibility, meaning, and much more. But first, we must reconnect with it both personally and collectively in a deeper way.

Each Sacred Web of Abundance is unique and distinct, yet interconnected. We feel that SWoA is not an abstract concept like “nature/environment/ecosystem” but rather a concrete one. You can learn about its history and the particular ways the land you are on likes to be cared for, celebrated, and loved; you can touch, feel, see, get closer to, interact with, learn from, feed and sustain yourself and your community by, and build meaning and life around, a particular SWoA. Furthermore, the concept of the SWoA is easy to relate to, given that we are all already in a relationship with it to some degree. Every human in every culture has a personal experience of abundance as a physical phenomenon, as well as of the SWoA as a network in nature, yet people are often not entirely aware of it. Under capitalism, we exist in a permanent mode of scarcity and extraction, whether we are conscious of it or not. This mode is interrupted and challenged when, collectively, we start weaving back into the SWoA.

In our early history, the human experience was centered around the Sacred Web of Abundance. We built everything from our relationship with it, including meaning, ritual, ceremony, agriculture, art, economies, sustenance, and culture. In more recent history, we have been slowly but surely estranged from the SWoA as we’ve developed culture around hierarchical power structures, normalizing extractivist systems and accumulation. Until the end of the last century, especially prior to the Industrial Revolution, many people were still foraging, growing, processing, celebrating, and sharing food collectively while still worshiping their particular SWoA. There are still people doing this today, but they are in the minority now, frequently self-segregated or pushed to live in isolation under attack from a global market economy.

Regardless of how radical our political ideas might be, most people’s relationship with their Sacred Web of Abundance is strained or truncated by the permanent mediation of capitalism and its narrowness. Capitalism controls our daily experience of the SWoA because people have to prioritize survival and because we’ve been conditioned to live with convenience and instant gratification. That’s why we don’t know, or have forgotten, how to accept the gifts of our particular SWoA. That’s why we are likely to step on an acorn or walk past the seasonal gifts of abundance on our way to work or to buy food at the grocery store, always distracted by the transactional. That’s why, in radical activist circles, we don’t prioritize foraging, growing, processing, distributing, sharing, or celebrating foods, which have been the main collective means of connecting and autonomous organizing throughout history.

Today, there is not just a misinformation crisis but also a crisis of motivation. Especially among young people, there is a lack of concrete ideologies that one can identify closely with, directly benefit from, experience, and be empowered to act on. We see this with the climate emergency and other pressing issues. In the face of the greatest crisis in modern history, organizers often recycle strategies for organizing that either no longer work or do not appear relevant to enough people to make use of the human energy that the climate emergency deserves, rendering this organizing performative rather than constructive. Sadly, even with the climate crisis at the forefront, the consistent trend within all of our organizing is the absence of consideration or even awareness of the Sacred Web of Abundance as a political idea, radical praxis, way of being, and urgent priority to attend to—that is, as an entity to defend.

Furthermore, most settler-imposed economic, political, spiritual, religious, and philosophical systems (communism, capitalism, socialism, etc.) have ignored the Sacred Web of Abundance as a critical collective experience and radical idea. Anarchism, too, has largely ignored it, and so sadly passed up the opportunity to effectively challenge and destabilize capitalism and private property. It’s uncomfortable for Western systems of thinking to build around the expansiveness of the SWoA, so instead they’ve focused on the extremely limited experience of humans, and a limited selection of humans at that. Therefore, all of the systems we live under or aspire to live under are weak, without self-actualization or resilience, because they all ignore the most powerful and common experience on this planet for all species: our interconnectivity to the SWoA, and our common histories of weaving and living in abundance.

Weaving Collectively Back to Our Beloved Sacred Web of Abundance in Atlanta

Since we started to organize against the construction of Cop City in Weelaunee Forest almost two years ago, we’ve been having deep conversations about collectively weaving ourselves back into the Sacred Web of Abundance. While bringing food and water to visit friends and comrades, before events and after walk-throughs, or during morning coffee at the open kitchen, we’ve become committed to testing out our ideas, not just talking about them. This commitment can be seen in the three Atlanta experiences shared below.

Pecan Foraging Morning

This past autumn, in 2022, Jordan and I went to Kirkwood, a residential neighborhood in Atlanta, searching for pecans. Jordan knew of a house where the most beautiful pecans could be found outside, and sure enough, we arrived to a blanket of them. They were big and soft, with thin and easy-to-crack shells, full of milky, earthy flavors and a strong dirt fragrance. We knocked on the house’s door, and when a woman answered, we asked if we could share in her abundance. “Go ahead, they are just going to go bad!” she said, so we got down on the soil until we had many bags full. After some time, the woman came back out with lemonade and some questions for us. The conversation went something like this:

“Why are you doing that?” she inquired.

“Because we love pecans! And we appreciate the gifts of the earth. We want to be connected to this pecan tree and web of abundance.”

“Oh, that’s so true! I’ve never thought about it like that.”

She started sharing stories of her family growing up in California, how they would go hiking and she would collect little things. She told us we reminded her of her own childhood practice of foraging and feeling that connection.

“Are you from here?” she asked. “Do you do this a lot?”

“Yes! We’re part of a new collective, Common Abundance,¹ and we want to make foraging accessible to all people.”

“What do you do with the things you forage?”

“Well, we process and share and enjoy them; that’s the whole point of foraging! We’re going to make acorn pancakes next Saturday from our foraging too.”

We continued picking up the pecans, and she began to reflect on the tree and how blessed she is to have this particular tree in front of her home. Though she doesn’t provide it with active care, it supplies such gloriously big pecans and is strong and healthy.

We thanked her—after filling up seven bags! We never take everything, of course, for the pecans left behind will nourish other beings and soils. Who knows who will come around next, or where those pecans will land again, or whether they’ll sprout into a new tree or die and offer their life back to the earth.

As we were about to leave, she said, “Come forage anytime, no need to ask! I’ll tell my husband and son that people are welcome to forage here. I want to support this collective.” She gave us her contact information and offered her skills in storytelling and tech. Before we left, she added, “I recognize this is not my land, even though I bought it a year ago. I’m not a steward here. I haven’t been taking care of these trees. Indigenous people were stewards here once, and probably Black people stewarded this land before me. That’s probably why these pecans are so beautiful. These pecans aren’t even mine. Come whenever you want. You are welcome anytime!”

We were amazed. Much to our surprise, we didn’t have to lecture to her, bring her to a documentary viewing night, or make her read Marx! We were just living the ethics of abundance, honoring the gifts of the land, and listening to the stories that emerged from the tree and this woman. The physical embodiment of abundance was so attractive to her, so welcoming, that she brought her whole self to it and broke open her own ideas of private property. She got it.

Foraging a Connection

My friend Jesse and I stand in front of a small crater that cups a mangle of severed roots. We are gathered to mourn and defy. Over the past two days, Weelaunee People’s Park has been illegally bulldozed by a private developer who was tired of not getting his way. In his tantrum, his workers have torn up what was planted with care. At least six serviceberry trees were felled. They are stacked in a sad pile on the southern edge of the park.

Have you ever tasted a fresh serviceberry? In her essay dedicated to the fruit, “The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance,” Robin Wall Kimmerer invites us to imagine “a fruit that tastes like a Blueberry crossed with the satisfying heft of an Apple, a touch of rosewater and a minuscule crunch of almond-flavored seeds.”² This understory tree lines parks, streets, forests, and forest edges from the southeast of the so-called United States to the northeast of so-called Canada.

I first met and tasted serviceberries through the Concrete Jungle food map. The map lists the public fruit trees in Atlanta—pears, apples, plums, and more. Concrete Jungle uses this map to organize volunteers to gather fresh produce and deliver that food to pantries and shelters throughout the city. But for these volunteers and other map users, myself included, it presents an exciting new geography of abundance. A portal opens into a world where every lawn, side street, forest, and forest edge becomes a possible source of food, new and wild flavors, and opportunities for learning, curiosity, sharing, and connection.

After many seasons of picking spring berries with friends, shaking apples and persimmons onto tarps into the fall and early winter, and expanding from fruits and nuts to wild greens, roots, and fungi, I’ve formed my own mental map of the abundant gifts hiding in plain sight. I’m not much of a visual artist, but even if I were, I’m not sure that I could paint this map for you. It is magical and dynamic. It re-renders as the seasons shift. It reroutes me toward the pecan tree with the fattest nuts on my bike ride home. It surfaces map pins of memories that dance larger as I approach.

There is the temptation to translate this newfound abundance into a dollar amount, especially given farmers’ market novelties like pecans at $5 a pound or chanterelles at $15. But when we come to something like acorn flour, which can be purchased at an Asian supermarket for a few dollars, the market economy comes out far ahead. Once you account for the hours gathering, drying, shelling, leeching, dehydrating, grinding, and storing, you’re looking at an hourly equivalent earning far below any minimum wage.

This is where the concept of the Sacred Web of Abundance becomes a useful tool. A monetary calculation doesn’t account for the refreshing richness of time spent outside under the trees, with the scent of earth and the soothingly repetitive task of sorting through eligible nuts. (This one has a crack in it, this one a weevil hole, this one is too small to be worth the effort.) It doesn’t account for the time spent with friends that makes the task more enriching. It doesn’t factor in the satisfaction of gathering to feast on acorn pancakes covered with blackberry jam. It does not account for the increased connection and feeling of responsibility toward our kin.

The average supermarket (if you can afford it) is abundant, true, but at its core, it’s extractive. It is not woven into the Sacred Web of Abundance. Commodities—items broken down into individual, indistinguishable units—are, by definition, disconnected. The cost of this disconnection is immeasurable; it is at the center of our culture of death and suffering.

Weaving an appreciation for abundance is the task of culture and relationship building. This is the goal of our new collective, Common Abundance. Through the sharing of tools and knowledge around foraging, specifically nuts and other nutrient-dense, high-calorie foods, we hope to make it easier and more accessible to connect to the web. Together, we can increase regional food autonomy by lowering barriers to harvesting uncultivated foods. As the taste for foraging grows, so must the amount of forageable land. This appetite can be fed through acts of ecosystem reciprocity, repair, and land defense.

This past autumn, in 2022, Common Abundance gathered in a park for an acorn skill share. We were able to demonstrate the many steps it takes to turn acorns into food for humans. Fear melted away as we collaborated on this multistep process and enthusiasm took its place. The participants were able to taste acorn pancakes fresh off the griddle, topped with jams and jellies also made with local forageables.

Our nutcrackers were present for display and use—from Grandpa’s Goodie Getter for cracking the rock-hard shells of the black walnut to the Kinetic Pecan Cracker, an electric tool for speeding up the shelling of pecans. It’s our goal to one day have a facility where community members can bring their foraged bounty to process with ease.

The steps we’ve made in this direction give me hope. While we mourn the loss of our serviceberry friends at the hands of a cruel, disconnected private developer, I have no doubt that they will be replanted. Too many people have tasted their berries and embarked upon a loving, reciprocal relationship with both the fruit and the tree.

So today, back at Weelaunee People’s Park, we follow the example of the spider, who doesn’t throw up eight limbs and swear off weaving when some deer or human unwittingly plows through its web. We set about cleaning up the park and preparing for that evening’s potluck in the ruins. Lights glow above folding tables. We share stories, songs, and reassurances. We feel full and connected. We eat.

Planting the Seeds of Abundance: Dandelion Fest

Some of the seeds of the Sacred Web of Abundance were planted during the Dandelion Fest, the money-less market and festival put on annually by Mariposas Rebeldes.³ There are few public spaces in the United States, especially queer ones, where spending money is not socially expected—or even compulsory. We are always encouraged to be consumers, buying things we don’t need and seeking to meet our individual needs instead of collective ones. The Dandelion Fest aimed to show people what it felt like to be in a queer space where there wasn’t an expectation to spend money, and where money wasn’t a barrier to accessing community. The festival was not permanent but ephemeral; an experimental experience of a horizontal society full of things that we could gift each other or trade with each other—one without scarcity. But what if we already lived in such a society?

Capitalism has brainwashed us into believing in the myth of scarcity. But we already live in abundance. The Dandelion Fest demonstrated this. Dozens of people came together to share food, medicine, plants, and clothes, plus their talents on the open mic. It felt like many other queer outdoor markets in Atlanta—except you didn’t leave spending $50. Soon, people were asking us when we were going to put on the next festival—it had become a staple of Atlanta’s DIY scene.

Dandelion fest challenged our dominant consumerist culture, which has infiltrated even the most leftist spaces. It asked the question: if we could pull something like this off, can we do it at a larger scale? Why aren’t we already living like this? Obviously, there are many practical answers to this question, living in a capitalist society, not having the infrastructure for robust mutual aid networks, and most of our modern education systems prioritizing the remembrance of facts over knowledge that would be relevant to our survival. We’re not saying we’re creating that infrastructure by throwing a free festival, but by doing this we hope to, even in small pockets, start shifting attitudes and culture around spending money and showing up for each other.

We also can’t say that we conceived of the philosophy of horizontal trade ourselves, which was the intention that the festival was centered around. We have been heavily inspired by the project El Cambalache, a mutual aid project and “free store” run by a group of primarily Indigenous women in Chiapas, Mexico. The philosophy of Cambalache, meaning literally “to swap” in Spanish, aims to remove the hierarchy of transactional value, allowing people to give what they don’t need and ask for what they do. This theory asks to unpack why certain things in our society have more value than others. Cambalache also forces people to be in relationship to each other, which buying and gifting doesn’t always necessitate. Cambalache also does not subscribe to the notion of charity, being that charity requires a hierarchy in which a person with resources or money gives to someone who lacks these things. Charity is diametrically opposed to horizontal exchange.

After the Dandelion Fest, we were left with feelings of wanting something more permanent. We saw how much could happen when people came together, even for a single afternoon, and brought with them the abundance that existed in their communities. But why couldn’t people help each other meet their needs on a daily basis? We knew we weren’t going to abolish capitalism overnight, so we settled for a Facebook page and a group chat. Our wish was that the seeds we planted during the festival would grow into a web of community, resources, mutual aid, and abundance! These virtual spaces would be a resource people could visit before or instead of going to the store and spending money on something new.

So far, the Cambalache chat has been beautiful to see: a place where people ask for care of their dogs, help building chicken coops, or a hand in fixing their cars. A place where people give away everything from shoes that no longer fit them to medicine and makeup. It’s a small chat, but we already see people getting their needs met! We hope that by encouraging people to interrogate and reorient their relationship to consuming and buying, that not only will we save people a few bucks, but also foster a sense of community. Hopefully they will start talking to their neighbors when they run out of eggs, instead of going to the Kroger self-checkout.

Radical Stewardship

In our view, the concept of radical stewardship stems from the recognition of the millennia of knowledge and work of the Indigenous people of any given land, the land’s first stewards. Radical stewardship is in alignment with the rights and interests of the first stewards of the land, whether they choose to demand the land back, move to “rematriate” it, or exercise their right to keep taking care of it. In our case here in Atlanta, these first stewards are the Mvskoke people.

Radical stewardship’s tenets are starting to reemerge due to our collective desire to reconnect with our beloved Sacred Web of Abundance. Right now, our work is to ask Mvskoke people, and Indigenous people everywhere, to help us give solid meaning to how radical stewardship works today. Should they be open to sharing with us what radical stewardship means to them and what practices are more beneficial to the land, we can continue to ground our lives, spirituality, and organizing in this way of being. Still, some of the key tenants are intuitive, like radical stewardship’s collective and dynamic nature (which is necessary for adapting to the challenges of the climate crisis).

Radical stewardship is fundamentally a spiritual way of being. When we allow ourselves to fall deeper into the Sacred Web of Abundance around us, we see how each moment of connection with the earth is a ceremony: we harvest pecans and sing the glory of the pecan tree, we bury the dead bird on the side of the road and mourn a life taken too soon, we speak with the chanterelles growing along the river and ask how we might be nourished by their bodies, we see the cycles of life and death happen again and again around us in seasons and know that we too must live now and will someday die, our body weaving itself back to SWoA—but while we breathe into this world, each connection weaves us tighter into the interconnected world, into abundance.

In his essay “All Land Back, All States Smashed: Free the Earth by Any Means Necessary,” Dan Fischer does the important work of reaching out and asking Native American people what the slogan “Land Back” means to them. This is what Madolyn Rose Wesaw, a Pokagon Band Potawatomi and American Indian Movement organizer, had to say: “I think in general what most [Indigenous] people understand Land Back to mean is returning stewardship of the land to Indigenous hands, because we believe it’s our purpose and we know how to take care of this land… We all agree on returning stewardship and responsibility of this land into Indigenous hands and then also providing us the resources we need to do our jobs, since so much has been taken from our communities.”

As we’re just starting to develop the concept of radical stewardship, and as we shape this idea into our main tool for personal and collective reconnection to the Sacred Web of Abundance, we must continue the paramount work of reaching out and being in constant conversation with Native American and Indigenous people everywhere. By doing this, we ensure that radical stewardship at any particular SWoA in the world is informed by the millennia of knowledge and work of the first stewards of the land.

Weaving Collectively Back to the Sacred Web of Abundance Everywhere

We are just beginning our collective weaving back to our beloved Sacred Web of Abundance thru rituals and ceremonies of praise, reconnection, celebration, learning, and enjoyment, along with the work of creating mutual aid infrastructure that replicates, protects, and enhances our natural SWoA, as well as our organizing rooted in radical stewardship. We feel these ideas acting as spores, landing in ready substrates, feasting on the ways of being that are dead and no longer serve. We feel our interweaving connecting us deeper to the sounds of cicadas while our bodies reflect the light of the summer sun.

Today, the call to reconnect with our Sacred Web of Abundance is stronger and more urgent than ever, given the threats of extractivism, ongoing colonialism and capitalism, and the climate crisis that endangers every SWoA on this planet. Wherever you are, we invite you to join us in weaving back to the SWoA together, celebrating her gifts while learning from and recognizing the work, knowledge, and right to steward the land from the first stewards of the SWoA—Indigenous people everywhere, and the Mvskoke people in Georgia and Atlanta. With this work, our collective SWoA is happy, keeps thriving and providing, and enables us to thrive too in these times that are at once challenging and full of possibilities.

It is our hope that communities will take any or all of these four ideas—abundance, the Sacred Web of Abundance, weaving back into that web, and radical stewardship—and expand, adapt, and shape them to their particular reality and autonomous work. May our weaving back into our beloved SWoA teach us to appreciate the next Pvsketv and sing loud the abundance of corn harvest like the cicadas in the height of new harvest time and bear good fruit in us all, and in all of our communities!

Enhoyv vcake sulke tos. “Webs that are precious are many.”

Common Abundance is a collective in Atlanta, Georgia working to make foraging more accessible by sharing knowledge and tools. You can find them on Instagram here. ↩
This essay and the larger project that it is attached to are indebted to the writing and thinking of Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. You can find the full essay here. ↩
Mariposas Rebeldes is a Latine queer, trans, two-spirit, gender-non-conforming, intersex, lesbian, gay, and bisexual agriculturalist collective building permanence in so-called Atlanta. You can find them on Instagram here. ↩

Poster: We'll Go Where Flowers Grow

2023-01-17T18:20:53Z

In response to the efforts of various fascists and billionaires to silence and isolate us, we present this poster in the romantic tradition of the first generation of CrimethInc. projects—a gesture of faith in the boundless possibilities that remain ahead of us and of determination to continue to build and rebuild the ties that connect us. Our collective predates the era of social media. We have lived through many waves of repression, many setbacks. Our enthusiasm remains undimmed.

Click on the image to download a PDF of the poster to print and distribute.

We’ll Go Where Flowers Grow

Their attempts to silence and separate us—to make us vulnerable to repression and attack, to hold us back and keep us down—will never be more powerful than our love and joyous anarchy.

When they isolated us in our homes and towns,
we found and built communities online.

When they kicked us out of class and put us in detention,
we carved love letters and memoirs into the wooden desktops.

When they cut the power to our basement punk shows,
we screamed without electric amplification: “Rather be alive!”

When they shut down the abandoned warehouses that we had brought back to life,
we partied in the desert and in underground storm tunnels using generators.

When they evicted and abandoned us,
we built networks of mutual aid and community self-defense.

When they dismantled our pirate radio station,
we installed a bigger antenna and sailed farther out to sea.

When they banned us from social media sites,
we reconvened on decentralized and encrypted platforms.

If ever you think you’ve lost me, just go where flowers grow. I will too. And we’ll always find each other again.

— Love and joy
CrimethInc. Star-Crossed Romantics

2022 in Review: A Year to Endure

2022-12-30T02:05:00Z

We’ve survived 2022—and with it, the ebb tide following the upheavals of 2019 and 2020. Both in the United States and around the world, this has been a year of challenges and reversals. In the following overview, we revisit how we got here, explore the events of the past twelve months, and review our own efforts to contribute to movements for liberation.

As for our collective, we reach the end of 2022 embattled but unbowed. We began the year with our warehouse in ashes and concluded it by getting permanently suspended from Twitter by Elon Musk—at that time the world’s richest man—at the request of a notorious pro-fascist troll. Yet in response to the fire, our comrades raised tens of thousands of dollars to support us and we were able to go right back into action; likewise, thus far, our suspension from the chief corporate social media platforms has only multiplied the number of people visiting our website and ordering our materials.

We didn’t expect this to be easy. We go into 2023 ready for the next round and we hope you’ll be right there beside us.

The United States: From 2020 to 2022

In the United States, the George Floyd Rebellion of 2020 and the subsequent far-right counter-mobilization remain the most significant political events of our time. The events of 2021 and 2022 have played out in their shadow. To understand the developments of the past year, we must begin in 2020.

As we argued in our retrospective on the fiasco of January 6, 2021,

When police murdered George Floyd, public trust and respect for law enforcement plummeted to unprecedented depths. Demands to defund or even abolish the police migrated from the extreme political margins to become serious proposals that were widely debated in the mainstream. Fox News and its imitators continued their racially charged crime alarmism, but with diminishing returns; efforts by police unions, PR firms, and liberal corporate media outlets to feature stories of cops doing good made little headway against the widespread suspicion that had taken hold from the left all the way to the center.

In this environment, the failed coup of January 6 was a godsend to the state. Police could pose as both victims and heroes again, the National Guard as saviors and bulwarks against chaos; even the Federal Bureau of Investigation was doing its part to protect democracy from right-wing thugs. Liberals and mainstream media outlets seized upon these interpretations and ran with them, with extraordinary success.

When Joe Biden took office in 2021, he didn’t have a solid enough grip on power to crack down on the networks that made the uprising of 2020 possible, nor on Donald Trump himself. Instead, Biden, the New York Times, and other centrists joined the right wing in calling for more police and re-legitimizing the judicial system. They succeeded in reconstructing a social consensus—or at least the appearance of one—around support for the coercive institutions of the state.

Anarchists and other rebels were already exhausted before Biden came into office—witness the attrition in attendance at demonstrations in the waning months of 2020. (Ahead of January 6, 2021, Trump tried to arrange for the National Guard to keep anti-fascists from interfering with the march on the Capitol, apparently regarding them as the chief threat to his coup attempt—but by that time, the anti-fascist movement was so overextended that very few anti-fascists went to Washington, DC at all.) The massive mutual aid projects that had emerged in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the routines of confrontation dating from spring 2020 had largely collapsed by mid-2021. But the same thing happened to the far right: after January 6, 2021, it took them a long time to regain their footing.

The centrist grip on power remained tenuous until the 2022 elections. Democrats were convinced that, if previous precedents were any indication, they would be trounced by Republicans—that the polls were not capturing the strength of Trump’s continuing popularity and they were essentially in an interregnum between fascisms. Perhaps as a consequence, throughout 2022, the Biden administration did little to crack down on Trump himself, instead continuing the spectacle of investigation that has been running since at least 2017—which chiefly functions to help both parties solicit donations.

In fact, Democrats outperformed their expectations in the elections of November 2022. This may embolden them to crack down on social movements, but it probably won’t shift their approach to Trump. If he remains weak, they won’t want to prevent him from becoming the Republican frontrunner in 2024, and if he regains his political footing, they will be back in the situation they were before, in which they are powerless to do anything besides wring their hands about his bad behavior.

The outcome of this election bears further comment. In fall 2020, the New York Times and other centrists had spread fear that street protests would cost Biden the election, attempting to overwrite the popular memory of the George Floyd uprising with their own defeatist narrative. Yet when the votes had been counted and New York Times correspondents crunched the numbers in a report that was not widely circulated, they had to admit that the majority of those who cited the protests as a factor in their decision had voted for Biden. In other words, if anything, the demonstrations in response to the murder of George Floyd helped keep Republicans out of power. If not for the burning of the Third Precinct, most people would never have heard George Floyd’s name—nor been prepared to respond to a potential Trump coup—nor participated in a movement that shifted public discourse. Let no one say that confrontational anti-authoritarian movements inescapably drive people to support the right wing; in a polarized and deadlocked society, the opposite is probably true.

This suggests that the suppression of the social movements of 2020 will not ultimately benefit the institutional left or political centrists. While Trump’s star is passing, sooner or later a more centrist Republican Party will probably take the seat of state power that the Democrats have effectively prepared for it by re-legitimizing the police, crushing rebellion, and framing Trump as exceptional.

The George Floyd rebellion of 2020 continued to produce echoes around the world well into 2022.

In short, at the end of 2022, we are finishing up the classic ebb phase that always follows a high point of struggle. This is to be expected. Once people have seen their long-cherished fantasies play out beyond their wildest dreams, discovering in the process what the limitations and shortfalls of those fantasies were, it takes a while to develop and pursue new visions. At the same time, the authorities have learned from the last round of revolt and are putting the pieces in place, one after another, to prevent history from repeating itself.

Still, the events of 2022 have continued to erode faith in the authorities and the state, especially among young people. At this point, a large proportion of both Democrats and Republicans are chiefly voting out of fear rather than hope. Most of the widely discussed “political issues” of 2022 have been framed as matters that only the state can address: gun control, inflation, student debt, abortion, what instructors can teach in schools, and the like. This is calculated to sideline ordinary people. But as soon as grassroots movements can show that ordinary people can address their needs directly without recourse to representatives, there will be another wave of social movements.

The post-2020 lull has been exacerbated by the fact that social atomization and the digital erosion of our attention spans have rendered it difficult to retain any gains from 2020, in terms of both organization and collective memory. Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is another step towards the ruling class consolidating control of digital communications, which will create new challenges for future movements. Our species is in a race against time as capitalists implement new repressive technologies and clamp down on the possibilities that digital connectivity opened up.

Musk’s buyout of Twitter shows how far the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few billionaires has gone: they can now buy major infrastructure themselves as private individuals, rather than as corporations. This extreme accumulation of power is contributing to the shift towards authoritarianism across the board—as people have less and less power relative to those who claim to represent them, they become angrier at the same time that it becomes harder for them to imagine egalitarian relations or doing without a representative.

In any case, the problems that caused people to get unruly in 2020 have not been resolved. There’s still tremendous potential, tremendous need.

In this context, anarchists in the United States are still grasping for new models. There has been a boom in interest in labor organizing, but we have yet to see workers overcome the structural impediments that have made it so difficult to build a contemporary labor movement with teeth over the past several decades.

We have sought to contribute analysis to these efforts, exploring the emergence of anti-work sentiments in the wake of the pandemic and studying what we can learn about how the economy has changed by comparing the general strikes of 1946 and 2011. On the same theme, we published an interview with Antijob, a Russian anarchist labor defense platform, and a history and analysis of graduate worker organizing at Columbia University, documenting how confronting the union bureaucracy has been essential to every victory across two decades.

Besides labor organizing, most of the newer struggles in the US in 2022 have been defensive projects focusing on public space—protecting homeless encampments, resisting sweeps, defending wilderness. The defense of the Atlanta forest represents one of the most promising of these experiments, bringing together an array of different issues and tactics and producing new constellations of diverse social bodies. The participants succeeded in establishing a months-long autonomous zone, building a movement that is affirmative and generative as well as defensive.

The burnt wreckage of a truck belonging to a developer in an occupied stretch of the Atlanta forest in summer 2022.

The Threat of Fascism

Although their electoral efforts have failed to secure them a firm grip on legislative or executive power in the United States, the far right has succeeded in solidifying their control in certain parts of the country. The same thing has occurred in France, Brazil, and other parts of the world, while outright fascists came to power in Italy this year. While centrists reign triumphant, the far right has consolidated a position as the chief alternative to the prevailing order, marginalizing those who would counterpose the possibility of revolutionary transformation and thereby serving centrists as a threat to keep potential revolutionaries in line. Future revolutionary movements will have to figure out how to overcome this challenge.

In the street, elements of the far right have continued to experiment with new models of their own. In January 2022, a truck convoy established occupations and blockades along the Canadian border on the pretext of opposing COVID-19 lockdown measures, initiating a weeks-long standoff. (For our part, we were most sympathetic to the students who organized walkouts against institutional carelessness in the face of the pandemic.) Later, supporters of Bolsonaro emulated Canadian and Chilean truck blockades after he lost the Brazilian election of 2022.

The year is ending with an ominous series of attacks on power stations in North Carolina and the Northwest. There are indications that these, too, may be the work of white supremacists experimenting with a new tactic to destabilize society and exert pressure. While the anti-social nature of such tactics might prevent fascists from building legitimacy with society at large, they would serve to play the role of terrorizing people into the arms of the reigning authorities.

Graffiti on a housing defense barricade in Portland, Oregon in 2020.

Reproductive Freedom and Gender Autonomy

This year saw a steady assault on gender and reproductive autonomy from Republicans and fascists across the United States, while heads of state like Vladimir Putin have made homophobia into one of the chief points in their program. Rhetoric about “groomers” has helped fascists to continue polarizing people towards transphobia and homophobia, though their attacks on drag queen story hours and the like have not brought out anything comparable to the mobilizations of fascists in Washington, DC and the northwest in late 2020.

