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Survival : A Story about Anarchists Enduring Mass Raids

2025-03-21T09:59:15Z

A work of speculative fiction.

In November 1919, United States President Woodrow Wilson launched mass raids against the entire anarchist movement in the United States. Police simultaneously arrested thousands of anarchists in many different parts of the country, shutting down their newspapers, organizations, and meeting halls.

If similar raids were to take place today, they would occur in a technological landscape involving mass surveillance and targeted electronic attacks. Those who survive would also have to adopt different tools.

Escape

When the police battering ram hits his door at 4:11 am, Jake is in his boxers on the floor, playing an emulated sidescroller. The adrenaline hits and within seconds he has jammed his bedroom window open, sliding down into the backyard and off in a run, his socks instantly soaked in the grass. He hears shouting but doesn’t look back to check if there are pigs looking out his window or chasing him from the side of the house, he jumps the back fence more awkwardly than he imagined, getting a splinter deep in his left hand, but he ignores it and dashes over the roof of the neighbor’s shed, trying to remember every detail of the surrounding blocks.

In what feels like an instant, he’s two blocks away, hiding behind some bushes as a squad car drives by. His breath sounds to him like the loudest thing in the world and his mind spins as he imagines a neighbor coming out behind him. He’s in nothing but boxers and muddy socks and his hand is dripping blood. Nothing happens. The squad car crawls down another block. Time to move.

Vera is almost home from work, listening to music in her earphones, when she comes around a bend and sees the corner of a SWAT van outside her punk house. She pivots immediately down another street, casually continuing her walk while pulling out her phone, she knows she should immediately turn it off but first she texts a group chat “House being raided” and then turns it off. Maybe that warning will help someone. Many phone batteries remain active even when the device is off, she knows; right now, some lazy junior officer could be noticing the GPS or her network connection triangulating her as she moves away. Should she throw it? Should she abruptly stomp on her phone out here on the street? There’s a drainage vent coming up, she could toss it in and keep walking. Vera hesitates. Her phone is “encrypted,” but against everyone’s advice she uses a short password. If they dig it out of the drain… she doesn’t know how to pry out the SD card, stomping on the whole device might draw attention and not even destroy the main memory… time is of the essence, so she makes a hard choice quickly and just tosses the whole thing in the drain. She’s just a normal person on a walk.

As she keeps walking away, Vera hears a car rolling up behind her slowly, it takes every ounce of willpower to keep walking normally, not to look back in terror. Maybe she should? Maybe she should just run for it? The car parks behind her and there are sounds of a mom unloading young kids. She’s not being followed. Where to now?

Julie and Maggie sit at their dining room table, struggling not to reflect panic at each other. Only one news outlet is even reporting the nationwide raids and there’s almost nothing there. Messages saying “Leave and then delete this group chat” keep popping up for both of them. Little spatters of reports on raids and then silence; a friend who is always too frantic is spamming everyone asking for updates, then suddenly she’s silent.

There’s an hour of nothing.

They trade terse updates with a friend who lives far away. Someone local suddenly appears online, but only to post a meme in a dead channel and then disappear.

The same music plays on the same radio stations. The wind blows through the trees. A cousin asks for advice with a preschool situation, totally oblivious. The local news does a puff piece about a local business. The neighbors get a pizza delivery.

“They’re probably not going to come for us. We haven’t done anything.”

Their confused dog is whining with shared nerves. Maggie keeps eyeing the go-bag by the door they packed together months ago. That afternoon, Julie had made a show of being a good sport, humoring her need to prep; now all Maggie can think about is everything they’re missing. Julie’s passport has just expired. Can they get across the border? If only they had done a dry run. They take the dog out on a walk, leaving all devices home, whispering potential plans to one another, trying not to draw attention as a jogger passes them by.

When they get home, there’s a private message on Instagram from a friend saying they’re putting together a legal defense committee, first meeting will be public, at a public park, they’re inviting some local liberal journalists as shields. Someone at the local alt-weekly says she’s writing a story. There’s a lawyer coming from a big-name liberal thing.

The internet keeps being really slow. Signal doesn’t deliver messages and then suddenly delivers three all at once. Loading a lot of websites just returns errors. They’re so sleep-deprived with stress that when they finally crash together on the couch, they sleep right through the defense committee meeting. A friend knocks loudly on their door and they nearly die of heart attacks, assuming it’s the cops. His report back is terse: almost no journalists showed. Most of the folks who went have been grabbed. One was driven down off her bike on her way home. An old liberal lawyer went to the county jail with a court order and the cops just laughed and arrested her. He’s going underground and suggests they do too.

But Julie and Maggie have a life, they have jobs—at least for now, as they’ve both called out sick—and they have a house. They’re normal now, even law-abiding. Burn a few posters, donate a few books to the neighborhood little libraries, delete a few accounts, maybe they can pass as upstanding citizens.

“If we leave our shit here and stop paying, we’ll lose everything we’ve built since poverty, plus have to pay some ridiculous fine.”

If they do get raided, maybe it’ll be just a few days in lock up, in and out, just a performance of a crackdown. The libs will get mad about the lawyers, surely.

Neither of them has been able to cook since the raids first started, so they drive out together to grab pickup. Waiting for a light, Maggie stares at something on the side of the street and then leaps out the truck passenger’s side door without a word. Julie is frightened at first, then furious, but when she pulls the truck over and heads back to Maggie, she sees her partner kneeling next to a homeless man lying at an odd angle.

“We don’t have our phones, we can’t call a paramedic,” she reminds Maggie. But then recognition dawns on her. It’s one of their friends. Under the mess of blisters and swollen bruises, his eyes are open, staring at nothing.

He lived in one of the first punk houses that was raided, he never went to anything besides some hardcore shows, he was just a baker.

They don’t pick up their meal. They head home. Dog. Go-bag. Some last-minute additional ideas. Camping gear. Encrypted backup drives. Medicine. Dry food. Clothes. Blankets.

Phones and leftover devices smashed. House key hidden somewhere in the yard for a friend. Maggie looks at her cheap Casio watch. “That’s time; we need to go.”

Resources

Jake has been tagging and dumpster-diving for years, so he knows his neighborhood pretty well. Just as he’s noticed what gets cleaned and what does not, he’s noticed what gets moved and what does not. What gets paid attention to and what does not.

There’s a moss-covered rock in a local park that never gets moved. No one even goes near it. There’s a roof of an abandoned building littered with garbage.

Long ago, Jake took two plastic bottles and sealed inside each a ziplock bag with a small amount of cash and two USBs each. Then he buried one bottle in the dirt underneath the rock and taped another bottle underneath a non-functioning vent on the roof of an abandoned building.

In each bottle, one USB contains an encrypted KeepassX database with the distinct login information of every online account he has, as well as a VeraCrypt encrypted folder with various files he wanted to make sure he never lost (scans of his IDs, photos of friends) including a GPG key pair. He has encrypted both with a passphrase of five randomly chosen dictionary words committed to memory. “Veritable Sasquatch Humdinger Locality Peeps.” He has practiced this every night for weeks, building all kinds of associations and mnemonics. Unencrypted on the drives are executable files to install KeepassX, Veracrypt, and GPG on any new computer. On the other USB is a full install of the Tails operating system.

Jake knows he looks a mess in his boxers and muddy socks, but he gets to the park and digs up the bottle without a squad car seeing him or some vigilante neighbor raising a fuss. The twenty and two tens inside will have to be enough. Luckily, there’s a small houseless encampment nearby and an old lady is willing to part with a sweater for ten. A free box happens to have a (too large) pair of sneakers. He desperately tries to make his boxers look like shorts and walks to a thrift store, quickly emerging with a backpack, a t-shirt, a baseball cap, and a pair of pants.

A visit to a corner-store bathroom with a razor and hair dye, and his appearance is at least a little different. He buys a cheap first aid kit for the splinter in his hand.

With his cash broken into change, he can catch a bus across town.

When Jake gets near the first house of comrades, not only are the cops there, but his friends are still in their underwear and hogtied on the lawn. A cop is violently molesting a friend of his under the pretense of a search while the others laugh. Jake keeps moving.

At the second house, there are no squad cars, but the front door is visibly missing. Jake notices someone sitting in an unmarked car across the street. He keeps walking.

The third house he tries belongs to a largely apolitical friend. It’s a struggle to try to get him not to proclaim surprise loudly on the front porch and not to talk near devices. “I just need to borrow a couple hundred, man, then I’ll be out of your hair. I never saw you, you never saw me. Please.”

Jake leaves with a hundred, a filled water bottle, a better hoodie, a better pair of shoes with dry socks, and a dusty old laptop.

It’s not enough bus fare to get to the border. He needs a sleeping bag, but REI has been implementing stronger anti-theft policies and the longer he fucks around town, the more likely he is to get stopped. He’s terrified of facial recognition/tracking software on the buses, and his thrift store baseball cap isn’t going to protect him forever.

He scopes out the city bus terminal from some distance, but it looks like this one checks ID and there’s a cop wandering around. Instead, he catches a city bus out to a distant suburb on the edge of rural two-lane roads, trying to hitch. Hopefully, the cops out here aren’t actively looking for him and won’t harass a hitchhiker. A state patrol car passes him without incident. He has no success for hours and it starts to grow dark, so it’s back to the city.

Worried about cash, in the middle of the night, he climbs the roof of his second stash, but it’s missing. Probably the tape eroded months ago and it fell off. Hope the person who found it could use the cash. If they opened one of the USBs, it would just prove cryptic, no way to even learn what was encrypted.

It’s a cold night, sleeping rough without a sleeping bag, and in the morning, Jake takes refuge in the back of a café, where he still has enough cash for a warm drink. He takes out the dusty old laptop from his friend and the Tails USB, booting it and accessing the internet over Tor. The connection to the Tor network has trouble, so he chooses “Configure Connection” and selects different bridges until he finds one that works.

A few anarchist counterinfo sites are reporting the raids, but a surprising number of sites are down entirely. Local news says almost nothing besides statist blather. Social media is trash with speculation from those least informed. Foreign noblogs and indymedia sites have the most relevant reporting.

Signal is down, something about centralized architecture, comments speculate about international law, but it doesn’t matter right now. Riseup allegedly melted their servers with thermite during a raid and were all arrested. Protonmail has apparently been collaborating, injecting spyware onto user’s devices, and some people are surprised by this? Wire is “temporarily unavailable.” A few people leave links urging people to use various apps or tools Jake’s never heard of. Other people debate the technical merits, but he has a hard time understanding. One new app is blowing up pretty quickly, lots of people attest to it being good, but this seems mostly based on them finding it easy to use. One person says they are still trying to use a smartphone but then goes quiet. One account that was quiet for a while starts speaking differently.

In the comments section on a formerly obscure site, someone says, “This is Big C, I’m free, a group of us are forming up at a secure location, contact me through a secure channel.” Jake knows this is Cookie, a local organizer.

After a little struggle, Jake manages to get the most popular new “encrypted communication” apps temporarily installed on his Tails instance. He joins one of the public channels that some comments encouraged using. It’s basically like Telegram or Discord: a flood of posting and arguing. Folks who’ve survived the raids using these new accounts try to imply who they are without saying it openly. It’s an amateur hour shitshow of oblique flailing: “Remember that one time when we did that one thing, I was the one who wore green.” Turns out one of the worst assholes in the scene is still free and he’s using the opportunity to crow.

Even when the crude “only you would know X” games imply an account is a given comrade, Jake knows that such details could simply be copy-pasted from a compromised device via some man-in-the-middle attack where the cops sit between two parties relaying their messages back and forth as if they’re the other person.

This is not enough to trust an internet post enough to meet up.

Vera walks immediately to the house of her old friend Cat. She scopes the front from down the street, notices Cat’s Subaru is missing, and makes her way in through the backyard. Vera has held on to a spare key for years, but their friendship is almost entirely offline. They don’t even bring devices when they hang out. As far as the outside world knows, Cat is just another park ranger doing ecological restoration.

Ten years ago, they burned down a condo together.

Vera cries and trembles the second she closes the back door behind her, falling into a fetal position. Cat’s house is pristine, beautiful, safe.

Vera rocks back and forth, trying to remember breathing exercises. Has her heart always been this loud? Is she dying?

After an eternity, she gets up and starts doing stretches and exercises. She pictures herself punching through the faces of the cops back at her house. She knows she needs to work out the adrenaline. She needs to—oh god she needs to drink water.

Cat’s house is like a warm security blanket. Everything is just right.

Vera lies on the floor of the living room for hours, not moving. Listening way too attentively to the sounds of cars going by. Is Cat even in town? Should she make something from her food in the pantry?

The slow crunching sound of Cat’s Subaru coming to rest in the driveway is an immense relief. Cat is surprised about the raids, but she grasps the severity, hugs Vera, and tries to throws lentils and veggies in an Instapot while listening and asking questions. While dinner cooks, Cat brings out an old laptop she rarely uses and they check the major news sites together, careful not to enter search terms or anything that might flag.

In some sense, it’s a relief to learn the raids were beyond just Vera’s house. They’re not targeted at Vera specifically. But no one seems to have been released yet, so it’s clearly not safe to leave. Cat makes up a futon for Vera in the basement. “Of course you can stay the night. You can stay as long as you need.”

Vera takes off her earrings and places them carefully beside her work bag. In each earring is a tiny sliver of a USB stick. Each of them is just like Jake’s: encrypted KeepassX database, encrypted file system, GPG keys, installation executables for Veracrypt and KeepassX.

In the morning, Vera will investigate what can be done with Cat’s laptop.

Julie and Maggie make three stops before heading out of town, first at Julie’s bank, where she successfully empties most of her account into five thousand in cash. But at Maggie’s bank, the teller disappears for a long while and doesn’t come back. “You know what, never mind, I’ll go to a different bank,” Maggie says to another teller, using her best imitation Karen voice. They drive off, heads on a swivel for cop cars. Finally, they slip a note into a friend’s mailbox explaining where to find their house key and some instructions for their lease.

They collect every credit or debit card they have and tape them together under a seat, never to be used again.

They take off quickly. Back roads to avoid license plate readers, then long country roads. It’s hard to navigate without their phones. Each of them picks a personality type and fashion style that signals no political or subcultural allegiance. They make up a backstory about how they’re friends and try to bicker in convenience stores to avoid looking queer. They pick up a bumper sticker they’d otherwise be livid at and slap it on.

At a campsite two hundred miles away, they go through all their remaining belongings. They have a tarp, a tent, two sleeping bags, a gallon jug of water, a Sawyer microfiltration water purifier, a five-gallon bucket of rice and beans, a camp stove, a couple pads, trashy books for boredom.

They end up buying basic comforts like folding chairs with their cash reserves.

“It’s just a camping trip, until it isn’t.”

They go on a hike with their dog and talk about communities they can flee to. A land defense occupation that became permanent. A log cabin squat built deep off any path on federal land. A friend’s organic farm with some partially abandoned yurts.

They discuss the pros and cons of various cults they know.

In the end they drive to the furthest option, the organic farm.

The drive is long.

On a thin winding back road, they stack up behind a long line of cars. Local vigilantes are performing an inspection to check for “ANTIFA.” A middle-aged white lady with an AR waves them through cheerily. “Stay safe out there!”

The next town has a small “rally for democracy” along the central drag, besides an Arby’s. A couple dozen liberals in folding chairs hold cardboard placards making puns about the suspension of a cable news channel.

At a gas station, Julie overhears two men confidently talking about the investment opportunities in real estate being opened up as all the “cockroaches” are removed.

One night, they sleep in their car in a Walmart parking lot on the advice of a friendly night auditor at a cheap motel. “New regulations, I can’t take a cash deposit. And there’s this thing I gotta enter your IDs into that wires them nationally.”

When they finally arrive at the farm and are allowed past the gate, there are already fifteen other people there: extended family of the owning couple, a couple of WWOOFer hippies, and two coteries of obvious radicals who are cagey and cold to anyone they don’t know.

Everyone is antsy.

Different groups cook different food. Panicked envy flickers in some eyes.

Two weeks in and Julie keeps to herself. Maggie spends her time trying to suck up to the owners and befriends an autistic nerd with one of the other radical groups.

An old balding white dude in a black hoodie keeps snapping at their dog. A trip into town for bulk food goes badly after the nerd insists on wearing a mask and a confrontation breaks out with a local. A backed-up toilet in the farm house makes the owners dour for a couple days.

One night, the situation boils over and folks start openly talking about the raids. There’s fury over who has a device and who can be trusted to have a device. Who is putting everyone else in danger. Who has a right to be here. Who has a right to anything. After someone brings up “Land back,” someone else screams, “Who do you think you’re fooling?! Who are your people exactly?! You’re not Indigenous, you’re as white as me!” and an awkward physical fight breaks out.

The next morning, there are immigration police visible in the distance at the neighboring farm. One of the hippies finds three young girls hiding down by the river and rushes them into one of the plastic yurts everyone else is hiding in.

Dogs bark in the distance. Julie joins the couple that owns the farm in meeting the immigration agents. Her dog barks at theirs and they put them away. The immigration agents are some of the newly deputized conspiracy heads that have barely any training, and Julie is able to find common cultural ground with them, ranting about how genetically modified organisms are poisoning the land, leaning hard into the persona she’s studiously built on the road. The wannabe genocidaires laugh at her jokes and leave, waving back to her.

The girls’ white uncle was allowed to remain, a nasty gash across his forehead. The rest of the family is being taken to one of the deportation camps where people die of dehydration. He’s profoundly grateful for the rescue of his nieces.

Over the next month, the adjacent farms begin to merge. A dugout hiding spot becomes a tunnel network. Maybe it’ll suffice to hide folks if cops return.

Some new folks arrive, fleeing other things.

Tensions break down, relationships begin to form across the groups.

One of the quieter members starts opening up, giving lectures on syntropic agriculture, and an array of projects rapidly consume all the spare land across the farms. As people get busy developing personal domains and projects to be invested in, the overall vibe improves dramatically.

Food gets pooled. People become more open about what devices they held onto, but it doesn’t matter as much, because all of the old internet is gone. A few specific corporate sites remain accessible, whitelisted by telecoms for the sake of commerce, but almost everything else is gone. You can get Amazon deliveries and send Gmail, but it’s impossible to reach Wikipedia, much less Athens Indymedia or any Noblogs.

The farm establishes a consensus on how devices are to be used. The owners maintain all their devices in the farm house, air-gapped from everyone else. News stories and everything else are downloaded to a USB by one person for an hour every day, then passed around the three laptops everyone else shares.

There’s one burner cell phone for the whole farm, bought with cash at one of the last Walmarts where that is possible. It’s kept turned off and wrapped in plastic bags under a rock five miles away along the side of a road. It’s for emergencies and strictly overseen usage. No one will put its SIM card in or turn it on near the farm or its stash location.

Having swapped out plates and tags, Julie and Maggie occasionally drive into the local town. They sit behind a café in their truck while it’s closed at night and tap into the still-active Wi-Fi with their laptop running Tails. Signal is long gone. Tor is totally inaccessible, even using the latest smuggled bridges. On the plain internet, they have managed to register two Gmail accounts using the farm’s collective burner phone. How can they find other comrades? How can they talk with them?

Communications

Jake doesn’t have to trust the new app everyone’s using while Signal’s down. Long ago, everyone in his affinity group created GPG key pairs, then verified each other’s keys and signed them. They also created private backup email accounts on other platforms only to be used in emergencies.

Jake’s Riseup email account may be down, but his GPG keys were in the encrypted folder on his cached USB along with a list of the backup email accounts of his comrades. He goes through each one, encrypting a message to that person’s public key and sending it to their backup email.

After a couple hours at the café, one of them sends a message back to him. Ethan is still free! Jake asks if he knows anything about Big C’s supposed posts. Ethan says he’ll check with someone in Big C’s crew he’s also in contact with, Ash.

Ash emails back with a public key for Big C. She signs his key with her own. Ethan checks it and sees that it matches the public key for Ash that he’s signed. Then he signs Big C’s key and sends it to Jake.

Jake messages Big C on the new app everyone is using. Instead of sending anything in cleartext, he encrypts a message to the key he has for Big C. He adds his own public key.

On that same app, in the general channel they’re all using, someone’s screaming that another account is a honeypot. People stop posting. If they move to a different channel or a different app, they never send Jake anything about it.

But that doesn’t matter, because Big C responds, his message likewise encrypted using GPG and then pasted within this new app.

Jake decrypts and checks that it was signed by the same key for Big C that his friend Ethan certified.

There’s a time and location. Back room of a donut shop a couple punks work at, 11 pm.

Jake spends most of the day at the café, trying not to attract attention. Then he scarfs down some fast food and gets a bus across town to the donut shop. He gets off a couple stops early and circles around it on back streets, looking for any car or person that could be staking things out. He decides to wait a little longer in an alley. But the alley isn’t empty. Ethan’s there, smoking a cigarette and also scoping things out.

They hug. “You’re the first person I’ve seen in like two days, man.”

Ethan’s heard a rumor about some kind of legal defense committee being set up, but he can’t stand one of the people he thinks is in it.

Jake quietly regales him with the saga of his nearly-nude escape.

They look at the donut shop down the street.

“If it’s a trap, maybe only one of us should go.”

“I’ll go. If it’s chill, I’ll come back out and get you?”

“Maybe they raid us only once we’re all inside.”

“Do you wanna wait out here all night?”

“Fuck, man. I dunno.”

Jake goes in.

A punk he doesn’t know ushers him in through the employee side door. It’s just three. Big C, usually known as Cookie, the unknown punk, and Ash.

Ash is chowing down on donuts nervously.

Cookie gets up and extends out a hand and then turns it into an awkward hug. They don’t really know each other like that, but Jake accepts, surprisingly eager for physical touch.

“Are we waiting for anybody else? Who’d you share this with?”

“I don’t fucking know, I told Ash and Sydney and Sydney said she told her band, but like I don’t trust them to—”

“Hey! Mitch is cool.”

“Yeah, sure, Mitch is cool, I’m just saying I don’t trust them to not tell someone random, you know.”

“Jesus,” says the punk Jake doesn’t know, looking out the cracked open employee door.

“What?!”

“It’s Zoe. She’s down the street but she’s coming this way.”

Some shared glances. No one wants to let Zoe in.

“Well, let her in.”

Half an hour later, the tiny donut store backroom is swampy with seven nervous anarchists, Ethan included.

“What are we fucking doing?”

“Besides running and hiding?”

“I say we make distractions, make them feel like they got the wrong folks. They’re not the threat.”

“So what? They’ve already grabbed everyone. It’s not like they’re gonna let them go to get us instead. They’ll just keep them detained and then use all their resources on the few of us. Naw, last thing we need to do right now is remind them they didn’t get all of us.”

“To what fucking end. Solidarity means attack.”

“Look, if you can think of some way to bust people out, I’m all for it, but like, right now we can’t even keep ourselves safe. We bust people out, we have no way to house them. They’re raiding random totally apolitical squats, they just cleared the last houseless encampment near the airport.”

“Look, you can run and hide if you want, honestly, I mean that, I don’t judge, but I know if I was captured right now, the number one thing I’d want to see in the world would be cop cars on fire in the county jail parking lot.”

The meeting ends a couple hours later. They have sorted into two groups and a lone individual. One group will focus on risky active strikes. The other group will try to build an underground capable of keeping people safe.

Ash is going to run a clearinghouse email account to take submissions and push out notifications. Only people within the signed network of GPG keys. If they shut down her email, she’ll just pivot to a different one, using the same keys and sending to the same recipients. “They can’t shut down email wholesale, too much of capitalism runs on it.” She’ll try to maintain a public counterinfo site for certain announcements marked to be public, but no promises. Two of the punks present are going to be showed how to use GPG.

Jake and Ethan head out into the night. Ethan’s got a van they can sleep in.

Cat said Vera could stay as long as she needed, but they’ve never actually lived together before, and as the weeks go by, little frictions keep coming up. Vera forgot that she sided with the bandmate of Cat’s old boyfriend that one time, but Cat hasn’t. Cat doesn’t approve of the lengthy showers Vera takes. Vera had no idea Cat was such a morning person.

Normally, these would be nothing, but the isolation and background stress is taking a toll. Vera feels like it’s hard to keep her head together. Hard to be her.

Without the reference points of her normal life, she feels unmoored and frazzled. Always a step behind. Saying things she should have thought through more. Cat doesn’t have a Netflix account and Vera has nothing to do all day but pace around Cat’s basement and read Cat’s books.

Cat doesn’t use the internet much and Vera is trying not to suddenly flood Cat’s router with a ton of activity. Every morning, around the time Cat said she sometimes checks her work email, Vera takes the new laptop Cat bought for her and connects to the internet.

Insofar as the raids are getting attention, it seems to be mostly because some prominent journalist got detained too. It joins the background shrieking about journalists’ rights being under attack, but the news outlets mostly want to use that narrative to bolster their subscriptions.

With social media effectively gone, there’s little coverage of the mass detentions of anarchists, save some conservatives chortling that it was about time, and “See, the old establishment was deliberately choosing not to fight terrorism the whole time.”

She’s careful to build a profile of internet activity that doesn’t match her prior use. She chooses different websites for news, even to check weather reports. She doesn’t want to deviate too far from Cat’s previous activity. If Cat used Bing for searching about mushroom harvests, so will she. If Cat didn’t use an ad-blocker, she won’t add one. The goal is to slowly build up Cat’s internet usage so she can use it more frequently while stuck at home. She holds herself back from checking radical websites.

In the last three weeks, Vera has almost never left Cat’s house. One afternoon, there was an unusual car parked all day within view of the front door. Even Cat was convinced it was sketchy. Cat’s home cooking is very cumin-and-vegetables oriented, but she picks up the Thai food Vera loves a couple times with cash, not card.

Vera is hesitant about booting Tails off the USB she had on hand and connecting on the home network because she’s worried that will draw attention.

Instead, she gets Cat to go to a nearby café during the day and write down the Wi-Fi password. Then, in the middle of the night, she goes out with Cat’s crusty old laptop, sits behind the café’s dumpster, boots Tails, and connects to the open internet.

A lot of anarchist websites are gone, and the foreign ones are thin on substantive report-backs. Meaningful news or how-to guides are overshadowed by essays that triumphantly advocate one or another grotesque alliance and declare the time of principles to be over. This provokes, in turn, angry evocative screeds that fetishize death. To survive is a betrayal of our fallen, says one, it’s our duty to die beautifully together. Someone else is aggressively promoting a Patreon.

In her backup email account, there’s an encrypted message to her, signed by her old comrade Matthew. He survived the raids that got every other anarchist in their town and has taken formal sanctuary in the basement of a Quaker house. The cops seem to know he’s there, though, or at least suspect it. They keep a squad car parked out front at all hours and have followed the two old Quakers who come and go.

He’s heard from a friend who escaped the raids in another city and has been riding the rails. Matthew has a normie friend, a former movement lawyer who has fallen off the radar doing corporate work for a decade, but who he is certain would put his other friend up. It’s just that he’s got no way to contact him.

He has another friend who made it down across the southern border, but is penniless, needs a money transfer to get an apartment and look for a job. It could be cryptocurrency, even a mailed check… is it possible to get an anonymous money transfer?

When Cat gets home, Vera is ready with questions.

In the middle of the night, Julie and Maggie have to leave the farm. They drive out with six of their friends lying flat in the back of their truck, supplies and blankets packed on top of them. Every time they swerve around a bend on a back road and see headlights, they flinch, waiting to see if it is the cops or the local militia who promised to kill all of them.

The sudden collapse of two major cities from back-to-back environmental disasters has killed thousands, but it has also resulted in the establishment of an immense internal refugee camp in the south. The rumor is that the authorities can’t demand ID there because so many people have lost theirs.

There are enough white people in the vast camp, with enough friends and family outside, that it looks unlikely they will be purged, like so many immigrants had been, if they just keep their stories straight and avoid speaking with an accent. They should be safer there than at the farm where they have lived for the last year.

The roads are too chaotic, the internal border checkpoints too overwhelmed. The eight of them make it south intact. They buy Taco Bell and donuts along the way.

When they get to the camp, the armed guards shake them down, pilfering whatever they think might be of value.

From the shoddy posters everywhere, they quickly discover there are out “leftists” in the sprawling camp—the kind that want to be an armed gang and won’t countenance any “organizing” that isn’t under their umbrella. Every few weeks, one of them ends up dead, and it’s rarely from the guards or conservatives.

The better relief organizations are all fatigued and thin on resources. They keep getting squeezed out by Christian groups and political organizations looking to gain contracts or legitimacy. It’s unclear to what extent this is the ruler’s acolytes cannibalizing a Federal project in an orgy of corruption and to what extent the powers that be are deliberately inflicting pressure on the refugees. Buses with corporate branding on the sides promise quick work contracts to those in the camps. People come back bone-weary, but they do come back through the security cordons and fencing that surrounds the camp. The ruler brags that this program is finally providing jobs for real citizens.

It’s said that Amazon is restructuring its national supply chain to center around the concentrated cheap labor that the refugee camp provides.

Julie and Maggie keep their heads down, forming a tight circle with their friends from the farm. When administrators try to split them up into separate tracts of tin sheds, they find a way to meet up again.

When the guards took their jewelry and cash, they left them their bulk filtration system, chemical water purifying tabs, and beaten laptop. These turn out to be worth more than gems within the camp. Being able to purify gallons of water every day makes their crew self-sufficient.

What remains of the internet in the rest of the nation isn’t much to speak of, but there’s almost nothing in the camp besides a single app that takes over your phone, charges you dearly, and pronounces news headlines from a single source.

Julie and Maggie ignore phones entirely, sticking to Maggie’s Casio watch and their laptop. They disable the Wi-Fi on it and pretend it is just for showing pirated shows. Electrical power is available in the camp for a hefty charge, but folks rig up DIY tin-can and magnet turbines in the river that can recharge batteries if you wait long enough.

Once you’re in the camp, you can’t leave, but smugglers promise to get letters or even packages to and from the outside world. Rumor has it that many of them steal whatever you entrust to them and turn anything incriminating over to the cops for rewards.

Julie and Maggie have signed GPG keys with everyone they lived with at the farm, and those who didn’t flee with them to the camps are now vital relays to a wider network. The uncle of the three girls they saved has left the adjoining farm to join up with family further east. His white father’s name and address is above suspicion, so far.

They operate a rudimentary onion network, mailing USBs out with the smugglers. First they encrypt a message to the final recipient, then they encrypt that encrypted message plus a note about how to relay it to them to a friend, like the uncle. This encrypted file they hide as a malformed gif file among other memes and similar junk of the sort that is passed around the internal refugee camp. If the smugglers or anyone else inspect the USB on its way to the uncle, they just see some memes and a broken gif. It’s crude, and not every message makes it, but enough do.

Soon enough, Julie and Maggie are writing reports on the camps that are getting to anarchist journalists and infosites in other countries.

One of the companies that oversees the camp’s most hated enforcement drones gets its supply lines attacked in the Mediterranean. The CTO is assassinated at a gala.

When news reaches the camp, even conservative grannies who are always on about racist conspiracy theories are suddenly praising “those anarchists.”

A communiqué from distant comrades makes its way back through a laborious series of USB exchange. Solidarity, it reads, means attack.

Attack

It’s actually pretty hard to live in the forest. Jake and Ethan knew it would be when they drove their van far off an abandoned logging road and began burying it with dirt and branches to avoid detection by overhead drones.

But they couldn’t live in the city anymore. Not after the attack on city hall.

Every night, they laugh about the video of the supposedly “progressive” mayor—the one who had approved the executions of so many of their friends in black sites or ditches screaming as he emerged from the burning ruins.

“Every night we are still alive to cherish this is a gift,” they tell each other. It makes freezing on a punctured air mattress and throwing centipedes out of their bedding a little more tolerable.

Before they had escaped the city in their increasingly suspect van, stencils had started appearing of the dying mayor’s face on the news reel. Printed underneath was NO PITY.

Food is a problem, though. They rapidly pick the surrounding valleys clean of dandelions, miners’ lettuce, chickweed, and blackberries. After they almost get caught raiding a dumpster for something with calories in it, they realize they need a better system.

Once a month, they make their way through the forest to the outer suburbs of the city. Cookie leaves two plastic bags of food and stove gas canisters for them to pick up in a forested nook just outside an army graveyard. Peanut butter, chocolate, granola, olive oil, instant rice, chili. Sometimes, there’s also a book or a boardgame. There’s never any T for Ethan, though; it’s impossible to get hormones for anyone these days.

Back at the buried van, they carefully ration their laptop use, laboriously rebuilding battery charge from a damaged solar panel. They only hook up to the Baofeng radio at specific times. With email effectively banned, Ash is now running communication bursts in the region via radio. About once a week, she bikes out to random locations around the edge of the city and fires off a blast of noise over ham radio before taking off. A few drones now circle the city taking pictures, triangulating her signal each time she sends it. She’s in a race against time with them.

This noise is encrypted, of course, and decrypted via private keys now shared by a wider set of anarchist survivors. Each communication burst includes the time of the next burst, though not the place. Jake and Ethan connect their radio to a program on their laptop each time, waiting to read and decrypt.

Most nights, it’s just news from the wider world, ferried in via underground networks. Warnings of systematic sweeps planned for certain neighborhoods or local highways being closed by militias.

But one night, it’s something new.

The ruler of the new regime is coming for a photo op. They’re going to drag out one of the comrades kept alive from the original raids and execute her as the mastermind of the attack on City Hall.

There will be a ton of security.

But maybe not enough for six different shooters.

It’s dangerous to keep connecting to the Wi-Fi in the middle of the night at the same café, so Vera rotates cafés, making sure that Cat doesn’t get the Wi-Fi password on the same days and doesn’t bring a phone or device when she does go.

With Tor blocked, Vera knows that every time she uses the internet at a café to check sketchy websites it’s a signal to the authorities there’s a radical still running around her town. She tries not to check sketchy websites the same nights at the same cafés where she checks the backup email account she’s been using to message with Matthew. She writes most of her emails ahead of time to minimize time on the ground. No more than three minutes connected, then back into the night. The cops could catch her if they really put resources into it, but she’s banking on their laziness.

Then one day her emails are blocked. All email seems to be blocked. There’s new ID legislation that’s gone into place?

This is the last night Vera goes out to a café.

But by that point, she’s already helped build a relay network across town.

Every Monday, Matthew hands a USB to one of his Quaker hosts, who slips it down the side of a bench while sipping coffee in a park. Cat checks the side of the same bench a couple hours later and brings it home to Vera, who decrypts it. Relay points and drop spots now exist across town because Matthew’s efforts to rope in the former movement lawyer have succeeded. Now there are two anarchists hiding out on the lam from other cities in his house. One lives in the attic. The other has changed her hair color, removed some piercings, added a full face of makeup, and is working a job under the table.

A month ago, they helped relay the complete archives of a major anarchist collection that had supposedly been purged from a university. It went south with an anarchist backpacking a long mountain trail. Hard drives with copies of the collection are now squirreled away in various places.

Another anarchist that their new network loosely knows has set up a hidden camp on an island in the river, taking a little hidden canoe back and forth into a national park in the wee hours once a week and getting supplies. Cat and the lawyer are finding ways to slip an extra hundred a month to him.