The Supreme Court decisions of 2022 contributed to the impression that we are still living in the Trump era, while the lackluster grassroots response showed the extent to which the spirit of 2020 has been successfully suppressed. When the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, for example, the ensuing protests were divided distinctly into passive liberal street marches and clandestine invite-only direct action. This a classic symptom of a waning movement, in which professional organizers dictate what happens in mass gatherings while a few isolated radicals continue to try to escalate out of contact with a social base that could join them.

For our part, in response to the assault on abortion access, we produced a poster, proposed a strategy to employ direct action to push back on the authorities, and published an interview with activists who assist people in accessing abortions in defiance of draconian Polish anti-abortion laws in hopes of equipping people in the United States to defend and extend abortion access here.

In response to the wave of legislation, mass shootings, and fascist mobilizations targeting trans and queer people, we published an analysis spelling out the case for gender self-determination and proposing a framework for resistance. We also published a do-it-yourself guide to producing transdermal estrogen in hopes of making it easier for people to take the care they desire into their own hands.

Around the World

As in the United States, people in many other parts of the world are caught between an unsatisfactory ruling capitalist centrism and a far right that is not quite powerful enough to achieve supremacy but still poses a credible threat. The global wave of revolts of 2019 was undercut by the pandemic, which largely benefitted the center and the far right—in that order—outside the US. Since then, war, environmental catastrophes, and other disasters have mostly immobilized people rather than remobilizing them. In France, last October, many people anticipated a new round of protests about the rising cost of living, hoping that these might become a sequel to the Yellow Vest movement of 2018-2019. Yet the demonstrations turned out to be underwhelming. Perhaps, when the government can blame all economic problems on Russia, it is difficult for outrage to gain traction, especially with far-right presidential candidate Marine le Pen having done so well in the last election.

A banner in Brazil in 2019, celebrating the global wave of revolts that year.

In this situation, it appears that no one on the statist left has any bold new ideas or proposals. This is most dramatically evident in Brazil, where Workers Party presidential candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won the 2022 election—but by a much narrower margin than he did in 2002 and with much of the promise that he originally represented discredited almost a decade ago now. Instead, in Brazil, the chief function of the Bolsonaro years has been to discipline those who voted for Lula out of the aspirations that inspired them to revolt in 2013.

It seems to be a defining feature of our era that the difficulties of survival regularly provoke revolt on a scale that exceeds any particular subculture or demographic, but that these movements have thus far almost universally failed to bring about fundamental changes. None of the pat answers for this conundrum (e.g., that it indicates the supposed need for a centralized authoritarian party) have helped anyone to produce different results. It still remains to us to hit upon new ways of living and fighting that are adequate to the crises of our times.

Consequently, the most significant new development of 2022 has been the spread of war.

“No war but the class war.”

Starting on the very first day of 2022, the rising cost of living and the end of fuel subsidies sparked protests in Kazakhstan. Within days, an insurrection erupted in Almaty, the country’s largest city. The armies of six nations coordinated to suppress it.

The uprising in Kazakhstan was only the latest in a long chain of events indicating how much pressure people are under in the former Soviet Union, both from economic privation and authoritarian domination. It was preceded by the brutal suppression of various protest movements in Russia and Belarus; in summer 2022, unrest also broke out in Uzbekistan. This situation came to a head with the Russian invasion of Ukraine at the end of February.

We covered the situation leading up to the invasion from the Ukrainian side of the border, then reported on the anti-war movement in Russia.

In the buildup to the invasion, Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko and Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin cynically lured refugees who were fleeing armed conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and other parts of Asia and Africa by promising them a safe migration route through Belarus to the European Union. While the European Union made some provisions to receive Ukrainian women (and trans men) who were permitted to flee the war, they heartlessly left refugees from other parts of the world stranded at the Belarusian border, starving and freezing in limbo between the two power blocs. We published an article detailing anarchists’ efforts to defy Polish law to get assistance to these refugees.

Panning back, we can see the invasion of Ukraine continued a process of militarization and displacement that had already gotten underway in Syria. Amid ecological collapse and war—the side effects of capital accumulation and its consequences—more and more people are being forced into exile around the world. One thing anarchists can focus on doing better in the future is to help refugees—whether from Ukraine, Central African Republic, or New Orleans—to develop political agency wherever they end up. Towards that end, we published an interview with Syrian refugees who managed to establish a collective in Paris and to continue to organize on an international scale.

The invasion of Ukraine is likely an indication of things to come. Over the past several decades, governments worldwide have invested billions of dollars in crowd control technology and military equipment while taking precious few steps to address mounting inequalities or the destruction of the natural world. As economic and ecological crises intensify, more governments will seek to solve their domestic problems by initiating hostilities with their neighbors. Now that Russia is too distracted to call the shots in its previous sphere of influence, we are already seeing signs of this in Turkey’s eagerness to resume invading Rojava and in new conflicts between Azerbaijan and Armenia and, further to the east, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. At the same time, we are seeing saber-rattling in Serbia about Kosovo, in China and the United States about Taiwan, and elsewhere around the globe.

Though the war in Ukraine has generated difficult debates among anarchists, we had better take these seriously if we are likely to confront similar situations elsewhere in the future. For our part, we have continued to report on anti-war protests and draft resistance in Russia. We also published an interview with a clandestine collective of anarchist combatants carrying out sabotage actions against Putin’s war effort.

Art by NO Bonzo.

Elsewhere, 2022 was less eventful, for good or ill. With the exception of Ecuador, which experienced a reprise of the uprising of October 2019 in 2022, and Sudan, where street mobilizations have continued periodically all year, most of the places that saw uprisings in 2019 have been quiet this year. The powerful movement in Hong Kong that helped set the tone for autumn 2019 has effectively been suppressed, though unrest has finally begun to spread in China. The movement in Chile, which arguably achieved the most out of all the 2019 uprisings, was effectively channeled into electoral politics via the promise of replacing the Pinochet-era constitution, and consequently ran aground as the right wing finally regained the initiative.

This past summer and fall, we published analyses from the Philippines and Brazil about the ways that electoral politics have served to strengthen the extreme right while giving centrists a pretext to discourage anarchist and anti-fascist organizing.

This year’s most promising movements have taken place outside the epicenters of wealth and power. The revolt in Iran has initiated change in Iranian society at large, if not within the Iranian government, while the occupation movement in Sri Lanka succeeded in temporarily chasing the head of state out of the country. These victories will be reference points for the struggles of 2023.

Anti-authoritarian revolutionaries facing off with the forces of the military dictatorship in Sudan in fall 2022.

History

This year, we published a collective oral history of the historic protests against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund of April 2000. We also published a retrospective on the Gezi Park uprising in summer 2013, recalling a moment of optimism and possibility in Turkey and analyzing the ways that Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan consolidated autocratic power in the years that followed.

In response to a destructive police raid on People’s Park, the longstanding commons in Berkeley, California, we produced a poster honoring Rosebud Abigail Denovo, an anarchist who was murdered by police while defending the park against an eviction threat in 1992.

Finally, one of the texts we most enjoyed putting together this year is “Punk: Dangerous Utopia.” This has just appeared as the foreword to a book about the intersections between punk and anarchism, published in the United Kingdom by Active Distribution. Punk was profoundly influential in introducing hundreds of thousands of people to participatory, horizontal, and decentralized models for organizing and culture, and there is still a lot we can learn from it today.

Before we knew that Elon Musk would personally boot us off Twitter, we published a history tracing the trajectory of Twitter from its origins as a street protest tool to the billionaire’s acquisition of the platform.

But long before that particular debacle, we knew we should not permit our access to the general public to depend on the good will of corporate executives. In 2022, we produced three new posters and twelve new zines in a total of ten different languages. This coming year, we’ll continue to publish new print projects.

“When Donald Trump was booted off of Twitter after January 6, it became inevitable that someone from his faction of the ruling class would seek to take over the company,” as we wrote in “Canary in the Coal Mine.”

Facing Forward

In December 2008, after the Greek insurrection, a small number of anarchists intentionally promoted two tactical proposals as a way to break out of the impasse that summit-hopping and other approaches from the so-called “anti-globalization era” had reached. These were university occupations and anti-police revolt. Although both of these had occurred in the United States before, these anarchists believed that they had untapped potential.

These experiments began humbly, with a few dozen people occupying buildings at the New School in New York and a few hundred people rioting in Oakland after Oscar Grant was murdered. The former led indirectly (via the “Occupy Everything” slogan of the student occupation movement and the subsequent occupation of the capitol building in Madison) to Occupy; the latter set a precedent for the revolts in Ferguson and later, in May 2020, Minneapolis. The long-term potential of those models was not immediately apparent in their awkward beginnings, nor were the permutations that the movements arising from those initial examples would undergo.

We are once again at the beginning of a new era that will pose new challenges. This is the time to propose new tactics, new strategies, new horizons for experimentation.

As you undertake projects of your own this coming year, imagine that these are not just ways to address immediate needs or respond to emergencies, but also opportunities to shape the imaginations of thousands of others like you. Imagine what it would look like to develop new models for revolt in an era of scarcity and ecological crisis, when people desperately need new ways to access and share space and resources. Imagine that your efforts could give rise to new experiments that will be infectious and that these will evolve in unpredictable ways. How can you contribute to this process? How can you accelerate it? How can you approach your own humble efforts as a step towards the movements of the future?

Those who hold power today may appear invulnerable, but nothing lasts forever.

Punk—Dangerous Utopia : Revisiting the Relationship between Punk and Anarchism

2022-12-13T21:12:42Z

How did punk emerge out of the countercultures of the 1960s that it claimed to reject? Why did it play such a central role in the resurgence of anarchism around the world at the end of the 20th century? How did it prefigure the participatory media of the digital age? And what can its legacy teach us today?

The following text is the foreword to Smash The System! Punk Anarchism as a Culture of Resistance, a new book published by Active Distribution. You can pre-order it here. You can freely download nearly all of the punk and hardcore records CrimethInc. has released over the years here.

“PUNK ROCK EQUALS ANARCHY PLUS GUITARS AND DRUMS. ANYTHING LESS IS JUST SUBMISSION.”

-Italian Punk

Punk: Dangerous Utopia

Let’s imagine the ideal cultural vehicle for anarchism.

It has to be defiant, obviously. It should accommodate both gleeful irony and stark courage. But let’s make it affirmative, too, even if we have to go the long way round through suffering and catharsis to get there. We don’t want the kind of nihilism that makes it hard to get out of bed in the morning—we want the kind that keeps people out all night causing trouble.

For starters, then, we’ll set our point of departure in the creative arts: music, fashion, design, graffiti, writing, photography, petty crime. These are fundamentally affirmative even when they express anger and despair—and the start-up costs are pretty low. Put the music front and center, so literacy isn’t a barrier.

Aesthetically, we’ll want it raw and disruptive. Throw out all claims to expertise; make a clean sweep of the classics. At the most, we can retain a few of the innovations that the music industry stole from working-class people. Afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted.

Economically, if we can’t unilaterally break with the capitalist mode of production, let’s build in some norms to counteract its effects: price controls (“pay no more than two quid”), a loathing of profiteering and all things corporate, a do-it-yourself ethic. Place all the emphasis on things that can’t be bought. If that means an embattled discourse about “authenticity,” so be it.

This subculture has to be inclusive—and not just in the superficial sense associated with the liberal politics of representation. Rather than just preaching to the converted, it should draw in people from a wide range of backgrounds and politics. We want to reach the same young folks who are going to be targeted by military recruiters, and we want to reach them first. Sure, that will mean rubbing shoulders with a lot of people who are not anarchists—it will mean a big messy stew of different politics and conflicts and contradictions—but the goal is to spread anarchism, not to hide out in it. Get everyone together in a space premised on horizontality, decentralization, self-determination, reproducible models, being ungovernable, and so on and let them discover the advantages for themselves.

The most important thing is the participation of those who are poor, volatile, and angry. Not out of any misguided notion of charity, but rather because the so-called dangerous classes are usually the motor force of change from below. The self-satisfied and well-behaved lack the risk tolerance essential for making history and reinventing culture.

Picture a self-education society without instructors, ranks, or lesson plans. Teenagers will teach themselves to play drums by watching other teenagers play drums. They won’t learn about politics in dusty tomes, but by publishing zines about their own experiences and corresponding with people on the other side of the planet. Every time well-known musicians perform, musicians who are just getting started will perform, too. Learning won’t be a distinct sphere of activity, but an organic component of every aspect of the community.

Bad Brains performing at Valley Green Housing Complex in Washington, DC on September 9, 1979. Photograph by Lucian Perkins.

Dadaism and Surrealism were OK, but “Poetry must be written by all, not one,” as Comte de Lautréamont put it. Our ideal subculture isn’t a coterie of artists—it’s more like a network of underclass gangs in which everyone has a band, a zine, or at least a criminal record. The art isn’t just what’s happening on the stage—it’s the designs people inscribe on their jackets and shirts and bodies, the dancing and kissing and fighting and vandalism, the atmosphere they create together. The collective mythos of a worldwide grassroots movement. Let that mythos be contested territory—the conflict will keep people invested.

Our subculture will be Dionysian—sensual, spontaneous, wild—an uncontrollable geyser of raw feeling. The Apollonian (the rational, the intentional, the orderly) will follow the chaotic energy that drives this movement, not precede it. Intellectual proposals can build on adrenaline, lust, violence, and pleasure, but they can’t substitute for them.

So nothing sanctimonious, nothing triumphalist or moralistic. Better a gritty romanticism that sees dignity in defeat as well as victory, an unpretentious attitude that says “nothing human is alien to me.”

This subculture should be a space where people can learn about the politics of consent and assert their boundaries against invasive authority figures, entitled men, and other pests. At the same time, it should spread a rebel sociality that erodes the physical and emotional confines that individualize the capitalist subject. “Our utopia is not a world in which no one ever bumps into you—it’s a world in which everyone crashes into each other and it is joyous and good, in which it means something different when people crash into you.”

Not an anodyne utopia in which there is no fighting, but a dangerous utopia in which there are things worth fighting for. Not a Potemkin Village concealing the fault lines that run through society, but an arena in which you can take a stand in those conflicts on the scale of your own life. Not the anarchist equivalent of the Red Pioneers—complete with doddering leadership and tedious traditions—but an open space of freedom in which each generation makes its own mistakes and charts its own path.

From this point of departure, we can pan back to an entire alternative way of living: self-organized venues and infoshops, collective housing, squatting, Food Not Bombs, reading groups, affinity groups, feminism, veganism, non-monogamy, eco-defense, militant unemployment—the sky’s the limit. A worldwide network of countercultural spaces and movements and lifestyles. A chain reaction of rebellions going off like a string of fireworks encircling the globe.

Only now, with the benefit of hindsight, can we grasp how lucky we have been to participate in one of the greatest countercultural folk art movements of the past several hundred years.

A band performing at Espaço Cultural Semente Negra, the Black Seed Cultural Center, in Peruíbe, Brazil.

Unions, Hippies, Punks, Millennials

“If there’s any hope for America, it lies in a revolution, and if there’s any hope for a revolution in America, it lies in getting Elvis Presley to become Che Guevara.”

-Phil Ochs

“Punks is hippies.”

-GISM

Now let’s situate the emergence of this counterculture historically, in the second half of the 20th century.

The powerful and rebellious labor movements of the early 20th century had been bought off, abandoning demands for self-determination in return for higher wages, cheaper consumer goods, and more job security—the so-called Fordist Compromise, though the same thing went by the name “socialism” in the Eastern Bloc. Thus integrated into the self-regulation of the market, the union bureaucracy was slowly being outflanked by corporate outsourcing as capitalism transformed the entire earth into a single integrated supply chain.

Stalinism, fascism, the Second World War, two Red Scares, and the Cold War had crushed the anarchist movements of the early 20th century, polarizing most of humanity into a binary between false freedom and false equality that boiled down to a choice between the CIA and the KGB. Those born after the Second World War grew up with no horizon for social change beyond trying to reform one side of this dichotomy or the other.

At the same time, thanks to Fordism, the baby boomers had access to a wider range of commodities than any previous generation. Corporate marketing encouraged young people to understand themselves as a distinct group with their own interests and aspirations. Mass-produced youth culture inadvertently generated the possibility of mass refusal of mainstream culture, creating new shared reference points that cut across older national, cultural, and social divisions.

Originally a working-class art form emerging from Black communities in the United States, rock music was one of the commodities that capitalists began to cultivate as a cash crop for this mass market. In this context, the success of the Beatles represented the anyone-can-make-it dream of economic mobility—but it was also an incomplete effort to appropriate and domesticate working-class youth rebellion. The fact that four ordinary Liverpudlian proletarians, availed of all the recording technology and popular attention of an entire civilization, could go from singing “Love Me Do” in 1962 to recording the “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” LP in 1967 implied a utopian possibility that exceeded anything the market could fulfill: if we all had such opportunities, couldn’t all of us be artists? The lads from Liverpool, like the generation who grew up on their music, discovered they were not satisfied with the options at their disposal, even at the top of the pyramid—and the social bodies that had coalesced through shared consumer activity rebelled against the conformity and alienation of mass society.

In his book, Do It!, arch-yippie Jerry Rubin credited the unrest of the 1960s to this progression: “The New Left sprang, a predestined pissed-off child, from Elvis’s gyrating pelvis.” The generation that started out rebelling against its parents’ sexual repression by listening to rock and roll ended up occupying universities and protesting in the streets. By the time of the Woodstock festival in August 1969, this counterculture was millions strong.

A proto-punk flier by Up Against the Wall Motherfucker.

Despite the anti-authoritarian spirit of these youth cultures, the resurgence of anarchism proper was limited. Anarchists established a presence in the campaign for nuclear disarmament in Britain and represented an influential minority within Students for a Democratic Society in the United States. Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, the “street gang with an analysis,” translated the Spanish anarchist concept of grupos de afinidad into the Anglophone model of affinity groups; thus equipped, they stormed the Pentagon, cut the fences at Woodstock, and brought their mimeograph machine with them when they occupied Bill Graham’s rock music venue to demand a free night for the people. Yet as the decade wore on, authoritarian Marxists won power struggles within the leadership of many of the movements of the era. Like Marx’s coup within the International Workingmen’s Association a century earlier, these pyrrhic victories contributed to the collapse of the movements themselves.

Within the counterculture, the star system introduced its own hierarchies. At Woodstock, half a million people watched from the mud as a series of celebrities took the stage.

Meanwhile, capitalists had begun incorporating hippie demands for individuality and diversity into the market. This coincided with the transition from straightforward Fordist mass production to increasingly diversified consumer goods and identities—the shift from economies of scale to economies of scope. If Beatlemania had exemplified mass culture, the emergence of metal, punk, and hip hop in the 1970s exemplified the “post-Fordist” proliferation of subcultures.

In summer 1976—one hundred years after the death of Mikhail Bakunin, fourteen years after the recording of “Love Me Do,” and seven years after the Woodstock festival—the Sex Pistols made their first television appearance, performing “Anarchy in the UK,” the song that became their debut single. “Bakunin would have loved it,” the television host quipped when they were done.

The Sex Pistols’ first television appearance, performing “Anarchy in the UK,” on the show So It Goes on August 28, 1976. “Bakunin would have loved it,” host Tony Wilson quipped.

Here it is, at the public premiere of punk proper: the proof of punk’s anarchist credentials. All the attempts to water it down came after.

So yes, punk was a reaction to the countercultures of the 1960s. Pistols singer Johnny Rotten opened that television performance with a derisive phrase about Woodstock, rejecting everything self-satisfied and naïve about the hippie era—all the ways in which, in seeming to succeed, the hippies had been neutralized and assimilated.

But punk was also a continuation of those countercultures. It recapitulated the same process of radicalization that Jerry Rubin’s generation had experienced—only intensified, like a bacteria that had become immune to antibiotics. From the beginning, punks took great pains to distinguish themselves from hippies; in retrospect, punk was everything hippie that couldn’t be domesticated and commodified. Not festival stages, but basement shows; not tie-dyes and peace signs, but leather jackets and street fighting à la Up Against the Wall Motherfucker. What is a punk band, after all, but an affinity group with guitars? Discussing the Sex Pistols, John Lennon remarked that the Pistols were intentionally doing all the things that the Beatles’ management had forbade them to do at the outset of their commercial career.

A year after the Pistols debuted “Anarchy in the UK,” Crass (one of the first punk bands identified with the redundancy “anarcho-punk”) got started at a collective living project that members Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher had founded in 1967. We can trace punk’s pedigree through Crass directly back to the hippies, complete with the pacifism that the next generation of punks shook off.

As a part of the post-Fordist shift, music publishing and printing technology were finally becoming widely accessible to the general public. Crass was one of a new wave of do-it-yourself punk bands who released their own records. (The story goes that they had to press 5000 copies of their debut LP because that was the minimum run that a pressing plant would produce at the time.) By self-managing the production process rather than selling themselves to a label, they were able to hijack the mystique that decades of capitalist investment and promotion had vested in the rock industry, reclaiming it for the sort of autonomous youth subcultures that had produced rock’n’roll in the first place.

Crass.

At the same time, volatile globalized markets were undermining the job security of the mid-20th century. In 1977, the children of redundant workers could read the writing on the wall, echoed in the lyrics of the next Sex Pistols’ hit: “No future.” Punk caught on among the forerunners of today’s superfluous workforce at a time when the futureless were still a bitter, isolated minority. It was the song of the canary in the coal mine.

But it took decades for Fordism to collapse entirely, vanishing along with the complacent masses it had produced. It wasn’t until 2007 that the Invisible Committee, in The Coming Insurrection, could write

“The future has no future” is the wisdom of an age that, for all its appearance of perfect normalcy, has reached the level of consciousness of the first punks.

Today, in a time of widespread economic and environmental crises, pandemic, and war, when practically no one anticipates a bright future anymore, punk has become redundant, at least as a minoritarian rejection of capitalist optimism and aesthetics. If we don’t set punk in its historical context—as a reinvention of preexisting forms of resistance in response to particular conditions—we won’t understand its strengths or the limits it reached. Considering the changes that were taking place in the labor market and consumer identity, it is not surprising that from the 1980s on, even the most doctrinaire anarcho-syndicalists were initially politicized through punk music rather than workplace organizing. Likewise, to understand why punk plateaued in the early 21st century, we have to recognize the ways that it anticipated and then was subsumed by the online networks, participatory models, and volatile identities of the Digital Age.

Nausea performing in Tompkins Square. Photograph by Chris Boarts of Slug & Lettuce.

From the 1970s to the turn of the millennium, almost everyone with confrontational tendencies was effectively quarantined in a distinct subculture. But as the shift from economies of scale to economies of scope accelerated, these subcultures ceased to be discrete, long-term affiliations. Today, people stack up consumer identities like trading cards, and many subcultural identifiers last no longer than it takes to circulate a meme. It has become as difficult to isolate rebellion in particular social groups as it is to constitute a coherent revolutionary subject.

Likewise, the underground economy based in do-it-yourself networks prefigured contemporary hyper-capitalism, in which the self-management of our marketability extends into every aspect of our social lives and leisure time. Crass and their contemporaries achieved a breakthrough by using formats that had previously been inaccessible to the working class to spread subversive messages, but in the process, they unwittingly pioneered and validated a new form of entrepreneurship, paving the way for less politicized entrepreneurs. All the shortcomings punks identified in the unidirectional capitalist media of the late 20th century (“Kill your television!”) inform the participatory capitalist media of our own day. Who needs to go to band practice when you can make a video on your smart phone and post it to Tik Tok immediately? Do it yourself!

Of course, social media platforms have hardly tamed the new generation. Continuing the process of assimilation and reinvention, today’s uprisings draw on every aspect of punk that could not be domesticated, commodified, or outflanked. Riots without punk shows; black sweatshirts without patches on them, so the police can’t identify you; defiance and rebellion without anthems, without aesthetics, without hope.

If anything, we have overcorrected against the vestiges of the hippie era that persisted in the first phase of punk. When the Pistols came out, they were reacting against a subculture that involved too much art, and not enough rebellion; too much entertainment, and not enough disruption; too much optimism, and not enough reality. As we move deeper into a century that is already characterized by destruction and despair, we could do with a little more art, creativity, and optimism.

This is one of the many reasons punk remains relevant in 2022.

“Today, in the anarchist movement, we sometimes miss the Dionysian spirit that characterized the hardcore punk underground at its high point: the collective, embodied experience of dangerous freedom. This is how punk can inspire us in our anarchist experiments of today and tomorrow: as a transformative outlet for rage and grief and joy, a positive model for togetherness and self-determination in our social relations, an example of how the destructive urge can also be creative.”

-“Music as a Weapon: The Contentious Symbiosis of Punk Rock and Anarchism”

History is not divided neatly into periods; it’s more like a series of sedimentary layers comprising the present. Tonight, as you read this, a symphony orchestra is performing uptown, a jazz band is playing downtown, and a punk band is playing out in the suburbs.

Punk’s not dead, I know—Punk’s not dead, I know it’s not.

If we understand punk as an heir to longstanding traditions of resistance, this will explain its persisting importance to anarchism. While an older generation of labor-oriented radicals used to deride punks’ political commitments as ephemeral, punk is much older—and stabler—than today’s contemporary political organizing models; it dates from a time when subcultures still produced lasting identifications and commitments. Small wonder if many of those who still maintain the infrastructure of anarchist organizing from one year to the next are longtime punks. Punk combines the engaging agitprop and global networks of 21st-century cultural movements with the longevity of pre-internet political formations.

Punk-inspired anarchists at the May Day demonstration in Bandung, 2019. Photograph by Frans Ari Prasetyo.

Coda: Testimony

My friend’s punk band is playing in the backward little Southern town next to mine. The venue is a fallout shelter from the Cold War. It’s called The Fallout Shelter.

A police car pulls up in front of the venue and an officer gets out. While the officer is hassling the punks on the sidewalk, my friend slips across the street. He gets down on his elbows and knees, crawls behind the police car, and punctures its tire with his pocketknife.

The cop has to radio for backup. All evening, between bands, punks drink on the sidewalk and applaud ironically as the police struggle to replace the tire.

The first week of high school, Seven Seconds plays the one club in my little town. The show ends the way every big hardcore show there does—in a massive skinhead brawl that spills out onto the main drag.

I go to class the next morning with a bruise on my arm in the precise shape of a Doc Martens boot print. It marks me: I’m not part of your world.

Over the following decade, I join a band, I start a zine, I engage in endless debates about dancing, fashion, food, and fighting. I befriend the people who work night shift at the copy shop down the street. I stay up all night photocopying zines there, strictly off the books. Somebody in Czech Republic mails me a copy of the Kritická Situace LP in trade for my zine. I take the LP to the listening station at the public library because I don’t have a record player. I drive twelve hours to play a show attended by bruisers who have pledged to attack me on sight. I set up shows for bands. I release records.

Our band goes on tour. Night after night, people host and sometimes even feed us. We buy a van together. We travel around the country, playing self-organized venues and staying at collective houses. Overseas, we see our first giant squatted buildings, with banners hanging on the walls and movement archives and bicycle repair shops serving the neighborhood. It starts to dawn on us that we’re part of something much bigger than we imagined.

It is only after three months on tour that I realize that I have shifted from thinking in the first person singular to the first person plural. We.

We meet the old-timers from the Crass generation. They’ve all got a couple decades on us; we’re the youngest ones at all the shows in the UK. A member of Doom drives us around the British Isles in their van, since we’re not accustomed to driving on the left side of the road.

One night, the fellow from Doom stays up late talking with a member of the Subhumans. They end up arguing about whether the Clash ruined punk by selling out to a corporate record label. I get the impression they’ve been having the same argument for twenty years. Still, it helps me to think of my own commitments on a longer time frame.

Reclaim the Streets—Millions for Mumia—the National Conference on Organized Resistance—the Presidential Inauguration. During every conference, before or after every protest, there is a punk show. Not just bands, but puppet shows, performance art, radical cheerleading. Itinerant punks set up literature tables consisting entirely of Noam Chomsky books shoplifted from Barnes & Noble bookstores. Sometimes the black bloc sets out directly from the mosh pit.

In Sâo Paulo, I attend a demonstration against a monument celebrating 500 years of colonialism. Everyone is masked up. The punks behind us throw paint bombs at the monument and rocks at the lines of riot police in front of us. The police shoot live rounds over our heads. Afterwards, we hide out inside an açai stand so the cops don’t target us for the paint on our clothes.

A couple days later, Abuso Sonoro plays in Guarujá. The guitarist performs wearing the same mask he wore at the demonstration. A worldwide culture of resistance.

The first time we pull up to Ungdomshuset, the squatted punk venue in Copenhagen, every window in the neighborhood is boarded up. There was some unrest here the night before, our hosts explain, because the police want to deport a man to Turkey. After the show, while we sleep in the guest room, police sit outside the building in an armored car, reciting threats over a loudspeaker to the punks standing guard on the roof.

The fourth time we visit Ungdomshuset, there are too many of us to sleep in the guest room. Instead, our hosts unfold gym mats across the length of the entire great hall. We unroll our sleeping bags and lie down in a line, thirty or more of us—the bands, the organizers, and every random traveler who doesn’t have another place to stay, together under the vaulted ceiling of the building in which International Women’s Day was announced in 1910. Let the earth be a common treasury for all. Before I go to sleep, I turn to the person bedding down to my left. “Where are you from?”

“Me? I’m from Australia,” she answers. “Where are you from?”

A year later, police raid and demolish the building in the biggest operation in Denmark since World War Two. The city riots for a week; demonstrations continue weekly for a year. Plans are in motion for thousands of people to forcibly occupy City Hall when the government relents and grants the squatters a new building. The next time I go to Denmark with a band, we play there, at the new Ungdomshuset.

Ungdomshuset.

Years later, during the Occupy movement, a new generation filters into the anarchist community in our little Southern town. They’re the first ones to arrive without having punk as a reference point.

“But you have to do a workshop about punk, too,” Liz says to me, after a direct action training.