Conservatives have been screaming about demolishing the Little Libraries on people’s lawns because liberals stuck a few banned books in them. They have no idea that Vera’s network uses them as flags to notify couriers about drops. A pulp sci-fi book with spine turned inward placed on top in a certain Little Library means to surreptitiously pick up a USB from a Burger King bag in a trash can down the street. They’re getting a whole system going.

Vera doesn’t need to know the network beyond her immediate circles. With her preexisting GPG public keys for certain distant comrades, she can just send encrypted messages with a distant city as a public destination and wait for couriers and swaps to copy and circulate it until her recipient can decrypt it. Messages get lost, but some get through. Through the network, distant strangers trade tips and tricks they have learned keeping their own local networks up.

With so much of the internet down, normies have started engaging in wider swap networks for saved files. “It’s almost like the libs are making their own little really really free markets.” It doesn’t matter that Cat doesn’t have a Netflix account, because now Vera has access to every show once torrented by local nerds. She keeps the new laptop that accepts such USBs air-gapped from everything else. Even if it’s not the shows she’d prefer, Vera can watch TV again.

Having something to do—knowing they can make a difference helping other anarchists—has Cat and Vera in a much better mood. Their city is a locus point in an emerging national underground railroad. That friend of Matthew’s south of the border that Cat sent cash to? He has a job now, and his apartment is packed with anarchists who have survived the dangerous trek across the border.

They still have the internet down there!

As Vera’s little sneaker net develops, folks begin to loop in around the edges—certain liberals from the pirate networks who have proven they can be trusted, at least with some things, at least to help relay GPG messages. One of the liberals in the network finds a way to tap into the credit card reader communications network and sneak packages of information back and forth with a programmer friend in another country.

When the Quaker house is raided and Matthew is summarily shot inside, it hardly breaks anyone’s stride.

And soon enough the network of safehouses and dead drop couriers is so well established that a subsection of it can risk moving not just people and money but guns.

Julie holds the wound closed while Maggie applies the glue, a contraband gift slipped into the camp via their smuggler friends. The fallen striker is cursing up a storm, but at least he’s not fainting.

Where’s that blasted Red Cross worker?

The crowd around them isn’t howling or chanting, they’re just jumping up and down in waves, a tactic somehow revived from decades ago in Apartheid South Africa. It makes the earth seem to shiver and shift—an avalanche of people, a force of nature. The usually sandy ground of the camp is already muddy with the rains of the flash flood. All the jumping makes it squelch in a way that adds up to something like the roar of the ocean.

This is it. More bullets are going to fly. But the guards don’t have enough and the camp knows it.

The gangs have disappeared. The leftists who talked endlessly about a mass strike are nowhere to be seen. The rune-tattooed fascists who work hand in hand with the guards are magically gone, too. A scrawny white boy who usually proudly hawks black market items is beating his chest wildly as he jumps alongside the grizzled Latina dyke who drives the aid workers around.

Maggie’s Casio watch is beeping with some irrelevant reminder. Their mud-soaked dog is jumping excitedly too, deciding the vast crowd is playing a game with her. Maybe the three of them will survive this, too.

If that video of the ruler’s photo-op that was smuggled in is to be believed, anything is possible.

Capitalism Thrives on Death—Death to Capitalism : Two Posters

2024-10-24T16:31:23Z

Ahead of Halloween, on the heels of several months of forest fires, hurricanes, and heat waves, we present two posters—”Capitalism Is the Dance of Death” and “Capitalism Thrives on Death.” Learn how to make wheatpaste and cover the walls of your community in these!

Capitalism Is the Dance of Death

From Greece to the Amazon, environmentalists and volunteer firefighters are risking their lives to protect ecosystems threatened by urban expansion, agribusiness, and industrially produced climate change. Yet the causes of these disasters are only accelerating, driven by a system that rewards profit at any price. We are swept up in a rhythm we cannot control, moving faster and faster towards our doom. Capitalism is the danse macabre, the dance of death.

Click on the image to download the poster.

The upper image is a scene from the conclusion of Ingmar Bergman’s film, The Seventh Seal, in which death, bearing a scythe, comes to drag the protagonists away to their deaths. The lower image shows the Alter Brigade, a volunteer firefighting group in the state of Pará, Brazil. They work especially along the Tapajós River in the heart of the Amazon Rainforest. They are among hundreds of groups who have risked their lives to contain forest fires in Brazil during the historic drought of 2024, when the Tapajós River reached its lowest level on record. Not only the Amazon, but other Brazilian and Latin American biomes, such as the Pantanal, Cerrado, and Atlantic Forests are under threat.

Capitalism Thrives on Death—Death to Capitalism

The market takes life and leaves destruction in its wake. It forces you to sell away the irreplaceable hours of your life to enrich bosses and bureaucrats—death on the installment plan. It rewards landlords for evicting families, engineers for inventing war machines, politicians for gentrification and genocide.

Capitalism reduces forests to junk mail and ecosystems to ash. A rally for the stock market means hurricanes and heat waves for us. Species by species, continent by continent, it is turning the whole world into a graveyard. If we don’t abolish it, it will destroy everything we love. This is a clear-cut case of self-defense.

Click on the image to download the poster.

The back of the poster.

For another poster in this vein, you could revisit our “Capitalism is a death cult” poster from 2020.

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. ↩

Notes on Love

2024-02-14T05:23:36Z

On a day often filled with consumerism and shallow romanticism, this manifesto from a comrade in New York City explores love as a foundation for militancy—a means of both resisting and redeeming.

Notes on Love

by Ferdinand

for Leija

Love is the only reason to be alive.

At a point in my life, I realized that letting myself be controlled by my fear of intimacy was counterrevolutionary. The individualizing urge to be aloof is a symptom of this fucked up world that wishes to isolate us from each other. If my politics aren’t informed by my love for my comrades, my planet, my friends, and myself,

what is the point?

The most radical thing one can do in this life is to love.
To be vulnerable.
To give one’s heart to another and to trust that they will be gentle with it.
It’s a terrifying prospect to be seen. To be known.
What if they reject me?
What if I’m not good enough? Not smart enough?
I say the wrong thing? Do the wrong thing? What if I am not enough?

This world urges us to be alone. When we are isolated, we are less powerful.

Divide and conquer.

How do we fight back against a world that aims to tear us apart? A world that wants us to see ourselves merely as individuals, with no bonds that tie us to each other and no common stake in the fate of those around us. They give us algorithms that show us countless options for potential lovers, turning each one into a commodity.

Swipe right to fill the void. A string of endless hookups delivered right to your door as easy as ordering pizza. Human bodies are made into objects for consumption.

It’s never been easier to meet someone. The world has never been so lonely.

How can we move with love in a world that tells us to be ashamed of it? They tell us it is better to be alone—we are sold ideas of individualism that have nothing to do with autonomy. They sell us self-help books with mantras about focusing on ourselves when things get tough.

“If you don’t love yourself,
how can you love anyone else?”

But loving others is how we truly learn to love ourselves.

Somehow, we were sold the lie that healing oneself is something that has to be done in isolation. It can’t be collaborative, and it can’t be achieved communally.

You have to do it on your own.

This is bullshit.

The truth is, we need each other.

No one has to go through this life alone, and no one has to heal alone. We heal ourselves and each other by fully dedicating ourselves to love.

We can heal this world through love
because love is an attack.

In ancient Thebes, the Sacred Band was an elite battalion of soldiers composed of 150 pairs of male lovers. Due to their bonds, or as Polyaenus described it, “devoted to each other by mutual obligations of love,” these warriors would fight more valiantly to protect their lovers. I think of these lover-soldiers and what can be learned from their commitment to each other. How their love made them more militant.

Love is a tactic for warfare.

To me, love is a clenched fist.
A brick through a window.
The thing we are fighting for
and the method by which we will win.

Why do we want a better world if not for the sake of love? When our struggle is motivated by love, the stakes are significantly higher. The fight hits home because we are fighting not only for our own lives but for the lives and futures of those we love.

A future that our children will inherit, of which our ancestors were robbed. We fight for a future in which our lovers, comrades, and friends can live the good life.

Whether we are having children, caring for our elderly, or forming couples, throuples, polycules, platonic life-bonds, or any other way of imagining human intimacy, when we engage with other humans it is the foundation for a militancy that can survive burnout and depression.

These mutual bonds give us the strength to go on when the fight feels hopeless.

Our survival depends on each other and our fates are tied together.

You don’t have to go through this world alone.

I’m here, I promise.

We live on a paradise of a planet that we have wrecked beyond all reason because we saw ourselves as somehow separate from the rest of the natural world.

I want to escape the shackles of civilization and accept my place as part of nature.

To love is to be human. Our longing for it is primal. Human beings are animals, and we are social animals. We are evolved to need each other, live communally, and care for each other. The desire to love and be loved is in our bones.

Love is the axis on which
my world spins.
The thing I yearn for above all else. The thing I’ve run from all my life.
How can I confront the terror
of being loved?
I am fighting against this world. I am fighting for this world.
Please have
my back.

There is a cynical tendency to view love as trivial.

We think of hippie slogans, “All You Need Is Love.”

We conceptualize love as some invisible force that will save us from this cruel world that seeks to destroy, if only we can somehow believe in it.

But love is a weapon. When I let myself experience intimacy with other human beings, that is when I am most human. That is when I sharpen love’s blade.

Fear is the enemy of love. When I let fear stop me from loving, I become my own enemy. Self-sabotage. Too many times, my fear of rejection has caused me to turn away from love. My tendency towards being aloof only left me feeling isolated and empty. I want to give myself more completely to my lovers and my friends. Is this what a life in common is really all about?

A life worth living is a life with love.

Let us abandon fear. Let us learn to cling to each other, support each other, and fight for each other.

Let love be the fire that burns this world. Let love be the seed that grows from its ashes.

Maybe I am naive and foolish. I’ll be the first to admit I have always been a romantic at heart. But again, love is a tactic for warfare. It is the thing we are fighting for and the method by which we will win.

While this world tries to tear us apart,
I am reaching for you.

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.

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

Camera, Action! : A Film Festival at the Gathering of Anarchist and Anti-Authoritarian Practices against Borders

2023-12-17T20:11:22Z

On January 26 and 27, during the first International Gathering of Anarchist and Anti-Authoritarian Practices against Borders in Tijuana, Mexico, the CrimethInc. Ex-Worker Podcast will present a curated series of anarchist films from around the world. In addition to showing our own published shorts and debuting some new material, we will curate a series of anarchist features, dramas, video propaganda, oddities, and experiments.

Call for Participation

If you want to submit a film for us to share at the gathering, email us! The deadline to receive submissions is January 20, 2024.

We will give priority to films whose producers or participants can attend in person to speak about the project or the subject of their video.

Please make sure your movie has English or Spanish subtitles—ideally, both.

Your invitation to the first International Gathering of Anarchist and Anti-Authoritarian Practices against Borders in Tijuana, Mexico, January 25-27.

A Tradition of Transgression

While anarchists around the world oppose and resist borders, this is a rare opportunity to join with anarchists on both sides of the US-Mexico in order to comprise a single movement. We can look back on a few precedents.

From 1910-1912, anarchists crossed into northern Mexico to join forces with the Magonistas in their military campaign to liberate towns like Ensenada, Tijuana, and Tecate from the state, clergy, and capital. Dozens of anarchists and Wobblies took up arms in this struggle. In Coahuila, they did away with the constitution and declared anarcho-communism.

A century ago: revolutionary dreamers in arms.

Several years later, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman organized legal support for Ricardo Flores Magón when he was in exile in California, persecuted by the counter-revolutionary victors of the Mexican Revolution.

In the 1990s, the anarchist federation Love & Rage included a Mexico City section, Amor Y Rabia, which published a newspaper of the same name and organized a variety of anarcho-punk activities. The federation attracted a few hundred members and played a crucial role in revitalizing anarchism in North America at the end of the 20th century.

Amor Y Rabia, March 1995.

In 2006, the anarchist videographer Brad Will participated in the months-long uprising in Oaxaca, Mexico. Paramilitary supporters of the government murdered him on October 27 of that year, and the state used his death as an excuse to send thousands of military police to invade the city. Brad’s documentary work played a crucial role in supporting liberation struggles all around the so-called Americas.

In 2007, anarchists and other anti-border activists established a week-long No Borders Camp at an unwalled portion of the US-Mexico border between Mexicali and Calexico. These two cities essentially comprise a single metropolis divided in two by the wall. Under the blinding floodlights of US Border Patrol, anarchists on both sides of the border shared food, watched presentations and movies, planned actions, and forged lifelong friendships.

The 2007 No Borders Camp.

Perhaps the last event comparable to the upcoming International Gathering of Anarchist and Anti-Authoritarian Practices Against Borders was the Jornadas Informales Anárquicas in Mexico City in December 2013, which drew anti-authoritarian comrades from Italy, Greece, and Chile as well as the United States and Mexico. The speakers included Gustavo Rodriguez, Wolfi Landstreicher, and Alfredo Bonanno.

The 2007 No Borders Camp.

For over a century, anarchists have sought horizons of liberation in defiance of the US-Mexico border. The International Gathering of Anarchist and Anti-Authoritarian Practices against Borders is a chance to kindle the flames that forge connections of international solidarity.

We’ll be there to tell stories and show the scenes that corporate media seeks to conceal.

We hope to see you there, too.

The 2007 No Borders Camp.

The Defense of Lützerath : A Photoessay and Poster Documenting Ecological Destruction and Resistance

2023-01-19T01:27:12Z

Over the past week, police have taken brutal steps to suppress ecological movements in Europe and the United States. In Germany, police evicted and destroyed the long-occupied village of Lützerath in a massive operation in order to expand an ecologically devastating open pit coal mine. Today, in Atlanta, Georgia, police murdered a person in the course of their efforts to evict and destroy the Weelaunee Forest.

Those who stood up to the police in Lützerath are fighting for a future for all human beings and living things. Whatever immediate justifications capitalist profiteers may offer for seeking to extract and burn more coal, keeping the earth inhabitable is more important.

Likewise, we are deeply moved by the courage of those who continue to defend the forest in Atlanta, even after police have demonstrated that they will commit murder to evict it. If our species is able to survive the ecological catastrophe that industrial capitalism is bringing about, it will chiefly be due to the courage of such brave and selfless individuals.

In the following photoessay, a witness of the events in Lützerath documents the clashes that unfolded between police and climate activists.

We have also prepared a poster identifying the responsibility of the authorities for the ongoing catastrophes inflicted by industrially driven climate change.

Lützerath: Before the Assault

In Lützerath, starting on the afternoon of January 4, activists and police faced off at the open pit mine. Protected by the police, the excavator run by German utility corporation RWE dug within 20 meters of the wall of Lützerath.

The Eviction

The following photographs are from January 9 to 13, documenting the eviction.

After some exhausting days, activists take a little break in Lützerath a day before the police raided the occupation.

In the village of Lützerath, activists occupied and barricaded most of the remaining buildings. Some chained themselves in a cellar.

Activists attempting to prevent police from constructing a fence around Lützerath. Eventually, the police succeeded in erecting a fence around the village in order to control the area as they set about evicting the occupation.

While pushing back activists on the L277 roadway in Luetzenrath, police nearly knocked over a tripod occupied by a demonstrator. Just as they did in their assaults on the occupations defending the Hambacher and Dannenröder forests, the police deliberately risked injuring activists.

Activists had built tree houses in many trees in anticipation of the massive police operation. These served as habitations while making it more difficult to evict the area, because only special police forces with climbing experience could carry out the eviction. Activists chained themselves inside some of these tree houses.

The banner on the tower reads “United for the Ogoni Nine. Burn Shell, not Oil.” The Ogoni Nine are a group of Nigerian widows who sued the oil corporation Shell after their husbands were executed by the Nigerian government following protests against pollution caused by oil leaks in the Niger Delta.

Cops evicting an activist from a wooden house. The houses are reminiscent of the improvised village (Hüttendorf) in Wendland during the 1980s, when anti-nuclear activists occupied the construction site for a planned nuclear waste storage facility in Gorleben. The Federal Border Guard and police evicted the Hüttendorf after a month-long standoff.

Activists face off with police. An architecture museum in Frankfurt asked to exhibit this hut after the eviction. However, because the corporation RWE does not want to leave any symbolism to the climate movement, the police demolished it.

Police evict an activist from a tree house by means of cherry pickers.

In order to avoid having to carry arrestees, police officers pushed them away in a wheelbarrow.

After the squatters announced that two people were occupying a tunnel, the police searched the entire area for the tunnel entrance. It took them several hours to find the entrance.

The tunnel posed the police significant problems during the assault. Eventually, the corporation RWE redefined the eviction as a “rescue operation” in order to force the fire department to be responsible for evicting the activists.

The two activists who occupied the tunnel delayed the eviction for several days. After at least four days in the tunnel, the activists exited more or less voluntarily. When they did so, they were the last occupants of Lützerath.

Police evict two activists from a monopod while destroying everything around them.

The remains of the “tower” pictured above.

Geräumte Träume, “evicted dreams, “ is a pun in German. The destruction of the occupation of Lützerath clears the way for the fossil fuel industry to wreak more havoc on the climate, but this place was also a partially realized effort to create an alternative model showing what life could be without the violence of police and the pressure to compete within capitalism. In that regard, the eviction also represents an attack on an attempt to demonstrate the virtues of a life free of domination.

Scenes of destruction following the raid.

The sticker reads “Disband the police.”

Artwork on the walls of Lützerath.

For over six hours, police held activists in a RWE vehicle. The arrestees were denied access to toilets for the entire time.

Immediately after the eviction of Eckhardt’s farm, the last official residence in Lützerath, police demolished the yard in order to destroy any symbols of resistance. The surrounding houses were destroyed over the following days.

Eckhardt’s farm.

Many of the security guards and workers employed by RWE in the demolition arrived in Germany as migrants or come from Eastern European countries.

Precarious employment paving the way for climate catastrophe.

Preparing for a long eviction, activists collected a lot of food. The police opted for a careless approach, repeatedly endangering human lives in order to carry out the eviction more quickly than expected.

Activists had painted a vast Pride flag on the wall of the “Paula” occupation. Police made a point of destroying it at the same time as Eckhardt’s yard.

Demonstration: Saturday, January 14

On Saturday, January 14, more than 35,000 people particapated in a demonstration against the eviction of Lützerath.

Immediately after arriving at the rally site, participants made their way to the fence around Lützerath. Spontaneously, many attempted to break through the police lines. Police responded by brutally striking demonstrators, often aiming for their heads. In what appears to be a new police tactic, many officers made a point of manually striking demonstrators directly in the larynx, so that these assaults might appear to be mere “pushing” when captured by the cameras of photojournalists.

Demonstrators gathering on January 14.

Demonstrators facing off with police on January 14.

Police struggling to deal with airborn mud on January 14.

Police violently attacking demonstrators on January 14.

After the police managed to stop the first attempt to break through their lines, organized groups joined in the confrontations and succeeded in pushing the first line of cops back to the fence.

There, the second wave also came to a halt.

Police clashing with demonstrators.

Demonstrators link arms as they face off with police.

As the old German chant goes, Hop hop hop. Schweinen im galop! “Hop hop hop! Swine in gallup!”

Police escort an injured officer away from the clashes.

Demonstrators face off with police.

After the clashes of January 14, footage circulated widely showing a person dressed as a monk—popularly dubbed the “mud wizard”—facing off with hapless riot police. See appendix I for more details about the international adventures of this mysterious figure.

Police face off with demonstrators and a “mud wizard” in Lützerath. This is a longer cut of the video; a shorter version became quite a widespread meme.

Decentralized Actions: Tuesday, January 17

For Tuesday, January 17, the alliance Lützerath Unräumbar (“Lützerath cannot be evicted”) called for decentralized actions.

One action group occupied the rails that supply coal to the coal power plant Neurath II.

Demonstrators mobilizing on January 17.

Demonstrators occupying the rails that supply coal to the coal power plant Neurath II. The banner reads “Peace to the villages, war on coal”—a modification of the old slogan, “Peace to the villages, war on the palaces.”

At the same time, people occupied a coal excavator in the Inden open pit mine and one in the Hambach open pit mine.

A group called The Last Generation blocked RWE access roads, while another group blocked RWE trucks with a sit-in blockade.

At Lützerath, some people attempted to break out of a demonstration surrounded by police to reach the fence.

In Düsseldorf, Extinction Rebellion mobilized in front of the Ministry of the Interior.

Demonstrators mobilizing on January 17.

Appendix I: Tracking the Adventures of the Mud Wizard from the ZAD to Lützerath

Footage circulated widely showing a person dressed as a monk—popularly dubbed the “mud wizard”—facing off with hapless riot police during the clashes in Lützerath on January 14.

In fact, this mysterious figure had already appeared in 2018, during the defense of the ZAD (the “Zone to Defend,” a longtime occupied area where the residents blocked the construction of an airport) at Notre-Dame-des-Landes.

According to le Monde, the police ambushed the monk among a group of other defenders. The monk threw buckets of water at the police, proclaiming “I baptize you in the name of the ZAD!” In the ensuing chaos, he made off with one of their batons.

A photograph of a demonstrator at the ZAD at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, facing off with riot police during their attempt to evict residents in 2018. Clad in a brown cowl belted with a length of rope, he holds aloft a police baton as if it were a crucifix while bearing some sort of improvised shield.

Reportedly, at the ZAD, the same monk was later seen chanting “disarm them” with the liberal retirees while holding the baton he had taken from the cops.

Victory to the mud wizards! Defend the earth!

Appendix II: A Poster

In response to the police violence in Lützerath and Atlanta, we have prepared a poster identifying the responsibility of the authorities for the ongoing catastrophes inflicted by industrially driven climate change.

Click on the image to download a PDF of the poster to print and distribute.

As climate change approaches the point of no return, remember—after September 11, 2001, the FBI declared that environmental activists were enemy #1.

As temperatures soar, remember how politicians passed legislation to protect fossil fuel profiteers.

As hurricanes pummel the coast, remember how the cops swabbed pepper spray into protesters’ eyes.

As flash floods destroy towns, remember all the people they brutalized at Standing Rock.

As forests go up in smoke, remember how riot police charged the crowds so they could expand the open-pit mine at #Lutzerath.

As the polar ice caps melt, remember how prosecutors charged young people with terrorism for trying to protect the environment that we all depend on.

Remember who is responsible.

If not for their violence, we could have dealt with the ones who are driving climate change long ago.

In return for a few dollars, they are forcing the end of the world on us.

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

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.

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.

Hands Off : A Poster and Resources Supporting Reproductive Freedom

2022-05-03T17:53:37Z

We’ve prepared a poster and a selection of other resources in response to the news that the Supreme Court is poised to give a green light to government agencies to take away the reproductive freedoms of tens of millions of people.

You can find an array of useful information about how to gain or support access to abortion in each state here.
You can find information about self-managed abortion using abortion pills here and information about how to access abortion pills online here.
Sister Song is an organization that focuses on reproductive freedom for Indigenous people and people of color. Statistics suggest that these demographics account for two-thirds of those who seek legal abortion. Thanks to structural white supremacy in the distribution of resources in the United States, these demographics will be the hardest hit by restrictions.
Abortion Care Network offers a support network for independent community-based abortion providers.
“Bodily Autonomy in the Streets“—A handout to distribute at demonstrations demanding abortion access, opposing top-down control of street actions.

This catastrophe compels us to confront the law itself as something hostile to us. If you are a person who might ever need an abortion—or if you care about a person who might—or if you believe that people deserve bodily self-determination, the state is your enemy. This system has given a handful of individuals, including at least two unrepentant sexual predators, the power to block abortion access to millions of people across the country. This is consistent with the explicitly misogynist and anti-trans agenda of the Republican Party and the systematic complicity of the Democratic Party.

As anarchists, we reject the idea that judges or politicians deserve the authority to determine the course of our lives. Rather than only trying to pressure leaders to vote one way or the other in a winner-take-all system that reduces us to spectators in the decisions that affect us, we propose solutions based in direct action: taking power back into our hands by enacting our needs and solving our problems ourselves, without representatives.

As long as legislators and judges can determine the scope of our reproductive options, our bodies and lives will be subject to the shifting winds of politics rather than our own immediate needs and values. Instead of validating their authority by limiting ourselves to calling for better legislators and judges, we should organize to secure and defend the means to make decisions regarding what we do with our bodies regardless of what courts or legislators decree.

In practice, this could mean networking with health workers who have the necessary skills, and sharing them widely; stockpiling and manufacturing the supplies we need for all sorts of health care; defending spaces where we can operate our own clinics; fundraising resources to secure access to health care and birth control options for all, regardless of ability to pay; and developing models for reproductive autonomy that draw on past precedents but address our current problems. We can do our best to render the decisions of would-be patriarchs like Kavanaugh irrelevant.

All this has already happened before. For example, from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, the Jane network, a vast clandestine effort centered in Chicago, provided illegal abortions to thousands of women. The fact that abortion was already accessible to so many women was a major factor in compelling the US court system to finally legalize abortion access in order to be able to regulate it. The most effective way to pressure the authorities to permit us access to the resources and care that we need is to present them with a fait accompli. Unfortunately, when it comes to standing up to elites like the Supreme Court and the police who enforce its decisions, there are no shortcuts.

-Kavanaugh Shouldn’t Be on the Supreme Court—Neither Should Anyone Else

Click on the image to access the poster PDF.

Every Flag Is Black in a Fire : The Black Flag—Emblem of Rebellion, Negation, and Hope

2021-06-14T15:25:10Z

In the following selections, a range of authors and artists from across a century and a half reflect on the meaning of the black flag, the anarchist standard of rebellion and negation.

Reporter: “There are some people here, roaming about… well, not exactly roaming, they seem organized. I don’t know who they are, they’re all dressed in black, they have black hoods on, and black flags… a flag with nothing on it.”

Anchor: “A flag with nothing on it?”

Reporter: “That’s right, it’s totally black.”

-Television coverage of the protests against the 1999 summit of the World Trade Organization in Seattle

Tina Modotti, “Woman with Flag”—a photograph of a woman walking “with the black flag of the Anarcho-Syndicalists” in Mexico City in 1928.

Louise Michel: In Mourning for Our Dead and Our Illusions

In November 1880, fifty-year-old schoolteacher and cop killer¹ Louise Michel returned to France at the conclusion of a lengthy exile in the South Pacific for her participation in the revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871. During her exile, her politics had matured into a thoroughgoing anarchism opposing all forms of hierarchy and oppression. She immediately threw herself back into radical organizing in Paris.

According to Maurice Dommanget,² Louise Michel was among the first to announce the black flag as an emblem of the anarchist movement—though below, we shall see evidence suggesting that unknown laborers had already employed the black flag thus for years in Lyon and likely elsewhere. On March 9, 1883, Louise Michel used a black petticoat as a flag during a demonstration of the unemployed and desperate, during which participants looted several bakeries. Nine days later, on March 18, the twelve-year anniversary of the outbreak of the Paris Commune, she made a speech at the radical club Salle Favié in the poor Belleville neighborhood of Paris:

“No more red flags, wet with the blood of our fighters. I will raise the black flag, in mourning for our dead—and for our illusions.”

On June 22, 1883, Michel stood trial for the demonstration of the previous March. “Why did we march under the black flag?” she addressed the courtroom. “Because this flag is the flag of strikes and it indicates that the worker has no bread.” The court sentenced Louise Michel to six years in prison for “having done nothing to discourage looting.”

Newspaper coverage depicting Louise Michel at a rowdy demonstration on March 9, 1883.

Le Drapeau Noir: War on All Laws, Codes, Judges, and Police Officers

On August 12, 1883, shortly after Louise Michel stood trial in Paris, a new anarchist newspaper appeared in Lyon, France, entitled Le Drapeau Noir (“The Black Flag”). Le Drapeau Noir only ran for 17 issues under that name; it was just one iteration of a series of different manifestations of the same publication—variously titled The Social Duty, The Revolutionary Standard, The Struggle, The Black Flag, The Riot, The Challenge, The Anarchist Hydra, The Alarm, and The Anarchic Duty—which was forced to change names constantly in order to stay ahead of state repression and censorship.

In the first article in this newspaper, entitled “The Premier of the Black Flag: To Anarchists,” the editors spelled out their aspirations:

Is there a need for a program when we take the title “The Black Flag” for our newspaper; are we not already indicating what our course of action will be? In taking this title, we were inspired by the local history of the city of Lyon, because it is on the heights of Croix-Rousse and Vaisse that the workers, driven by hunger, displayed it for the first time, as a sign of mourning and revenge, and thus made it the emblem of social demands. By taking this title, therefore, it means that we will always be on the side of the workers against the exploiters, on the side of the oppressed against the oppressors.

It is a commitment that we will not fail, taking inspiration from the campaign that our predecessors started with The Social Duty, The Revolutionary Standard, and The Struggle; we will see The Black Flag fly at the front in the assault that the anarchists carry out against this corrupt old society, which is already trembling on its foundations; an organ of struggle and combat, The Black Flag will wage war on all the abuses, all the prejudices, all the vices, all the hypocrisies, which, under the name of social institutions, are currently joining forces to delay the fall of this rotten old world, which, left to its own devices, would soon collapse under the weight of its infamies.

Supporters of absolute freedom, we will wage war on all those pseudo-liberals, makers of laws, who only understand freedom when it is well regulated, for we believe that freedom is only real if it is unhindered; we will wage war on laws, codes, judges, police officers, and all institutions, in the end, whose real goal is to restrict this freedom, which we proclaim so loudly, and to promote the exploitation of the masses by a privileged minority.

In the second article, the editors went on to make clear the reason for their preference for the black flag:

“Events, everyday facts, have made it clear to us that the red flag, so gloriously defeated, might well, if victorious, conceal within its flaming folds the ambitious dreams of a few self-seeking schemers. For it has already hosted a government and served as a standard for a constituted authority. It was then that we understood that it could no longer be anything for us, the ungovernables of every day and the rebels of every hour, but an embarrassment or an illusion.”

The debut issue of Le Drapeau Noir, August 12, 1883.

The Alarm: The Emblem of Hunger

According to the anarchist paper The Alarm, anarchists in the United States marched with the black flag for the first time on November 27, 1884, Thanksgiving Day, in a demonstration explicitly calling for the forcible abolition of property and wage labor. The following quotations are drawn from an article entitled “The Black Flag: The Emblem of Hunger Unfurled by the Proletariats of Chicago,” in the November 29, 1884 issue of that paper.³

The day designated, Thursday, the 27th of November, opened in sleet and rain. The wind blew sharp and frosty and left a stinging, uncomfortable sensation upon the exposed portion of the face or hands. At the time announced, 2:30 pm, over three thousand persons had assembled on Market street, between Madison and Randolph. The mingled rain and sleet fell unpityingly from above, while the ground beneath was covered with mud and water. The severity of the weather showed some of the spirit that must be in the people who were not deterred by it.

The first speaker declared the demonstration “an assemblage of men in the interest of humanity” and presented a critique of capitalism:

Now, when the market is glutted with clothing, the mills shut down, and thousands are thrown out of work and consequently deprived of the means to get any of that over-supply, and the result is that men must go ragged because there is too much clothing in the country. This is true of all other things. People must live out of doors, because there are too many houses in the country. There are so many houses now vacant that there is no demand for more, and therefore the builders are idle and cannot earn money to pay rent with. Think of it! Ragged because there is too much clothing in the country. Living out doors because there are too many houses in the country. Hungry because there is too much bread in the country, and freezing because there is too much coal in the country. Can this continue? Is there a man so blind that he cannot see that this system must be changed?

Among the others who took the podium was the anarchist August Spies, who was subsequently murdered by the state in the Haymarket tragedy.

The next speaker was August Spies. He pointed to the black flag and said this is the first time that emblem of hunger and starvation has been unfurled on American soil. It represents that these people have begun to reach the condition of starvation of the older countries. We have got to strike down these robbers that are robbing the working people.

After the speeches, the march got underway:

Two large flags, one black and the other red, headed the procession. About midway the procession, there was [sic] two more large flags, one black and the other red.

The march concluded at the offices of The Alarm and Arbeiter Zeitung, #107 Fifth Avenue.

Here, the crowd assembled amid the strains of [the French revolutionary anthem] ‘Marseillaise,’ the waving of the black and red flag, and the cheers of the thoroughly abused proletariat.”

A black flag at the South Pole.

Sergei Eistenstein: Red Flags, Black Flags, White Flags

In the early Soviet film Battleship Potemkin, director Sergei Eisenstein wished to depict the rebels raising a red flag over the battleship. But the black-and-white film of the period rendered the color red as black. In order to get the effect he wanted, he had to film the scenes with a white flag in place of a red one, then have the flag hand-tinted red, one frame at a time. The resulting propaganda coup drew thunderous applause from dutiful Bolsheviks.

There is a heavy-handed metaphor here about who really made the Russian Revolution and how it was depicted afterwards. Every real red flag looks like a black flag to history, and those flags have subsequently been subtracted from the official narrative—whereas the famous red flags of widely circulating state propaganda were actually… the flags of surrender.

The mutineers raise the red banner on the Battleship Potemkin. Or do they?

André Breton: The Colors of Freedom

The following text by senior surrealist André Breton originally appeared in Arcane 17 in 1945. It was translated into English in The Rebel Worker #7, December 1966, and reprinted in Dancin’ in the Streets: Anarchists, IWWs, Surrealists, Situationists, & Provos in the 1960s—As Recorded in the Pages of The Rebel Worker & Heatwave.

Ranged above our heads, the flaglike windows forever unlit, continued to lap up their measure of air. They had the dimensions of those red cloth flags which in Paris flank certain highway works and from which there stand out, in big black letters, separated by dots, the inscription “SADE,” which has often returned to me in reverie.

The red flag, free from any mark or inscription—this flag I shall always see with the same vision I had at seventeen when during a popular demonstration just before the other war; I saw it unfurled by thousands, low in the sky of the Pré Saint-Gervais. And yet, I feel that reasoning is powerless to intervene here—my pulse will continue to beat yet more powerfully when I recall the moment that this flamboyant sea, in places flowing but thinly and restrictedly was pierced by the soaring flight of black flags.

At that time I had not much political consciousness, and I must admit I am perplexed when I take it on myself to gauge what degree of consciousness I now have attained. But, more than ever, the currents of sympathy and antipathy seem to me strong enough to demand the subjection of ideology; and I know that my heart was set beating, is still set beating, by that day’s very movement. In the deepest galleries of my heart I shall always rediscover the swaying to-and-fro of these countless tongues of flame among which a few linger to lick a marvelous carbonized flower.

The present generation will be hardly able to imagine a spectacle of that order. The heart of the proletariat had not been rent as yet by innumerable factions. The torch of the Paris Commune was far from being extinguished; there were many hands there which had held that torch—a torch uniting all in its great light, which would have been Iess beautiful, less true, without a few spiraling wreaths of thick smoke. So much individually disinterested faith, so much resolution and ardor could be read in these faces; so much nobleness, too, in those of the veterans. Around the black flags, to be sure, the effect of sheer physical suffering could be sensed more strongly, but passion had really burned itself into some eyes, had left there unforgettable points of white heat. It always will seem as if the flame had spread over them all, burning them only less or more fiercely; serving to maintain some in their absolutely realizable and well-based demands and hopes, while leading others, more rarely, to burn themselves out on the spot in an inexorable attitude of sedition and defiance.