“A workshop? Why? Punk is just a style of music, it’s not essential to this stuff,” I answer. Decades of arguments about subcultural insularity have made me a little touchy on this subject.

“Maybe, but for all of you who knew each other before this, punk is like a sorority you were in, or a secret society. A bunch of references to bands we’ve never heard of, like a private code. It only comes up when you’re socializing with each other, but… that’s how people form intimacy, right? You have to let us in on it.”

A few years later, the anarchist student group at the local university asks us older townies to come make a presentation. I expect they want us to talk about security culture or consensus process or the Spanish Civil War. In fact, they want us to tell them about punk.

Roxy and I commandeer a full-length mirror from the abandoned glass factory next to my house and bring it into the classroom. We set it up facing the audience. I begin reciting a boring lecture in a button-up shirt, like a professor. While their eyes are on me, Roxy swings a baseball bat into the mirror, sending shards flying everywhere, and the d-beat kicks in.

“There—now why would we do that?” she asks them, afterwards, and their answers tell them everything they need to know about what punk is. Whatever conception you have of yourself and the world you see yourself in, smash it—whatever you consider bad luck, do it right now—and begin from there, remaking yourself and the world.

Whose Tweets? Our Streets : A New Poster and Zine for an Offline Media Offensive

2022-12-02T20:47:27Z

Last week, Elon Musk personally banned us from Twitter at the request of a far-right troll. Musk is not introducing “free speech” onto Twitter; he is systematically suppressing the voices of those who oppose fascism while welcoming the most notorious Nazis back onto the platform. In response, we invite you to make the streets of your community speak out with a new poster about capitalists like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. If there’s one medium that billionaires will never control, it’s wheatpaste.

But first—why has the world’s richest man thrown his lot in with fascists?

The best theory we can come up with is that fascism in general and anti-Semitism in particular offer the most convenient means to redirect anger that would otherwise be directed against the capitalist ruling class. Over the past three decades, the amount of wealth controlled by the world’s richest man has increased by almost ten times. As the billionaires get richer, the rest of us get poorer and more desperate. If not for conspiracy theories about the “wrong” people having all that power, the obvious fact that it is unjust for anyone to hold so much power would be inescapable.

Musk didn’t set $44 billion on fire because he thought he was going to make money on one of the world’s notoriously unprofitable platforms. It was worth it for him to spend billions buying Twitter in order to shape public discourse according to his personal interests. As for what those interests are, we can deduce them from the voices he has removed from the platform and the voices he has added back to it. Billionaires like him and Donald Trump would prefer the rest of us have to fight brainwashed fascists than have our hands free to take on the system that creates such imbalances in wealth and power in the first place.

To address this situation, we’ve dusted off a classic motif of ours and designed a new poster. We invite you to plaster the walls of your community with it—in a strictly legal way, of course.

Click on the image to download the poster.

In addition, in case you prefer to paste up posters the old-fashioned DIY way rather than just buying wallpaper paste or spray adhesive, we have made a zine version of our Field Guide to Wheatpasting—please print these out and distribute them to anyone who might be interested in communicating on a platform that isn’t run by a pro-fascist billionaire!

You can read the contents of the zine in full online here.

Click on the image to download the zine.

The text of the poster follows.

They Don’t Give a Fuck about You

For every billionaire, millions go hungry. That’s what creates billionaires: the concentration of wealth in a few hands. When you hear about a billionaire running for president or a billionaire buying Twitter as you pass homeless encampments on the way to your second job, make no mistake—it’s all connected.

They’ll tell you anything to make you believe that your problems are your own fault, to pit you against each other, to get you to work a double shift so you can make more money for them. But however hard you work, they take home more than you do. That’s the nature of capitalism.

They tell us they want to preserve free speech, that they offer us “opportunities,” that they’re here to protect us. Then they buy up the ways we communicate, fix the algorithms, determine what we see and hear. They sponsor fascists who attack anyone who criticizes them, spread lies to foment ethnic and religious strife. They want money to be the only thing that has value so we can’t dream of anything else.

We deserve a world in which people are respected for what they share, not what they take for themselves. The real problem is the system that creates these inequalities in the first place. Rather than competing to be the ones who exploit and oppress, let’s abolish the means by which they do.

For a world without tyrants or tycoons!

Another version of the poster. Click on the image to download the poster.

Beneath the Concrete, the Forest : Accounts from the Defense of the Atlanta Forest

2022-08-09T18:15:56Z

In Atlanta, Georgia, the city government intends to destroy large swaths of what remains of the South River Forest—also known by the Muskogee name for the river, Weelaunee. In place of one stretch of woods, they aim to build a police training compound; they have sold the neighboring part to Blackhall Studios executive Ryan Millsap, who intends to build a giant soundstage. Yet for more than a year now, activists have protected the forest against their plans. In a previous article, we chronicled how this campaign got started and the strategies that have driven it; in the following collection of narratives, participants in the movement describe their experiences and explain what makes this fight meaningful to them.

The fight to defend the forest brings together locals whose neighborhood will be gentrified by the developments, environmentalists who recognize the importance of the forest in mitigating the impact of climate change, forest defenders who have been occupying the trees for months, abolitionists who oppose the expansion of racist policing in Atlanta, and young people who desperately need a free space to build community outside the high prices and profit imperatives of Atlanta corporate nightlife. These are not discrete issues, but aspects of a coherent whole.

The destruction of the tree canopy and the gentrification of neighborhoods are stages in the same process: the former paves the way for the latter. Forcibly displacing Indigenous peoples, carving up the natural world into private property, burying the fertile earth under concrete, and terrorizing the inhabitants with police violence are all expressions of the same logic. Catastrophic climate change is the large-scale consequence of a series of smaller steps that are no less catastrophic in the lives of individual human beings.

The defense of the forest in Atlanta is only one of many such struggles over land and housing across the continent, including People’s Park in Berkeley, Echo Park in Los Angeles, and the camp defending the UC Townhomes in Philadelphia. As investment capital floods the real estate market, it has become increasingly difficult for to afford housing, let alone maintain collective space in which to experiment and build a common context. These movements have responded by defending a shared space of life and struggle.

Most of the following accounts describe the events of the week of action at the end of July 2022, when people from around Atlanta and other parts of the United States gathered for a week of discussions, protests, and concerts. The week of action culminated with a festival during which DJs, bands, and speakers performed, showing how the forest serves as an autonomous zone beyond the constraints of the capitalist economy.

The forest is not just a particular concentration of trees; we can also understand it as a network of relationships between living creatures of all species. Life flourishes when it is liberated from control. This was palpable in the festival at the conclusion of the week of action. In a club, a breakdown or a breakbeat functions as a kind of lubricant to grease the gears of exploitation, bringing in business and (at best) advancing the career of a particular DJ or band. In a liberated zone, the collective experience of music can signify shared power, the joyous realization of potential, showing how each person’s creativity can contribute to the liberation of all.

The South River Forest is not an old-growth forest. If anything, this makes the movement to defend it more inspiring. This land was already brutalized—yet, given a few years of peace, it became a wilderland capable of sustaining spaces of freedom. Any patch of flowers growing out of the cracks in the concrete could become a forest if we defend it. The possibility of freedom awaits all around and within us, even in the most repressive environments.

The forest—which is to say, the web of life—extends beyond the bounds of any designated park, into each of our bodies. This web is what sustains our lives, not the extraction industries that are currently destroying the basis of existence for countless species.

Two decades ago, the authors of Fighting for Our Lives suggested that “The best reason to be a revolutionary is that it is simply a better way to live.” As state violence accelerates the catastrophes resulting from capitalist industrialism, it may turn out that it is also the only way to live.

“The Forest within Me”

The forest is a breathing barricade. Like any breathing mechanism, the boundaries continuously undo themselves. Inputs and outputs collide—between the city and the woods, the feral and the tame, the safe and the dangerous. What qualifies as violence becomes murky in the woods. Violence as negation manifests itself in the form of the state, helicopters flying overhead and cops on the edge of the barricade to arrest the forest dwellers, sometimes they dare to enter, with their machines and their armor. Violence as creation manifests in the destruction of this negation: playful sabotage and joyful tricks. Anarchic violence becomes a productive flux of becoming. For the police, the inputs and outputs are far clearer and qualifications are far more rigid: the forest is a dangerous place, unknown territory understood in opposition to their cosmopolitan terrain.

For us, the forest is a haven. The threat of the state is different than the peril of the woods. Stumbling upon a decaying coyote carcass feels like a blessing—to witness a transformation of flesh into soil in the soft fallen pine leaves is nothing like stumbling upon a clear cut where the limbs of trees lie severed, their torsos hacked up into discarded bits. The severing of trees is the precondition for the construction of the dystopian simulators through which the apparatuses of power will perpetuate their orgiastic fantasies of violence and capital. But this will not happen, because the forest is an ungovernable, indestructible, breathing barricade.

In the forest, the boundaries lapse between the content of space, how things were constructed—by machine or by hand or, often, a combination of the two—and to what degree things become consumed and consumable. But there are also lapses between different kinds of time. The time it takes to walk from one patch of woods to another may take minutes or hours. It’s easy to get lost under the trees, to lose yourself in movement and return to the slimier flows of collective being within the barricade. To lose yourself intentionally or try to make yourself unlocatable—from the helicopters overhead and what lies beyond the barricade.

Yet the barricade does not delineate a concrete edge. The edges of the forest do not indicate an end. The forest is indestructible because it is ever-expanding and constantly transforming. The forest here is a node that connects to many nodes and has many nodes within—including our bodies. The boundary of the body slowly erodes here. A viral outbreak reminds us we are perforated bags of water within perforated bags of water, including the forest.

Find ticks burrowed in your skin and you slowly become a deer. In our camouflaged garb we cosplay trees. It is something erotic to live in trees and to dress like them. We multiply ourselves through pseudonyms and costumes. We multiply ourselves by becoming deer, becoming tree, becoming decaying matter and waste. Eventually, in our deterioration and deterritorialization, movement and occupation, gathering and dispersal, taking up of space, and place taking us up, we become forest. We become barricade. Forever ungovernable and infinitely becoming.

“The Forest Is a Portal”

The forest is a portal. The concrete blocks spread wide, allowing entry into the graffiti-filled lot. Anarchist sprites and other mischievous spirits have painted, scratched, stapled, pasted, singed signs everywhere conveying our welcome, our allegiance to this new world that calls to the depth and courage of our hearts. As I walk the liberated path, purple swirls form messages that guide me like breadcrumbs. My fae kin appear around me in gauze, denim, and metal, resplendently eschewing gender. Entering the wild, I return to my stirring self: this intimate green.

“Letter from a Treesitter”

This letter originally appeared here.

I’ve been preparing myself for what feels like the inevitable: a raid, an attempted extraction—or will they choose to siege?

I’ve become attached to my treehouse, thinking of it almost as an extension of myself. I found myself questioning this, questioning the connection I feel to a temporary structure. But I realized that what I was feeling was beyond that. From my feet high above the canopy to the roots buried deep in the ground, I could feel it. I wondered if this energy was spiteful, a land so scarred and blood-stained, never given a moment to heal. Was I here because of spite? Yes. But the spite I feel toward the police is also born of love: love for the land and all of my friends here and beyond. This forest is not something I am going to give up without a fight.

Every delay opens up more possibilities. Every contractor that backs away brings us closer to victory. Each of our moves keeps them guessing. Whether or not they choose to destroy our homes, I’ll be here keeping up the struggle. I’ll be here for as long as I can, for as long as it takes. They can try to evict us, but they will never be able to make us stop fighting.

There’s joy in our fight. This spirit, this forest, will never be able to be contained. Everywhere you look, the police are trying to shrink our worlds, shrink our lives. But we have chosen to say no. Our fight extends beyond the borders of this forest—it extends through our expressions of collective and individual joy, incomprehensible to the narrow imaginations of the police and the ruling class that they protect. We laugh harder than them, we feel more pleasure even in the midst of their assaults. Falling in love with these woods has meant falling in love with one another and with the possibilities of this world—a love that the police will never understand, and therefore cannot crush.

“When the Barriers Came Down”

When the concrete barriers went up at the park at the behest of a local real estate baron, it felt so banal. What—another space in the city enclosed, forbidden, made concrete? Long before this struggle began—a struggle for my neighborhood park, my local forest—I could trace my life through a string of interactions with police in public parks, or a string of neighborhood parks and natural spaces closed, contaminated, forbidden. I could trace a line through this life: if you want to be outside, you have to pay or you have to trespass.

The concrete road barriers were standard issue, but the real punch was when I saw that they took the sign and replaced it with a much smaller one, a generic one reading “Park Closed.” As if the public park, the forest, our entitlement to the land could be made or unmade with a sign. As if we would abide by the sign, something so “neutral,” produced to justify the land grab as official. It might as well say Forget being outdoors, catch the forest on Netflix.

Like me, my neighbors didn’t stop when they saw the barriers. If they noticed that the park sign was gone, it didn’t turn anyone around. The stream of cyclists, trail explorers, and dog walkers continued, pushing through the small opening that immediately appeared between the barriers. Soon enough, just as I expected, the barriers were pushed open all the way, the parking lot effectively re-opened. People make the spaces they need. I smiled when I saw them opened up: a sign of complete indifference to the roadblocks in our way. A disregard for property lines.

A week has passed since the barriers went up. Today is the first Saturday of the fourth week of action. Hundreds of people stream into the forest to enjoy a free concert, a barbecue, the company of others in the movement.

As the day cools down, a crowd gathers around the front of the barriers. I notice that people are hoisting a new sign, painted with a new name. They welcome me in through the barriers. I help hold the sign, heavy in my hands, as it is affixed to the old sign stand. We drape a sheet over it. A few moments later, a Dekalb County police SUV slow-rolls by, but a crowd has already started to amass at the barrier entrance. Some shouts of mocking harassment from a crew of masked people send the cop down the road. “He won’t be back.” Maybe he will, but with a different kind of calculus.

The crowd murmurs, carrying plates of grilled chicken and vegan hot dogs to come perch on the barriers. Someone has strung a fancy red ribbon across the barriers, tied in a bow. It feels like we are saying: this forest is ours, and these barriers are a gift. We call to others in the lot to come watch the sign unveiling unfold. Some make speeches, reclaiming the park. Excitement in the air, true feelings of power, laughter at the exaggerated speeches.

Now the sheet is finally pulled off, revealing the sign: “South River Forest Park” reads one side; “Weelaunee People’s Park” reads the other. Within seconds, I hear loud pops and champagne sprays, covering us all, showering a 20-foot radius. Cheers rise from the people gathered, then a chant: “People’s Park! People’s Park!”

With a dramatic flourish, R— cuts the red ribbon, and everyone is yelling, celebrating, a burst of joy. Spontaneously, now we are running. Running past the new sign through the barriers, as if for the first time, as if something has been unveiled to us: a gift we’ve given ourselves.

“A Tour of the Forest”

At daybreak, the birds turn on as the music turns off. I’ve been dancing for almost twelve hours. It’s early Sunday morning, the end of my birthday. I feel blessed to have spent it in the forest with my friends and many strangers. This was the last day and night of the three-day Defend the Atlanta Forest music festival, an explosive culmination to the fourth week of action. We spent whole days and nights dancing, grooving, moshing to the rhythms of the free forest. My body is filled with an energy that I know doesn’t come from it, from the food or water or sleep that sustains it. It comes from a more diffuse and mystical power. A power that only emerges in the connection between many bodies engaged in freely creating a shared world.

The festival began with a friend speaking about the movement to the growing assembly of people standing under and around the massive tarp and stage that has been constructed here. It serves as a temporary venue, no less historic, for shelter, gathering, rage, expression, joy, communing. As she explained that this is a decentralized and autonomous movement, inviting everyone to repeat back those two fundamental words, I felt a buzz of excitement.

This is an almost 800 acre autonomous forest within the city of Atlanta. It was abandoned, then reclaimed, then sold, swapped, and again abandoned by the city. Now it is used and cared for by us—the people, the public.

When my friend wrapped up her welcome speech, another friend caught my attention through the crowd and asked me to lead some newcomers to the forest on a tour to a treehouse. I made an announcement and a couple dozen people followed me along a path through the trees.

I made stops along the way to point out where the kitchen is and the additional do-it-yourself kitchen where there are always snacks and sometimes people cooking special additional meals. I pointed out the sweat lodge that a Lakota comrade built during the last week of action. I told the story of how this movement became one of the many embers that were scattered when the boot of the state violently stomped out the sacred fire that was Standing Rock. I led them up the hill and encouraged everyone to look up. High above us, we saw a large platform in the tree covered by a domed tarp. There was a hanging potted plant with flowers; someone said, “Ooh, look, they are making it cute, like a home.” I answered, “That is her home.” Others asked, How do they get up there? How did people get everything up there? Everyone looked up at their childhood dreams come true.

At dusk, the sky glows out from the negative space, forming shapes between the thin pine trees. The sun is lighting up the the world from below. People roam around the Living Room, our name for the part of the forest where pine straw provides a clean ground for public gatherings, meals, meetings, events, music, and art happenings. Everyone is standing or sitting in circles, eating, chatting, scheming, encountering or reencountering each other; dogs run around us playing and chasing with abandon. It is dinner time. All the hard work of carrying boxes of produce, jug after jug of water, chopping vegetables, stirring massive pots, washing the dishes from lunch, carrying them and the fresh hot food from the kitchen (in the woods) to the serving area in the living room has paid off. Everything we do here, we do voluntarily—a labor expressing faith in abundance, creating a free meal, a free show, a free experience. This simple fact is more significant than I know how to explain.

One of the highlights for me, this week, has been seeing some coworkers from the restaurant I work at come out into the forest. At work, I’m always bringing fliers, putting up posters, begging my coworkers to come. The way we normally relate is always mediated by work—how miserable but resigned we are to be there, doing what we are doing, day after day, cleaning the bottles and floors just so we can clean them again when we close the next night. Out here in the forest, they ask me, Do you live out here? Did you put this all together? I say, Sometimes, I say, Yes, we all did.

“The Truck Became an Attraction”

When the first can of Dr. Priestley’s Seltzer Water flew through the air and exploded against the windshield of the excavator, temporarily blocking the view of its operator and complicating his attempt to destroy the parking lot gazebo at the newly opened Weelaunee Peoples’ Park, it felt to me like a small but important milestone had been reached—another indication that the movement to defend the Atlanta forest continues to grow and to outgrow its limits.

The sudden ubiquity of the cans of seltzer water themselves, cases of them sitting around the forest free for the drinking, felt like one such milestone in its own right. When an occupation reaches a certain level of power and prominence, resources begin to flow and strange abundances appear. I remember boxes of thousands of loose cigarettes arriving at Standing Rock and a small pious circle of chain-smokers forming to package them for distribution to the wider camp. Nobody knew where they came from. As far as I know, the seltzer water came to the Weelaunee Forest from the warehouse of a failed startup somewhere and quickly became the unofficial beverage of the week of action.

The confrontation with the excavator ended with its operator, a neighbor and henchman of Hollywood billionaire Ryan Millsap, fleeing along with the off-duty police working security for him. They left behind Millsap’s truck, a 2020 Dodge Ram 5500, which was soon set ablaze. This ended Milsap’s second attempt to close down Intrenchment Creek Park and establish his private ownership over it. His first attempt had occurred over a week before, when he sent workers to remove the official park sign, close the parking lot with concrete barricades, and put signs up around the area declaring it “private property.” Our response had been to paint the barricades vibrant colors, keeping them in place but open them enough to allow vehicles through, and to declare the opening of a Peoples’ Park.

The park feels different now. Millsap attempted to forcibly impose his private ownership but instead shattered it, and now the burnt-out husk of his $80,000 truck serves as visual proof of how easily such illusions can be dispelled. Instead of scaring away regular park-goers, the burned truck has become an attraction. People come just to look at it and take pictures of it. Something about it brings them joy; they leave visibly elated by what they’ve seen.

It’s also clear that nobody misses the police, who no longer feel comfortable circling the parking lot or coming at night to harass “suspicious looking individuals” despite the old park being open 24 hours a day. Unlike a public park, which is defined by a list of things you’re not allowed to do, the peoples’ park invites your participation on all levels. You can drive on the bike path. You can dig up the grass and plant a garden. You can put up signs asking people to drive slower on the bike path. You can get a piano on Craigslist and bring it to the woods and play it at 3 am. You can park your car and sleep here because it’s safer than the Walmart parking lot and the communal kitchen is cooking a meal every day. You can throw a huge dance party under the canopy and the stars and fall asleep on the soft pine straw.

“Deep into the Future”

When it started raining on the third night, I wondered how I would make it back to my tent. I also wondered what that truck looked like in the parking lot, soot washing off its charred remains, perhaps mixing with the paint and chalk that redecorated the iron frame. In the madness of the night, the status of the music was the only thing I did not question. One of my friends spun in circles, shoeless, in the downpour. I saw people kissing in the mud. The large blue tarp overhead, which just an hour earlier had almost come crashing down on our heads as reckless punks used it to facilitate stage dives and other antics, now shielded hundreds of people from the storm.

I was standing on the side, beneath a smaller tarp, next to the makeshift bar. The pulsing of the dance music wasn’t quite so loud that you couldn’t talk, but with the sound of the rain on top of it, I had to yell to be heard. My friend and I were discussing the morning. We had woken up with a start some 18 hours earlier to the sound of yelling: [self-described owner of the forest] Ryan Millsap had brought police to the parking lot and they were threatening to tow cars. Although we had only slept in our tent for a few hours, my friend and I pulled on our shoes and jackets and rushed through the forest to defend the newly christened Weelaunee People’s Park. In the parking lot, people were throwing stones and cans of sparkling water at the police. Elsewhere, someone was anxiously hiding the sound equipment in case a raid was imminent.

I still can’t believe we managed to pull this off. I shouldn’t be so surprised, but it’s hard to overstate the magic of what took place. There we were, perhaps 500 punks, dancers, anarchists, artists, partiers, rappers, indie rockers, forest defenders: if the police couldn’t stop us, if the developers couldn’t disperse us, the rain certainly wouldn’t. How many people had come over the previous days? There’s really no telling. The only thing certain is that on this final night, all of them walked through the cement barriers past the smoldering truck, deep into the forest, deep into the future.

“This Time, We Were There”

Rocking with the pines, air thick with cicadas, the first night, the night of my arrival. The breeze shakes the treetops, rustles their needles together, cradles me in the sway of this forest.

I miss my friends back home already. I wish they could be here with me, looking up at the cloud-mottled night—my last sight before shut-eye, giving myself over to the charming clicks of bugsong. A hammock can be a lonely place to sleep, but less so when you find that people you once knew in a past life are suddenly your neighbors once more, stepping through the portals of their tents and raising their arms to the sun.

As camo-clad demonstrators beat that truck mercilessly with a shovel, ripped its doors from their hinges, emptied its cab, I told the Rolling Stone reporter that what we were doing was building a new world. The music of these woods shows how we can find beauty in the scraps we’ve been handed, the cut cleared and replanted like the weeds growing from the old prison farm. Punk asks for no more than three chords, a rave no more than bass and bodies to populate the dance floor. In this world, we sway unbound by the weight of debt that is intrinsic to the success and poverty of city life. In this world, I find I can stretch my sleeplessness a few hours longer, waking life more nourishing than slumber. At night, our generations constellate with the stars.

Along the glowing trails, I find faces new to these woods. I see kids ten years my junior showing up bright-eyed and ready to mosh under the dusty rain tarp. I see friends that I have known for the past decade carrying guitars and speakers, noting that we have come to be the elders of this scene. We are weathering life’s seasons in this world that we are building. Spring and summer happen simultaneously; slowly, we are bringing fall and winter back into the fold.

By the time you get the notifications, it’s already too late. The forest has been sealed off by police or barricaded by protesters. You’re left pacing the hardwood floors of your apartment, wondering how you can help from afar. In the world we’re building, you just have to be there. News of the forest isn’t digested over breakfast, it’s made before a drop of coffee hits your lips. When morning comes and the cops raid, or defenders reduce construction equipment to rubble and ash, you’re either in the woods or you’re at your table. This time, we were in the forest.

“DJing Is an Extension of My Everyday Acts of Resistance”

All week the sun is beaming, sweaty bodies rustling through the woods, minds wondering what will come next, what will I need to do next? The threat of downpour loomed all week; it finally blessed us briefly on Saturday when the full rinse came. The darkening yellow sky, lightning pulses, damp pine starkly reminds me of early memories of Atlanta sunshine unveiling after afternoon showers. I worry how today will go after the downpour.

The tarp bowl quickly fills up as the day continues and the pines dry. Suddenly, it feels like a music festival. There are pockets of people laying down on blankets, dancing, moshing, talking, and looking at zines.

As it gets darker and darker, I start hearing ”When are you DJing?” I’m the last to play to close out the Fourth Week of Action and the music festival. I’ve DJed in the Weelaunee forest before, but, this felt different. As I stepped to the stage, I stepped into the hips of the woods. Swaying, Jungle-infused pop and locking, and Techno bouncing between the bones of the forest. The bowl flowed into late-night freaks, dancing to the hard bass, fuzzy mids, and ethereal highs. An all-consumption by the woods, by the energy bouncing off the pine, by my love for dancing and grimey hardcore sounds. Two hours to release anger, anxiety about what will come in the next few days, weeks, months, years to the forest, to my friends, to my life in Atlanta.

The Weelaunee Forest is a land of resistance. The lineage of the land of Muscogee people, their forced removal, enslaved West Africans, incarcerated people in the Atlanta Prison Farm, and the fight to resist the state and colonialism continues in Weelaunee every day. DJing is an extension of my everyday acts of resistance, feeling true to the roots of Techno and Jungle that grew out of Black curiosity to find a place. DJing in a constructed money-maker will never compare to DJing in the fight for open spaces. My place is nuzzled between the pocket of trees.

“The Sweat Lodge”

Scrappin slop and tarps, frockling among carcass and debris, screaming songs of moto exhaust and white throated swallows, here among the Weelaunee.

Mudtracks of ATVs lead us to wheelbarrows, tarps, abandoned clothing, slashed and trashed camps. Above, glorious clouds threatening us with a humid breath. That same rain that, we fear, will revolt in the strength of the kudzu and multiplying mold spores is also the rain that we crave to feed our gardens and creeks. A humidity that encourages the vining reach capable of overpowering the forgotten billboard, tagged with evidence of an incredible feat. So high, we both reach. Palpating canopies alive with green lichen, expanding arms for a choking embrace. Waterlogged tarps fastened into a caved dome, slugs fling in every direction as we snip the paracord that held this forgotten structure in place. Spiders emerge from the folds, where mosquitoes breed in stagnant puddles. Not so long ago, this sweat lodge was sanctuary for the ritual of gathering—of celebrating this forest—this land that haunts us with tragic horrors of nightmares past and the future that may emerge without our presence. We break down and repurpose our leftovers, we dismantle sites of abandon and create through decay. With the speed of acceleration, the drops that were once tender, hit like pellets, blinding my ability to admire the canvas of lightning against the dank green horizon.

“To Defend the Forest, Everyone Has to Fight”

The first night of the music festival I had an affective epiphany. I was humbled by the glowing social atmosphere of everyone around me. Yet when standing still, I realized I felt out of place. When in movement, when busying myself with tasks, I felt necessary, like I was a part of something, but I found myself unable to relax, unable to dance with friends and strangers.

The second night, I examined the faces around me—so many unknown youth, people who are just coming into the Atlanta music scene or who have been occupying a different section of it. For a moment, the nostalgia for people and places long gone overtook me. My surroundings, my home, friends, were foreign. I started ignoring people, walking alone. An old friend who had performed the night before came up to me. He said he was looking for a familiar face. I felt massive roots pulling me back down to earth, to the moment.

Saturday morning, Ryan Millsap’s truck drove an excavator into the ICP parking lot. The driver slammed the excavator into the roof of the gazebo where people were standing. He dug a random hole in the path. He screamed profanities at people and threatened more violence. People fought back. They destroyed his excavator, chased him and the police out of the park, scavenged the good bits from the truck and burned the rest.

Encouraged by the exuberance of the morning’s win, my band played later that night. As a band, we are situated in realistic grief for our apocalyptic era, but we know that we can still fight for a freer future. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more grounded than when I took the stage that night. My goal was to portray the desperate reality: that to defend the forest, everyone has to fight. We can no longer be idle spectators of the state’s capitalist war on our bodies and our futures. Watching everyone move together in front of the stage, I felt a release of hopelessness. I felt the creative force of bodies moving and breathing together. There, we shaped a brief temporality, an energy that will live forever in us and in the forest as long as it stands.

During our set, I read this excerpt from Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters:

Revolutionary Letter #34

[…]

hey man, let’s make a revolution, let’s
turn off the power, turn on the
stars at night, put metal
back in the earth, or at least not take it out
anymore, make lots of guitars and flutes, teach the chicks
how to heal with herbs, let’s learn
to live with each other in a smaller space, and build
hogans, and domes and teepees all over the place
BLOW UP THE PETROLEUM LINES, make the cars
into flower pots or sculptures or live
in the bigger ones, why not?

Revolutionary Letter #35

rise up, my
brothers, do not
bow your heads any longer, or pray
except to the spirit you waken, the
spirit you bring to birth, it
never was on earth, rise up, do not
droop, smoking hash or opium, dreaming sweetness, perhaps
there will be time for that, on the long beaches
lying in love with the few of us who are left, but now
the earth cries out for aid, our brothers
and sisters set aside their childhoods, prepare
to fight, what choice have we but join them, in their hands
rests the survival of the very planet, the health
of the solar system, for we are one
with the stars, and the spirit we forge
they wait for, Christ, Buddha, Krishna
Paracelsus, had but a taste, we must reclaim
the planet, re-occupy
this ground
the peace we seek was never seen before, the earth
BELONGS, at last, TO THE LIVING

Appendix: (Not) a Music Festival

The following text was distributed on a flier during the fourth week of action in the Atlanta Forest.

This Is Not a Music Festival

…because we are not here as consumers or as mere spectators. This is not another photo op, another “networking opportunity.” We are here because our need for a free forest, culture, and existence can’t be crushed by the police, nor can it be sold back to us as an image in an uninspired Hollywood rip-off.

In a cave called Divje Babe, located in present-day Slovenia, archeologists have recently discovered a 60,000 year old flute. The human need for music has been with us since the very beginning. We are here to affirm that this deep and timeless desire, which has survived an Ice Age, the rise of empires and states, the advent of borders; slavery, war, famine, and Holocausts, is an important part of the current struggle.

This movement is not just about a piece of land. It is not being fought between the police and their goons on one hand and some activists and their friends on the other. We are witnessing the collision of two competing ideas of life and the future.

If they win, they will pollute all of the rivers, destroy all of the forests, pave over everything beautiful, and they will use the police to assure unlimited profits as our civilization chokes out its dying breaths.

If we win: human needs will be measured against the imagination, against our collective ambitions and dreams, not held hostage by a system of artificial scarcity and waste. Our communities will not be held together by their ability to kill and maim enemies or heretics. They will be held together by music, and the ability to generate common luxuries.

So let’s not say, “Oh, THEY don’t really care about the struggle, they are only here for the party,” or, “This is not about music and festivals and all of that crap, this is about serious politics and organizing.” Instead, let’s say the truth; this is only a glimpse of what we could give one another if we manage to outlive the oil-based economics of the current world system. The emancipation of the senses, the free development of the imagination and the passions: this is precisely what we are fighting for.

No cop city, no Hollywood dystopia!

Terra Incognita: A Travel Zine in Portuguese : Reports on Two CrimethInc. Tours in the So-Called Americas

2022-08-08T19:51:18Z

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.

Click the image to download the PDF.

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.

Click the image to download the PDF.

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.

Click the image to download the PDF.

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!

Click the image to download the PDF.

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.

Anarchist Resistance in Trump Era - Part 1/2.

Anarchist Resistance in Trump Era - Part 2/2.

From Democracy to Freedom - Part 1/2.

From Democracy to Freedom - Part 2/2.

"Addicted to Tear Gas": The Gezi Resistance, June 2013 : Looking Back on a High Point of Resistance in Turkey

2022-06-20T16:31:04Z

Early on May 28, 2013, a bulldozer arrived in Gezi Park, at the center of Istanbul, and began uprooting trees. Thousands flocked to the park in response, clashing with the police and catalyzing a movement that spread around the country in defiance of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Today, as Erdoğan takes advantage of Turkey’s current leverage within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to plan another invasion of Syria, it is important to remember that he had to suppress powerful social movements in Turkey in order to cement control. Such social movements still represent our best hope for peace and social change—in Turkey, Syria, and all around the world.

The following text originally appeared in Rolling Thunder in early 2014. The author has added an introduction penned this week. For more on Turkey, you could start by reading about the background of Kurdish resistance or the roots of Turkish fascism.

The Gezi Park uprising, June 2013.

Introduction: Looking Back on the Gezi Uprising from 2022

The memory of Gezi is vivid and fresh. It’s as if the barricades went up just last month, not nine years ago. I suppose that’s how you can distinguish a truly historical moment from ordinary run-of-the-mill moments.

What started as a last-ditch effort to protect a public park in the heart of Istanbul accelerated rapidly into an uprising that spread throughout the country, becoming the most widespread and largest movement Turkey had ever seen. From its practices within the occupied park to the humor scribbled on every building, Gezi was unique, a dream realized for any anarchist or leftist radical.

Although the memory is fresh, it is punishingly bittersweet. Looking back on the joy and hope we felt in the streets that June, I wonder—was it naiveté or optimism of the will that led millions to chant “This is only the beginning”?

In hindsight, it was indeed a beginning. But it was not the beginning of the liberation we tried to bring about. Instead, it was followed by a series of counter-revolutionary measures against everything that Gezi stood for.

How much counter-revolution can you fit into a decade? Let’s look at the five fronts on which the reaction has advanced in Turkey since 2013:

1. Consolidation of Power

Gezi was one of many factors that precipitated a falling-out between the two factions within the Turkish brand of islamic neoliberalism, identified with the figureheads Tayyip Erdoğan and Fethullah Gülen. After the rift between them widened, the Gülenist cadres within the armed forces launched an unsuccessful coup attempt against Erdoğan on July 15, 2016. The fallout from this rift between those in power has reverberated throughout Turkey. Erdoğan’s counter-attack was comprehensive; he took advantage of the coup attempt to arrest and imprison all of his opponents, including many of the actors within Gezi. Those who have avoided imprisonment have been blacklisted, lost their employment, and became public targets via the throughly AKP-controlled media channels.

2. Targeting Solidarity between the Kurdish Movement and the Turkish Left

The Gezi uprising was a rare moment—perhaps the only one in living memory—when you could see a Turkish nationalist and a PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party] supporter fighting on the same side of the barricades against a common enemy. The AKP regime rightly identified this as a threat to its existence; arguably, it could threaten the existence of the Turkish state-building project as a whole. The AKP has attacked this solidarity with extreme violence and repression while intensifying the war against the Kurdish movement in Turkey and Syria and also, recently, in Iraq. For now, the prospect of solidarity between the Turkish left and the Kurdish liberation movement appears distant. Peace caravans and demonstrations organized in solidarity with Rojava were bombed by Islamist mercenaries under the observation of Turkish intelligence services. The leaders of the HDP (Peoples’ Democratic Party), a project explicitly aimed at establishing bonds between the the Kurdish liberation movement and the Turkish left, have been thrown in jail along with thousands of their members. The complete suppression of the HDP is almost a foregone conclusion at this point, the date of it to be determined by Erdoğan’s political calculations.

3. Wealth Transfer

Gezi’s implicit demands were the removal of Erdoğan and his AKP regime—but at the onset, the politics that drove the defense of the park were shaped by a demand for “the right to the city.” According to some figures, the privatization overseen during the AKP regime amounts to 62 billion dollars and the public land that was sold comprises 75,000 acres. The plunder of public space and resources has accelerated over the past decade as privatization and land development continue to run rampant. Over the past five years, the Turkish lira has lost 75% of its value against the dollar, with the pace accelerating to a loss of 44% last year. Estimates of inflation range between 25% and 70% depending on who is crunching the numbers. Any way you look at it, the currency is at the edge of collapse at the expense of working people. One strategy of survival is to maintain loyalty to the AKP to secure gainful employment and skim off as much as possible. At the top, the AKP cadre and large holding firms close to them have been adding to their fortunes by transferring any remaining wealth to their pockets.

4. Restructuring State Institutions, Intensifying Repression

Alongside the post-coup purges, Erdoğan has been restructuring state institutions including the universities, the governance of charitable organizations, and—most crucially—the judicial system in order to ensure that they all do his bidding. The latest fruits of this restructuring are the convictions of the alleged organizers of the Gezi after a lengthy show trial. Eight people have been handed sentences ranging from 18 years to life for supposedly organizing the Gezi uprising. For those of us who lived through the spontaneous movement that erupted in Gezi, this is a laughable claim: it was a festival of resistance, a carnival of liberation exceeding anything anyone could have organized. Today, it is nearly impossible to even have a peaceful march in Turkey without the police immediately surrounding, beating, and arresting you. The only radical constituent of the Gezi movement that is still able to wield power in the streets is the women’s movement, with their annual March 8 marches and efforts to organize against patriarchal violence.

5. Paramilitary Formations

The AKP’s involvement in Syria has enabled it to form tight links with a variety of jihadist organizations. They have been training and arming groups like al-Nusra, hybridizing them with their homegrown equivalents and opening up Turkey as a safe haven for Islamists. Of course, these favors will be called in when the time comes. The aforementioned suicide bombings and the various paramilitary formations operating in Kurdistan offer an indication of what that might look like. The existence of these armed groups melding Turkish nationalism with Islamism and overlapping with the military and police represents a real threat to all stripes of the Turkish opposition, from revolutionaries to liberal democrats. Even rumors that the paramilitaries might take action have a chilling effect on those attempting to organize against the AKP and Erdoğan.

Gezi Park, seen from above.

Today, we are waiting on the next presidential election—an election that many of us are counting on as what might be the last chance to get rid of Erdoğan, an election in which the HDP and its sympathizers will once again act as the decisive bloc. It feels momentous, and Erdoğan is indeed losing strength as some members of his cadre jump ship one after another. Yet despite the importance of this upcoming vote—the actual date of which remains to be determined—this is all strangely familiar.

In fact, we’ve been here before. For the past ten years, there has always been an election on the horizon that people hope will deal a death blow to Erdoğan. Since Gezi, there have been no less than six of these elections, ranging from a referendum to presidential, parliamentary, and mayoral elections. Some of them were repeated until the “correct” result was delivered. Perhaps this is the counter-revolutionary maneuver that is the most painful. The spirit of direct action and prefigurative politics has been crushed through Erdoğan’s shrewd consolidation of power and brutal repression—leaving us to put all our hope into electoral politics. Once we were fighting for the beginning of a revolution; now we are fighting for the end of our despair.

Of course, no-one saw the Gezi uprising coming. In retrospect, it shared common threads with the momentum and tactics that produced the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, the plaza occupations in Spain and Greece, and the Occupy movement in the United States—but at the time, from where we were standing, it took us by surprise. Similarly, many of the ominous developments we see in Turkey are variations on themes that we also see playing out in Russia, the United States, and elsewhere around the world. As internationalists, we must continue to learn from each other’s struggles and tactics and remember that solidarity is our most powerful weapon against the disease of nationalism.

Almost a decade on, as another wave of unrest slowly sweeps back and forth from one side of the planet to the other, the Gezi uprising can serve as a reference point for the high-water mark of the previous wave of rebellion. It might also inform us as to what it will take to surpass it.

One lesson: you might unexpectedly find yourself at the beginning of something momentous. The more prepared you are for that moment, the more likely it will be that you will be able to help shape what that something will become.

June 11, 2013, Taksim Square. “In Seattle, we wrote the legal number on our arms in marker to call a lawyer if we were arrested. In Istanbul, people wrote their blood types on their arms. I hear in Egypt, they just write their names.”

“Addicted to Tear Gas”: The Gezi Resistance

The remainder of this text was completed at the beginning of 2014. For a day-by-day account of the uprising, start here.

Timeline

May 27 – Bulldozers arrive at Gezi Park to remove a few trees as part of the government’s development of Taksim Square. A few dozen friends respond immediately and stop the trees from being removed, starting an encampment that grows tenfold in each day that follows.

The pepper spraying of the woman in the red dress on May 28 produced an iconic image of the resistance, which spread through social media.

May 31 – Having been brutally evicted from the park by riot police, a few hundred people attempt to hold a press conference at Taksim Square but are attacked with water cannons. Social media is buzzing with news of the attack. The neighborhoods around the square explode in spontaneous revolt; street fighting continues until early morning.

June 1 – The Gezi Resistance recaptures the square and the park from the police and starts to set up an occupation; thousands arrive with tents in tow. The clashes spread around Istanbul and Turkey as people march in solidarity with those defending Gezi Park.

June 8-9 – The neighborhoods around the square have been totally transformed by graffiti and barricades, while an autonomous commune takes shape within the park. On June 8, fans from the three major soccer clubs of Istanbul converge on the square for a dramatic show of force. They have put aside previous hostilities towards each other, becoming the principal fighting force against the police, especially the fan club of Besiktas, Carşı. On June 9, there is a much larger demonstration of hundreds of thousands, this time more leftist in character. People claim this is the largest crowd the square has ever seen.

June 11 – The police launch an operation at 7 am to take back the square. Fierce clashes continue into the night, but ultimately the police hold the square.

The evening of the police operation to clear the square, June 11. A call was put out to converge on the square. While the numbers were at their highest, the police launched a barrage of tear gas. It was a miracle that another fatal stampede didn’t occur, reprising the tragedy of 1977.

June 15-16 – Having occupied the square for the past four days, the police use it to stage the eviction of Gezi park at 7 pm. The park is quickly cleared, but Istanbul explodes as the city tries to make its way to Taksim. Demonstrators cross the Bosporus bridge for the second time in two weeks. The fighting goes on well into the next day.

June 16 – Prime Minister Erdoğan makes his appearance at a massive rally in Istanbul in the style of a conqueror while clashes still continue across the city. He continues to defame, insult, and belittle those in the street.

June 18 – Through the initiative of Carşı, forums begin to take place in dozens of parks in different neighborhoods around the city. They are local in flavor, emphasizing various issues that impact the neighborhoods.

June 30 – The Gay Pride march is larger than it has ever been, with 50,000 attending. It is as much a march for the Gezi Resistance as for the LGBT community in Istanbul, pointing to the convergence of many struggles through Gezi.

July 8 – The beginning of Ramadan, the month of fasting for Muslims. The Anti-Capitalist Muslims mark the month by organizing people’s iftars, the breaking of the fast at sunset, in public places on newspapers spread on the ground.

Some of the Participants

Carşı

Carşı is the main fan club of the football team Beşiktaş, with a 30-year legacy behind them. Despite having the Circle A in their logo (previous versions also carried a hammer and sickle), they do not identify as anarchists; the circle A simply represents their “rebel spirit.” Carşı defines itself as apolitical in the sense that it does not support any political party or ideology, yet they have a history of participating in May Day and anti-war demonstrations and opening political banners in their stadium. One of their main slogans is “CARŞI: Against everything, including itself!” Carşı gained a lot of respect during the resistance both for their bravery in street fighting and by providing a space for the soccer fans of all three major Istanbul clubs to unite against the police, putting aside their previous mutual hostility.

On June 8, fans from the three main clubs in Istanbul converged on Taksim Square for a celebratory show of force.

Anarchists

Anarchists were integral to the Gezi Resistance, providing the forms of prefigurative politics that shaped the commune in the park and participating at the forefront in fighting the police. Beyond the smaller crews, the most organized anarchist group was DAF—Revolutionary Anarchist Action¹—although the sudden emergence of the movement shocked them as much as everyone else. They set up their space right at the entrance with the Anti-Capitalist Muslims on one side and the Kurdish BDP and PKK on the other. Running three social spaces in Istanbul, they were able to provide logistical support in self-organization and also organized workshops and events on the anarchist struggle worldwide.

LGBT Blok

The LGBT community outdid itself at every step as one of the shining constituents of the Gezi Resistance. They held down a section of the occupation at the park and fought on the barricades during some of the most crucial battles, blowing minds in a traditionally macho and homophobic society where queer people are regarded as passive and cowardly despite every example to the contrary. The annual Pride week occurred right after the eviction of the park and served an important role in keeping people in the streets. The Pride March drew more people than ever before: the first example of how movements in Turkey can count on much larger numbers and energy thanks to Gezi.

Anti-Capitalist Muslims

With their slogan “Allah, Bread, Justice,” the Anti-Capitalist Muslims challenged both the Islamist neoliberalism of the AKP and the conservative secularism of some within the Gezi Resistance. They emerged during the May Day celebrations of 2012, drawing on a current of thought leading back to the Iranian Islamic Scholar Ali Şeriati. They organized Friday prayers and other Islamic celebrations at the park in an effort to combat the “pious vs. sinful” polarization pushed by Erdoğan. One of their most successful initiatives occurred at the onset of Ramadan, the month of fasting, which began a few weeks after the eviction of Gezi. As a response to the government-sponsored lavish feasts to break the fast at sundown, they organized “earth tables.” Throughout the month of Ramadan thousands of people around the country broke their fast together upon newspapers on the ground, sometimes directly in front of water cannons.

Anti-Capitalist Muslims holding Friday prayers at Gezi Park.

Leftist Unions

DISK and KESK are the two trade union confederations on the left that emerged from the struggles of the 1970s and ’80s. DISK was the main organizer behind the 1977 May Day demonstration in Taksim Square that became the site of a paramilitary massacre. Both confederations supported the Gezi Resistance, attempting to supplement it with calls for strikes. Although two such strikes did happen during the uprising, they were completely ineffective in sabotaging the national economy; once again showing the powerlessness of traditional-form trade unions in the modern class-composition landscape.

Müşterekler (Our Commons)

An umbrella group representing various city-based struggles in Istanbul. Many of their members belong to a budding anti-authoritarian Left scene involved in immigrant rights defense, ecological struggles, and fighting the enclosure of the city. They were involved in defending Gezi Park from development long before the struggle blew up, and were the most organized logistical group within the park due to their already extensive network among those interested in right-to-the-city activism. They attempted to push the movement further by reclaiming a derelict parcel of land within the barricaded zone. Like many other groups, they emerged from June 2013 much stronger, with new projects including a weekly news bulletin and a pirate radio station, Gezi Radio (www.geziradyo.org).

A map of the occupation of Gezi Park.

A map of central Istanbul, with the Bosphorus to the east.

Addicted to Tear Gas

I look around and can’t fathom what has become of this place, of the streets where I grew up. Where I went on my first date and went to my first protest, where I had my first drink sitting on the curb, where my friends and I periodically got into trouble. It was all on these streets of Beyoğlu. Now, we are thousands and thousands taunting the police in unison, chanting for them to gas us so we can get going.

And finally it arrives: the canisters are flying in one after another. We are so used to it by now that it is almost a relief to smell the gas; our first reaction is to cheer the arrival of the burning sensation. There’s no panic and no one is running. We make a slow retreat of a few dozen meters before the materials to construct the first barricade of the evening are brought to the forefront. This is the beginning of a two-day battle to take back the square. We’ve all lost count, but probably the fifth or sixth such battle since the end of May.

The AKP government, with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at its helm, took power in Turkey ten years ago and embarked upon itslong-term project of transforming the country into an exemplary Islamic neoliberal stronghold. The latest stage of Sultan Erdoğan’s vision has been a concerted attack on Istanbul through a number of urban transformation projects that would enclose the remaining public spaces in the city. One of these was to destroy Gezi Park to make way for a commercial shopping complex in the heart of the city, Taksim Square, effectively erasing the long history and culture associated with that space.

Two months prior, in April, there were only about 300 of us at Gezi as part of a day-long festival to fight the development of the park. At that time, my comrades and I acknowledged that we were in yet another losing fight, after having been through so many. There was some energy at the festival, but we were mostly just the usual suspects. It was hard not to be cynical. At least we made a stand, we told ourselves; hopefully history will remember that some were opposed to what Istanbul was slated to become. It was just as depressing as every previous moment of the five years of AKP rule. It felt like there was no space to move, even to breathe, as Erdoğan consolidated his grip on our lives.

Although at home it felt more and more claustrophobic, the pundits of politics and economy observing from afar kept glorifying the successes of the Turkish miracle. “More than 10% annual growth rate!” “Look at Greece and Spain, Turkey is doing amazing!” Yes, Turkey has been spared the austerity measures that have been implemented in countries such as Portugal, Spain, and Greece, but this has been the result of another crisis-fighting strategy: extreme urban development through the enclosure of the city. Although initially hit by the financial crisis in 2008, the AKP government was able to keep full fiscal blowout at bay by attracting foreign liquid capital in a scheme intrinsically tied to urban development projects such as the destruction of Gezi Park.

As I observed the hundreds of thousands around me in Taksim Square, I couldn’t help imagining that this might be the crucial turn from the austerity riots of the past years. Gezi was—at least in part—an uprising against the enclosure of the city in a time of an economic boom; it was not a protest demanding a return to the Keynesian dream. That said, the clock is ticking on the Turkish economy; the foreign debt holders will come knocking on the door soon. One can only hope that a population having struggled during boom-time development won’t settle for a return to liquidity once a financial crisis brings about austerity.

Burnt media vans form a makeshift barricade in front of the Ataturk Cultural Center, draped in the banners of leftist organizations and other groups.

Recovering from Left Trauma

Taksim Square is a heavy place for my parents’ generation. My uncles and aunts have told me the story of the Taksim Square massacre on May Day 1977, when snipers on rooftops and the ensuing panic killed 34 people. Since then, Taksim Square has been the hotly contested zone of May Day celebrations; many of the demonstrations of the past five years have become street battles to take the square. Despite the ritualistic nature of these protests, they were instrumental in injecting life into a Left that had found itself in a rut, powerless.

At first, my relatives hadn’t wanted to talk about the old militant student movement, though they had been integral to it. They claimed to have moved on from that period of their lives. But it was clear to me that rather than having moved on or even sold out, they had been crushed by the successive military coups of 1971 and 1980. Thousands of leftist students were rounded up, imprisoned, and tortured by the military regimes. In addition to dozens of extrajudicial paramilitary killings, military tribunals hanged more than 50 people. The trauma of the iron fist still hangs over the society in Turkey and has been blamed for the “apolitical” culture of my generation, those born in the 1980s and ’90s.

Taksim Square on May Day 1977, the day of the massacre of 34 people.

Cursed by what preceded it, this apolitical generation created as if out of thin air the most defiant, diffuse, and long-lasting popular uprising in the history of the country. Older leftists are still trying to wrap their heads around this. The joyful rebellion did not fit into their stale frameworks; it did not compute with their Trotskys and Lenins.

This was the beauty of the Gezi resistance. That nobody saw it coming. Not one person or group in Turkey can claim with a straight face that they predicted what transpired at the end of May and into June. The euphoria that dominated the streets of Istanbul had a lot to dowith the unexpectedness of the revolt. Millions of people had their wildest wishes fulfilled overnight as if by a magical insurrectionary genie. Isolation and depression evaporated as people found each other in the tear gas.

Barricade number 4 on Inonu Caddesi, with the Bosporus Strait dividing Europe from Asia in the background. This barricade was named for Abdullah Cömert, killed on June 3 by a tear gas canister shot at his head in the southeastern city of Hatay.

Commune

Gezi Park was a beautiful commune for almost two weeks. Spontaneity and autonomy were the rules of the game; after the park was retaken, the first tents went up with the initiative of small groups of friends. The whole park rapidly filled with tents to sleep in and dozens of larger structures hosting almost every single leftist or activist group. Mutual aid was the order of this utopia. Starry-eyed old-timers and fresh militants were living a dream come true. Leaving their normal existence behind for the time being, people who had never imagined a world without police were impressed to discover a more harmonious society in the absence of the state.

German pianist David Martello brought his piano to the barricades on June 12, 2013, providing inspiration and encouragement to all who were tensely awaiting the next police attack.

The encampment at Gezi Park bore some similarities to the experience of Occupy in the US. It was an experiment in self-organization: free stores (called Revolutionary Markets), libraries, a permaculture space, workshops, multiple kitchens, a medic tent, media production zones, and cultural events were part and parcel of the space. Yet in other respects, it was totally different from Occupy.

For example, there were no general assemblies or decision-making processes apart from those organized by the constituents of the camp in their smaller affinity or organizational groups. The central podium was an ongoing open-mic where people were free to speak as they pleased and some larger concerts and film screenings took place.

A library in Gezi Park during the occupation.

Despite the absence of a centralized decision-making body, the camp was home to many different organizations in addition to the individuals and groups of friends who were also there. The occupation resembled an open-air fair of Left, revolutionary, and identity-based groups. Each group eventually carved out a little space where members would camp and congregate.

This was especially the case while the square itself was occupied. Almost every far-left group opened up a tent with their flags flying on top. At one end of the square looms the Atatürk Cultural Center, which was adorned with dozens of banners representing many of the same groups camped out in the square and the park. What a slap in the face this must have been for Erdoğan, who had unleashed police violence for years every May Day to prevent rallies of a few hours. This surreal landscape was refreshing in that it showed a rare moment of unity among groups that evolved through sectarian split after split, stretching back to Turkey’s militant-leftist 1970s. However, it was dismaying that the pissing contest between organizations promoting their names and logos continued even in these circumstances.

The Gezi occupation also differed from Occupy in class composition. While in the US, many of the occupations became de facto homeless encampments, this was not the case in Istanbul. Perhaps because the occupation broke out at the end of the school year, during the day the occupiers were mainly people in their 20s—a budding white-collar workforce slated for the malls and business plazas of AKP’s future. This changed at the end of each workday when thousands of older people passed through until the late hours of the evening.

Critiques have been leveled at the Gezi Resistance for being too nationalistic in tone. While this was partly true at the onset of the uprising, it was quickly transformed by the participation of Kurdish groups. The Peace andDemocracy Party (BDP), the political party of the Kurdish struggle, claimed the space to the left of the entrance. Kurdish youth raised the flag of the PKK and portraits of their leader Abdullah Öcalan, imprisoned in a Turkish island prison since 1999. For those who remembered the bloody 1990s, when the majority of the 35,000 deaths from the civil war occurred, it was surreal to see the face of public enemy number one flying on flags over Taksim square. Up until recently, politicians would not even dare speak Öcalan’s name in public, instead referring to him as the “head of the terrorists.”

Every night, the commune transformed into a massive party and celebration. Huge circular halay dances with hundreds of Kurds singing their songs of liberation occurred at the entrance; deeper inside the park, participants consumed copious amounts of alcohol. This public drunkenness expressed defiance of the AKP and its policies of piety, but it also generated controversy, as some from the encampment wanted a more serious and less intoxicated resistance and others thought it inappropriate to be partying while comrades were still fighting the police in Ankara and elsewhere in Turkey—even in other Istanbul neighborhoods such as Gazi.

“Freedom for the headscarf and for alcohol!”

During the taking of the square and the weeks that followed, the air was thick with the excitement of a city in resistance. Indeed, “resistance” became the assumed name for what was going on; those on the streets saw themselves as part of a resistance movement against the AKP, its vision for Turkey, and its police state. This resistance was expressed in the creative energy, wit, and humor unleashed upon the walls of Istanbul. The liberated zone was visually transformed, thanks in part to street vendors who seamlessly switched from selling their usual fare of sunglasses, clothes, and tourist schwag to spray paint, helmets, and gas masks.

Wall space ran out; you had to wander around searching for a place to throw up your most recent witty slogan.Istanbul jam-packed the streets with obscure references to popular culture, internet memes, and nose-thumbing at the government. Word plays celebrated the ubiquitous tear gas:“ Does it come in strawberry?” Erdoğan’s statements were flung back at him, such as when he said each woman should bear three children: “I’m gonna make three kids and have them jump you.” Another hilarious quip waited around every corner: “Tayyip Winter is Coming,”² “We’re gonna destroy the government and build a mall in its place,” “Incredible Halk,”³ “You weren’t gonna ban that last beer,”⁴ “Everyday I’m Chapuling,”⁵ and on and on for kilometers.

“Until you run out of gray paint!”

The takeover was so complete that even some of the non-sympathetic business establishments had to comply or suffer mob justice. One of the owners of a döner kebab stand at the entrance of Istiklal Avenue off of Taksim Square made the mistake of posting on Facebook about the “dogs” who had taken over and his desire to live in a Muslim country. His restaurant was reduced to rubble moments after and the board of his company had to fire him. Other businesses that did not demonstrate solidarity with the resistance were repeatedly pressured and taunted. Even Starbucks Turkey, having received some heat for not assisting protestors, had to issue a press statement expressing that it was with the resistance and would always provide support.

One of the owners of a döner kebab stand at the entrance of Istiklal Avenue off of Taksim Square made the mistake of posting on Facebook about the “dogs” who had taken over and his desire to live in a Muslim country. His restaurant was reduced to rubble moments after and the board of his company had to fire him.

The fact that many from the bourgeoisie supported the uprising underscores the central contradiction of the movement. Members of the old-guard secular and liberal bourgeoisie appeared to embrace the Gezi Movement—most notably the Koç Group, one of the few family brand-name dynasties in Turkey. They went as far as providing infrastructural support by opening up their franchise of the Hyatt alongside the park to serve as a makeshift hospital. Mobile telephone providers brought cell phone transmission vans behind the barricades in orderto facilitate the ever-increasing traffic of text messages and tweets. Ironically, they had to hang banners reading “This vehicle is here so that you have reception” as insurance against arson.

How could the interests of a faction of the bourgeoisie converge with those wanting to stop development in Istanbul? This was a product of an intra-ruling-class conflict that had been brewing for years between green (Islamic) capital, under Erdoğan’s favoritism and facilitation, and the old-guard secular capitalist class that had been sidelined and saw the Gezi uprising as an opportunity. It also reflected the desire to be part of a movement to preserve the individual freedoms and rights of modernity, recently under attack by the Islam-tinted neoliberalism of the AKP. The fact that a part of the ruling class of Turkey supported the Gezi movement points to its success at becoming all-encompassing and also its failure to become an anti-capitalist force, despite the massive number of anti-capitalists involved.

“Tayyip [Erdoğan] blocked us on Facebook!”

Barricades

All of this transpired behind dozens of barricades set up around the liberated zone of Taksim and the park. On one of the main avenues leading into the square, Inönü Avenue, there were 15 separate barricades constructed from bricks, construction debris, busses, cars, rebar cemented down to point outwards, trash containers, and everything else. Constructed from materials passed hand-to-hand by human chains of fifty or more people, these barricades stood many meters high.

As in other cities where barricades have stood consistently, such as Oaxaca where in 2006, they were maintained for months, the barricades developed their own rebel culture. Crews of mostly younger kids or leftist militant youth claimed barricades for their own with a sense of pride and conviction. Little tents and squatted spaces storing rocks and bottles near certain barricades also provided shelter for their guardians to rest. These were the outliers, the barricades at the edge of the commune. The more central ones had been claimed with banners and flags in the leftist pissing contest.

Clearing the Square

I am woken up by a comrade who tells me that the police are in the square. I rush to get there. I run across the barricade of the Socialist Democratic Party (SDP) at the edge of the square, a few hundred meters from their offices. It’s a massive metal structure made of scaffoldings, concrete barriers, and other material scavenged from construction sites. Molotov cocktails are being tossed by a handful of people in front of the barricade, behind a shield that reads “SDP Public Order Enforcement.” From the higher vantage point of the park, hundreds of people are watching this unfold as if at a soccer match, cheering when a Molotov explodes on the advancing water cannon and booing when the cannon attempts to ram through the barricade. A few hours later, the media posts pictures of those tossing the firebombs and the twitter feeds light up with conspiracy theories about how they are actually police provocateurs. The evidence? A bulge beneath one of their belts—supposedly a radio or firearm.