The condition of humanity is such (independently of the ultra-amendable social condition which man has made) that this last attitude especially of which there is no lack in the history of the intellect of illustrious respondents, whether named Pascal, Nietzsche, Strindberg, or Rimbaud has always seemed to me absolutely justifiable on the emotive plane, leaving out of account the purely utilitarian reasons for which society may repress such an attitude. One is compelled at least to recognize, that it alone is marked by an infernal grandeur. I shall never forget the exaltation and the pride which overcame me, when as a child I was taken for one of the first times into a cemetery, at the discovery among so many depressing or ridiculous monuments of a slab of granite engraved in red capitals with the superb device Neither God Nor Master. Poetry and art will always retain a preference for all which transfigures humankind in the desperate, irreducible demand which, now and then, takes a derisory chance to make in life.

The fact is that over art and poetry also, whether one likes it or not, there flies a flag in turn—red and black. There, too, time is urgent. It is a question of insuring that from human sensibility is drawn all that it is capable of giving. But whence comes this apparent ambiguity as to the color?

Perhaps it is not given to any man to act on the sensibility of other men in order to mold and enlarge that awareness, except at the price of offering himself as a sacrifice to all the scattered forces of the soul of his time: forces which, in general, only seek each other in an attempt to pronounce mutual exclusions. It is in this sense that such a man is, has always been and, by a mysterious decree of these forces, must be at the same time their victim and their executioner. Thus, the same is necessarily the case as regards the taste for human liberty which, called to extend its field of receptivity to all in practically infinite proportions, draws down on a single person all the dire consequences of excess. Liberty does not consent to caress this earth except in taking into account those who have known, or have at least, partly known, how to live because they have loved her to a point of madness.

A black flag at the South Pole. The artist Santiago Sierra [see appendix] helped to coordinate the placing of black flags at both the North and South Poles in 2015, as a gesture of defiance against nationalist colonialism.

Jean Genet: “The Kind of Revolution I’d Like to See”

When I was invited by the Cuban Cultural Affairs, I said, “Yes, I’d like very much to go to Cuba, but on one condition: I’ll pay for my own trip, I’ll pay for my stay there, and I’ll go where I want and stay where I want,” and I said, “I’d like very much to go, if it really is the kind of revolution I’d like to see, that is, if there aren’t any more flags, because the flag, as a sign of recognition, as an emblem around which a group is formed, has become a castrating and deadly piece of theatricality and the national anthem? Ask him if there is no longer a Cuban flag and a national anthem.”

-Jean Genet, interview with Hubert Fichte

Howard J. Ehrlich: Why the Black Flag?

From Reinventing Anarchy, Again.

The black flag is the symbol of anarchy. It evokes reactions ranging from horror to delight among those who recognize it. Find out what it means and prepare to see it at more and more public gatherings… Anarchists are against all government because they believe that the free and informed will of the individual is the ultimate strength of groups and of society itself. Anarchists believe in individual responsibility and initiative and in the whole-hearted cooperation of groups composed of free individuals. Government is the opposite of this ideal, relying as it does on brute force and deliberate fraud to expedite control of the many by the few. Whether this cruel and fraudulent process is validated by such mythical concepts as the divine right of kings, democratic elections, or a people’s revolutionary government makes little difference to anarchists. We reject the whole concept of government itself and postulate a radical reliance on the problem-solving capacity of free human beings.

Why is our flag black? Black is a shade of negation. The black flag is the negation of all flags. It is a negation of nationhood which puts the human race against itself and denies the unity of all humankind. Black is a mood of anger and outrage at all the hideous crimes against humanity perpetrated in the name of allegiance to one state or another. It is anger and outrage at the insult to human intelligence implied in the pretenses, hypocrisies, and cheap chicaneries of governments… Black is also a color of mourning; the black flag which cancels out the nation also mourns its victims—the countless millions murdered in wars, external and internal, to the greater glory and stability of some bloody state. It mourns for those whose labor is robbed (taxed) to pay for the slaughter and oppression of other human beings. It mourns not only the death of the body but the crippling of the spirit under authoritarian and hierarchic systems; it mourns the millions of brain cells blacked out with never a chance to light up the world. It is a color of inconsolable grief.

But black is also beautiful. It is a color of determination, of resolve, of strength, a color by which all others are clarified and defined. Black is the mysterious surrounding of germination of fertility, the breeding ground of new life which always evolves, renews, refreshes, and reproduces itself in darkness. The seed hidden in the earth, the strange journey of the sperm, the secret growth of the embryo in the womb all these the blackness surrounds and protects.

So black is negation, is anger, is outrage, is mourning, is beauty, is hope, is the fostering and sheltering of new forms of human life and relationship on and with this earth. The black flag means all these things. We are proud to carry it, sorry we have to, and look forward to the day when such a symbol will no longer be necessary.

Hong Kong artist Kacey Wong raising a black flag: “It symbolizes mourning, pain, resistance, and power to mourn this dying city. It also expresses the resistant spirit of ‘We live free or die.’”

Anonymous: The Opposite of Surrender

I had the good fortune some years ago to be present at a small town in the South when a young punk rocker was showing his even younger brother around the collective house he had recently moved into.

“What does the black flag mean?” asked the younger sibling, referring to the square of threadbare fabric displayed on the front porch.

I awaited the answer with some curiosity, as I inferred that it might be one of the first times that the elder brother had been invited to explain the complexities of anarchist doctrine.

“Oh, that?” the punk rocker answered. “It’s like—the opposite of surrender.”

Appendix: On Anarchist Identity

Asked whether he himself was an anarchist, Santiago Sierra replied: “I regard anarchism as a political and behavioral philosophy with which I identify fully. However, anarchism is, above all, morality and implies a way of life without concessions. In this sense, I would not be, so much, because my life is far from that of any anarchist militant.”

This humble answer is reminiscent of the response of Chilean student José Domingo Gómez Rojas when special minister José Astorquiza demanded to know whether he was an anarchist: “I do not have, dear Minister, sufficient moral discipline to assume that title, which I will never merit.” Gómez Rojas was nonetheless murdered by the Chilean state while in custody.

The important thing is to destroy the mechanisms that centralize violence and control.

“They have a black flag at half-mast for hope and melancholy that they bear through life, knives to cut the bread of friendship, and some rusted weapons so they never forget. They are not one in one in one hundred, and yet nevertheless they exist. They stand arm in arm in joy. And for this, they are always standing. The anarchists.”

-Léo Ferré, “Les Anarchistes,” which he performed for the first time on May 10, 1968, at the annual gathering of the Anarchist Federation at the Mutualité in Paris, coinciding with the outbreak of barricading that led to a countrywide revolt and general strike.

According to the April 10, 1871 issue of the official journal of the Commune, “There is an energetic woman fighting in the ranks of the 61st Battalion. She has killed several constables and police officers.” George Clemenceau confirms that this was a matter of life or death: “In order not to be killed herself, she killed others… How she escaped being killed a hundred times over before my very eyes, I’ll never know. And I only watched her for an hour.” ↩
Writing in The History of the Red Flag, from Its Origins to the War of 1939. ↩
Apparently, the black flag represented hunger itself before it became the standard of those who hunger for a world without oppression. For example, in the November 17, 1861 edition of the New York Times, a front-page article that includes reporting on food shortages in South Carolina is subtitled “The Black Flag in South Carolina.” ↩

We Are Now: The Story of an Armed No-Cop Zone in Atlanta : A Documentary Film

2021-05-19T21:12:20Z

On the night of June 12, 2020, Atlanta police officers murdered Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old Black man, at a Wendy’s in south Atlanta, Georgia. This took place immediately following the high point of the countrywide uprising in which people responded to the murders of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, and countless other Black people around the United States. In response, a new wave of protest and revolt broke out across Atlanta, in which the Wendy’s burned to the ground. Armed Black demonstrators occupied the site of the Wendy’s, mourning for Rayshard Brooks and seeking to create spaces of Black empowerment.

Ahead of the anniversary of the George Floyd uprising, we present We Are Now, a film centering the voices of participants in the occupation of the Wendy’s. We hope that this will help to pass on the memories of some of the forms of courageous resistance to white supremacy and policing that took place in 2020, along with the lessons that people derived from their experiences. None of the struggles depicted in this documentary are concluded. Let’s learn from the past and prepare for the next chapter.

Content warning: this film shows lethal police violence and resistance to it.

We Are Now: The Story of an Armed No-Cop Zone in Atlanta.

The Making of

We didn’t know the Wendy’s occupation was still happening. It was a few hundred miles away and it felt like every stretch of highway we had previously ignored suddenly led to something strange and promising—a mystery of not whether, but how people’s misery would be expressed. The map was bigger now. Every town wanted to represent and there was a shit ton of news coming at us. On all devices. At all hours. From all kinds of people you kind of think you remember from that band that played that party… A whirlwind of memory and doubt about the veracity of any information. Objectivity defenestrated.

Nevertheless, some things were real. Rayshard Brooks was a Black father of four, shot dead in Atlanta by two police officers—by every police officer—on June 12. It was caught on camera and word spread fast. On June 13, demonstrators—mournful, angry, and hyped—burned down the Wendy’s. On June 14, people began occupying the Wendy’s as a “cop-free zone.”

We didn’t know any of this. We were in Atlanta for a rave and figured the Wendy’s was over or heavily co-opted. We didn’t know shit. We had heard about a protest plaza in DC, the CHOP in Seattle, a tent city in Philadelphia, a Confederate monument transformed into an open-air revolutionary social center in Richmond, but we didn’t know if any of these were ongoing on any given day.

To know for sure, you had to go.
And we had to know.

Into Atlanta a few hours before the party.
Should we go check it out?
That’s it. It’s still happening.
The signs look weird with their lights out.
Can we get closer?
Other people are going in.
Ok let’s try but if they tell us to fuck off…

“Welcome to the Wendy’s of not Georgia. Some ID please. Hold on a second.” Not like a cop… more like that time I went to a Caracol in Chiapas and had to surrender my passport to enter. Guns too. I can’t wait for a world without guns or identification. There’s already no cops here, and you can just sense that they aren’t coming anytime soon. He looks so tired. It’s been more than a second… more than a minute. Finally, “Ok, just don’t park over there.” He gestures to the flowerful corner where Rayshard Brooks was killed.

We gather in the back with the multi-racial, but mostly white, crew of multi-tendency—but mostly anarchist—carpenters while the multi-racial, but mostly black, security team watches the entrance in multi-quality, but mostly cool, cars with good speakers and bass music. A man walks over. “I just want to thank y’all for what you’re doing.” Oh shit, that is a lot of weed. And it’s gushy. The carpenters exchange straight-edge inside glances, and people have COVID-19 nerves, too, but I see the love in that man’s eyes and I will smoke his weed. It is one thing to be permitted—it is another to be welcomed.

We need a guide. We find a guide. Old friend guide. This old feeling. No one’s in control. Cars come in fast and their tires sing screeching hysteria to us. They’re gone. We’re gone too. Winding around the city. “Don’t stand there, that’s where people get shot.” A few weeks later someone is shot there. We find the rave. Bass. It’s happening. I’m in love with everyone. Or free. I’m keeping the faith. With everyone. Or both because same. Same and both.

Same?
Yes.
More?
YES! MORE!

“Dude, we’ve only ever hung out in official states of emergency. This is like number four.”

“MORE!”

“You’re out!”

“You’re back!?”

The sun is rising. Everyone is arms all over each other. There’s a kitten when we get to our car. It’s time to find darkness.

We release this film in memory of everyone who has lost their lives to state violence—across the United States, but also worldwide, from Colombia to Myanmar and Palestine—in hopes that together, we might one day bring about the end of every institution that treats human beings as disposable.

Life Is Ecstatic Intercourse between Destruction and Creation : A Poster in Homage to the Previous Generation

2021-04-26T17:44:22Z

We’ve prepared a poster combining imagery and text from our forebears, crystalizing how earlier generations of anarchists saw the relationship between resisting the existing order and building alternatives to it. Below, we trace the history of each element of the poster.

“Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternally creative source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too.”

-Mikhail Bakunin, “The Reaction in Germany,” Deutsche Jahrbücher fur Wissenschaft and Kunst, nos. 247–51

Click on the image to download the poster.

The Illustration

This illustration originally appeared in 2001, at the high point of a wave of anti-capitalist activity sometimes referred to as the “anti-globalization movement,” in a 7” record by the Danish anarchist punk band Paragraf 119. Named for the article of Danish law that prohibits the injuring of government officials (“And if a cop wants to pay with his life—it’s OK with us”), Paragraf 119 emerged from the punk, squatting, and anarchist movements in Copenhagen in the 1990s, concentrated around the historic squatted social center Ungdomshuset. In another album by Paragraf 119, the photos of the various band members show each of them getting arrested in some breach of “public order.” This is punk at its best—not as a style of music, but as a culture of resistance in which the songs derives their power from the shared activities of the performers and listeners, whose collective efforts created a space in which these anthems had real meaning.

The cover of the 7” record by Paragraf 119 in which this poster art originally appeared.

Remember them, each and every one, until the day we strike back
Remember every beating, remember every imprisoned activist
Remember the broken comrades, every murdered anarchist
Remember the trumped up charges, remember every injury
Remember all the unjust acts committed by those in power
Nothing forgotten, nothing forgiven

-Paragraf 119, “Intet Glemt, Intet Tilgivet” (“Nothing forgotten, nothing forgiven”) on the “Musik til Ulempe” 7”

A painting of the poster design in the anarchist squat (steki) in the Economics School in Athens, Greece.

The Text

As far as we can tell, the slogan “life is ecstatic intercourse between destruction and creation” first appeared on the cover of the fifth issue of the eco-anarchist periodical Live Wild or Die! around 1994 in Berkeley, California.

Along with Do or Die (and later, Disorderly Conduct), Live Wild or Die! served the most radical and uncompromising elements of the ecological movement in an era before most participants had consistent internet access. You can find the first three issues here.

From the cover of Live Wild or Die! #5.

Finally, the smaller text on the poster is excerpted from a well-known interview with the Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durruti that appeared in the Toronto Daily Star on August 5, 1936. This interview remains relevant today, when the latest administration to come to power in the United States purports to oppose fascism, yet continues to prioritize repressing anarchists and other anti-fascists:

“The masses are in arms. The army does not count any longer. There are two camps: civilians who fight for freedom and civilians who are rebels and Fascists. All the workers in Spain know that if fascism triumphs, it will be famine and slavery. But the Fascists also know what is in store for them when they are beaten. That is why the struggle is implacable and relentless. For us it is a question of crushing fascism, wiping it out and sweeping it away so that it can never rear its head again in Spain. We are determined to finish with fascism once and for all. Yes, and in spite of the government,” he added grimly.

“Why do you say in spite of the government? Is not this government fighting the Fascist rebellion?” I asked with some amazement.

“No government in the world fights fascism to the death. When the bourgeoisie sees power slipping from its grasp, it has recourse to fascism to maintain itself. The Liberal government of Spain could have rendered the Fascist elements powerless long ago,” went on Durruti. “Instead it temporized and compromised and dallied. Even now, at this moment, there are men in this government who want to go easy with the rebels. You never can tell you know,” he laughed, “the present government might yet need these rebellious forces to crush the workers’ movement.”

[…]

“Can you win alone?” I asked the burning question point-blank.

Durruti did not answer. He stroked his chin. His eyes glowed.

“You will be sitting on top of a pile of ruins even if you are victorious,” I ventured, to break his reverie.

“We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall,” he said quietly. “We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a time. For, you must not forget, we can also build these palaces and cities, here in Spain and in America and everywhere. We, the workers. We can build others to take their place. And better ones. We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth. There is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts,” he said in a hoarse whisper. And he added: “That world is growing in this minute.”

-“Durruti: The People Armed,” Abel Paz

Throughout much of the later 20th century, the global squatting movement was one of the chief lines of transmission via which anarchism was passed from one generation to the next, literally subsisting in the ruins. If anarchist ideas are spreading to new demographics today, it is partly thanks to the efforts of those generations of squatters and eco-saboteurs, to whom we dedicate this poster.

Maggots and Men : Building a Queer and Trans Utopia from the Memory of Kronstadt

2021-04-03T17:17:50Z

What is revolution? Is it a moment in time, a cataclysmic break with the past, an ongoing dynamic process of transformation? Is it the overthrow of an oppressive government, the seizure of the means of production, or a complete shift in everyday social relations?

Cary Cronenwett’s 2009 film Maggots and Men, a creative reimagining of the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921, offers one compelling approach to these questions. It is articulated by the protagonist, Stepan, whose eloquent letters to his sister Anya form much of the film’s text, but he attributes it to an elderly woman from a nearby Russian town who carries milk for a living. To the revolutionary sailors, who have overthrown their oppressive officers in the Russian Revolution of 1917, she offers this advice:

We should be like fish, and the revolution should be like water: something we breathe and move through that is all around us, and that is in motion all the time.

As the viewer absorbs this message—intoned in an earnest Russian voice and translated in English subtitles—the camera trains on the last moments of a remarkable scene, in which a group of frisky sailors has stripped naked and dived into a lake, splashing and horsing around with each other. It evokes the carefree joy and comradeship of a group of men building a new world together, having cast off the shackles of the old.

“We should be like fish, and the revolution should be like water: something we breathe and move through that is all around us, and that is in motion all the time.”

What makes the scene all the more remarkable is that every one of the actors is a trans man. Maggots and Men likely includes more trans and gender-non-conforming actors than any other feature film in the history of cinema, from every major protagonist down to the small child picking mushrooms. In the swimming scene, as throughout the film, the camera neither highlights nor obscures bodily cues that might mark the actors as specifically trans, subverting assumptions of masculinity and cisgender identity. The fact that the actors and their diverse bodies are presented as unremarkable is one of the most radical features of the film’s vision. It conjures a world—not unlike the alternative queer San Francisco of the early 2000s in which the film took shape—in which the assumed correspondence between different gendered and sexual signifiers falls apart entirely. A stubbly chin, a male-presenting partner, a sailor’s uniform or a dress: here, none of these index the shape of one’s body, the core of one’s identity, or the angle of one’s desire.

Maggots and Men locates this world within the history of the Kronstadt rebellion, interlacing political and gender revolutions a century apart. As in the advice of the Russian woman, they are linked by the fluid quality of a transformative resistance that suffuses us while remaining in constant motion.

These splashing sailors are indeed like fish swimming in revolutionary waters. The trans and queer actors, like the rebel sailors they portrayed, immersed themselves in revolution as a medium, creating temporary autonomous zones of defiant joy and anti-authoritarian subversion on the set of the film as they excavated it from Russian history and acted it out through the script. The utopias they created in life and on screen, like the ones they brought to life from the past, remain fraught and incomplete, but survive to inspire us in our own experiments with freedom.

The Blue Blouse Theater in Maggots and Men.

Drawing on a rich history of experimental film and aesthetic radicalism remixed through a queer and trans lens, Maggots and Men is a retelling of the history of the Kronstadt rebellion; a sexy and tragic queer love story; a reimagining of masculinity; a parable of gender anarchy; and a utopian meditation on the body, comradeship, and memory.

The film advances via two distinct modes of narration. The first involves a self-consciously performative theater troupe modeled on the Soviet agit-prop Blue Blouse Theater. It lays out key details in the story’s chronology, narrated in English, on a stage populated with visually striking props and costumed performers interacting through highly stylized movements, cheered on by an audience of sailors. The second involves scenes shot in a more realist style, following the Kronstadt sailors as they interact in barracks, on ships, on land, and in snowy battles with the Red Army. A voiceover narrator reads letters in Russian written by the protagonist (modeled loosely on Stepan Petrichenko, the leader of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee at Kronstadt) to his sister, offering a more intimate window into the events.

The film opens with the whistle of cold wind through a snowy forest, as Stepan’s melancholy memories of fleeing Kronstadt lead him to think back to the heady early days of the revolution, “when our future shined before us.” He recalls the intensity of life during the rebellion as flashes of “everyday life, but different and full of meaning”—invoking the sense of enchantment suffusing the mundane that so many of us have felt in fleeting moments of struggle from Occupy encampments to the George Floyd protests, when our immersion in collective resistance distends our sense of time and transforms the ordinary into the magical. His memory arches back to a moment of sleeping with his fellow sailors in hammocks on their ship—masterfully recreating the opening scene of Eisenstein’s classic The Battleship Potemkin, reproducing its homoerotic gaze on the sleeping men, but transformed into a celebration of the transmasculine body.

This scene from Maggots and Men of sailors asleep in their hammocks on board their ship (right) is modeled on the opening scene of Eisenstein’s 1925 film Battleship Potemkin (left)

The Blue Blouse Theater troupe sets the stage for the viewer with a didactic agit-prop introduction about the background of the rebellion, replete with period theater costumes, a campy Dr. Frankenstein, and cartoon Soviet propaganda. A scene recreating a worker’s strike observed by the sailors, while portrayed in a highly stylized aesthetic language with echoes of German expressionism, powerfully evokes the chaos and ferocious emotions of a demonstration facing violent repression. After the initial clash of 1917, in which they dispatched their oppressive officers, the Kronstadt sailors “began the hard work of making the revolution,” the narrator solemnly intones.

But in a delightful dissonance, the scene cuts immediately to an idyllic landscape in which frolicsome sailors lounge in the grass, drinking, playing chess, doing acrobatics, knitting, napping, and eyeing one another seductively. The scene is suffused with a sense of play, pleasure, and bodily ease, proposing a radically different sense of what “the hard work of the revolution” might be. It’s not a somber asceticism trumpeting the dignity of proletarian toil for the greater good (or—the good of the Party), but an aestheticism celebrating communal leisure: not in the sense of bourgeois consumerism or capital-intensive recreation, but the simple pleasures of sunshine on the skin, crafts and games, the fellowship of comrades. The subsequent portrayals of the sailors engaged in more conventional forms of labor—preparing food, hauling supplies, planting gardens, splitting wood, and the like—do not valorize work as such, but rather the (trans) body in motion. Such scenes break down the heteronormative boundaries between a feminized domestic sphere in which love and sexuality are privatized and the masculinized public sphere of work and politics. Echoing a long tradition of queer radicalism, this sequence proposes a revolutionary vision of love and desire for one’s comrades in work and struggle as integral to the process of social transformation.

The hard work of the revolution.

Tucked inside from the cold Russian night, a cabaret hosts a raucous party for the sailors. But look a little closer: the sailors are dancing together and with fancy femmes from the city, who are also necking with each other. Pairs and trios swirl around solo dancers, all enjoying the lively music, the plentiful drink, the permissive atmosphere. Mustaches and make-up, stripes and lace, curves and bulges—all signifiers seem to blur and melt into one another, and the flirting knows no bounds. As the party rages, in the shadows of an austere bedroom, Stepan and his sailor comrade Kilgast cling to each other and fuck ferociously.

The cabaret.

But there is trouble in paradise. The autonomy from the central government that has allowed the sailors’ dynamic communal experiment to thrive—vividly portrayed in the scenes of cooperative work and bacchanalian play—is coming increasingly under threat, as the Bolsheviks clamp down brutally on urban strikes and the sailors recognize their common grievances. As the announcement rings out for a meeting to discuss solidarity with the Petrograd workers, Stepan observes optimistically, “We no longer fight each other, but stand together and fight for the future.” This plaintive declaration foreshadows the betrayal in which the Red Army turns its guns on the defiant sailors, but it also gestures at the horizontal hostility that suffuses many contemporary queer and trans communities, and at utopian hopes to overcome it.

While the sailors strive to embody and extend the revolution, the Soviet government seems determined to stamp it out at every turn. Lenin and Trotsky—whose portraits hang on the sailor’s barracks—“seem like old friends who have turned their back on us,” reflects Stepan. The film depicts the Bolshevik leaders with a twist of comic villainy, albeit with a dark edge. Trotsky talks on an ornate telephone from behind an elaborate desk featuring a chessboard, while he stuffs his face with fancy pastries; Lenin’s equally opulent office features a staff of cherubic Young Pioneers who serve as his secretaries, shine his boots, and, it is strongly implied, cater to his more sinister erotic whims. Motifs of political authoritarianism, corruption, and sexual exploitation intertwine in the film’s fierce critique of the Bolshevik leadership’s betrayal of the revolution.

Lenin and one of his twinks.

Trotsky’s message demanding Kronstadt’s submission to the Soviet government blares out over images of shivering sailors and loudspeakers. The injunction that “those who resist will be disarmed and put at the disposal of the Soviet Command” is juxtaposed with gruesome imagery of flesh coming out of a meat grinder, portending the slaughter to come. As Trotsky threatens to shoot the rebels like partridges, an enraged sailor in the mess hall smashes a plate, evoking a scene from The Battleship Potemkin that foreshadowed the famous mutiny of 1905. Here the film appropriates the tropes of classic Soviet cinema and directs them into a powerful critique of the Soviet regime that Eisenstein’s classic served to legitimize, forcefully refuting Bolshevik claims to be the inheritors of the Russian revolutionary legacy and complicating Soviet cinema’s position within the vanguard of aesthetic radicalism.

“Those who resist will be disarmed and put at the disposal of the Soviet Command.”

The stage has been set—and a clash is on the horizon. In a contentious meeting on the Battleship Petropavlovsk, the sailors discuss the political situation, hearing updates from urban workers and hotly debating the advice of a former general who also hates the Bolsheviks.

The meeting.

In the tradition of classic anarchist films such as Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom, the scenes depicting political meetings evoke the complex and conflictual dynamics of non-hierarchical organizing. As the Bolsheviks mount their claims that, knowingly or not, the Kronstadt rebels are counter-revolutionaries—claims that authoritarian communists continue to repeat to this day—Stepan declares, “The sailors have had enough, and we are ready for a new revolution—or at least a good fight.”

The classic debate about the collectivization of land in Ken Loach’s film about the Spanish Civil War, Land and Freedom.

The first attack comes; ominous music echoes over the stylized fisticuffs of the theatre troupe interspersed with chaotic scenes in the snow. Nothing will be the same after this betrayal. Amid images of sailors hoisting the bodies of their comrades off the snowy ground, a haunting scene unfolds in the same cabaret that had previously hosted the joyous passion of intertwined political and gender/sexual revolutions. The same band graces the stage, but sways tentatively as if they might collapse at any moment, while only a handful of dispirited spectators sit alone, watching their mournful waltz. As Stepan surveys the corpse-strewn snowy battlefield with shock and grief, his lover sits in the near-empty cabaret, swigging vodka and gazing morosely into the distance.

The rebels do not succumb to despair. Mutual aid sustains the hungry as food grows scarce, the sailors fortify their defenses, and the printers turn out copies of their daily paper, the Izvestia. But the strain takes a toll, with conflicts and fights breaking out. Two bearded sailors arm-wrestle as an ominous portrait of Lenin looks on from the background, indicating the origins of the internal conflicts in the Bolshevik power grab. Yet afterwards, they share a conciliatory drink as the spectators applaud: the fragile bonds of solidarity strained but holding fast.

Arm-wrestling.

The two clashing sailors, Valk and Perelpelkin, represent the opposing poles pulling the rebels in different directions, laden with gendered and sexual symbolism, and towards different conceptions of time. Valk, who married a local and is raising a family, fears that a conflict will end in bloody catastrophe, and spouts cautionary proverbs about the imprudence of overzealous action. His investment in the feminized, domestic realm limits his commitment to the sailors’ revolution, locking him into a concept of time oriented towards reproduction and the future. Perelpelkin, by contrast, is an agitator who romanticizes the impending conflict. Whatever family (and, implicitly, sexual and romantic connection) he has lies with his comrades, the fellow sailors. He remains in the masculine sphere of militarism and revolutionary ardor, anticipating a glorious clash that will mark a historical break. Towards the beginning of the film, in the heady early days of the revolution before the Bolshevik betrayal, Stepan observes with wonder, “Here in Kronstadt, it feels like we are freed from history.” As the final conflict approaches, the sailors are split: should we be reasonable, thinking of the children and their future? Or should we pursue the queerest insurrection, joining our band of brothers in an orgasmic clash that might rupture time itself?¹

As the Red Army closes in, a similar split plays out between Stepan and his comrade and lover Kilgast. In a final heated meeting, the exhausted sailors debate: is it better to make a last stand, whatever the cost? Or, to do justice to the revolution, is it more important to ensure that we live to see another day? Kilgast, committed to fighting to the bitter end, will not abandon his comrades. As the agonizing scene unfolds in which the two sailors bid farewell, Stepan reflects that there is something else with his lover “that is beyond me; a glint in his eye, a thirst…” As Kilgast stares intently into his eyes, Stepan can only look away. Committing body and soul to a queer path—to a revolutionary path in which one’s comrades in love and struggle mean everything—is not for everyone. It is no coincidence that Stepan is narrating this struggle through his letters to his sister—symbolizing the investments that he still has in his family of origin and the feminized spheres of connection outside of the masculine camaraderie of his lover and the sailor’s revolution. In this climactic scene, the men try to part, but their hands nearly refuse to let them, grasping even as Stepan reluctantly walks out the door. As he flees into the snow, he laments, “I never felt so alone in my life.”

Stepan and Kilgast bid farewell.

As tense piano music mounts, the sailors take their positions and the army trudges through the snow. A final climactic montage intersperses the Red Army’s Gatling guns, the chessboard from Lenin’s desk, the fisticuffs of the Blue Blouse performers, and wriggling maggots before fading into grainy white oblivion.

In the final scene, a despondent Stepan writes from hiding in Finland, hungry and hunted, lamenting the slaughter of his comrades. Did Kilgast die in the snow like so many others? Did he escape in disguise to the city with pamphlets calling for a strike? Without the struggle to build and defend a revolutionary utopia and the lover who embodied it for him, he feels lost, clinging to his memories of those days that seemed outside of history. He says, “Every day I feel Kronstadt slipping further away, and every night I dream of going back to Russia.” Kronstadt has become a queer utopia that exists beyond the flow of time, beyond the weight of gender and poverty and state repression.

In the bitter tragedy of Stepan’s vanished utopia, in the memories redolent with traces of sweat, cum, and hormones, we hear echoes of the devastation of the AIDS crisis, in which an unprecedented culture of gay sexual liberation nearly vanished as an entire queer generation fell under the scythe of the epidemic. This is interconnected with mourning the collapse of the urban conditions in which alternative urban cultures of sex and gender rebellion could flourish in the late twentieth century, which were destroyed and erased by gentrification. The queer generation that participated in making Maggots and Men flourished in the time period between these dual tragedies, attempting to reconnect to the legacies of liberation severed by HIV/AIDS while struggling to hold on to territory as developers, cops, and politicians transformed the San Francisco of the Cockettes and the White Night Riots into today’s millionaire tech-bro dystopia. Every day, queer Kronstadts slip further away, leaving the survivors to mourn and to remember.

In the film’s opening scene, a flash-forward to Stepan’s despair, he reflects on how fleeing from Kronstadt was “like waking up from a sweet dream back to real life,” a life that now “resembles a nightmare.” Dreams, like revolutions, distort our sense of time: what seems to be an eternity, immanent with infinite possibility, can unfold and then seemingly vanish in an instant. Even as Kronstadt slips further away—from Stepan, and from us as viewers a century later—the revolutionary inspiration it embodies persists somewhere outside of time, a seed of utopia ready to sprout anew when the soil is ready.

Revolution need not be the glorious cataclysmic moment anticipated by Kilgast or Perelpelkin, nor the melancholy memory slowly slipping from Stepan’s grasp. It can be the water surrounding us, as the old milk woman urged us to understand, constantly in motion as we move through it.² Here, the political and gender revolutions that the film explores converge. The revolution may be hard work, but it is suffused with pleasure and desire; and in the midst of its ongoing flow, our bodies, the gendered positions they hold, and the types of labor we perform with them can all transform in meaning.

To be honored and accepted as men need not mean conforming to a schema of patriarchal masculinity anchored in cisgender and heterosexual norms. Rather, in the film’s deeply queer and trans utopia, revolutions can be made by loving men—the men we are and are becoming (whatever we were assigned at birth), the men with whom we struggle to build a free world, the men we insist could still be our brothers, even as they march towards us with their rifles across the ice under Trotsky’s orders. Like the early gay liberationists who pointed out the absurdity of punishing men for loving each other while drafting them to kill each other, the trans sailors of Maggots and Men point to a utopia in which the meaning of maleness could be radically transformed, becoming a position from which people of different bodily histories can connect in a collective struggle fueled by eros and solidarity.

But this re-envisioning of maleness need not result in fixed gender roles or homoerotic sexist fantasies of a world without women. In this revolution, the men’s process of gendered and social transformation promotes active solidarity with the liberation of women, as both the historical Kronstadt sailors and the trans actors who portrayed them in the film each conveyed in their message of solidarity for International Women’s Day. In the moments of queer euphoria that it enables, the proliferation of play and pleasure can dissolve into gender anarchy as sailors, femmes, and assorted revelers dance, slide into, and become one another.

The cabaret.

These subversions undermine not only the gendered assumptions of conventional revolutionary history, but the narrative norms of popular LGBTQ culture. So many conventions of queer cinema and narrative focus on the individual’s pathway to self-awareness and self-acceptance, a basic bildungsroman arc of budding consciousness that positions the achievement of individual identity as the apotheosis of the queer story. But Maggots and Men offers a profoundly collective vision of trans becoming, anchored in joint struggle and mutual desire. Most of the sailors are unnamed; the Russian-language voiceovers that blot out their individual voices shift the focus from their unique identities to their interactions and dynamics. Even Stepan and Kilgast, the most individualized characters, are primarily symbols of the forces flowing through those revolutionary moments, conduits for the utopian longings of the Kronstadt sailors and the twenty-first-century trans communities portraying them. In this film, history—like revolution—is no longer defined by the transcendent individual and the climactic moment that ruptures time, but the force and desire of the many, immanent within a flow of ongoing transformation, within which each self-redefinition achieves meaning in a collective affirmation of utopian possibility.

The format of film offers a powerful array of tools to deconstruct authority, invoke utopia, and redefine memory. At the same time, cinema was one of the tools the Bolsheviks used to try to contain and control the revolution. From the propaganda film in which actors recreated the battle on the ice—evoked in Maggots and Men as Lenin sits watching it surrounded by his young servants, intoning, “Cinema is for us the most important of the arts”—to Eisenstein’s effort in The Battleship Potemkin to appropriate the resistance of the fed-up sailors to shore up the Communist Party’s legitimacy, authoritarians have harnessed cinema as a tool to control historical narratives. Maggots and Men enters the fray with an anti-authoritarian counterstrike, reclaiming the legacy of resistance with an anarchist sensibility, linking the resistance to state tyranny at Kronstadt to the revolutionary challenges to gender and sexual norms of the twenty-first century.