This assumption takes hold like wildfire; in no time, even the international media is circulating it.

Leftist militant or police infiltrator? Many pacifists were quick to label those fighting back during the eviction of the square on June 11 as paid police provocateurs. None of these allegations proved true.

Those at the barricade eventually have to retreat into the SDP office, and 70 people are arrested in a raid. Among them is Ulaş Bayraktaroğlu, identified in pictures clearly as one of the main people throwing the Molotovs: he’s a former political prisoner from the state-invented Revolutionary Headquarters case, and a member of the central committee of the SDP. The police also show a handgun they say was found among other weapons in the offices. The conspiracy theorists update their stories. Despite their determination to remain in denial, the pacifists involved in the Gezi Resistance are confronted with the fact that this movement also includes bona fide leftist militants, some of whom are involved in armed factions. So much for the spin doctors and liberal intellectuals who want to frame Gezi as Turkey’s version of Occupy, who hurry to label those who fight back as provocateurs.

All day and into the night, there is intense street fighting in and around the square, while inside Gezi Park a strange tranquility reigns. The calm is occasionally interrupted by medics rushing the injured from the streets into the medical area. From time to time, the police launch a barrage of tear gas into the park; some put on their gas masks so they can continue their conversations, while others rush to extinguish the canisters. In the end, the square is left to the police. All in all, it feels like another normal day at Gezi.

Enclaves of Militancy

One evening, I go to the neighborhood of Gazi, a stronghold of DHKP-C (The Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party—Front) and other leftist urban guerillas. The DHKP-C has come to resemble a death cult of martyrdom in their use of suicide bombers. Despite their undeniable ability to assassinate police, in their communiqué of support for the Gezi Resistance they said that they would not launch any attacks until absolutely necessary, as they want to see the street-fighting movement mature without such interventions. Hats off to them.

The fighting never stopped in the neighborhood of Gazi even when the reclaimed Gezi Park resembled a massive party behind barricades. Although only 19 kilometers away, Gazi is much further in class terms from the more white-collar resistance in Gezi, and has its own history and culture of resistance. A slum dating to the ’60s, it was the destination of many refugees from the Kurdish civil war, and it has always been a strong enclave of the leftist Alevi population of Istanbul.

In 1995, a paramilitary drive-by attack on two cafés and a bakery left an elderly man dead before the attackers fled to the local police station. It was a provocation in the true sense, not the kind alleged by pacifists at Gezi. After the vehicle rushed to the police station, neighbors immediately gathered in front of it, only to be fired upon with high-caliber machine guns. Another person died on the spot and many others were wounded.

Gazi exploded. For four days, it was in open revolt, with battles against the police and the army. In the end, seventeen people were killed and the rebellion was brutally crushed, but it left a deep mark.

Some Greek comrades who go to Gazi looking for that Aegean solidarity in the flame of a bottle say that they have never seen such large Molotovs. Indeed, every evening a march starts up on the main street and becomes an urban war with fireworks, stones, slingshots, and Molotovs directed against the police and their armored vehicles, met by tear gas and a plethora of explosives and projectiles. People from the neighborhood tell me that at times both sides have also fired upon each other, but no one has caught a bullet yet.

At Gezi Park, the Gazi neighborhood has become a mythical land where superhero leftists wage war on the pigs. It’s distant enough to be an Other inspiring admiration. This reminds me of how US liberals love it when the Third World riots against corrupt governments, yet line up to protect the police from angry youth in their own cities. The sentiment in Turkey is not as bad as in the US though—how could it be? When the police attack Gezi, people fantasize about Gazi coming to the rescue. As usual, Twitter is the venue for rumors: “Gazi neighborhood is on the highway marching to Taksim!” “The police are totally fucked now that Gazi is coming,” but the superheroes never arrive en masse.

That is, not until the last attack on the park on Saturday June 15. That day, thousands of residents from Gazi walked on the highway at night and fought their way to Taksim, finally reaching the city center by morning. They joined in with those attempting to take back the square; but even with their help, in the end, we could not recapture the square for a second time.

Counter-Insurgency

Tension reigned after the police took Taksim square on June 11. Everybody was waiting for the inevitable final battle. It was clear that the police had taken the square in order to prepare a staging ground from which to take back Gezi Park. Walking around the encampment, you could feel the urgency. Some were collecting the most valuable things to be rescued in case of a raid; others were preparing, filling balloons with a panoply of fire accelerants. The counter-insurgency strategy of the state was in full force: Erdoğan and his cronies kept emphasizing that naïve young environmentalists were becoming pawns in the hands of leftist terrorists, and that those who were behind all this unrest were actually the “interest lobby”⁶ or “foreign agents.”

The government used outright lies to rile up its base against the Gezi Resistance. The day after the park was reclaimed for the commune, on June 1, the heaviest fighting occurred in Beşiktaş, as the soccer fan club Carşı tried to make its way up the hill to reach Taksim. They fought for hours in their own neighborhood, in one instance hijacking a massive bulldozer to charge the police lines. When it seemed like the police were on the verge of committing a massacre, hundreds of people fled into a nearby mosque seeking shelter. The muezzin, who sings the call for prayer, let people into the mosque and facilitated the formation of a makeshift clinic. Blood was oozing from multiple head injuries and many were vomiting from the tear gas.

This episode was brought up over and over again by the AKP and Erdoğan himself to illustrate the sinful nature of the resistance. They had entered a mosque with their shoes! They were drinking beer and having orgies! People running for their lives had entered the mosque with their shoes on, but all that transpired inside was a frantic effort to stanch bleeding wounds. Such lies were refuted even by the officials of the mosque itself and served only to infuriate those who were involved in the protests.

The mosque of Valide Sultan is turned into a makeshift medical center treating people injured on the street.

Erdoğan’s strategy was to polarize the country by defaming the Gezi Resistance. He was counting on his 50% electoral victory, emphasizing his democratic ascension to power. Erdoğan became such a defender of democracy that when he was at his mildest, he would encourage the resistance movement to meet him at the polls in the upcoming elections. The possibility that those reclaiming Gezi and Taksim Square could be done with both the military—the brutal guardians of secular democracy—and with democracy itself, which brought autocratic neo-Islamism to power, was beyond the comprehension of those in power in Turkey. Where the experiment in autonomous self-organization will lead the rebels of Turkey is still uncertain, but the circumstances in which the struggle emerged point to a critique of democracy itself.

Meanwhile, the government was reading from the counter-insurgency playbook page by page. The AKP met with self-appointed representatives of the movement to seek concessions and prepare a pretext of failed negotiations. The commune rejected such representation outright, holding autonomous forums at seven different areas of the park to discuss how to move forward. The park was cleared while these discussions were still in their initial stages.

Although there were no “naïve environmentalists” at Gezi, there was a degree of naïve trust that the negotiations with the government could at least delay the impending attack. Consequently, the final attack came when people least expected it. The police attacked on June 15, when the park was filled with its usual evening crowd of children and the elderly. They entered Gezi Park, destroying everything and brutally beating everyone in their way. The city exploded once again, as neighborhoods started to make their way towards Taksim to participate in a battle that would last for more than a day.

Fighting for the Commune

There was something odd about the water cannon that evening, during the eviction of Gezi Park. Instead of spraying at the fiercest members of the resistance at the front, the nozzle was directed to spray over everyone. There was no tear gas launched at that moment, yet the air was acidic, burning in our lungs. Were they using transparent tear gas? Was it some new crowd control weapon?

It became clear what was happening when we saw people running into sympathetic bars, furiously stripping off their clothes soaked by the water cannon to reveal that their whole bodies were bright red. Some were convulsing, trying desperately to rub anti-acid solutions all over their skin. The next morning, the newspapers published photos of the pigs loading jugs of pepper-spray into the water cannons. The initial pepper spraying of the woman in the red dress had produced an iconic image of the resistance, which spread through social media. With no sense of irony, the police were now dousing the entire population in pepper spray from the nozzle of the water cannon.

The barricade wars went on until the first hours of the morning. After a few hours of sleep, we were back facing the tear gas and ripping up cobblestones on Sıraselviler, one of the streets that lead to Taksim. It was the usual back and forth as we advanced toward the water cannons, only to be sprayed back to our original position behind the barricades. It was Father’s day; some people had hung a banner for our patriarch sultan, reading “Happy Father’s Day, Dear Tayyip.”

Finally, the police overcame our barricades and there was panic as they charged down the street arresting people. I had the keys to a nearby apartment, so I gathered a group of fugitives who seemed helpless and lost and herded them into it. Eleven people around their mid-20s flooded into the apartment with relief. Peeking out the window, we saw a manhunt on the streets—plainclothes police were sweeping up everyone they found. The fugitives hadn’t forgotten their manners; they clumsily took off their shoes at the door even though I insisted that it didn’t matter under the circumstances. I was reminded of Erdoğan railing against the infidels who didn’t take off their shoes when they went to have their orgy at the mosque.

It was a bit awkward, as none of us really knew each other; there seemed to be three or four different groups in the tiny apartment. Everyone was riled up and speaking frantically about the events of the day and the weeks past. Suddenly, I realized that some of them were nationalists; others were upset about people throwing rocks at the police. This was the spirit of the Gezi Resistance: finding yourself in the same space with people you never thought you had anything in common with. I was tempted to argue with them, but after all the tear gas I didn’t have it in me. Later I lamented that missed opportunity.

After the police left, we went back out into the street. It was 9 pm; as on every other night over the past three weeks, people were leaning out of their windows banging on pots and pans. Cars were honking; some residents started chants from their windows as the pot banging subsided: “Shoulder to shoulder against fascism!” “No liberation alone, either all together or none of us!”

Night had fallen. We began converging on Istiklal Avenue. Once we were a few thousand, we started marching toward the square with the conviction that it belonged to us. The police attacked with tear gas and water cannons. How many times can you experience the same sequence of events and still find joy in the face of it? A group of young and fearless street fighters headed to the front with one of those boxes of fireworks intended to be placed on the ground and watched from a safe distance. They lit it up and held it aimed at the closest water cannon, advancing slowly as bright colors exploded on the line of cops. The crowd behind them applauded wildly as we advanced to reinforce the growing barricade before setting it on fire.

The battle continued into the early morning hours until there were not enough of us left in the street. We returned home wondering what would happen the next day, and what would happen to Turkey in the future.

This is Only the Beginning

Once the police cleared the park, they continued by raiding the homes and offices of the best-known participants. The first raids were predictable: the state went to the addresses of leftist militants and groups, as it had for decades. Dozens of operations took place and many of their cadres were arrested. In addition, there were raids targeting the leaders of Carşı, the soccer fan club of Beşiktaş, as well as those who tweeted under their legal names about what was happening in the streets.

The euphoria of the Gezi resistance hasn’t evaporated yet. The stories are on everyone’s lips; it’s all people talk about in the cafés and bars of Istiklal. During Pride Week, I attended some of the events; the theme this year was resistance. Both the trans march and the main Pride march were bigger than they had ever been: 50,000 people adorned in rainbows in the face of a traditionally homophobic Turkish society. Friends commented that this was probably the second time that there were more straight than gay people in the Gay Pride march—the first being thirteen years ago, when there were only a few dozen people, most of them allies marching in solidarity.

At the onset of the rebellion, there had been instances when anti-women, anti-sex worker, and homophobic chants could be heard in the streets. Queers and feminists intervened in various ways when this took place; they succeeded in countering this manifestation of patriarchy in a transformative way.

The story goes that during the first days of the uprising, after the police were kicked out of Taksim and the square was reclaimed for the people and barricaded, there was a moment of calm. A delegation of Carşı members took advantage of this to pay a visit to the offices of one of the main LGBT organizations in Turkey. Like other rebel identities and leftist groups, this organization also had an office in the liberated zone of Beyoğlu from which it was providing crucial infrastructural support to the uprising. Carşı entered to offer an apology for their homophobic and sexist chants. They explained that this was what they had been taught by society, but now they understood their mistake. As a token to show the sincerity of their apology, they had brought a shield that had previously belonged to the riot police.

After the dust settled, I met up with a friend I’d made during the heady days of the commune, a student from Kurdistan attending Istanbul Technical University for an engineering degree. We talked about the peace process the AKP had been crafting with the PKK since the winter. He was extremely cynical about the politicking, seeing the Gezi Resistance as the true path to peace for the Kurdish struggle. We exchanged stories we’d heard about personal transformation during the uprising. He told me about the tensions between their BDP tent, with the flags of Öcalan, and some of the Turkish nationalist elements in the Gezi occupation. That argument had become a dialogue that continued, interspersed with battles with the police, throughout the events. Suddenly finding themselves on the receiving end of state violence and a media blackout, many Turks had to come to grips with the fact that their perceptions of the war in Kurdistan had been mediated by the same corporations that were silencing them now.

Sharing this space of resistance against a common enemy inspired a revolutionary reconciliation. Yet with summer lethargy taking over, the first manifestation of the Gezi Spirit came to an end. June had left five dead and hundreds with serious injuries, some in critical condition. Physical and figurative wounds needed healing. Although from afar, it might seem that things have died down since June, on the ground there is a tense anticipation of what is to come. One challenge for the resistance will be the upcoming election cycles: municipal elections in spring 2014, and general elections a year later. All shapes and sizes of political leeches are looking to co-opt the movement.

It is incredible how the sense of nausea, helplessness, and depression that had overtaken many in the face of the steamroller of the AKP has evaporated after Gezi. It is still an open question how the Gezi Resistance will develop in the future and whether or not it will be able to further the practices first developed behind the barricades. Although one cannot predict the course of the coming years, it is unquestionable that a genie has come out of the bottle and millions have found each other. This spirit is haunting Turkey and the worst nightmares of those in power; everyone knows that Gezi will have a lasting impact on social and political life in Turkey. The Gezi Resistance is prepared for the long haul. As we reminded each other in one of the most popular chants:

This is only the beginning. Continue the struggle!

People working together to build barricades.

Further Readng

Recently, DAF collapsed when it emerged that a couple at the center of the organization had been employing physical and emotional abuse towards members. ↩
A reference to the TV series Game of Thrones. ↩
The Incredible Hulk is detourned by replacing Hulk with Halk, the Turkish word for “the people.” ↩
The AKP has attacked the bustling street life in Beyoğlu by passing laws against alcohol consumption. ↩
One of Erdoğan’s initial remarks on the uprising was to call its participants çapulcu, looters or marauders. Participants assumed this name for themselves, proudly proclaiming that they were all çapulcus. ↩
We assume that Erdoğan meant to implicate the old-guard bourgeoisie with this epithet, but also to cultivate support among those who see interest as a sin in Islam. ↩

Steal Something from Work Day 2022 : Some Stories from the Old Days

2022-04-15T15:06:00Z

It’s that time of year again! This year, to observe Steal Something from Work Day, we present a handful of stories from workers who have turned the tables on their employers over the years. Enjoy reading and stay safe as you pull off your own Robin Hood operations.

As usual, you can read a wide array of agitprop, theory, and personal narratives on the Steal Something from Work Day website. This year, we welcome new Steal Something from Work Day initiatives in Dutch and Hebrew.

The Good Old Days

Sometime in the 1990s, my friend from high school was working at a gigantic and direly evil corporate department store. One day, she injured her hand in the box crusher. Far from giving her any paid time off or workmen’s compensation or anything of the sort, her employer told her in so many words to shut up and get back to work if she wanted to keep her job. This angered my friend, whose family was not well off and who needed the income.

My friend called me up one day and said, “I’ve got a plan. I’m certain that it will work.”

Before I go any further, I would like to say that in general, I do not make a practice of incriminating myself or others, but that the statute of limitations pertaining to this affair has long since expired. Furthermore, I would like to stress that this particular caper would never work now. This story takes place before CCTV was widely in use, before most transactions were done via credit or debit card. Back then, payment with cash or check was much more common. At the time, this scheme was fairly risky. In 2022, it would be a certain trip to jail. Anyone currently in a similar situation will have to develop other techniques.

“OK,” she said. “At the start of the semester, the university always sends people into my store to make bulk purchases. They don’t give them cash. They come to the register and request this form where they fill out the account information for the order. I memorized it. So, this is all we have to do. We’ll think of everything we could possibly want that will fit in a shopping cart. You come in while I’m working and fill that cart to the brim. Come to my register and ask me for one of those forms. Fill it out correctly. I’ll ring everything up like normal, and you can stroll right out the door. Eventually, the university will get the bill. They’ll say, ‘Hell no, we didn’t order any of this bullshit,’ and the store will take the loss. That’s what they get for fucking up my hand. If they ever try to question me, I’ll say ‘Hell if I know what the problem is, I double-check all the account information any time I ring those orders up, what else do you want me to do?’”

Adding to the finesse of this scheme was the fact that my friend and I were of different racial and subcultural backgrounds, which if anything may have been more relevant in our town back then than it would be today. Looking at us in line at a store, most people probably would not have immediately assumed that we knew each other. This is one of the benefits of going to public school.

“You’re a goddamn genius,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

So we did. My friend’s first request was that she wanted the nicest fishing pole in the store. We pulled the plan off without a hitch!

In retrospect, the wise thing to do at this point would have been to call that a win and quit while we were ahead. That is not what we did. Instead, we ran this caper several more times over the next few months. We both put new stereos in our cars. It got to the point where neither of us really even wanted anything else that they were selling at that store.

By this time, it was starting to get cold. We had another idea.

“You know who probably could use some of this shit?”

We started ringing up large piles of hats, gloves, thermals, socks, and nice warm sweaters, which I would merrily take down to Food Not Bombs at the park on Saturdays. Many of the people who would gather in the park had no houses to sleep in and little access to resources. They were accustomed to seeing us show up with buckets of vaguely edible vegetarian slop; they know that we weren’t working with a tremendous amount of access to resources ourselves. It was easy enough for them to put two and two together when we suddenly started unloading truckloads of brand-new winter clothes.

“Damn, this shit is stolen, isn’t it?” people would ask me.

“Shit, I don’t know, probably,” I would say. “This guy keeps donating it to us.”

“Well, I don’t give a damn. Yeah, I’ll take some of those gloves. It’s colder than a motherfucker out here.”

In retrospect, we were pushing the boundaries of what was advisable even during the analog era. But the company never caught on! Eventually, we decided to lay off for a while. Some time later, my friend got into a heated argument about unrelated matters with her supervisor, who fired her. End of story.

Years later, my friend and I reconnected to discuss our youthful artistry one last time.

“Damn, that shit was glorious,” she said. “But we got lucky.”

Breakfast and Lunch

I got the café I worked at to cater a community kids’ lunch. I just told my boss that I had already told them and everyone in the café that we would donate the food. When the organizer called my boss about it, he felt too embarrassed to say no, so we got a sandwich, fruit, and milk for each child.

I also used to steal food from work every week to give to a kids’ breakfast program. I would add some stuff to the “day-olds” that I was told I absolutely could never give away. I put it out back by the dumpster like I was going to throw it out, and I would simply take it to my car at the end of my shift.

It was so much food that the kids could never eat it all. I often had to take leftovers to the houseless camp.

The Great Vegan Yogurt Heist

By CrimethInc. operative Gregorious

Of all those who steal from work, have stolen from work, or might steal from work, I am possibly the worst at it of anyone in history. Do not do as I do, but be sure to do as I say.

When I was in high school, I worked at a small health food store in a sleepy little New England town. The job was part time, every week for a few hours. Still, the hours I spent there weren’t worth the money. After only a couple weeks, I started to concoct a plan.

I had a friend at the time with whom I was prone to getting into trouble, so I called him and let him know that I wanted to cast him in a starring role in a scheme involving theft and chaos. I knew that the cooler at the store was easily accessible from the outside of the building through a small entryway. I knew where the key to the cooler could be found. I knew that there was no security system at the store. And I knew when no one else would be around at night. I set a plan in motion which—to my mind—combined the complexity and grandeur of Ocean’s Eleven with the intensity of Heat.

The plan was simple. We would wait until the middle of the night. My friend would have a getaway car running on the street. I would make my way around the back of the store to the cooler. I would break in, steal what I could, and escape back to the getaway vehicle. Then we would drive like bats out of hell to a secret location at which we could explore our newly acquired bounty. I was about to become the biggest criminal since Al Capone.

What if I was caught by the lone police officer who lived in the town? What if he happened to be awake—what if he was nearby, paying attention, and saw me? I would undoubtedly be sent to Alcatraz, the electric chair, and the firing squad, probably in that order. This was my one and only life we were talking about here. As the heist approached, my heart pounded faster and faster in anticipation of my new career path as a criminal.

The night arrived. We drove to the store. I was wearing the customary black outfit of the malefactor—long before wearing such attire identified you as one of the good people. My friend parked out front across the street. I got out and ran around back. I made my way through the entryway and into the cooler.

I looked around at everything there. The possibilities were endless. Would I take something small so I could conceal it as I escaped? Could I figure out a way to take everything in there at once? Should I change my mind and walk out casually to meet my fate at the hands of the SWAT team that was undoubtedly gathering in the darkness, laser sights pointed directly at my heart? I split the difference. I looked to my right, grabbed a case of vegan yogurt, and walked out.

With the case under my arm, I dashed back into the night, ready to dodge bullets and evade helicopter search beams. There were only crickets. It was a quiet New England night. The world was asleep, unaware of my heist. I could have crawled out on all fours over a span of several hours without anyone spotting me. All the same, just in case, I sprinted to the car. My friend and I drove off laughing maniacally into the night.

But the story does not end there. We drove. Not just down the street—we drove at least two towns over. Our plan was to get far enough away that we could enjoy our case of yogurt out of the reach of law enforcement. Did we plan on eating twelve yogurts each? The world will never know.

Because when we stopped the car and pulled the cardboard open to expose our riches—when we each took a spoon from the glovebox, selected a yogurt, tore it open, and took a bite—we realized that the case was expired. The yogurts were spoiled. They had the tongue-stinging taste of food gone bad: nature’s way of saying, “Stop eating this, you fools.”

Dejectedly, we discarded the entire case. It didn’t even occur to me to go back to steal something else. For years afterwards, I wondered if I had grabbed something from a pile of food to be discarded. Was that why it was beside the cooler door? Or maybe it was simply bad luck?

Years later—many years, more than thirty to be exact, and specifically while I’ve been typing this—I finally realized what we’d accomplished by stealing that yogurt. We had done the store a favor. They probably came in the next day and wondered, “Wow, what industrious employee threw out that old yogurt after closing?” They couldn’t have sold it. If they had, they would have gotten in trouble. Same if the health department had showed up to inspect them. The managers probably noted with relief that the case was gone and went about their day. We had stolen their trash.

So do not do as I do, but be sure to do as I say. If and when you steal, make it worthwhile. Make sure it means something, at least to you. Go for value first, symbolism second, and trash last. I’d love for you to end up with more than just a story. I’d like for you to end up with some kind of treasure, something representing your reclaimed agency, some example of direct action and revenge.

Or at the very least, something you can actually eat.

Donate to Work Day

In a secret research lab, there was a day when everyone from machine operators to software engineers to executives was asked to donate a book to work. It was in peak quarantine, early 2020 and morale was low. The message wasn’t phrased with the word “donate,” but we all knew that’s what they meant. We were asked by a director of human resources to pick a book from our personal libraries that we would let go and donate it onto a bookshelf featured prominently upon entering the factory break room. We were asked to sign a dedication inside the cover of the book. Anonymity was not acceptable.

It felt weird. They were paying us for our labor, not paying us to leave the company our personal property. It was not a coincidence that this message reached us only a month after a third of the company was fired… to cut costs. We could be next. There was an unspoken message implied about how we would never see this book again if we got fired.

Over the following week, the books began to arrive. They weren’t too interesting at first—some engineering manuals, texts on math and physics, a few pulpy genre bestsellers. The quality began to improve with science fiction and compilations of academic research. Then there were the cringe titles. Those written by the professional managerial class to motivate managers, under the disguise of improving worker productivity. Self-help titles. “Manuals” for effective strategies to improve as an employee of a corporation. Vague advice on how to succeed as a leader in corporate America.

Among this trash was a single, unique-looking cartoon book titled simply, Work. At least, it looked like a cartoon book from the cover. Taking a closer look, it was a book about the class hierarchy in American society. It’s available on this website. It presents a good analysis of contemporary capitalist class hierarchies. This research lab employed nearly everyone in the pyramid featured on the book’s cover, from the top to the bottom, including military, lawyers, and captains of industry.

After two years moving on and off the shelf, Work (which was donated new) looked as worn as the other books, many of which were much older. In the break room, a machine shop worker approached the person who signed their name under the cover and thanked them. He said he took it home for a couple weeks (the first known use of this program as if it were a public library) and the contents were eye opening. He asked for some other similar recommendations to read. It felt like the program was working, though likely not the way the original corporate controller imagined.

While this might sound like the opposite of stealing something from work, think of it as reclaiming power in a contest of ideas. Sadly, the bosses are the least attentive but fastest to act when presented with a case of workers building power through solidarity. For example, the REI sports apparel corporation recently fought their workers after employees began to organize a union for higher wages and improved conditions. Corporate leaders see you as a threat to their wealth and want to punish you at every turn. Never forget that there are people whose only job is to protect the corporation from its employees.

Corporations steal from us every day through wage theft. This particular research lab had a bad reputation of not paying overtime. Fortunately, one thing they cannot steal from us is our ideas. Spread these ideas in secret. Spread these ideas in plain sight, but understand they might fire you if they feel like these ideas are too dangerous to them. Without a labor union, you have little defense other than litigation, at best. But just because you don’t have a union doesn’t mean you are powerless to take back what is rightfully yours, your time at work. Read books on the clock. Does your employer have an “unlimited PTO” policy? Take off more time, start at 12 weeks. In some parts of the world, it is expected to have that much vacation time.

If you are ever in the position where an employer asks you to donate something to work, consider ideas that will encourage everyone to “donate their time” somewhere else. That’s a donation we can all believe in!

Our dreams = their nightmares.

More World, Less Bank : An Oral History of the A16 Demonstrations against Global Capitalism

2022-04-14T16:52:00Z

On April 16, 2000, tens of thousands of people gathered in Washington, DC to mobilize against the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. This was one of a series of Global Days of Action against neoliberal capitalist institutions including the G8, the World Trade Organization, and the IMF/World Bank. At the time, opponents of these organizations were loosely described as the anti-globalization or alter-globalization movement; later, as the global justice movement.

While resistance to those institutions dates back to their founding at the end of the Second World War, this movement was arguably launched by the Zapatistas, a revolutionary insurgency in Chiapas, Mexico. The Zapatistas appeared on the world stage in an armed insurrection against the government of Mexico beginning on January 1, 1994, the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect—a trade agreement between Canada, Mexico, and the United States that bankrupted 1.3 million Mexican farmers.

People’s Global Action emerged from the Intercontinental Gathering of the Zapatistas encuentro in 1996. This provided a framework for organizing against neoliberal trade institutions, drawing together thousands of grassroots organizations, affinity groups, and anarchist collectives. These motley radicals were joined by traditional labor unions, environmental groups, Non-Governmental Organizations, nonprofits, and individual activists. It was a big umbrella, rife with contradictions, riven by messy debates about tactics and strategy, inclusion and identity, violence and non-violence. The goals of the participants ran the gamut from reforming neoliberalism to destroying capitalism.

After the world-famous demonstrations that shut down the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle in November 1999, preparations for the IMF/World Bank meeting in April 2000 spread the momentum to the East Coast, showing that the events in Seattle were not an anomaly but a stage in the emergence of a powerful movement. In a series of spokescouncils, protesters planned to shut DC down with blockades; in the end, the police effectively conceded the city to protesters by shutting down a massive portion of downtown themselves.

The following oral history brings together the experiences and voices of some of the participants in the actions of A16.

A delegate trying to reach the IMF/World Bank meetings, flanked by demonstrators from the black bloc intent on stopping him. This photograph, the header photograph above, and others herein were taken by Orin Langelle, a documentary photographer and activist and the co-founder of the Global Justice Ecology Project. You can see more of his photographs here and read more information about him below.

These anti-WTO protesters are a Noah’s ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions, and yuppies looking for their 1960s fix…

-Thomas Friedman, New York Times opinion writer Senseless in Seattle

From his point of view, that’s probably correct. From the point of view of slave owners, people opposed to slavery probably looked that way. For the 1 percent of the population that he’s thinking about and representing, the people who are opposing this are flat-earthers. Why should anyone oppose the developments that we’ve been describing?

-Noam Chomsky, Author, linguist, and anarchist in response to Friedman

Children of the Zapatistas

Our narrators arrived at A16 from a variety of backgrounds and points of entry.

Ryan: The older activists and organizers who especially influenced us, as young anarchists in DC in the late ’90s, were people of color: folks in the Black community who organized around Mumia and police brutality and Indigenous organizers working on freedom for Leonard Peltier. There was a lot of that organizing happening at the time and they were super supportive of us as young activists and approached us as mentors. We saw them as elders, folks to learn the ropes from.

Ben: In 1992, we saw the videos of Rodney King. And those cops were beating him down. We were at Claremont College, and every white pudgy-faced cop was let off. I remember thinking “Holy shit!” and I saw the campus emptying out. It was a raw, sick in the stomach feeling. I remember things starting to burn. One of my friends was dancing and screaming “It’s been 400 years!” And it just expanded all across Los Angeles. I remember looking at downtown LA and seeing flames going up in the air. That was not a march!

“It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” was already out. Does life imitate art or art imitate life? “Straight outta Compton” was the soundtrack, with “Fuck tha Police.” We were listening to that all spring before the riots. And these movements were raw, that was the moment I realized that history was alive. I’d had this sense that history doesn’t happen in the United States, it happens far away, but wow, history was happening right here.