For those who want to read more, these ideas about time draw on Walter Benjamin’s essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”; the discussion of gender, reproduction, and the future touch on Lee Edelman’s No Future, but particular the discussion of these concepts in the first issue of the queer nihilist journal Baeden, especially “The Anti-Social Turn”. You might also want to consult Towards the Queerest Insurrection, the Bash Back! anthology Queer Ultraviolence, and the other issues of Baeden. ↩
Like the slogan emblazoned on Captain Nemo’s vessel, mobilis in mobili—moving within the moving elements, changing within the historical processes of change. ↩

Kronstadt as Gender Anarchy : An Interview with Cary Cronenwett, Director of Maggots and Men

2021-03-31T21:30:19Z

In 1921, the Russian Revolution came to an end with the storming of the island of Kronstadt, where soldiers, sailors, and workers had revolted against the autocracy of the Bolshevik Party in favor of grassroots Soviet power. In the early years of the 21st century, a trans and queer filmmaking collective set out to shoot a film evoking the story of this rebellion. Featuring what is arguably the largest cast of trans actors in the history of cinema, Maggots and Men reimagines the Kronstadt revolt from the standpoint of a queer utopianism. The result is a haunting masterpiece that breathes life into the memory of the past.

Continuing our series commemorating the one-hundred-year anniversary of the Kronstadt rebellion, we interviewed filmmaker Cary Cronenwett, who conceived and directed Maggots and Men. Our discussion explores the film’s significance as a radical affirmation of trans bodies and identities, the historical sources that the participants engaged with, and the overlapping political and gender revolutions that the film envisions, exploring the possibilities of cinema as a vehicle for the utopian imagination. You can read our own thoughts on the film here.

“I don’t think that revolution is dead. I think there are revolutionary possibilities all around us and avenues to work for change.”

You can stream Maggots and Men here.

Trailer.

How did you first encounter the story of the Kronstadt Rebellion? How did the idea of formulating it into a contemporary trans and queer feature film take shape?

Maggots and Men started with the concept of setting a film in a definitively all-male environment (such as a naval base) then casting it with actors of different gender expressions and bodies, thus redefining “male” for the audience. I’d done this previously with schoolboys in boy’s school in Phineas Slipped, a short I completed in 2001. I’d spent several years making Phineas, so after it was finished, everyone was asking me what was next. When I visited my friend Allison in London and she asked, I told her I wanted to make a sailor movie and I was looking for ideas, something historical—I didn’t want to make anything light or sexy about the US military, so it needed to be set in another time and place.

She said she’d heard of an island of anarchist sailors—“What could be dreamier?”—and I agreed. In that moment, that was actually all she could tell me. So it was funny that it was already mythologized and told to me as a rumor. Who were they? Were they pirates? I did a search and quickly found Kronstadt. I’d made up my mind right away that they, whoever they were, were perfect for my movie.

My imaginings were enough, but as I delved into the research, I got more and more involved in the actual history of Kronstadt. I’m excited by revolution and ways we can transform society; that was my impetus to start making films, to challenge people’s perception of gender. I’m influenced by anarchism and communalism, and the film was a way to engage with these ideas. The conversation above with Allison took place in a squatted funeral parlor where she was living at the time. She was part of a squatting community in South London, where I visited as often as I could and had lots of magical times. I’d wanted to move there, and because I never did, I had this romanticized idea of what it would be like to live in that anarchist utopia.

In making Maggots, there was a lot of emphasis on the process of the filmmaking; we prioritized the experience of being on the set or in a scene. The politics of how we ran the set, recruiting, casting, etc. were important and discussed at length. We were constantly revising and in a state of flux. We collected building materials off of the Craigslist.org “Free” section and dug through dumpsters. We were on a tight budget, but we were also consciously trying to minimize our footprint—buying as little as possible and using things that were otherwise going to waste. While making this movie, in a way, we created our own intentional community.

Photograph by Andrew Wingler.

It’s all non-professional actors. Very few people, cast or crew, were paid beyond travel expenses. We drew people in from different networks: trans folks, radical queers, and film people, and also through activist groups people were part of, networks of radical left that were already quite strong in San Francisco. We were excited by the aspect of different people attracted to different aspects of the project (left history, film, queer) coming together and working with each other.

It took five years to make, and there were a couple of years when we were in production when it was a lifestyle. It wasn’t a typical movie set. We built a studio in Ilona’s backyard [Ilona Berger, the Director of Photography]. Actors would do cooking shifts and build sets, and the crew served as extras. We had sort of a “shoot-then-recover” approach. Between shoots we had Sunday night sewing parties, where Flo would cook fabulous meals, and we’d put people to work sewing or making stencils. Both Flo McGarrell (one of the Art Directors) and Travis Clough (the actor that played Kilgast) moved out to San Francisco to work on the film and moved into my flat, and we sort of lived in the project. My relationship with Travis and close friendship with Flo really added to the lack of boundaries between the film and my life and also the sweetness of that time. The film consumed us… Looking back, it really was a kind of utopia.

I think the pinnacle of this immersion came when we’d built the set for Kilgast’s sleeping quarters in the basement of an apartment building. Travis and I slept on the set so that we didn’t have to load the equipment out that night and back in in the morning. It was a fake bed, just boards and some burlap bags that we’d made for the scenes at the fort. Still, we thought it was a good idea. It was cold, but it was fun. I remember we felt like we crossed through and became the movie that night.

There were a lot of sort of uncanny connections to source material. One example is Battleship Potemkin. Of course, Potemkin is historically relevant because it involves the same fleet of sailors; but once we dug into the material, the relevance became quite layered. When I watched Potemkin, I was surprised that it was so homoerotic. As I researched, I quickly learned that Eisenstein was gay, and through this lens, I could understand the homoeroticism in Potemkin as his way of inserting his own interventions into a retelling of history. This loosely paralleled what we were doing, and this through line connected us personally to the material.

When describing the process, I have to say that there was a sort of a cosmic element in the way things aligned. Flo felt compelled to work on Maggots because of a dream he had that connected him to the project. He brought a lot of magical energy and had sort of a way of divining or manifesting things. And magic aside, there was a real sense of a higher purpose. We felt like we were a part of something special—there were the revolutionary ideas and the inspiration from and fascination with the source material. It was also a unique collaboration of trans folks and much needed celebration of trans self-acceptance. I think we all felt compelled, for one reason or another—that we had to make this film.

Ilona Berger. Photograph by Andrew Wingler.

Among those who were involved in the film, how did you engage with the history of the rebellion? Were most of the participants familiar with it, or learning about it for the first time? What conversations did you have about the history and how it connected to what you were trying to do?

We would share the history of Kronstadt with each new person. People got interested and borrowed books. Most people hadn’t heard about the story, including the handful of Russians (who had been born in the Soviet Union) that worked on the film because the history was erased. We would have books on set that people could read in their free time—not just the history of Kronstadt, but also the Blue Blouse theater. We had a couple of giant Constructivist Art books and folders filled with photocopies of Russian art and design from the time period, Meyerhold poses, etc. Ilona Berger, the Director of Photography, was always bringing Russian films on VHS. We got excited about things and hosted movie nights. We felt very connected to the Constructivist and protest art—the props made out of cheap materials mirrored work that we had been producing as artists and activists.

The history of Kronstadt became very important to us when Ilona and I were writing the script, and likewise for Blake Nemic and I when we were working on the first draft. I had originally intended it to make a much more experimental film—less story, more sex, less history—but over time the history became very important to us and got shifted to the forefront. I think anyone involved in any social justice movement asks themselves how much they are willing to sacrifice, and it was fascinating to imagine what it must have been like for the sailors.

Cary Cronenwett and Samara Halperin. Photograph by Andrew Wingler.

So far as I know, this film probably has more trans actors than any other in the history of cinema. Yet it includes practically no explicit or direct invocations of trans identity; it conjures a world in which trans embodiment is totally unmarked (to the point where a cis/straight viewer might not even register how profoundly their assumed gender and bodily norms are being subverted). Tell us about the choices behind this approach, and how the film’s aesthetic choices relate to it—lighting, color, camera angles, voiceovers and dialogue or lack thereof.

Yes! There are lots of trans actors. We were intent on getting as many trans folks in the film as possible. (I finally counted and came up with something like 77.) We were particularly excited by the mushroom picking scene because the trans kid in the scene was only eight at the time. We had fun recruiting people for cameos, such as Susan Stryker who is yelling out of a window in the strike scene. I felt that the film could function loosely as some sort of testament to the gender revolution that was taking place at the time with San Francisco at the epicenter. It was an important aspect of the filmmaking process that we were consciously collaborating on an art project with other trans people in both cast and crew.

While trans identification was definitely part of the discussion while making the film and trans camaraderie an important aspect of production, in the space of the film, for the viewer, I wanted the sailors to simply be accepted as male rather than necessarily specified as trans. As far as the lighting, color, and camera angles, those choices were primarily about mimicking early film, though we did knowing use the low camera angles, typical of Russian film, to portray the sailors as heroes. We consciously placed trans bodies into the sort of iconic imagery of the revolutionary hero. The use of voice over (by a cis actor) was not at all about taking away the voice of the (trans) actors, though that aspect was actually discussed at one point. (I often had to defend my decisions to the group or at least to Ilona and Flo.) The actors had spent so long rehearsing and learning their lines that it was disappointing for some to learn that the audio wasn’t likely to be used. The decision to use voiceover came from wanting to create cohesion and have the film be in Russian, as well as to create the feel of a silent film.

Esa Schneider. Photograph by Andrew Wingler.

The film makes a number of allusions to the classic film The Battleship Potemkin, from its title to scene of the sailors in the hammocks. What tricks and tropes did you draw from Eisenstein and early Soviet cinema? Are there other references to past films or artistic works? What were some of the other works that inspired you in the process of making the film?

I had some of the ideas for the general approach going in: that the film feel more like a collage than a seamless narrative, that’s some scenes would feel chaotic and tight, while others calm, and open; the film would be sweet and sad, gritty and grainy like Un Chant d’Amour. These ideas became more refined with research. Flo showed me Daisies, which became an example of the collage I’d had in mind. Ilona showed me the contrasting editing styles of Soviet cinema; the quick, jarring cuts of Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera) and the flowing, wide open landscapes of Dovzhenko (Earth) The hammock scene, the plate smash, the maggoty meat all reference scenes from Potemkin.

Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin.

I read Eisenstein’s texts about his dialectical approach to editing. The juxtaposition of the meat grinder shot between the sailor smashing the plate and Trotsky demanding the sailor’s surrender and inserting the maggots into the battle is meant to push the viewer into drawing a conclusion about where the sailors were heading—to make a statement that war is death. That soldiers are pushed into battle like meat through a meat-grinder. These scenes loosely parallel the scene in Strike, in which Eisenstein intercuts a demonstration that is suppressed by the Army and a cow being butchered.

The windows in the cabaret are a nod to Querelle (Fassbinder). The group exercise draws inspiration from Beau Travail (Claire Denis). The Young Pioneer (Justin Kelly) who is executed while holding the jug of milk is inspired by a scene in a Soviet film, The Commissar (Askoldov).

The Blue Blouse Theater Troupe actually existed and many of the tableaus in the film are recreated from photographs from their actual performances. There’s an excellent text about them called Revolutionary Acts by Lynn Mally. In the boxing scenes that reappear in the battle, The Blue Blouse are performing biomechanical exercises developed by Meyerhold, who was a Soviet theater director at the time. Meyerhold had this fascinating approach to acting that had to do with total muscle control and trained actors with yoga-like poses, gymnastics, and breath control. The person who worked with Zoe Fife, the Blue Blouse choreographer, to develop the scene was actually trained in biomechanics by someone who had worked with Meyerhold.

The Blue Blouse agitprop group in Maggots and Men. Photograph by Dan Nicoletta.

We’ve been debating the meaning of the title. Who are the men—and who are the maggots? How should we understand the brief powerful moments when the wriggling maggots appear, in the 1917 conflict between Stepan and the officer and the disturbing climactic montage as the Red Army attacks at the end? What other binaries does the dichotomy between maggots and men stand in for—or destabilize?

The title, Maggots and Men, references one of the chapters of Battleship Potemkin that is actually called “The Men and the Maggots,” in which the sailors complain that the meat is maggoty; the officers deny it and tell them to eat it anyway, and mayhem ensues. This event spurs the mutiny on the ship. An abbreviated version of the scene where the sailors point out the maggots to their commanding officer is recreated in Maggots and Men. The maggots are evidence of the intolerable conditions that the sailors are forced to live in. In my film, the maggots also represent death on the battlefield. In a historical revolutionary context, the term “maggots” has been used to refer to bureaucrats or non-party members as parasites that are leaching off the people, as opposed to the workers that are contributing to society. Maggots and Men asks what it means to be a man, and shows more than one answer, with Kilgast and Petrichenko choosing different paths.

Rhani Remedes and Brody Elton. Photography by Andrew Wingler.

Maggots and Men offers a powerful visual celebration of the transmasculine body. The scenes of the sailors working, playing, swimming, dancing, fucking, and fighting offer a fascinating portrayal that both celebrates and remixes masculinity. How were you and the other participants thinking about this during the filmmaking process? How did it inform the visual aesthetics? How does the film encourage us to rethink gender and masculinity?

There was definitely an awareness on the set around trans/body positivity and it was really beautiful. It was sort of a celebration of self-acceptance. I think the swimming scene is really important—that the actors, that trans bodies are portrayed as beautiful and natural, and that their backs are to the camera in an organic way, not as if they are hiding. Then in the sauna scene, we see a reveal and though it’s somewhat obscured by the steam, there is a penis. The idea is that the film is not going to give you a clear answer as to whether the actors are trans or not and is making the argument that it shouldn’t matter.

The path to living as trans can be challenging. I can’t speak for everyone, but many of us share a common feeling of being at odds with our bodies, and that alone can be the cause of a lot of pain. Many people are processing the fallout from experiencing rejection or lack of support from families and friends, face challenges at work or have trouble finding a job. While living as trans and expressing one’s gender can be a positive force, it can also be stressful or feel isolating. I think Maggots was fulfilling a need—by collaborating on something artistic, it was a way to be part of something affirming. To find the actors, we put flyers up at Tom Waddell, the trans health clinic, and recruited people from bars around San Francisco like The Eagle and The Lexington. We also did call outs on the internet and such, and people came from all over to participate.

The locations were primarily in San Francisco and the surrounding area, but we did the frozen ocean scenes in Vermont where Flo was living before coming to San Francisco. Flo’s parents had a giant house and he put people up for a long weekend. People came from all over the East Coast, including a whole vanload of people from New York, because they wanted to participate. It was really special. Maybe people were curious and maybe it sounded like fun, but I think people came because they were jumping on the opportunity to collaborate with other trans people.

Other people were drawn to the project because they’d seen Phineas Slipped. A lot of people really identified with Phineas Slipped—one person wrote on his LiveJournal that he felt beautiful for the first time when he saw that film, which was why he was working on Maggots and Men. It was really moving for me to hear stuff like that. The project took on a lot of importance, like a responsibility, which I took very seriously. We all did. These films really come from not only wanting to be accepted as male, but desired as male. I think that’s something lot of trans guys can really relate to.

Photograph by Andrew Wingler.

One of my favorite scenes is the first one in the bar, with wild music and dancing and gender chaos. What experiences or fantasies fueled this vision of an unruly trans and queer utopia?

Wild parties and picnics (as well as flyers and endless meetings) are important parts of an anarchist utopia. We wanted to show a mix of cosmopolitan and rural folks, arty weirdos like the bartender. The wild women are party girls that came from St. Petersburg, and if we’d had a larger budget, we would’ve seen them arrive in a sleigh. The women were also important because it is problematic to imagine a utopia without them, so this scene carried that importance.

One cool thing about the scene is that the costume design was done by Flo and a team of five women, all of whom are in the scene, including Flo in a dress he designed.

I really wanted them to be doing the Charleston, but after extensive research, I decided the foxtrot was more appropriate. The folk dances are meant to visually show that people had a peasant background, though they’re not historically accurate; we tried to get proper folk dancing lessons, but couldn’t make it happen. In the end, the folk dances were pieced together from somewhat random internet clips.

The cabaret scene is a fun example of how we emphasized the experience of participating in the scene. There was a lot of planning and dance rehearsals that took place before, and on the day of, the party-goers did get to have a party. It did get pretty wild. I remember one person got out of hand and had to be asked to leave. There was also a misinformation campaign on set, with someone trying to convince people that the sailors drank cocaine-infused vodka—and they brought some to share. The shoot just sort of transitioned into the wrap party. We were a wild bunch, and celebrating making it through a long stretch of shooting.

That shoot was towards the end of our longest stretch, 17 days, which nearly destroyed us. We were hanging on by a thread. We hadn’t slept. The set was built in the garage of the Bakers Dozen Co-op; we had to move a bunch of bicycles and tools out of the way before setting up and we had very little time. We’d been shooting the meetings right before and lots of thing fell through the cracks—like how the widows in the cabaret were meant to be set into walls with light behind them, but the walls of the set never got built, so the windows are just hanging against the garage wall. I remember thinking that that was a crisis, but we had to move forward with the day anyway. In the end, the dancers did great, the outfits were amazing. We’d gotten all of our shots and pulled it off. It was pretty amazing, and we all had a lot of fun.

Rhani Remedes and Abby Schkloven. Photograph by Heather Renée Russ.

One of the most striking aspects of the film is the way the narrative advances through a combination of expository theatrical scenes, with dialogue in English, alternating with scenes told through letters from a revolutionary Kronstadt sailor to his sister, narrated in Russian. What theatrical or cinematic traditions helped you craft this narrative structure, and why did you choose this way of framing the narrative?

We were fascinated by the images of the Blue Blouse and needed to have them fit in somehow. I also like the idea of interruptions in the film that show our hand in telling the story, rather than the film taking place seamlessly in sailor-land. The theater occupies a liminal, anachronistic space and the narration in English help to set it apart from Kronstadt in 1921. The narrative function of the theater is to lay out the facts of a potentially confusing story, taking that burden off of the letters so that they could be more poetic.