Gabby: I was raised by two old hippy militants who got burned by the COINTELPRO operations, they felt very betrayed by the movement they were a part of. Because of their disillusionment with that, they were very dismayed when I got involved with politics, but I basically grew up a red diaper baby. I grew up being pushed around picket lines in my baby stroller, with my dad and with my mom, to pro-choice marches. But I didn’t really learn about my parents’ radical youth until I started getting arrested at protests and hanging out with no-good anarchists.

Panagioti: I was living in a trailer park in Florida. I’d dropped out of high school and was living with people who decided to participate in youth anarchist organizing. We were doing local organizing, stuff like Food Not Bombs, Zine Distros, local shows.

Vikki: I went to high school in Jamaica, Queens. And now we’d consider that a school-to-prison pipeline school, this was the 1990s, so we didn’t really have the language then to describe a school that was Black, Brown, and mostly immigrant; it was under-resourced and underfunded. It had a bunch of school security guards, you had to go through metal detectors every morning and put your bag through an airport scanning X-ray machine. It was like going to jail, every single day.

There were several thousand kids there, super overcrowded, and it was a perfect recruiting ground for gangs. And a whole bunch of my friends joined gangs, dropped out and got arrested for gang-related activity, mostly armed robbery. Because their families didn’t have any money and they weren’t able to post bail, they ended up in Rikers. That was my first “What the hell is this?” awakening.

I started to go and visit them at Rikers. I had to bring an adult with me each time because I was only fifteen and you weren’t able to visit by yourself until you were sixteen. I spent a lot of time in the Rikers waiting room: three hours if you went at the earliest time if you woke up at 6 am, or you’d spend six hours waiting if you went later. I would end up talking to all these other people who were there for their loved ones. It was mostly Black, Brown, and immigrant women waiting to see the menfolk in their lives.

Pica: I was a college senior, majoring in history, destined for jobs as a barista and labor organizing. I feel like we were the children of that period of time, children of the Zapatistas, we really had to try and make our town better and build community.

Lelia: I grew up in an activist house—my parents were activists, we had lots of roommates who were activists, it’s just sort of what I thought people did. If there is something going wrong locally or nationally, we need to do something about it. As soon as I got to college, I hit the ground running and joined every activist group that there was.

Mark: I became politically active the first semester I got to college and that was the South African Divestment movement, in its full flowering. I’m an older Gen Xer, so I went to Hamilton College in 1986. The Divestment movement was probably at its peak then. There was an occupation in the President’s office that Fall, thirteen students were expelled from the college. It was pretty militant, everyone involved in the Divestment movement wore black armbands on campus, we had whistles. There was a pretty substantial right-wing reactionary student body, fraternities and hockey players, your typical meatheads.

Nicole: I grew up in New York City, so in high school, there were multiple scenes, there was a lot of organizing around Mumia Abu Jamal and police brutality. In my senior year of high school, I went to what later became the Left Forum. I also went to some workshops based on Paolo Freire, which was cool.

Back then, there were always people tabling with literature, where people shared with me that there were protests happening around the Community Gardens in the Lower East Side and all around the city. Giuliani was auctioning them off, so I went down to Tompkins Square Park, right on time to join my first Reclaim the Streets protest.

R. Harvey: My first experience in being politicized was probably listening to the Clash and the Dead Kennedys when I was 13. When I was 14, I got into vegetarianism, as we did back then, going vegan. I got into animal rights very early on, getting PETA to send me some signs.

Gil: For A16, I planned a poster to carry with me as I wandered the streets of DC. I was arrested there in 1972 when there was a police riot under the directorship of Tricky Dick [President Richard Nixon].

Ryan: At Positive Force meetings, there would be a handful of people who attended to represent another group, asking for time on the agenda. They would run down something that you’d learn on a post now. The upcoming protests against the IMF meetings in ’99 or an upcoming Zapatista solidarity thing or whatever.

They’d come with a bunch of literature and you’d leave with a stack of paper. Then you’d go home afterwards and look through everything, information similar to what you might access through a social media feed now.

Before the age of widespread digital access, anarchists in New York City maintained a telephone hotline to connect people to local organizing.

Millions for Mumia

Another crucial thread drawing people together was support for political prisoners, especially from Black and Indigenous movements. The campaign to free journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, facing execution in Pennsylvania, provided a rallying cry against the systemic racism of the United States legal system.

R. Harvey: With Mumia, you know, the role that Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu Jamal played in our movement, these were folks from the 1970s and ’80s; the reason why people knew about them were the Black Panthers and MOVE, they never let people forget about Mumia. Who knew that they would have a side effect of politicizing the people who went out to confront globalization?

Lelia: We went to Philly—I feel like we went to Philly a lot for Mumia stuff. Jericho Movement, that was huge. I don’t really remember much, other than the sea of people and the chant:

“Brick by brick
Wall by wall
We’re gonna free
Mumia Abu-Jamal”

Gabby: I was heavily influenced by the Zapatistas, I used to do Books through Bars, went to marches for Mumia, prisoner support. It wasn’t a world I was living and breathing every single day, but I remember going to Philly for Mumia. I remember the “brick by brick” chant, I was thinking that this was the best protest chant I’d ever heard.

Anarchism has a long history in Philadelphia. A flier for a gathering in 1993.

Jimmy: When I was in San Francisco for the Food Not Bombs in 1995, one of the most amazing things that happened was this really militant torchlit march for Mumia. He was on the kill-list, they moved him up on the execution timeline and they had a date for killing him. There were protests across the country.

Those San Francisco and East Bay anarchists, they really did us proud! We’re marching right up Market Street, through the construction zone, knocking over barricades, picking up shit to throw if needed. And bicyclists are coming down all the side streets in support, with bundles of torches, dropping them off at the street corner for the march. It was intense. People along the route were so excited, hanging out of windows, cars honking for Mumia. We’re telling people and passersby “Come on, join us!”

So we marched through the Castro. I was running with people I met at the Chicano Youth Center, an infoshop-style place, these Chicano punk teenagers and anarchists, this woman Red Moonsong, who was a queer radical grandmother anarchist hippy. The cops freaked out and started to counterattack. Red Moonsong, I remember her saying “Um, this is the part where grandmothers leave.” Later, you know? So, she dipped out. Me and the dude from LA were folding up the big Food Not Bombs banner we had, stuffing it into a backpack, and the concussion grenades were exploding around us.

Ben: I was writing my novel, my roman à clef, in the Kilowatt, or maybe it was 500 Club, by the Roxie, somewhere on Valencia Street in San Francisco, working on the notes in my journal. And I heard some shit going down in the street outside, I was like “What the hell is that?” and it was going against traffic. I asked someone, what’s going on? And they said “March for Mumia!” And I was like “Who’s Mumia?”

People were screaming and somersaulting and jumping between cars. They weren’t exactly breaking things but there was a feeling—is this a march? Is this a riot? Besides ACT UP, I wasn’t plugged into anything. There was a rawness. And someone said that it was about the Prison Industrial Complex. Oh that! There was an immediate sense that this was a live issue. People are talking about Malcolm X and it’s a real thing. It’s not a past thing, they’re listening to the Last Poets, to Gil Scott Heron, “The Revolution Will Not be Televised.” That album, along with “A Nation of Millions,” was the soundtrack.

Mimas: A major current of American activism in the 1990s was prisoner support and anti-police-brutality campaigns, especially around political prisoners like Mumia Abu Jamal. Through awareness of him, we also learned about the repression of the Black liberation radicals and anarcho-primitivists in Philly. The Philly police actually used an incendiary device, a literal bomb, and dropped it on the MOVE house. That’s how far they were willing to go to stop them, to literally kill Black people with bombs.

While awaiting execution, Mumia became a vital critic of the death penalty, an author of books and articles about police state and the criminal justice system, with his supporters campaigning for his release from prison. He also had a coolness, a sense of calm righteousness that truly captured our hopes and aspirations for a better world. Many of us were radicalized by or otherwise supportive of Mumia, prior to and during the anti-globalization movement.

Vikki: When I wasn’t going to this arduous bus trip to Rikers, I’d make the trek to the City [i.e., Manhattan], go to St. Mark’s Books. I’d just stand in their prisons section and read these things because I didn’t have enough money to actually buy these books and everything there.

I realized that this is not a system that is broken, that it’s actually functioning as designed. The system is designed to monitor, control, and to surveil these Black, Brown, and immigrant bodies. That’s why the waiting room and the visiting room looks like the way it does; that realization in the Rikers waiting room was my politicization.

R. Harvey: I went to Millions for Mumia on April 24, 1999. That was my first big protest. I was in the anarchist punk scene in Baltimore, I was from Towson, where we had our own scene. We were listening to local bands, bands like Aus Rotten, A//political, Anti-Product, these kinds of groups and they were talking about these issues.

Ryan: Millions for Mumia was a big one for us. It was the first black bloc I was ever in for sure.

Millions for Mumia.

Building Momentum

In the United States, activists began to align themselves into a movement, gravitating around Food Not Bombs, Critical Mass, Youth Liberation summits, Earth First! campaigns, Reclaim the Streets actions, Latin American solidarity movements, and campus organizing. The international day of action on June 18, 1999 marked the convergence of many of these currents.

Mark: Prior to Seattle, there was the G8 meeting, which happened on June 18, 1999. Reclaim the Streets was a global formation that started in London, specifically around the M11 link road and the rave protests—the anti-roads movement and the anti-rave legislation that had been passed. They later went to work with the dockworkers and so forth, but they really jumped into and were formative in the Alter-Globalization movement. It then spread across Europe through the Reclaim the Streets form, so in New York, we were paying a lot of attention to Reclaim the Streets UK.

It was the early days of the internet, but Reclaim the Streets UK had one of the coolest websites you’ve ever seen; it’s archived somewhere. It was basically a Borges “Garden of Forking Paths” structure where you could get lost in it; lots of quotes from Abbie Hoffman, the Diggers, and the Levelers. The images were just incredible.

The rave aesthetics of the J18 organizers in London are exemplified in this palm-card distributed to promote one of the rallies.

Nicole: That was my first time seeing protests like that, before you could get news from social media or the internet. I hadn’t been exposed to those kinds of images at the time, the radical far left. It always felt good, whether it was Reclaim the Streets or Critical Mass, to be in the streets.

What always felt really powerful was taking the streets and changing the narrative of what things should be like. Any chance to change your thoughts and make a cleavage with what normally is; that was really attractive to me, especially when it comes to saving the planet or helping people that were oppressed.

Ben: I remember Food Not Bombs was so great locally in San Francisco, because they were risking arrest all the time for the critical offense of giving food away… how could anybody think they were a hindrance to the quality of life?

Food Not Bombs prefigured a whole movement with their name, like the More Gardens! Coalition or Housing Works. It’s very relevant. “Food not bombs?” It’s very hard to argue with.

Gabby: Food Not Bombs was really important. When I was traveling, I knew I could show up anywhere with a Food Not Bombs and meet people and figure things out. Or, is there an infoshop in this town? There was a whole network and infrastructure. I slept on so many floors around the country.

I also spent a lot of time at ABC No Rio, I was definitely involved with bike culture, riding Critical Mass. Later, when I was tree-sitting, I’d sit in my tree and dream of Critical Mass Rides in New York City.

ABC No Rio, a squatted venue in the Lower East Side, was one of dozens of community centers and infoshops across the country that formed the infrastructure of the anti-globalization movement.

Vikki: Because I didn’t have friends to hang out with, because they were locked up, I started to coming down to the Lower East Side to ABC No Rio and Food Not Bombs. From there, I fell in with a bunch of punk rockers who were really political. And it was really eye opening, the idea that you could be an anti-authoritarian! That was not something I would have thought about before, instead of going to law school or medical school to be successful, which is the immigrant narrative that a bunch of us are fed. So if you are reading, you have to read things that get you closer to law school or medical school.

It was eye opening that you could be anti-authoritarian, that the system was fucked up. But I was still this bookish kid who liked to read about things, so you could actually be smart and like books, but it didn’t mean you had to follow this capitalist program. The women there, especially, at ABC No Rio kind of took me under their wing, would take me to this or that thing. That brought me even further into political organizing, when I was 17 or 18.

Ryan: I remember getting a postcard for the Carnival of Chaos, J18 at an event in downtown DC; I think it might have been the spring meeting of the IMF in 1999. The protest was small, like 50 people outside their headquarters, they were passing out things about the Carnival Against Capitalism, and different events.

Those 50 people protesting the IMF in spring 1999 mostly worked for NGOs, walking down the sidewalk trying to take the street a little bit. Shortly after J18 was Seattle, then A16, with tens of thousands of people for the same IMF meetings just a year later.

On June 18, 1999, the most well-known demonstration took place in London, but in fact, actions took place across the world, including this one in San Francisco.

Mimas: A set of protests was called to coincide with the meeting of the G8 in Germany on June 18 that year, which brought together the leaders of the world’s wealthiest democracies (the G7) plus Russia. As early formation of the anti-globalization movement, J18 kind of created a template for later actions, its slogan was “Our resistance is as transnational as capital.”

The London protests in particular drew wide attention with the street carnivals, samba bands, Critical Mass bike rides, and blockades of corporate headquarters. Other international protests also took place on J18 in Canada, Australia, and Nigeria, where they shut down Shell oil infrastructure, as well as dozens of actions across Europe and the US.

Back here in the US, those involved in J18 protests and those in Seattle were more likely than not also participants in movements such as Food Not Bombs, Critical Mass, Reclaim the Streets, Earth First!, the Ruckus Society, and international solidarity campaigns. Those pre-existing actions and groups became fertile ground for the American iteration of this global movement. Back then, each country was a little different in how they approached the fight in terms of rationales, but we had a common target—the neoliberal institutions that supported the expansion of inequity and exploitation around the world.

“Our resistance is as transnational as capital.”

R. Harvey: The Carnival against Capitalism in London was taking a lot of inspiration from the No Roads Movement, which came out of the anti-nuclear movement. Crass was really inspired by the anti-nuclear movement.

Panagioti: We were doing youth liberation summits and Mayday gatherings back then. I’d see the same people in slightly different circumstances, doing and talking about the same things.

I remember these videocassettes of the forest occupations at Cove Mallard in Idaho back in 1996, seeing people using lockboxes and tripods. We had a crusty old copy of the video from Whispered Media, they were an IMC predecessor. We probably showed that thing 50 times at different conferences, workshops, and trainings to let people know what was happening. We amassed a collection of those videos.

The idea would be that you’d bring videos you’d collected along the way, gather 20 people together in a room, then eat mediocre vegetarian food and watch this video to find out what was happening.

Mark: I was involved in the first Critical Mass bike rides in San Francisco for several years after I moved there in 1992/93. I didn’t meet Chris Carlson until many years later, but I’d show up at the Embarcadero at 5 pm on the last Friday of the month, like a bunch of other people. My buddy Sheffer ran a bike shop called Pedal Revolution and he was making Frankenbikes, crazy tall bikes.

These rides were really celebratory, really goofy, I don’t remember in those days any conflicts with police. That might have happened later on, when things got edgy at times. We’d always wind up on a beach somewhere, smoke some weed, hang out with the Mothers of Perpetual Indulgence and Cacophony Society people, the latter stages of those people. I didn’t know what I was doing, just that my buddy made these tall bikes in the Mission and I was going along. They were really just a blast, just really very fun.

The reverse of the poster promoting the demonstrations in San Francisco on June 18, 1999.

Nicole: I got really involved with environmental activism, local issues like the community gardens. I started going to the Wetlands Center, working with people who did anti-Gap and Banana Republic campaigns, because they were destroying old-growth forests. This was the time of anti-sweatshop organizing, that was very big in campus activism.

Ben: My dad’s best friend died of AIDS. I started going to ACT UP demonstrations, and it wasn’t just a march, it was going to Sacramento for a direct action. There are some drag queens on the way, there are people carrying the ashes of their lovers that they are spreading and throwing at the cops. The cops rushed them, there was screaming and crying. Ashes in the air, then we’d go out for a drink and have a great time. There was a march, and a funeral procession, and then we’d go dancing. That was ACT UP. Activism was a practice; it wasn’t an identity.

AIDS activism was always my driving force, but after the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, they started to build South Central Farm. I saw it as a prefigurative community-building gesture that was bringing people together to share space, to share food, to share histories.

That garden was a big common space that people shared. There was a lot of food and a lot of healing. When people get together and share a space outside of capitalism, where no one is arguing about who owns what, we can build a space together. People can do really beautiful things.

Getting back to land is belonging. We have this industrial idea that we’re supposed to be surrounded by concrete, but touching earth is important for human beings. bell hooks’ book about belonging is all about going back to Kentucky because the dirt called her: “This is my home, this is my people, we’ve been farming this land for a long time.” And I think people have a raw sense of connection when they touch the earth.

Radical queer activists played an important part in the anti-globalization movement, just as gay and lesbian liberation activists in the 1970s served as inspiring antecedents.

Pica: Community gardens were really magical places in every city you’d visit. That sounds corny, but if you ever spent a sunset in one with friends, with a fire, or someone making food in the casita… You got legitimate cultural exchange, locals hanging with the weird travelers from all over, with outcasts and rejects.

Ben: I really fell in love with the movement in New York in the ’90s. I’d walk to the subway to go to the Bronx from the East Village and I’d see these little patches of land as I walked by. And I thought, “I love these spaces.” You can just sit down, nobody cares, with whatever you’re bringing in, you could eat your dinner and have a coffee.

The gardens movement in New York City was a food security movement. There were Black Panthers involved in that, Young Lords, there were a lot of through lines to the community empowerment movements. And there were the squatters! The squats and the gardens overlapped and when the squatters showed up, you knew you were going to have power.

I hate this term, “green gentrification,” but gardens do improve neighborhoods. They increase the number of eyes on the streets, that’s what Jane Jacobs said. You need people to look at the neighborhood. You don’t need cops; you need individuals in the community looking in the streets to make sure everybody is OK. But they do increase property values because people can sell you a building, and say “Look at this beautiful green space that the neighborhood made, right around here.”

Lelia: At American University, one of the compelling groups was the Free Burma Coalition. At the time, there were four student activists who were arrested for leafleting in public, just passing out papers to people. It was the first thing I signed up for as a freshman.

It wasn’t just at AU, it was all over. There was a big Burmese population there, folks who had to leave their country, living in the DC community. There was intergenerational activism; we had letter writing, benefit dinners, fashion shows—that’s funny to me, because I’m so not fashionable. We also did civil disobedience.

We had this long campaign with letter writing, including all the proper quote-unquote “steps,” and we began thinking on what we have to do to move down the chain of demanding more action. I arrived at school, in maybe August, and I was arrested by October—I had decided that it was enough letter writing for me and it was time to move to civil disobedience. We had a divestment campaign as well, getting the university to stop doing business with certain companies.

Mark: I landed in NYC in the fall of 1998, I came to do grad school at New School. Just before I arrived in New York, I’d been to Bread and Puppet Theater, in Glover, I’d been going there since 1994. I was puppeteering and I met Aresh from More Gardens! in the costume room in the barn, and Trudy and John from Great Small Works, of course, and the Bread and Puppeteers. They were really involved in the community gardens struggle in that moment, and Charas El Bohio community center, which had been auctioned off.

And then it was Steve Duncombe, who guest-lectured in a media studies class I was taking at New School. He talked about Reclaim the Streets, and I was like, “Hmm, tell me about that.”

Ben: By 1998/99, there was an action every week in New York, whether it was a garden action, or a Fed Up Queers Action, ACT UP. I remember when Matthew Shephard, the young college student in Wyoming, was killed, we tried to have a funeral march in Manhattan, and Giuliani tried to arrest all the organizers and wanted us all to be on the sidewalk. 5000 people don’t fit on the sidewalk, Giuliani!

If he would have let us march for an hour, we’d have gone to the bar afterwards. But no, he swept everyone up, and everyone went to jail for the night and the next day, your friends are doing jail support. We were covered in the New York Post and the Daily News, and I was arrested with Charles King and Keith Kyler from Housing Works. And Sylvia Rivera was in the pen with me, when we were all daisy chained together with restraints. Michael Cunningham, who had just won the Pulitzer Prize for The Hours, was with us. There were epic groups of people together and every week there was another action.

And then we started hearing about the rumblings of [the mobilization against the WTO ministerial in] Seattle in Adbusters. We planned our solidarity march with Reclaim the Streets. We had one to save the gardens, and another to Times Square. I think people thought it was an MTV video, so they left us alone. Mark got really badly beaten up by the cops. You’d do jail solidarity, with yoga going on outside, and then people got straight out of jail to go to the airport for Seattle.

Nicole: In New York, right before the demonstrations against the WTO in Seattle, there was a big Reclaim the Streets action. That Reclaim the Streets was one of the most exciting protests I’d ever been to at that point; we showed up to Union Square, and then had a subway party, with people in costumes, people hanging from the bars on the subway. People dancing and singing, we got up to Times Square, then, later, Bryant Park. It was massive, people taking over an intersection. There was even a tripod, this was the early days.

Vikki: Seattle was visceral, people were on the streets and they were fighting. When I first got to the Lower East Side, one of the things that really drew me in was that it was the tail end of the large-scale squatter movement. I came in right after the 13th Street squat [was evicted] with a tank, so those two were linked in my mind.

Anarchist organizing and outreach in New York City before the age of digital connectivity.

Dreaming of the End of Neoliberalism

Prior to the Zapatista encuentros, the institutions driving neoliberal adjustment—the WTO and its precursor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the IMF and World Bank—were obscure entities. By targeting their annual meetings and ministerials, activists took the abstract phenomenon of neoliberal globalization and made it concrete. You can’t abolish capitalism with a bullhorn, but with 20,000 of your closest friends, you can disrupt a meeting of bankers and bureaucrats.

Eric: After World War II left Europe devastated (and centuries of colonialism and resource plunder had severely damaged what is now called the “Third World”), a conference was convened at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944 to create institutions separate from the United Nations that could oversee the regulation of international trade and assist in the building of Europe. The result was the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which became the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The stated goal of the World Bank was to aid Europe’s reconstruction and help to develop poor countries around the world. The original mandate for the IMF was to facilitate global trade while leaving countries free to establish their own economic guidelines.

A16 protest flyer distributed at the Convergence Center in Washington, DC.

The IMF is like a loan shark. When a country has problems paying its foreign creditors—for example, when interest rates skyrocketed in the 80s—the IMF will provide an emergency bailout. The price of this bailout is that the country has to sell its soul. The IMF and WB both require what they call Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs). “They SAP the poor to fatten the rich.” SAPs include a number of common attributes. Everything a country has will be liquidated to pay off loans—but the loans never get paid off, so they remain stuck in crippling debt. The country must make drastic cuts in education, health care, food subsidies, and other things that the poor depend on. Environmental regulatory agencies must also be completely defunded, so any environmental laws that remain on the books cannot be enforced.

Another part of the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) is privatization. Everything that might make a profit is sold off to foreign companies for pennies. Bolivia sold its water utility to a San Francisco-based company that immediately doubled water rates for the poor.

-A16 protest flyer distributed at the Convergence Center in Washington, DC

Ben: AIDS activists went to Charlene Barshefsky’s office, who was the US trade representative. And they told her that she had to change the United States drug policy. You had the World Trade Organization rules that said that you can actually, in the healthcare crisis, create your own drugs, generics, and yet you’re suing South Africa that has a health crisis with AIDS going on.

To me, the IMF protests were all about amplifying that injustice. I didn’t think we were going to stop the meeting. I think you had to make clear that what was happening in the meeting was bad and that if you care about health, you need to do this differently. They wouldn’t listen to us, or listen to anybody, if we played by their rules.

Did you know that Donald Rumsfeld, before he was Secretary of Defense, was the head of the Office of Economic Opportunity from 1969-71, under Nixon? That’s how anti-poverty programs become mechanisms of war—that thinking, using debt as a bludgeon. Literally the guy who pushed for the Iraq war started as a poverty guy. That’s the Herbert Marcuse idea—when the welfare state becomes the warfare state.

Pica: The people in Cochabamba and their supporters across Bolivia—farmers, workers, residents, students—weren’t going to let Bechtel destroy their lives by tripling the price of water. They had a massive rebellion, blockaded the main roads in the country, essentially shut down the country. They fought back because their lives literally depended on it. As we were planning for A16, the shit was going down in Bolivia. These policies were being determined in boardrooms and ministerial meetings here in the US, we had a moral obligation to fight them here, on their home turf.

Panagioti: Pretty quickly, the basics of economic globalization became known. By the time A16 rolled around, we had to understand the acronyms better. The World Bank and IMF seemed a little more complicated, having been around longer, than the WTO, which was new. I was really open to learning things really quickly.

A pamphlet from the turn of the century critiquing capitalist globalization.

Mark: I remember going to see Life and Debt, the film by Stephanie Black, right around that time. To this day, it is a terrific description of structural adjustment programs as imposed on the island of Jamaica. It was very specific—what happened with the local milk production industry, the banana, all the trade policies that destroyed Jamaican farmers.

Eric: The debt is not the result of the will of the people; governmental agents, encouraged and instructed by local elites and foreign investors, were the ones who accrued the debt. These agents of capital are the ones who have received the profits from investments and pork-barrel spending, but it is the public who must pay the costs. The bailouts orchestrated by the IMF and World Bank pay little attention to such nuances.

If the government of Indonesia owes money to Swiss banks because they spent all their money buying tanks and bombs from the United States, then it is the people of Indonesia who must starve themselves and work for slave wages in order to pay it back.

The mass mobilizations are key to maintaining pressure on these institutions, and to creating the change we are talking about. It is quite impressive when you get millions of people saying, “Cancel the debt.” It is quite impressive when millions of people are saying, “Stop structural adjustment programs,” “Open your meetings,” and “Stop environmentally destructive projects.” It is quite different than when you just have a few NGOs who are not necessarily pushing hard.

Njoki Njoroge Njehu, 50 Years is Enough

An anarchist banner on A16: “Global liberation, not devastation.”

Pica: We knew we were seeing something special with this movement against capitalism, against corporate globalization. All of these groups and fights for justice, coming together—prison abolition, workers’ rights, queer activism, international solidarity, anarchism, feminism, campaigns to hold police accountable, all of it. All of our parallel paths came together arm in arm in the streets of Seattle and DC.

It was very common for people, especially in small towns, to support other projects and campaigns. You might be a labor activist, focused on workers’ rights and raising the minimum wage, but you’d kick it with the vegans and join the roadshow to watch a Chomsky documentary about the media when it came to town. People had a baseline of solidarity in left radical circles.

Gabby: As cool as things were in those days, I think I did a lot of FOMO. I felt like I grew up in the shadow of the radicals of the ’60s and the radicals of the Lower East Side, a place where a younger person could make a place for themselves. We still did it, we had a big squat called Camp C, it was unreal what we were able to get away with, it was like a square city block. The place was fucking huge.

The DIY scene in New York was all about hanging on to the spaces that were left as the city got more policed and more expensive, it was about being a place where you could go and make things happen as a person trying to live outside of the money economy. We built a whole culture around circumventing that money economy. It cheapens it to just say it was about our lifestyles because we built a whole world that was not about going through money to live our lives and have our needs met.

Nicole: This guy Tofu came to this conference at my college, he was a singer, I think he had been in Seattle. Also, there were the More Gardens! people who attended a political prisoners’ conference that we held. That conference was super powerful, Ramona Africa and Laura Whitehorn spoke there, they were amazing advocates who had been freed from prisons in the 1980s.

We would later see people we knew personally imprisoned because of their politics. All these things were happening in person, people had to come to these meetings to learn about these topics.

Ben: My favorite pre-Seattle action was against Disney. We went to the Disney store at Times Square and declared it our right not to live in a shopping mall. “Put down the mouse, put down the mouse” was our big chant. I’d never gotten arrested at a retail outlet for saying “Stop business as usual!” But I felt that we had a right to our own stories. Disney was sucking up our stories into their vortex. It was involuntary entertainment, we wanted to have a right to our own narratives. There was an absurdist defiance. It was fun, and Seattle became a part of that joyous moment.

Panagioti: In some ways, the formula to be an activist seemed similar to what I see now, but the process was so much more demanding. You’d read a flyer or pamphlet and go “Hmm, well, this makes sense.” And then, instead of just reposting it on Instagram, you’d go to a copy shop, make a hundred copies, cut and fold them and go to 20 different venues or coffee shops, hand them out or give them to people. Or make some stickers. The process of spreading information, and motivating people to mobilize—it was a lot more hands-on and tactile.

A flier promoting “Anarchist Soccer”—a euphemism?—in Milwaukee.

N30 Seattle

The protests against the World Trade Organization Ministerial in Seattle on November 30, 1999 were a watershed moment in the expansion of the movement.

Vikki: The internet was still kind of new and young and someone was like “Hey, I have a ticket to Seattle for those dates for the WTO protest and I can’t go. Does anyone want this ticket?” Neither I nor any of my friends knew what it was. We figured we’d do some kind of Reclaim the Streets or something in New York that same weekend instead. We didn’t know what the hell she was planning on flying to Seattle for, so I don’t know if anybody took her up on that free ticket!

And then Seattle happened and everyone was like “Holy shit!” and we started paying attention to globalization. I was focused before on things that were local or regional and the things that I could put my finger on. Police, jails, prisons? OK.

This larger idea of globalization? It didn’t occur to me to follow this, and people weren’t as online at that time, so you wouldn’t necessarily know about it from a morning newsfeed. Because of the “Battle in Seattle,” I started paying attention.

Pica: I had a few friends who went to WTO in Seattle. I couldn’t go because I couldn’t get off two weeks from my job. It would have been the bus, no way I could have afforded to fly there. I went to the reportback in my town afterwards in early December. I couldn’t believe it worked. At most, we could get twenty-five or fifty people to a protest; how do you pull off 50,000? Shutting down a whole city? The first thing I wanted to know was “When are you doing this again?” Because I knew I would be there.

Panagioti: I ended up in Seattle mostly having had read zines about globalization. When I got there, it felt, you know, like something close to a revolution, at least in my mind. I wondered to myself, “What if we didn’t go back home? What if we just stayed in these streets?” Looking back on it, maybe we had delusions, thoughts like “This is the Paris Commune of my youth!”

I had read these historical accounts of those moments of insurrection and I had this sense of participating in that, in some small way. It was accurate in one sense, but also absurd based on the short duration. These things we were doing were a couple days, instead of months of sustained occupation.

Mark: I had never been in that sort of situation before, what I saw in Seattle. I remember running to the Indymedia Center, I was there as a part of Paper Tiger TV collective, I was a media maker as well as a direct action organizer, and for Seattle, I was really focused on being a part of the TV production team for Indymedia. So we had embedded ourselves in a lockdown crew that included Carwill Bjork-James and Gopal Dayaneni; they were both in that lockdown.

“Breaking the Spell,” a documentary about the Seattle WTO protests.

Jimmy: Lars was there at the reportback for N30. I remember him returning riding high on a wave of anarchy, he had that song, “We are winning / Grab a bandanna for the tear gas cloud / Get organized and come downtown.”

Eric: The protesters in Seattle and DC were not, as many media reports claimed, confused kids with no place better to be who traveled in search of a good time and an expression of youthful rebellion. We took action because the policies of the IMF World Bank, and WTO are causing untold suffering, misery, poverty, and death.

We spoke out because we want to live in a world based not on greed and profit, but on human needs, equality, and economic justice. We want everyone to have food, housing, medical care, and a decent standard of living. In a world as wealthy and bountiful as ours, there is no reason for caring people to accept the suffering that exists all around us.

R. Harvey: As November approached, I remember distinctly being at an A//Political show in a row house in Baltimore. I think they were playing with Anti-Product and they were passing out flyers. Basically, “We’re going to destroy Seattle” with a picture of punks dancing on the city. Typical imagery of that time period. They had a song called “Whose Trade Organization” with very explicit anarchist punk lyrics.

That’s how I started to learn about it, but it wasn’t until the protests started to happen in Seattle that I went “Oh my god, they weren’t joking around. This is a real thing.”

Lelia: I remember really wanting to go to Seattle. We put money in a pot and we decided we’d send representatives from DC to Seattle because we couldn’t all afford to go. I remember Dave going for our group. I remember thinking, “This is our moment,” that we had been working up to this as activists for all this time. It was really neat to have so many of us coming together, labor and environmental folks in the same space was really powerful—not to say they were always at odds, but they can be.

Debriefing was part of the deal for the folks we sent to Seattle: we want to hear about everything they experienced when they came back. We were living vicariously. We had to meet in person to talk about it and ask them questions. Then we used the spokescouncil model used at Seattle to organize A16, pretty much right afterwards.

R. Harvey: I was like 15 years old, I couldn’t go out to Seattle. After that, like many, that day, I was on the internet reading about globalization. During the WTO in Seattle, I remember reading Indymedia, I remember the Global Exchange website—they had a good set of Fact Sheets.

Mimas: We were successful in disrupting the WTO ministerial by stopping delegates from actually attending the meetings through massive street blockades, which were met with tear gas, billy clubs, and general violence from the police.

The street protests led to the emboldenment of African, Asian, and South American countries within the WTO meeting itself and effectively scuttled the progress of the talks which were heavily weighted for richer countries against the poor. It wasn’t a total victory—capitalism was not completely derailed that day—but it was much more than anyone could have expected.

Seattle was perfect in lighting a match—all our different projects now had an umbrella to live under. It would start with capitalism and the exploitation of the Global South, but it also fit later with the first George W. Bush Inauguration, the Democratic and Republican Conventions in 2000, and even the anti-war movements after 9/11. Later on, I think you can make an explicit connection to Occupy and an indirect connection to Black Lives Matter, as well. There was a broad understanding that you could wear multiple hats, be a part of different movements in solidarity.

Mark: There was the whole plan, the whole ring to block off the intersections, to stop the delegates from attending the ministerial. Initially, that morning, we were like “OK, things are calm,” nothing was really happening. We went back around the convention center and it was a full on shitshow, it was massive, riot cops with tanks and tear gas canisters—all the images that you’ve seen—a war zone.

And they’re pepper spraying—these battles of pepper spray—so we stayed in the street for a while. We got to the Indymedia center with all this footage, and we were trying to get it downloaded so we could get it in the broadcast, trying to get it edited—we edited it all night, I didn’t sleep for two days. Or three?

I remember going into the Indymedia center and being like, “Oh my god, it’s a riot.” And Eric Galatas, who’s a Free Speech TV guy, Indymedia guy, one of the founders of Indymedia, said “No, it’s an uprising. Let’s be clear.”

https://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1200763806898626560

Taking on the IMF and World Bank

With Seattle setting the template, the next target was five months later in Washington, DC: the meetings of the IMF and World Bank in April 2000.

Ryan: A16 was already being planned prior to Seattle, but the meeting and the planning for it increased exponentially after Seattle and showed that the movement was on a new trajectory.

The Mobilization for Global Justice was a broad coalition that was anchored by three different categories of organizers. First, any activist who was interested off the street. Second were Unions. Third was international NGOs like 50 Years is Enough and Jubilee 2000, key NGOs working on debt relief in the Global South. Public Citizen had a presence in Seattle and also was involved with A16. This coalition was made up of dozens of smaller DC activist groups. It was a smorgasbord: DIY punk activists like my group of friends and many people who worked at NGOs but wanted to be part of something bigger.

Lelia: I really remember Nadine Bloch being central in the DC organizing for A16, because she could say, “This is how it was done in Seattle, and this is what might be done here.” So we went from there, it felt both that we had some semblance of organization but it was still organic. It felt good. I was part of the spokescouncil meetings, plus the Infoshop folks, plus being part of the American University crew, so I don’t exactly remember what hat I was wearing at a given meeting.

Mimas: A16 wasn’t just a single day. It was really a week of resistance culminating on April 16 and a few days after. People were there for over a week before that date itself. A16 was one of a series of global Days of Action against international capitalist entities, which included the first Carnival Against Capitalism the year before in June and, of course, the Seattle protests.

What you need to remember is that these Days of Actions were in direct response to calls for international solidarity by the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico. The Zapatistas were so damn cool; they were both completely inspiring but, how can I say this politely, also sort of too good to be true! Balaclava’d revolutionaries in the Mexican jungle talking about international resistance to NAFTA and neoliberalism? That definitely captured our full attention.

As it turned out, the Zapatistas were the real deal. They were extremely important because they initiated a number of international meetings of activists, called encuentros, first in Chiapas in the jungle, then in Spain and Geneva, between ’96 and ’98. By getting all of these activists together, they helped to develop space for an international movement. By the time it came for Washington DC, A16 was just another link in the chain. The World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, NAFTA, the FTAA—we saw them as a part of a coherent system that needed to be resisted.

Panagioti: I remember a lot of trying to replicate what we saw other people doing in Seattle, people having a lot more experience than I had. I guess I’d gone to some Ruckus Society camps by that point; I volunteered at the kitchens. I don’t think I was climbing yet, Ruckus direct action climbing was a lot tighter than Earth First!’s. I think they’ve shored up those gaps in recent years.

We were trying to figure out how, with limited experience and resources, to plug in and do the technical stuff, blockades, the structure of who makes calls. We were deciding pretty intensive shit, like, how many lockboxes do we need to build? Who’s going to put their arms in them?

I had just learned how to do these things myself—blockades, sleeping dragons, tripods—and now I was training hundreds of people how to do it. The experience we had in Seattle was formative enough that we thought, “We could just train everybody else, back on the East Coast.”

Pica: I mostly understood the whole dropout thing, they were poor and squatted and trainhopped, they were dedicated to radical change. One thing that bothered me at the time was the whole “professional activist” thing. Maybe it was my naïveté, but the idea of someone getting a paycheck from some official reformist group to organize protests was somewhat of a contradiction to me. Today, I understand it, everyone has to make a living; but at the time, I thought it had to just be about passion while you did your crappy day job and hustled on the side through grassroots activism.

These people seemed to have unlimited money and I really wondered where it came from, but maybe that was just my class war mentality coming through. Bless them for dedicating themselves to the cause, but if it comes with strings? If you are condescending? No way. Don’t lecture me about non-violence or alienating “normal people” if you’ve never held down a minimum wage job, you’re the one who is alienating us!

Ryan: A certain amount of organizing locally had already occurred six to nine months out, and then, around the three month mark, someone would pay those people money to come in, they’d live in DC temporarily. They acted like hotshots, they were often slick glad-handers.

These people and the funders, they want things to be set up in a certain way. “We want to move everything to look like this.” Our little crew of activists would go to Mobilization for Global Justice meetings, but for the most part we never felt welcome there. Most of the meetings we went to in DC, prior to A16, were majority people of color. That was something new with the anti-globalization movement, there being more white organizers and upper-class people involved in DC organizing.

The Mobilization for Global Justice, at least on the surface and its professed approach, was a consensus-based organization. If you dig a little deeper and you understand the politics that were at play and where the money was coming from, the people who were the swoopers, there were definitely problems regarding who had power and who was given more say.

Panagioti: We organized really hard in Florida, coming back from Seattle after a few months of traveling. I was doing Earth First! a lot at the time, the first convergences, fusing those experiences. We did trainings for a few hundred people around the state, at a bunch of cities and conferences, and talked about the blockades in Seattle and our organizing there. From the blockades to jail solidarity to the follow-up anti-repression work that happened and the lawsuits that followed.

We had a glimpse of that vision by the time the convergence in Washington, DC was called for. A lot of people who I still know today, I met at those trainings. The people who started the Miami Workers’ Center and the Coalition of Immokolee Workers, some of those people who were building their local or statewide projects around the same time period, we were communicating and organizing together. The idea was we were doing these trainings to put together these street blockades in DC.

Sand: At 4 am, in the days prior to A16, we whizzed through DC to re-wrap the front page of 20,000 _Washington Post_s with a mobilization parody on the IMF.

Stop signs, mailboxes, streetlights, bus stops, and other features of the urban environment expressed solidarity with the protests.

Ryan: All the NGOs wanted to be connected to A16 organizing, environmental groups to animal rights to social justice. Everybody wanted to find a place for themselves and find themselves involved in the A16 organizing.

And there were the unions. The unions brought a lot of money, a certain amount of budget and certain restrictions on what things would look like. Then there were folks like the Direct Action Network, from Seattle, Rainforest Action Network, people connected to Ruckus.

Ben: There was a ton of planning for RTS—too much, really. There was a cool kids club, who’d go to the spokescouncil meetings for the Direct Action Network, so it became a bit of a high school thing, a little ageist. If you were a teacher, maybe you were made to feel that you didn’t fit in. There was some sexism in the meetings, some people talked too much, a lot of the males. And queer people weren’t as always welcomed in the meetings. You professed it, but if you are always dominating, you’re not really making space.

Panagioti: I had mostly positive associations with the feeling of dispersed decision-making and collective process, but I’m also quite certain that if I were able to give it more thought and dig a little deeper, there were certain personalities who drove a lot of it as well.

Ryan: They were of a particular generation, a particular age. We always called them the helicopter activists, we also called them the swoopers. They were often from California, more “progressive” places and were inclined toward imposing their culture and ways of working.

Mark: I was already both feet into the deep end, the next year or two after Seattle, the movement such as it was really was my life for those years. It probably already was, but now even more so.

Lelia: We were friends with Adam, we did a lot of wheatpasting. He organized these paid wheatpasting nights, with these beautiful posters for A16. Someone gave us money to wheatpaste!

Jimmy: I was bummed I missed Seattle, but I was glued to TV news coverage, anything I could glean off the internet, newspaper articles, clippings. The reportbacks were a huge thing, really galvanizing. People were like, OK, what’s next? A16, here we come.

Vikki: One of the things that came out of Seattle was this story of a pregnant woman who got tear-gassed, and she miscarried. I remember that people had criticized her for being there and then it turned out she was just going to get groceries, or whatever. And I thought “Why are the cops going around teargassing pregnant women? What the hell’s wrong with them?”

Literally that afternoon, as we were heading down for A16, I was getting ready to get in the van and I was packing up my stuff. I hadn’t gotten my period for a while, which wasn’t something I normally tracked too closely. With that woman’s story in mind, I thought, well, maybe I should go get a pregnancy test. I’m sure it will be negative, I’m sure it’s because I haven’t been eating well. We had been working on opening a new building to squat, near the Adam Purple Squat on Forsyth Street, and I was sleeping there. I figured I just hadn’t been taking care of my body; this is probably why I’m late.

I got the pregnancy test and I peed on the stupid thing and I’m waiting, and I’m trying to figure what to pack in my bag, should I bring a big blanket or sleeping bag, you know, what would be best for this weekend trip? And then I looked down at the pregnancy test; and it was positive. OK, wow.

So I called my partner. And he picked up the phone, this was back in the day before cell phones and luckily he was home. So I called him and I told him I was going to DC for the weekend and he told me to have fun and I said “Oh by the way, I’m pregnant, so if I don’t get tear gassed and miscarry, we should have a conversation when I come back.” You know? “I’ve got to catch this van,” and I hung up the phone and left.

I told two people on the van ride, in case something happened to me, in case I started bleeding. You wanted people to know what was happening if you’re having a miscarriage on the street. When I got to DC, there was a communal kitchen. I ran into an old roommate who was there and told them, and they started talking about how it wasn’t known what the long-term consequences are if you get tear-gassed and you don’t miscarry. She was explaining that we don’t know what happens, if I chose to keep it, to your later baby if you inhale a shit-ton of tear gas. And I hadn’t thought about that. My plan was to run with the black bloc and go fuck shit up.

After that conversation, I decided I wasn’t going to go to the black bloc. Someone mentioned there was a legal protest planned. I figured that sounded boring; I could have just stayed home if I wanted to go to a legal protest. Why come all the way to DC and sleep on the fucking floor just to go to a legal protest? I wound up joining the Food Not Bombs flying brigade, we made food, put it in a shopping cart, and fed people all weekend out on the streets.

My daughter isn’t impressed by this story, by the way, she doesn’t really care! I think she turned out fine.

Black bloc demonstrators in Washington, DC on April 16, 2000. Photograph by Orin Langelle / Global Justice Ecology Project.

Hitting the Ground Running

A major mobilization demands months of logistical organizing. It means setting up a convergence center, legal support teams, street medics, houses for dozens of people to crash, kitchens to provide free food to thousands, and Independent Media Centers for activist journalism. It involves building giant puppets, forming brass bands, planning for creative resistance such as banner drops and direct action.

The Mobilization for Global Justice produced a pamphlet including a calendar of events for the protests and explaining why demonstrators were resisting the IMF and World Bank.

Sand: The check-in hall at the convergence center was flooded with information and help. You could buy a T-shirt, find out when the next training was, or post a notice for a friend. There was a whole garage area for making the large puppets usually with about 20 busy bees hammering, painting, and papier-mâché-ing. You could just stand there and soak up empowerment.

Mark: We had shark fin hats, and polyester leisure suits that we got famously from Harry Bubbins at Casa Del Sol, which we traded him in exchange for a canoe. He had like 400 of these polyester leisure suits, blue, who knows why the fuck he had them, but they were perfect for us. He said “I’ll give them to you for free, but I need a canoe.” Which we did!

We had all had our gear at the Reclaim the Streets crew and we wound up sleeping on the floor of one of those churches you wind up sleeping in. We had a van. We were rolling with the Hungry March Band, they were our soundtrack. So, HMB and RTS, we were wedded and it was a blast. We were a roving cluster, we didn’t lock down, the whole idea of trying to shut down the meetings didn’t materialize.

Many of us have come from Asia to be with you today. We did not come to dialogue with the World Bank and IMF. We did not come to negotiate. We actually came to shut down these institutions.

-Walden Bello, Filipino Activist, Focus on the Global South

Sand: I loved making cheers, skirts, and pom-poms: rounding up Radical Cheerleading squads. We did cheers in metros, restaurants, department stores, and at Farragut circle for 30 cops parked on their bikes (you know they loved us).

Throughout the week prior to A16 itself, you could go to a ton of other political actions: a banner drop attempt on Monday, Iraq sanctions lobbying, a Free Chiapas rally, the day action for Iraq, a Global Network rally against nukes in space, School of the Americas lobbying and fast, Jubilee 2000, and rally against the Prison Industrial complex. I never even had time to go out for Ethiopian food! On Saturday, we sent surprise press releases and at least 100 media outlets came to Dupont circle for our huge street performance.

Radical cheerleaders in Washington, DC for the mobilization.

Lelia: I was at the mass arrest on A15, at the Prisons rally. I was in college and I had a final or something so I couldn’t miss class; I dodged through an alley, out a parking lot, and managed not to get arrested. All my friends got arrested. It was a large open space, they had cornered us and corralled everyone by blocking off the streets.

Mark: For A16, I wore both hats fully, Paper Tiger TV and Reclaim the Streets, so I was involved in bringing online the second Indymedia iteration, which Eddie Becker was involved with and DeeDee Halleck and Michael Eisenmenger, all these amazing people. And Rick Rowley and Jackie Soohen from Big Noise films, who were amazing.

A lot of the same players from Indymedia Seattle were in place and I was at those meetings trying to figure all that out and figure out what my role would be.

Michael: On Saturday, April 15, the police shut down the protesters’ Convergence Center under the pretext of fire code violations. To paraphrase DC Police Chief Charles Ramsey’s explanation, this was done because he cared about the demonstrators’ safety. The 1350 arrests, the tear gas and pepper spray, the beatings, the denial of legal and human rights to those arrested, the intimidation, surveillance and sabotage must have been Ramsey’s version of “tough love.”

Police on one side, puppets on the other. Iconic art from squatter artist Fly referencing the police raid on the convergence center in DC.

Sand: The decision by the DC police to shut down the space on A15 was very strategic. It was a big blow, but some were surprised it lasted as long as it did. However, we had back-up sites available immediately.

Ryan: There was a black bloc spokescouncil meeting the night before A16, there were maybe a couple of hundred people in that room. We had it at the Wilson Center, the same place we had many punk benefit shows at the time. The strategy discussed was that the black bloc would act as a flying squad to support the lockdowns in place to close off access to the IMF and World Bank meetings. On A16, the bloc really acted as a solidarity squad.

There was a comms team—you know, “Police are cracking down at this intersection,” then we’d go there to give support and the bloc would roam around and help out wherever needed. It was very much under diversity of tactics, people had other plans to do this or that. The thinking was: we’re going to show solidarity to a certain set of values, we’re going to make anarchism and anti-authoritarianism visible and be a self-defense group for those who are locking down, to try to take some pressure off them.

There was a conversation around the topic: we’ve been stigmatized as the troublemakers after Seattle; so what’s the best way to show up? We’re here in solidarity, so when the police are cracking down on other activists or other tactics, we’re here to show we back up everyone.

Gabby: I cut class to go to A16, I was still in high school and I had decided I was going to these protests. I was too young to go to Seattle, it was too far away, so I was really a kid when Seattle happened. DC was close enough, I don’t know how I got there, whether it was a Chinatown bus, or a school bus running on grease, a grease bus that a lot of people jumped on. I didn’t really have any friends with cars at that point.

R. Harvey: I only went down on the day of the 16th, we got there at 9 in the morning, maybe. I remember driving in and having the feeling that this was a big thing, driving into the city. We stopped at a gas station, and there was a person coming into the station as well, and they’d just gotten out of jail, arrested the day before. I remember that was the first thing, we were just on the outskirts of the city and we meet someone who had just gotten out of jail. We were like—this is going to be big!

Demonstrators blockade an intersection in downtown Washington, DC with lock boxes on April 16, 2000. Photograph by Orin Langelle / Global Justice Ecology Project.

A16: All Together

A16 itself was on a Sunday. By the weekend, there were already 20,000+ activists from across the country plugging into a myriad of events, protests, rallies, marches, speak-ins, and direct actions.

A calendar of events in DC in April 2000, produced by the Mobilization for Global Justice.

Lelia: I started the radical cheerleaders squad in DC, so I remember going down to our set intersection. I think we were between H and I on 16th street. I remember people planning on having the adult diapers, but when it came time to do it, people were like “I’m not actually doing that.” I was like, “This is serious! We’re not leaving this spot!” We linked arms for that intersection, we kept the crowd engaged and entertained with the radical cheerleading.

Jimmy: I remember getting up at 4 o’clock in the morning and walking through the darkness, at some point meeting up with friends who had cell phones, they were the comms people. Oh, wow, these were tiny little things, not the yuppie cell phones from the ’80s anymore.

The crowded streets of Washington, DC on April 16, 2000.

Nicole: We had a small group of people who got in cars really early in the morning to go to Washington. We came with all this stuff in case we got pepper-sprayed, in case we got tear-gassed, handkerchiefs, vinegar, all that, and we’d wear glasses instead of contacts.

I wound up leaving the people I went there with—some of the people I went with were locking down with a Sweatshops event. A16 was such a huge thing, you could come at it from an environmental lens, or via American neocolonialism. Or it could be from a labor perspective, whether in the US or elsewhere. You could come at it from a variety of perspectives, or in solidarity with developing nations and people directly fighting neoliberalism.

Jimmy: I will always remember that image of Panagioti stepping into the intersection at 5 in the morning; sticking his hand out at our assigned intersection for our blockade, and the car that would have been passing through just stopped. Then it reversed, it backed up as the cluster moved into place. I thought “Shit! We’re doing this!”

Protesters blockade the streets of Washington, DC on April 16, 2000.

Panagioti: People were really determined not to get the shit kicked out of us again, so they brought extra padding, plus the football pants and the crazy homemade gas masks. Kip had this amazing body armor. We had gotten arrested together in Seattle. People rode freight trains across the country with a bag full of whatever materials they needed to protect themselves.

There is good news coming out of the US when the youth of America rise up and take to the streets. I challenge you to rock the boat on Sunday!

-Oronto Douglas, Nigerian Environmental Civil Rights Lawyer

Ryan: Some of those affinity groups wanted to be in the black bloc, some wanted to do lockdowns, some only wanted to go to the rally. In those days, in my 20-year-old mind, I may have been a little judgmental—“So you just want to go to the legal rally?” But in the end, they were our friends, we supported them and they weren’t necessarily arrestable. We are all working through a lot. We were questioning a lot of assumptions within ourselves and trying to figure out where we fit into this exciting movement.

Nicole: Early in the morning, the goal was to block traffic, to stop people from getting to the IMF meetings. I don’t know if that was successful, but I saw the lockdowns in the morning. There was tear gas, people running, people locking down, the cops coming.

By daybreak on April 16, nearly every intersection in downtown DC hosted a lockdown, street party, or demonstration.

Ben: For the IMF, my favorite bit of street theater was the “Twelve Days of Monsanto.” We were singing Christmas carols for all of the joyous aspects of Monsanto. Our flying squad was great. We’d sing “Mack the Knife” as loan sharks, with a kick line, and that kind of worked. I had a sense that we wouldn’t be able to block the entrances the way they did in Seattle, that just wasn’t going to happen.

But I thought the message was powerful: If you wanted to get lifesaving drugs into bodies around the world, you had to address the IMF’s structural adjustment and austerity programs. The debt that was strangling governments like Haiti’s from being able to create their own health care programs. There were these groups like Partners in Health for Haiti, and Health Gap that were coming up, saying, “We can do better than this.”

That was the moment right before Seattle that Al Gore was saying he would defend the drug companies—when they were in the process of suing Nelson Mandela! Now that’s tacky. Here’s the global non-violence hero of the century [sic],¹ and you’re suing him for trying to make life-saving drugs for South Africa.

Mark: Entertaining the troops was the mission, going to the people who were locked down for 15 hours and do a little routine for them and then move on. We got to see such a mix of people, young, old, Black, white, Brown, so many people; it was polyglot. That one in particular was very diverse. It was very multi-generational, multi-class, multi-racial, all together.

Panagioti: Part of our team, someone who’s now a lawyer in Oregon, was part of the comms team. We had handheld radios. I was in proximity with the people who were in more rigid responsibilities, I was like a block away breathing fire during the street theater performance. There are photos somewhere of me and —— breathing fire in the street.

Lelia: There were delegates trying to get in, in a convoy, and the police trying to clear the intersection. I will never forget this to this day—we rushed from our separate lines, blocking the sidewalk, and rushed into the intersection. We sat down, we linked arms and there was a huge—it felt like a tank—but maybe just a very large police vehicle. All these guys jumped out with their SWAT gear. And they hit every other person who was locked down on the bridge of their nose. Every other person had a busted, bloody nose.

I’d seen police violence previously, and I’m familiar with police violence that was worse than this, but I’d never before seen police walk into a crowd of people and slug people like that. Just with abandon. I’ve never looked at police the same way, I’ve always looked at them with distrust, but I couldn’t have imagined that they took their billy clubs and hit every other person across the nose, one by one.

I remember it. Luckily, I was not one of the people who got my nose smashed, but tending to those people—it was really nuts. They tried everything to get us to move.

The black bloc came at that moment when blood was streaming down people’s faces and essentially pushed the police out of our intersection. They were just this wall of bodies that pushed them out and saved our intersection from any further police abuse. I’ve forever been grateful to that black bloc for hearing on the walkie talkies that we needed help and coming so powerfully to our aid.

Mark: The black bloc was in full effect. They were very militantly opposing police aggression and defending protesters, that’s how I would put it. They were picking up whole chain-link fences and charging police lines, you know, forcing the police back on their heels.

Since I was with a roving cluster, we experienced some of that, but we tried to steer clear of the most intense stuff. But you know, we inevitably saw it all, we were roving around all day. It was exhausting but exhilarating. And then that night, I went back and edited video for the Indymedia broadcast.

Clashes in Washington, DC during A16.

Michael: I was at K and 18th St. when, unprovoked, police fired tear gas and went on a rampage, clubbing demonstrators as they tried to get away. Eventually, the intersection was completely militarized, with over 100 police, the National Guard, and a small tank securing the area. Elsewhere, tear gas, pepper spray, and clubs were being used liberally on nonviolent demonstrators.

Joe: All of us who went to Washington, DC for the A16 protest have an obligation to represent to others what we went through. It’s not often that human behavior can lead to such massive power and chaos all at once. To challenge authority so greatly that it fights back, reveals its tactics and weaponry, just as we are revealing our strengths and tendencies in stating our demands, in massing and marching. That characterized A16.

Lelia: There was so much energy. I worked on a large puppet, I did a bunch of puppets over the years. We did a Critical Mass ride as well, the police motorcycles started running into us. My partner got arrested in that. I remember the moment they were handcuffed, it was crazy watching them get arrested for riding a bicycle. Getting arrested for attending a normal rally.

A giant puppet depicting a pig with the world in its mouth like an apple, representing the IMF, appeared in DC in the early hours of April 16, 2000, as protesters got in position to establish blockades.

R. Harvey: It was exhilarating, it felt like something was happening. We were there to disrupt the meeting. If you’re doing something to disrupt the meeting, then it’s effective. The thinner spread the cops are, the less quickly they can arrest the people who are locked down.

Diversity of Tactics: Marching Bands, Blockades, Flying Squads, and Radical Cheerleaders

People came to DC with a wide array of visions regarding what A16 was about and a wide range of tactics and strategies with which to do their part.

Footage from the protests against the IMF/World Bank meetings in Washington, DC in April 2000, from the film “A Year in the Streets” by the Cascadia Media Collective.

Joe: Many people heard and read more about the issues of globalization and the role of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The protests did work on that level. Delegates, too, know there’s no free ride: no invisibility to their actions. Many others also got a first-hand look at the power of the people, felt the kinship and oneness that a mass-movement organization can provide.

They also got a lesson in media literacy—one of those rare opportunities when there is massive sensationalized media coverage of an event with many, many people. The distortions and bias of the media, along with their sensationalism (and the tendency of people not involved to believe it) became apparent to all who were there.

Gabby: A16 was my first time getting arrested and my first time being beaten up by the cops. What was really profound for me was that I had this feeling of looking out at a crowd and feeling that these were my people. I try to really listen to myself when I approach a space—and when I saw the streets of A16, I had that “Holy shit!” feeling.

I was pretty fearless in those days. I ended up getting a picture snapped of me and my friend getting beat up by the cops. We were on the front cover of the New York Times on April 17. I had bright red hair. I had it framed at one point at my house, right next to the absence note for school from my mother. It said “Please excuse Gabby, she was detained in Washington, DC and could not attend classes.” I had them right next to each other.

The cover of the New York Times on April 17, 2000.

Jimmy: The radical marching bands, like the Rude Mechanicals Orchestra, were around. There was a whole “carnival of chaos” vibe.

Mark: I also remember the black bloc, the more Northwest Earth First! types, there were lockdowns, there was a Clown Block, the Puppetistas, a lot of chaos. Really chaotic, it made it really difficult for the delegates. There were a lot of absurd images, really beautiful art. Radical cheerleaders were out in full effect, doing all of their cheerleading; running to the lockdown crews to literally cheer them on.

Nicole: What happened with this movement in general was that there was the Ben and Jerry’s side and the, you know, radical activist side. I don’t know if you need to have one to have the other?

Joe: The direct action street challenge (and the labor-sponsored rally on the Ellipse that weekend) was composed of a lot of youth, primarily, ranging from drumming, dancing eco-freaks to clean-cut college kids, punk-rock-inspired anarchists in black clothing and masks to a large mix of older activists. Amid these groups were beautiful costumes and puppets there to celebrate and give hope for a liberation from that which threatens us: global greed and exploitation.

A photograph from DC on April 16, 2000 showing massive puppets created by or inspired by Bread and Puppet from Vermont. This puppet commemorates those killed at the Rio Negro Massacre in 1982, in which the Guatemalan government and its military proxies murdered over 5000 villagers who were protesting the Chixoy dam, which displaced their villages.

Ryan: There was a concerted decision to be this autonomous group, but the main objective was not to “just break windows.” The black bloc was higher profile; we couldn’t just do the same thing people did in Seattle, because the police were going to expect that tactic. That tactic has been used and it was successful, it got all eyes in the world on us, that box was checked.

What we needed to do at that point, at A16, was to help people understand what anarchist ideas really are. It’s not just about being a set of secret cells breaking windows, because we are a real part of this movement that needs to be taken seriously.

As participants in the black bloc, the thinking was: we’re not going to get voluntarily arrested; or we’re not going to sit in the street while they put pepper spray in our eyes. We are going to fight back against police abuse, if needed. That was planned and coordinated. There weren’t reps of every single affinity group, or whatever, in that initial discussion on tactics, but there were hundreds of people with us in making that strategy successful.

During the A16 protests, demonstrators used banners to conceal themselves and their equipment from the eyes of police.

Jimmy: We were one of the first street blockades in position and we were the last one that broke up for the day. We were prepared to hold it longer, but the other blockades were breaking down. We were like “Fuck that shit, we’re not breaking down.”

It happened that there was a big march coming down past us, it was a funny mix of anarchists with plastic trashcan lid shields and rain ponchos to protect themselves and a giant mass of animal rights activists with these enormous long banners. So we negotiated with them to stop their march. It went something like “Hey, can we have some cover to smuggle out these lockdown devices? We don’t want the cops to see what we were doing.” So they positioned these banners across our intersection, so the cluster could break down the lockdown and smuggle them out safely.

I remember this one kid, he was such a wingnut, this total protest warrior of the wasteland, with a trashcan lid with the circle A on it, and he was so serious but so friendly. He was a big chubby kid and he and his crew were at the front of the march. They provided the visual barrier, to block off what was going on with the banners as we broke down our blockade. The technical people were in the middle, they smuggled everything out with a vehicle, on the edge of the park.

We’d been there all day and it was late afternoon, 5 pm or later, when we finally broke down the blockade. It was only then that I got a full sense of what we had accomplished. And what we were up against; the massive police state, the snipers on the roof. We’d seen the choppers in the air, but now they were following our march.

Ryan: Things like the radical cheerleaders, I thought all that stuff was great. Some of it was compelling to me personally. Some of it felt like just “This is the stuff people do in this world I’m in.”

Nicole: There was a lot of marching, big puppets, lots of chanting, lots of bucket drums. There must have been a legal march, or at least the cops didn’t bother to harass us. We were in the streets singing and dancing. It felt good to be in the streets.

A montage of footage from A16.

Gabby: I remember dancing; it was a pretty festive thing, moving between these phases. Going to big protests like that, I feel that’s where I learned to dance. I used to be really shy, but the energy of the crowd with everybody being there, I could let loose more.

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening, a cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman], a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.

I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world—prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.

-Emma Goldman, Living My Life

Jimmy: That intersection that the pagans had was so cool. I remember they had made a giant spiderweb to block the street.

“People, not profit”—yarn strung in spider webs to block access to the meetings. Photograph by Orin Langelle / Global Justice Ecology Project.

Pica: These people were from all over the country, all over the world. There were Tibetans, the Mexican farmers, college kids, dropouts, union people, there was a real sense of the gathering of the nations of the world. These were all people against a specific form of capitalism that they called globalization, but there were other things that motivated us. The peaceful labor march, the prison-industrial complex protest that got busted where they arrested 400 people.

Mark: There were a lot of discussions from people who were organized with the black bloc and the rest of the organizers about diversity of tactics. That was what everyone was talking about after Seattle.

As I recall, that was handled really well at A16. The black bloc, they understood that they should not endanger anyone who was vulnerable or anyone who was in a position that was in jeopardy. They understood themselves as a defensive front to push back against police violence, they were very effective in pushing back, and they made that their job in a way, that made people feel a lot safer.

It didn’t feel like they were escalating things, it felt they were pushing back against violence. I think that sentiment was widely shared, but I don’t know if that was shared by everyone. It was my perspective.

R. Harvey: I remember at A16, there was that carnival vibe—you’d go to a new intersection and wonder “What are these people up to?” Then something completely different at the next one—people in costumes, people drumming, people burning stuff, an animal rights contingent led by Compassion Over Killing, the Pagan Cluster.

Nicole: I did not want to get arrested. My friends locked down and it was crazy because we got there so early in the morning. It wasn’t light yet, and very quickly you could hear cop cars and everything was happening. Pepper spray, people were sitting down and chanting.

After walking around, I found myself on a lawn, it was sunny, and it was a totally different scene, like it was people with their children. It was like an alternate rally, so I went from the radical lockdown area to this lawn, and I swear, the Indigo Girls were playing! But I could be wrong? We’ll have to look that up.

RC/DC (Radical Cheerleaders of DC) performed cheers to people locking down in intersections on April 16, 2000 in DC. An example cheer was this or something similar: “My back is achin. My bra’s too tight. My booty’s shakin, from the left to the right. Shout it out, revolution! Shout it out, support the union! Enough is enough. We all must rise up. Didn’t eat today. No place to stay. So kiss the back of my butt. Uh! Kiss the back o’ my butt. Uh! Kiss the back o’ my Kiss the back o’ my Kiss the back o’ my butt. Uh! My acka backa, you’re a soda cracker, your money, your jobs, Your institutions that never listen, to the people’s needs. It’s all about greed — I Said, Beep beep beep. Take your voice to the street!”

Get Those Animals off Those Horses!

The DC police preemptively shut down a massive part of Washington, DC, using tear gas, pepper spray, and batons indiscriminately and employing motorcycles as weapons.

Jimmy: There was one kid who went by the name Grapefruit. He was staring down a cop on a motorcycle, and the cop bumped it forward and hit him with his bike. The cop knocked him down, and that motorcycle wheel rolled up his body, just past his crotch and rolled back off him. I thought “Oh my fucking god! That guy just got his junk crushed.” And then he got up and dusted himself off. He was fine, because he was WEARING A CUP! I mean… he could have had a crushed pelvis or his genitals destroyed forever, but no, he was fine. He looked like a goofy hippy, but he was prepared. I was like, “You are one smart kid.”

Joe: My eyes, which spent a lot of time moving from place to place over the two and a half days that I was there, saw several instances where police inserted themselves into peaceful situations and made them worse. They turned peaceful protest into a tense confrontation, bringing violence with stick, spray, and “rubber bullet”-type weaponry to groups of people marching, drumming, and chanting or simply blocking a street in an already blocked-off section of the city.

Gil: We were attacked by police in roving packs of Lambretta scooters. They aimed to run us over. The tactic was to aim at us, quickly turn away, let the scooter slide into us, and while we were attending to our hides, they would attack with clubs. I was splattered with the blood of a guy in our group whose head was split open.

I knew the DC constabulary to be vicious. I planned a sign to say something like, “In the land of the free and the home of the brave, we are governed by (controlled by) fascists. They will beat you, kick you, gas you, jail you and kill you, for freedom is an illusion if anyone is not free. We are none free until we are all free.” (Somebody else said that.)²

But as you know, DC was a busy place and the sign did not get made, but I did have two others, and they said, “The police murdered Amadou Diallo” and “No one is guilty of anything. There is no protection from police brutality. There is no justice in law.”

It is unfortunate that I know this to be true. Those of you who went to DC probably wouldn’t argue otherwise.

Running battles between police and demonstrators intent on blocking traffic on April 16, 2000.

Jimmy: I remember a guy from New York or New Jersey, seemed like a long-haired peace punk, he got fucking mauled. The cops pepper sprayed him, he’d already been tear gassed, they chased him down the street and then beat the shit out of him. He was puking and all mangled, he was miserable in the jail. He was definitely one of the worst cases of abuse from A16 that I personally saw.

Gabby: There was a rowdy black bloc of young people, the freaks with the puppets that were really radical too, there was a big labor contingent. You could move between these different worlds in the streets and also at the convergence center.

We were so crazy, so fearless. I remember at some point marching with the anarchists past this construction site. And a whole bunch of us picked up this fence, these couple of links of fence and charged the police line.

It was so wild, the cops running away from us! That moment gave me the strength to really grab my life by the reins and take it where I wanted to take it. I decided I wasn’t going to go to college, for better or worse. That was my first big radical protest and it gave me a taste of being out in the world and having a radical life at a very young age. That was pretty profound for me.

Ryan: I have not thought about “the fence” in years, but I was right there. That was probably one of the most empowered moments of my young life at the time. Running with the fucking fence, in that moment.

Protesters charge the police with two sections of fencing on April 16, 2000.

R. Harvey: We walked straight into downtown, saw the blockades, the sleeping dragons, the big yellow puppet and went down to I street. All of the streets there were blockaded. We went to where George Washington University is located, there was a big lockdown there.

And then, it was pretty early, after doing a big loop, then we wound up right in that moment, where people grabbed the fence against the cops. I was in the back, as a viewer, thinking “What’s going on here?” So we followed along. There was a big standoff with the cops, we were running in the opposite direction of the fence. I wasn’t clear what the tactic was, maybe we just found a fence and decided to chase the cops with it?

Definitely, the fence battle was a moment, I was tear-gassed right after that. That was the first time I was tear-gassed, right there at 14th and I street. I remember how pissed off people were about that.

I remember Chief Ramsey, standing there at the intersection, with tear gas still in the air, getting interviewed saying “There was tear gas fired, but my officers didn’t fire it. I don’t know who did.” The interviewer asked if he was suggesting that the protesters tear-gassed themselves, and he said “No, my officers just aren’t the ones who did it.” I was so shocked about that.

Arrests and jail solidarity in Washington, DC during the protests against the IMF/World Bank in 2000.

Ben: For the IMF moment, the best thing about the global justice movement was to let a thousand flowers bloom. I know people don’t like that expression because of Mao, but it’s useful to have a zillion actions going on, where you could have a blockade, have a march, have the black bloc throwing things. It was great theater.

It was those little moments where we’d try to do a street performance, whether it was the Students for an Undemocratic Society, or against Monsanto. You are having fun, but also critiquing and bringing that message to the stakeholders inside of the meetings. We’d give copies to them. Good street theater is a moment to educate—that’s where we pivoted and it was really effective in getting a message out there.

Nobody pays attention to just a march. You have to throw some theater in there to make it useful. And I loved that, the protests against the IMF really got the word out. How many legitimate stories got out there? Church-based groups, Jubilee 2000—I didn’t know about the Jubilee stuff until I saw a sermon at Judson Memorial Church about debt relief. That’s another part of the story: public health and democracy are much more important than corporations and death. That’s just colonialism all over again.

Ryan: For me, if they can mediate how we protest, how we speak, then everything is going to remain the same. If we follow their protest rules, we’re going to reify all of their rules about how life should be. And we can’t give them that. If we get an opening in the street, like the fence, that’s how we get another opening and that’s how we get another opening.

“No justice, no peace, fuck the police!”

-A black bloc chant at A16, which remains a rallying cry to this day

A banner on A16: “Whose power?”

Jail Support after A16

After thousands of arrests, several supporters and the Midnight Special legal collective stayed behind to help people get out of jail and receive legal support. Years later, the courts forced the police to pay a multi-million dollar settlement for the illegal detentions and violation of constitutional rights at A16.

We, the male prisoners arrested in Washington, DC during the week of the A16 demonstrations against the IMF/World Bank (April 16-22, 2000), wish to express our solidarity with our fellow inmates, as well as with prisoners around the world who die and are tortured daily, often simply because they ask to be treated fairly, equally, and justly. Second, we wish to express our sincere thanks to the many supporters who stayed outside the jail in solidarity with us, and to those many who sent emails, wrote letters, and made phone calls on our behalf. […]

We were denied contact with our lawyers for consecutive periods of more than 30 hours at a time; left handcuffed and shackled for up to eight hours; moved up to 10 times from holding cell to holding cell. Many of us were denied food for more than 30 hours and denied water for up to 10 hours at a time. Though many of us were soaking wet after Monday’s protest, we were refused dry clothing, and left shackled and shivering on very cold floors.

For no apparent reason, some of us were physically attacked by U.S. Marshals; we were forcefully thrown up against the wall, pepper sprayed directly in the face, or thrown on the floor and beaten. At least two individuals were forced against the wall by their necks in strangulation holds, with threats of further violence. This sort of violence was perpetrated against at least two juveniles in order to separate them from the larger group. […]

After our arrests last week, many of us chose to remain anonymous to protest these abuses. We chose to show solidarity with our fellow protesters who were unjustly charged with felonies and misdemeanors in the act of non-violent civil disobedience against the IMF and the World Bank. It is clear to us that the District of Columbia and the Federal Government, by trumping up charges, by arresting frivolously, and by keeping us in jail for a week, had much less of a problem with our alleged infractions than with the fact that we spoke our minds and faced up to their brutality and threats.

[…] We will continue to risk arrest, and if necessary resist with our very lives, until we expose this world as one in which profits come before people, so that a more just, humane, and free global society may take its place.

-A statement collectively written by 70 protesters arrested during the A16 protests and incarcerated for a week. “The writers consolidated ideas, suggestions, and editorial comments for the letter by passing suggestions between bars from cell to cell.”

Police carried out arrests in Washington, DC at random on April 16, 2000, with apparent impunity.

Jimmy: I stayed for jail support. I don’t even remember where we crashed, we were there for about four days. There was an activist encampment outside the DC jail, where most of our people were being held. It was a collection of shitty tarps strung together in the rain. There was a little sunshine, but it mostly rained. And we sat around in ponchos eating stale bagels, you know.

Sugar: By Monday [April 17], 1300 citizens’ constitutional rights had been violated as they were arrested for practicing freedom of speech and the freedom to assemble. I witnessed police brutality against harmless and peaceful demonstrators—physically, mentally, and psychologically. People in jail resorting to chanting “I want to see my lawyer now.”

Someone getting charged with “assaulting a cop” for vomiting on a cop from tear gas sprayed directly in their face. People getting bruised from police officers holding them “a little too tightly.” A woman cooperating and was still being thrown against a wall.

Gabby: There were a handful of us who were arrested as minors. I got arrested in that early morning snake march on April 17. Arrested the same day my face was on the front page of the New York Times.

They kind of didn’t know what to do with us as minors, they just “catch-and-released” us. I didn’t even get a court date. They were like, “What? Huh? You’re seventeen with no ID? We don’t even want to deal with you.” So they had this van full of children that they kept around for a while, for a couple hours, and then we were released.

In the weeks preceding the two-day demonstration, Midnight Special organized progressive lawyers, led legal observer and “Know Your Rights” trainings, and began to document the intense surveillance and harassment of activists, including our own collective members, in the streets and at the convergence site. We trained over 1500 activists and 200 legal observers at a furious pace, wherever we could—in warehouses, schools, parks, and churches.

During and after the protests, Midnight Special staffed three phone lines around the clock, taking calls from arrested activists, concerned friends and relatives, and demonstrators on the streets. Over the course of three days, nearly 1200 people were arrested.

Midnight Special sent lawyer-activists teams to the jails to meet with the arrestees and help negotiate a universal plea bargain which would protect those in custody who were at risk. About 150 activists withheld their names, forcing the authorities to hold them in an already packed jail. By using legal solidarity, these arrestees forced the authorities to reduce the charges of everyone’s misdemeanors to a $5 jaywalking ticket.

-Midnight Special Legal Collective

Jimmy: Midnight Special was great, I definitely remember Katya in particular, who was famous from Seattle ’99. It was great that they were there to support us in DC for A16. Lawyers from Midnight Special were definitely there. Jail solidarity was really cool, people were doing workshops, doing history lessons and know-your-rights trainings, food sharing, all kinds of creative scheming to get people into the jail, trying to get messages back and forth, trying to get lawyers in.

Ben: I’m always glad to see DC in the rear view mirror behind us. I always like to show up, and I’ve been arrested a dozen times in DC. It was basically get arrested and get the hell out of there.

Sugar: Many lessons came to me as I stood outside the jailhouse five days in a row, chanting, cheering, singing, and joining in solidarity with those of us left in DC for the aftermath and with the incredible Midnight Special Legal Team, whose periodic updates were the rainbows on our rainy and cold days outside.

Whether outside a jail, a courthouse, whether on Pennsylvania Ave. locked down or in a cool house near American University or in a metro headed east on the red line—this activist community is strong, tight, and full of good people, hopeful people, and strong people who join together, stay together, sing and dance together, make consensus together, and live together for a better world here and now and for tomorrow.

The District of Columbia has agreed to pay $13,302,500 to settle a class-action lawsuit related to the illegal arrest of 680 people. Those people were arrested on April 15, 2000 in connection with the protest against the Prison Industrial Complex during the International Monetary Fund-World Bank demonstrations.

-Prison Legal News, October 2010

Police guard an alley in Washington, DC on April 16, 2000.

A16 Was My Baptism

A16 was a life-changing experience for many participants.

Ryan: Part of that time period, what I gravitated towards and why A16 was so compelling, was that it was an opportunity that came out of a culmination of realizing what the world really was, wanting to immerse myself in a real fight for a better world.

The world I grew up in was really neoliberal, it repressed so much reality. There was a certain pulling back of the veil that happened with Seattle and A16, when you strip it down to its raw components of people versus power: that’s what the fence represented. People on one side, power on the other. That’s what the fight was about.

Pica: A16 was right in the middle of that era, not the highest high, but a formative experience for many people.

Gabby: I had a bit of a time period of being a hater about all the summit hopping. The really dedicated cool kids got there really early, and often, had cool adventures getting there. I thought it was a blast, but clearly, we didn’t manage to overthrow capitalism by doing that. Instead, we did create this whole world for ourselves.

I’m not a hater anymore. I believe in grassroots movements, but I also think some of these decisions I made in my hater period were along the lines of “No! You should stay at home and slog through this ‘really important’ organizing instead of going to the big party, the big anti-capitalist gala.” The RNC used to be the anarchist Olympics for years, somebody was going to get it and we’d all go. It was a family reunion. If I could talk to that hater version of myself back then, I’d say, “Go to the party.”

I don’t know if this current generation needs to listen to me, but I do think it is valid, you know, to enjoy your life and have a good time while being a revolutionary. I don’t think we should be too self-aggrandizing about it, trying to be the most radical, thinking you’re doing the most important work—but there is a real value in experiencing some of those big highs, being there with your people and having wild times. You don’t need to just slog through things because people tell you that those things are more important.

Michael: The mainstream media did not discuss how IMF and World Bank policies make poor countries much poorer with structural adjustment programs. Instead, they chose to ridicule the protesters as a bunch of misguided youngsters, “A ragtag band of ’60s recidivists and assorted ‘activists,’” as Washington Post pundit Jonathan Yardley so cleverly put it.

If this is true, would that explain why police closed off 90 square blocks downtown for a few bankers? Why did DC, under fiscal strain, spend $5 million to arm and train 1500 police, federal marshals, and FBI agents with Robocop riot gear and “non-lethal” chemical weapons? Why were 1350 people arrested for exercising their freedom of speech? Was this ragtag band truly so threatening with their cries of “People before Profits” and “This is what democracy looks like”?

Joe: We who went, for our myriad of reasons, wanted to send a message that the corporate-dominated cultures, whose appetite for resources, consumption, and low-wage exploitation are exceeding any kind of sustainable economy for the planet, need to be challenged. These are the practices that put some of the poorest people on the planet at great hardship and bring down the quality of life for many others while enriching only a relative few.

Ben: We’re not going to stop globalization, just like you couldn’t stop mercantilism. But we can democratize it. Have we achieved that? Maybe in certain nooks and crannies. But what I liked was that politics is local and they were abundant and you could stake out your claim for change. It’s still really powerful and we’re still working on all those issues.

Lelia: It felt good after A16 and we thought “What next?” There was Seattle, then A16, then what’s the next project we’re going to do to show up to make our world better? I was on the coordinating committee for the National Conference for Organized Resistance for several years in DC. The first conference I helped with was 1999, where I started by organizing just one workshop. Then after that, I joined the coordinating committee.

After that, as we kept doing it for years, it was definitely a labor of love. There were so many smart people in one spot, thinking about how to make the world better in so many different ways. I just loved everything about it. There were definitely some harder years, but it was a really meaningful space for people to connect across projects and across regions. We’d do the same thing every year too, in Vermont, joining the RAT conference, Renewing the Anarchist Tradition.

Around that same time, we were developing the Brian Mackenzie infoshop in DC over nearly a whole decade. The first meetings were in 1998; it eventually closed in 2008.

Sand: Most important for me was the sense of community between the activists. We were there because we cared enough to create a new path. As long as we build with community, we will be able to offer an infrastructure to support the masses when consumer culture can’t and won’t anymore.

Joe: That’s our obligation. We must continue the organizing work—and let people know what is really going on, so the people and power of the A16 weekend can continue and grow.

A flier promoting a protest against the IMF and World Bank meetings a few months after A16, in September 2000.

R. Harvey: If Seattle was the thing that really sparked me, A16 was my baptism or whatever. Leaving A16, I was thinking—I’m in. And I’m ready for the next one.

Nicole: It felt like being young, to be part of something. I had found my community. I didn’t have any idea of the massive size, of that many people. Those moments of being there in the streets of A16, it felt like an expression of all the local stuff that we were doing; it was a homecoming. It wouldn’t have felt as powerful in a vacuum, on its own. It felt good because we were already doing this activism with other people.

Ryan: There was a lot of non-violence dogma before A16, which was sort of a big dividing line for the younger generation that I was part of. This nonviolence dogma in relation to tactics made spaces like the Mobilization for Global Justice less accessible.

After A16, inspired by organizing in Canada against the 2001 FTAA ministerial, we created the Washington, DC Anti-Capitalist Convergence, which was intended to create an alternative to the Mobilization for Global Justice. The Anti-Capitalist Convergence prioritized creating a space organized around anarchist and anti-capitalist principles that was intentionally anti-racist, anti-sexist, and in support of a diversity of tactics.

The bigger NGOs were not supportive. Public Citizen and those kinds of groups? No. But I recall that 50 Years is Enough was one NGO that was very open to the ACC and thought we were moving things in the right direction. They were led by people from the Global South for whom anti-capitalism was not stigmatized the way it is here.

R. Harvey: The anti-globalization movement is really significant. In our lives, it was really significant, because if a single protest or series of protests or a movement produces people like us—who still believe, who are still doing work that stems from that politicization—it’s clearly very important.

If everyone was depressed in 2004 because they felt that this time period had ended, then that means that it mattered, it was of significance. We may misjudge or inflate the impact that the part of the movement based in the US had on the world, because it meant so much to us personally. But don’t forget, they overthrew the government in Argentina five times, there were huge protests in South Korea, South Africa, Indonesia, this was all part of the worldwide movement, produced by these social movements, of which we were the US version in the streets. We were part of that.

John Timoney served as First Deputy Commissioner of the New York City Police Department, Police Commissioner of Philadelphia, and Police Chief of Miami during the demonstrations against the Free Trade Area of the Americas ministerial in 2003. He was famous for the same police strategies employed at A16: mass arrests, indiscriminate use of tear gas, the deliberate abuse of arrestees. Though he did his best to crush movements for liberation, we outlived Timoney and enthusiastically wrote his obituary in 2016.

Ben: I think the best movements are a mix of generations. We had a guy in ACT UP, and I got so sick of hearing him talk about being at the Stonewall Riots, but at the same time, you know what, he plugged that experience into a story for fighting for homeless queer youth. It wasn’t just him bragging about being at Stonewall, it’s reminding us that those homeless youth were some of the ones who fought in the riot and they’re still in the park right now. What are we going to do to put them in the center of our story?

Ryan: When I think back on this trajectory of protests… summit hopping and convergences like A16, once Seattle happened, this movement emerged where people were searching for the next opportunity to fight in the streets for a better world. To have a place to bring myriad issues and concerns into the public sphere and wrestle with them. That was core to that movement.

Anarchists in the anti-globalization movement were true believers. We didn’t throw ourselves into this because it was popular or trending. Maybe some did, but so many of us stuck with it and continue to fight for a better world now, in and outside of social movements. All movements are like that—these windows of time and possibility open up where things that were previously unpopular to talk about become part of mainstream discourse. In these openings, ideas and truths are introduced and they can’t be suppressed again.

For instance, during the George Floyd uprising, ideas like police abolition and defunding the police that existed in the grassroots for decades came to the surface. Mainstream conversation started to consider “Could we live in a world without police?” In these movement moments, ideas go to the top of societal discourse, even if for a few months, and it evolves the discourse going forward. Even when the momentum of movement settles down, specific ideas have been introduced into discourse as acceptable or familiar. Potential for change and future movements builds from there.

Ben: If you study any movement, there are always through lines. I see the anti-globalization movement as opening a door. There were a thousand direct actions that created Seattle, then Seattle points us in the direction of the IMF protests. And there were actions in Bolivia, in Chiapas, in New York, in Durban, there are these flashpoints of action that point to a more humane way of living. And you keep doing that work, which fades into another set of actions that becomes Occupy Wall Street, then Black Lives Matter, and I think it’s important to see that one thing doesn’t just stop and another starts. There is a through line of people that are participating all the way through, waves of action ebbing and flowing.

I mean, there are people talking about Fred Hampton at Black Lives Matter protests. Well yeah, the guy was shot face down in his bed. We should still be talking about that! We should still be making sense of that, so that’s a through line. Maybe the Black Panthers were shut down by the government, but those ideas never go away. With the affinity groups of ACT UP, it may not be as large, but the work around Global Apartheid, around AIDS vaccines, that still continues. We need to make the vaccine free. We did an action just this summer on 42nd street.

“The Miami Model,” a documentary about the protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas ministerial in Miami, Florida in November 2003.

Gabby: In later years, I had a moment of disappointment, feeling that “We always lose.” We do these activist campaigns and we always lose. I was so sick of it. And my friend said something that stuck with me. He helped me remember that all the time, there are people in suits sitting in board meetings making big decisions that affect the world. Having that discussion and they have this moment of cost/benefit [analysis]. If we do this plan, are there going to be protests? Do we want to bother with them? And sometimes, they say “Yes,” and plow forward anyway, and it’s true, they do tend to cut all the trees, or smash the union. But sometimes, the answer is ‘No.” And they don’t bother, and that’s a win. Every time they say “Don’t bother,” we win, and we never even know it.

Coming to A16 on the heels of Seattle was so exciting, because it was such a surprise win. It awakened the imagination of a whole generation—certainly here, but maybe even in other countries, also. With these big movements, things become different; I think we saw that with Occupy and with Black Lives Matter. And we’ll see it again! When those moments happen, they feel mystical, but really, they happen because we build them and we make them happen.

Lelia: I feel like everything you do prepares you for what you do next. I’m still an activist today. I don’t think it’s in the past.

And things today, I mean, I’ve been going to Black Lives Matter protests since I was four, it was just called something different: the march against police brutality. I have been out there and I’m committed to being out there and fighting for change. I still feel the pull of the streets; I need to be in the streets, even when it’s been tricky navigating our comfort level with COVID-19 and all the other things today.

In the past few years, I have felt in my activist heart that I have to go and be in the streets. I remain compelled.

Anarchists on A16.

This account was compiled by the OUR Histories Collective and it is the first of several narrative oral histories to come. If you have a story to tell or would like to contribute to this ongoing effort, please get in touch.

About the Pictures

The header photograph and several others are by Orin Langelle, a documentary photographer and activist. His work spans five decades over five continents covering social, ecological and economic struggles. He has photographed protests at the WTO, World Bank, FTAA meetings, UN Climate conferences, and much more, including the Zapatista struggle in Chiapas, Mexico and the 2019 People’s Uprising in Chile. Langelle co-founded Global Justice Ecology Project and is currently archiving his photos. You can see more of his work here.

CrimethInc. : Categories : Adventure

The Anti-Deportation Collective : Fighting the Machinery of Deportation in France in the 1990s

Gare de Lyon: Paris, May 5, 1998

The Anti-Deportation Collective

The 21:03 to Marseille

Too Much and Never Enough

Further Reading

It's Safer in the Front : Taking the Offensive against Tyranny

Further Reading

Fell in Love with Fire : A Documentary about the 2019 Uprising in Chile

Stories from the Making of

Anarchist Techno Attacks : Remembering Reclaim the Streets

Party as Protest <—> Protest as Party

Music for the Jilted Generation

Time Keeps on Slipping…

Further Reading and Viewing

A Virtual Tour of Priamukhino, the Bakunin Family Estate and Museum

Weekend at Priamukhino

The Frogs of Priamukhino

Museum

Kutuzov Hill

The South Wing of the Bakunin House, the Barn, and the Forest

19th-Century Church

Cascade of Ponds

Priamukhino Village and Administration

The Environs of Priamukhino and Lopatino

For More Information

Steal Something from Work Day 2024 : It's Time to Even the Score!

Attack the Gas Station

The Team

A Moment of Illumination

The 2024 Zapatista Encuentro : A Report-back with Footage of a Play about the Movement to Stop Cop City

Getting There : The Road to the Zapatista Encuentro

Getting There

December 28

December 29

December 30

The Encuentro

2023: The Year in Review : A World on the Brink

The Ongoing Tragedy in Palestine

Stop Cop City, Defend the Forest

Europe

The Mideast

Latin America

History

In Memory

Public Events

Posters

Zines

Audio

Languages

Motion Pictures

And More!

Let's Be Done with Waiting : A Film in Memory of Alfredo Maria Bonanno

Scenes from the Life of Alfredo Maria Bonanno

Further Reading

Gender and Sexuality in Saint-Imier : A Memoir

Memories from Saint-Imier, 1872 to 2023 : Accounts from a Worldwide Anarchist Gathering

From 1872 to 2023

And in 2023?

Anarchist Infrastructure

A Daring Experiment

Anarchist Initiative

What Gives Me Hope

The Inspiration We Need

Imagine the Authoritarian International

Something Was Missing

Village Life

Some Complaints

A History of Criticism

Accompanied by the Spirit of Mary Shelley

The Choir

In Memory of Dmitry Petrov : An Incomplete Biography and Translation of His Work

A Life in Combat

Appendix I: To Be a Revolutionary

Belief in Victory

Discipline and Responsibility

Willingness to Endure Hardship

Loyalty and Devotion

Checking the Results