In the film, we can recognize the texts of actual broadcasts from Kronstadt, copies of the Kronstadt Izvestiia, and other archival materials. Was the character of Stepan based on a specific historical individual, or a composite of the rebellious sailors? Are the letters imagined, or archival? How did you access and choose between archival materials?

Stepan Petrichenko was the reluctant leader of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee, appointed by vote. I know very little about him other than that he was of peasant origins and fled to Finland along with around 2000 other people, including the whole provisional revolutionary committee. There is a short list of names written in the front of a book by Ida Mett, and all the names of the sailors used in the film were taken from that list. The names are of real people but very few personal details were included in the texts. Valk was a civilian from the island. Vilken and Kozlovky were real people. Vilken did come across the ice disguised as a Red Cross worker and offer them a deal. Kozlovsky was formerly a czarist officer and he did recommend that they blast holes in the ice (so the Army couldn’t walk out across the ice to kill them), which could have saved them, but the sailors told him to shut up because, basically, they didn’t trust anyone over thirty. The broadcast by the sailors acknowledging International Women’s Workers’ Day while they were under fire actually happened. The sailors didn’t agree on what to do. Many stayed behind and refused to believe that the army couldn’t be persuaded join them, while others ran. The sailors calling out to the army to join them and trying to persuade the army with leaflets was historical, and they did this to the last minute.

The letters are completely fictitious, as is Petrichenko’s sister Anya, to whom he’s writing. The letters were written by Icky A., and I think he did an amazing job of making the story come to life. We had a separate script that we used while filming, and the letters were added during post production as a way to make the story both more cohesive and more accessible.

Max Wolf Valerio as Kozlovsky. Photograph by Andrew Wingler.

Your portrayal of Lenin and his fancy for young Communist twinks to shine his boots is both one of the funniest parts of the film and also disturbing. What motivated you to use this combination of humor and creepy homoeroticism to drive home the film’s critique of Bolshevik authoritarianism?

The aim of the film was to present the story from an anarchist perspective and prioritize the sailors’ voices. Lenin and Trotsky are sort of cartoon characters, villains that forsake the sailors. Regardless of the communist ideals that they promoted, they chose to diverge from the ideals of the revolution, and in the following years were responsible for an unforgiveable number of deaths. Lenin’s and Trotsky’s lines are taken from their actual speeches and are left untranslated, to take away their voices. I’m not sure exactly where the Daddy Lenin characterization came from, though it was an obvious choice. Lenin was played by a leather fag who could bring his own boots. Portraying Lenin as a creep was just us trying to have a sense of humor and show his abuse of power; and, of course, pedophilia is the ultimate abuse of power.

Justin Kelley, Jeff Stroker, and Walt Thorp. Photograph by Heather Rene Russ.

Maggots and Men uses the format of tragedy powerfully, as we taste the sweetness of the sailors’ revolutionary utopia, only to see it overrun and the participants killed or dispersed. Tragedy evokes the hunger that embattled communities today feel for gender/sexual freedom as well as political revolution—but it also frames moments of joy and freedom as temporary ghettos under siege, ultimately doomed by more powerful forces. What were the advantages of framing Maggots and Men as a tragedy, and what limitations did that introduce? How does genre inform the politics and possibilities of a work of art?

With this project, it quickly became important for me to do the history justice, to do right by the sailors and tell their story responsibly. It really wasn’t much of a choice at the time; I didn’t see how to frame such a tragic event as other than a tragedy. In some ways, we did a very straightforward telling of the history. We didn’t discuss other options, like making it a time travel story, or whatever would need to happen for it to have a happy ending. I think it’s OK, and appropriate for the story, to have a sad ending. But one thing I really struggled with was that the story was too hopeless, that the takeaway would be that the revolution was dead, as my friend Omar Wilson commented after watching it. I don’t think that revolution is dead. I think there are revolutionary possibilities all around us and avenues to work for change.

The theme I was trying to explore with Kilgast and Petrichenko was: what does it mean to be a hero? What does it mean to be true to one’s convictions? It functions loosely as a metaphor for transitioning gender, in the sense that there’s not always a clear right or a wrong, and each individual needs to determine their own path. I worry that one reading could be: damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. For me, the real heart of the film is between the strike and the meeting when the sailors sent to observe the strike report back to the group—utopia before its unraveling. I’d like these images to prompt the viewer to imagine that another way of life is possible.

Travis Clough, Alex Polotsky, and Ilona Berger. Photograph by Heather Rene Russ.

What was the significance of the making of this film for the trans and queer communities who took part in it? Were there ways that the political visions and ideas expressed in the film formed part of the process of making it?

There was a direct connection between the politics of the film and our approach. The artists who were doing the poster art, Icky A. and Zeph Fishlyn, are both involved with print-making collectives that make political posters as a way to engage with the public and disseminate information. The band in the strike scene is a group that formed to play at protests and the actors in the scene and the people making props were mirroring their participation in real demonstrations.

We really were a work in progress; we never stopped revising the script, and the project was constantly redefining itself. I feel like this approach is a way of engaging with our radical queer politics. We welcomed input from actors, and often reworked scenes as they were cast and scheduled. For example, the sex scene with Kilgast and Petrichenko was negotiated between the actors. They basically just got to say what they wanted to do. They are actually having sex on camera, which was important because it was also a way to assert our radical queer approach and put our politics in motion, so to speak.

There were also moments where the film diverged from the Kronstadt commune. Most decisions were made by a small group, which was primarily Ilona, Flo, and I, though the group did fluctuate. The set builders and costume designers had a lot of freedom. It may have seemed as though we were consensus-based because most of the time we were all in agreement and we tried to operate like that, and a lot of us had previous experience with consensus-based groups. But there were a few times when it was put to the test, where I used my executive power, so to speak, and there was a lot of pushback around that. There were discussions about whether or not I was entitled to executive power, and I had to make a case for myself. Not only to discuss the issue at hand, but explain why I felt I was entitled to have veto power over other people. I made some decisions that people disagreed with, and I remember that a lot of trust was lost, which took some time to get back. There were definitely a few rifts, but I feel like we worked together quite smoothly overall.

It’s normal for a film to rework lines and develop characters as they go along. We really embraced this approach and applied it to all aspects of the project. We were continually asking ourselves, How can we be doing this better?—both from the standpoint of learning a craft and of our efforts to live up to our ideals.

Esa Sneider and Brontez Purnell in a deleted scene. Photograph by Andrew Wingler.

In several scenes, the film self-consciously reflects on the place of cinema: as the camera shows a camera filming the exercising sailors, or Lenin watches a film of the attack on Kronstadt and says, “Cinema is for us the most important of the arts.” Indeed, after the attack on Kronstadt, the Bolsheviks restaged and filmed a version of the storming of the island base purely for propaganda purposes. This film is part of a now century-long effort to continue the fight—the fight between the partisans of freedom and centralized authority, or between petit-bourgeois adventurers and the true revolutionary party, depending which side you take. How do you see the film within this historical tradition of artistic intervention?

I did wrestle with the idea of the film as a Propaganda Movie and how to have a sense of humor about engaging with that medium. This is seen in the portrayal of Trotsky and Lenin as cartoon characters, sort of writing them off; this is propaganda, because promoting a certain vision takes priority over truth. We were also conscious of how some framings, such as low-angle shots of Soviet film, overlapped with fascist imagery.

But the tone of the voiceover is so genuine and the letters are so earnest that the film doesn’t feel like propaganda. Furthermore, the film calls attention to itself as a storyteller, rather than presenting the story from a point of authority, or as a seamless immersive drama. The hand of the storyteller is revealed, and the viewer is aware that this is a telling of the history, rather than the history. Interruptions, such as varying film stocks and hand processing, call attention to the medium and remind the viewers that they are watching a film, as well as structural interruptions with the Blue Blouse Theater. The voice of the narrator is familiar, contemporary, and English-speaking, which also situates the storyteller’s perspective.

In the post-revolutionary Soviet Union, agitprop theater groups made performances that were a means to disseminate ideas to a mostly illiterate population. They performed the news of the day as well as communicating a new ethos being ushered in by the Revolution. I’d like to imagine that Maggots and Men offers a way for people to engage with history and a call to envision the future.

Strike! Photograph by Andrew Wingler.

How should we understand the relationship between social revolution and gender and sexual freedom that the film presents? Is one a metaphor for the other, or are both contingent on each other? Is there a (trans)gender/sexual equivalent of the Kronstadt Rebellion?

I’d like to think that Maggots and Men links the gender revolution or the movement for trans rights with other social justice movements. The film references issues of police violence, particularly against trans women, and labor organizing (the strike scene). It also touches on the government spreading lies with help of the media—labeling the enemy as terrorist to fight an unjust war—which felt particularly salient at a time when the US government and press were doing something similar during the Second Gulf War. I think it’s important that LGBTQ struggles be linked to anti-war movements and a broader push for human rights and equality. The mainstream LGBTQ movement really falls short in this respect. For example, I’d like the discussion around trans people serving in the military to be inseparable from a critique of the military, and the push to redirect funds away from the military into education and social programs.

Trans murders have been an ongoing problem and each one is its own tragic story. I think that the rate that trans people are murdered, particularly Black trans women, is a true failing of our society. The deaths related the government’s mishandling of the AIDS crisis shouldn’t be overlooked. There have been a lot tragedies that the government has had a hand in and there are certainly battles being fought, but I’m not aware of a trans equivalent of Kronstadt, and I wouldn’t want to use such a unique event as a metaphor. What really defines Kronstadt is that they were a politicized group of people who were on the side of justice that declared a position that made an authoritarian government feel threatened. Rather than attempting a diplomatic resolution, the government had them surrounded by the army and slaughtered, and thousands of people were killed in battle or executed. It’s notable that they were literally revolutionaries trying to steer the government back on track as it drifted off course. Because the sailors were on the side of justice, the Bolshevik government felt that their mere existence was a threat, which was the motivation for eliminating them. Murdering people because their existence is perceived as a threat certainly bears a similarity to anti-trans violence.

Cary Cronenwett and Scout Festa. Photo by Andrew Wingler.

Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us! What’s next for you?

I directed a short for the ACLU about Eisha Love, a Black trans woman living in Chicago, for a series called Trans in America (2018). I’m currently working on feature doc about the same woman, who is now a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the state of Illinois in an effort to overturn a law that bans felons from changing their names. I will start production in the coming months as soon as COVID-19 permits… and I’m looking for funders, so please get in touch!

Ilona Berger and Cary Cronenwett.

Peter Watkins: The Paris Commune, 1871 : Revisiting a Revolutionary Film on the 150-Year Anniversary of the Paris Commune

2021-03-28T18:48:43Z

On the occasion of the 150-year anniversary of the revolutionary Paris Commune, we revisit the experimental film that Peter Watkins made to summon the spirit of the Commune, a bold challenge to the role of cinema and an example of historical memory as a weapon.

An earlier draft of this text appeared in issue 8 of Rolling Thunder, our anarchist journal of dangerous living.

The Film

Before we present our remarks on the film, here it is for your viewing convenience:

La Commune 1871, part I. Note that part I actually ends at the 2:44:20 mark, at which time you should proceed to part II, below, rather than watching the fragments of it that appear out of order in this video thereafter.

La Commune 1871, part II.

La Commune de Paris, 1871 by Peter Watkins (1999; 5 hours 45 minutes)

The feature article in the second issue of Rolling Thunder asked whether anarchists should understand liberation as the consummation of current values and desires, or a total rejection of them. One might pose a parallel question about radical cinema: is it better to appropriate popular aesthetics and turn them against the powers that be, or to violate them in the course of rejecting the system that produced them? Would a full-length Hollywood epic complete with star actors and CGI animation seduce viewers to the other side of the barricades more effectively than Guy Debord’s famous blank screen, or would it simply utilize rebellious desires to rivet more spectators to their seats and help them get all that rebellion out of their systems?

In 1871, at the end of a disastrous war with Germany, Paris experienced a popular uprising. The rebels drove government forces from the city, convened a council of immediately recallable delegates, and attempted a variety of ambitious social experiments in women’s liberation, workers’ self-management, and public education. After two months, a reactionary counteroffensive supported by the Germans recaptured the city, though the communards fought street by street and block by block; the invaders murdered tens of thousands of Parisians outright and later executed or deported tens of thousands more. Anarchists and communists hailed the Commune as the first proletarian revolution; on the other hand, as Edmond de Goncourt wrote,

“A bleeding like that, by killing the rebellious part of a population, postpones the next revolution… The old society has twenty years of peace before it.”

In 1999, dissident television and film director Peter Watkins set out to depict the uprising in a film intended to be as horizontal and experimental as the Commune itself. Hundreds of actors were recruited according to the class and politics of the historical figures they were to portray, ranging from rough-and-ready radicals to bourgeois conservatives; the majority had no prior acting experience. They formed study groups to learn about the lives of the constituents and opponents of the Commune, and discussed the relationship between the Paris of 1871 and modern-day Europe. A set representing the working-class 11th district of Paris, one of the last to fall at the end of the uprising, was built inside a disused factory on the site of the studio of film pioneer Georges Méliès. In this setting, the cast acted out the story of the Paris Commune from beginning to end, while the camera crew dashed around filming as if they were documenting a current upheaval. You could call it historical memory as theater, but the effect is more like a séance, in which the participants invite the spirits of the martyred Communards to possess them, delivering the message of the Commune with the same urgency it had in 1871.

As the Situationist International put it, “Real poetry brings back into play all the unsettled debts of history.”

Today, La Commune still makes a jarring viewing experience, though not necessarily an unpleasant one. While the costumes and interiors are convincing, Watkins never hides the edge of the set, undermining the “authority” of film as representation the way Bertolt Brecht might have. Similarly, Watkins anachronistically depicts the uprising through reports from opposing television channels, the reactionary Versailles TV and the radical Commune TV, emphasizing that any portrayal of the Commune necessarily takes place through the lens of our own time. By explicitly requesting that viewers suspend their disbelief—“We ask you to imagine that it is now March 17, 1871”—the filmmakers achieve the opposite effect, denying the audience the illusion that the reenactment takes place in a world other than their own. La Commune thus avoids the catharsis Aristotle described as the purpose of tragic drama, in which people experience an emotional discharge in a controlled environment only to return to their ordinary lives: “Wasn’t that a sad story!”

Rather than focusing on the Brad Pitts and Audrey Tautous of history, Commune TV wanders the crowd in long cuts, giving equal time to scores of people the way a haphazard Indymedia video might. The apparent improvisation of the cast and film crew succeeds in evoking the tremendous chaotic energy of an insurrection: the urgency and disorder, the alternation of exultation and terror, the multiplicity of voices, desires, and activities.

As the reactionary forces of the government begin bombarding Paris from outside, power struggles develop within the Commune, opening the fault lines that divided anarchists from communists and other socialists shortly after its fall. The cast weigh the purported necessity of centralizing power to coordinate the defense of the city against the ideal of the Commune as a pure, if doomed, gesture towards liberation; as the arguments intensify, some actors depart from character to debate the Bolshevik revolution and the slaughter of the rebels at Kronstadt.

The way to learn something is to teach it; the way to make something your own is to fight for it. Watkins extends this logic to the cinema, approaching filmmaking as an infectious process of self-education.

The journalists of Commune TV undergo a parallel schism. One—perhaps intended to represent Peter Watkins, and in any case acted by his son—is outraged at the other’s pretense of objectivity in the face of the consolidation of power by the dictatorial Committee of Public Safety: “We’ll give our opinion from now on and that’s it, or I’m going home!” Like the real-life Watkins—who made La Commune for French television only to see it suppressed—the scruples of the fictional journalist result in his departure from the television crew.

Today, when television has largely been superseded by online media platforms, it’s hard to imagine what other functions that the medium could have served. We can hardly separate the shortcomings of the technology from the ways it has taken shape in this society, and the ways it has shaped our society in turn. In robbing us of our imaginations and sense of historical contingency, capitalism renders it impossible to imagine or remember how any of the inventions of our civilization could be applied outside its logic. Luddite generalizations aside, could we produce anything along the lines of “motion pictures” without dooming millions to spectatorship, and melting the polar ice caps in the bargain? We may never find out. But it’s poignant that only two decades ago a renegade director, doomed to obscurity by corporate stonewalling, was still struggling to build signposts to the roads not taken.

The risk, of course, is that in earnestly attacking corporate media and its aesthetics, the film might legitimize itself as a medium—buying more time for a format perhaps better buried entirely. The ubiquity of onscreen entertainment today is no argument for the necessity of revolutionary entertainment—on the contrary, it seems to suggest that such a thing is impossible. Even Guy Debord’s blank screen was still a spectacle to contemplate, as its afterlife in European museums attests. Yet one can also look at Watkins’s La Commune as an effort to discover a way of recounting history that brings its unsettled debts back into play. Whether or not it accomplishes this for viewers, it seems to have served this purpose for members of the cast, some of whom went on to form a collective that continued organizing around the issues brought up by the film long after its release. One can imagine that, in attempting to incarnate revolutionaries without ceasing to be themselves, the actors were forced to engage with the injustices and possibilities of their own times as well as those of 1871.

This personal engagement is the film’s greatest strength, from a viewing standpoint as well. Though some of the earlier stretches can drag, the film builds to a stirring and unusual climax. Because the artifice of cinema has long been revealed by the final sequences, they can only derive their power from the extent to which the passions displayed in them are genuine—in other words, from the fact that the explosive charge of the Paris Commune continues to resonate in our own era, as its unsettled debts come back into play. This underlines the essential message of the film: not only does history repeat itself, but all of its unresolved conflicts continue to seethe just beneath the skin of the present day. As one communard proclaims near the conclusion, with a sincerity that provokes gooseflesh:

“If there are any barricades in Paris in the year 2000, I’ll be there fighting!”

Today, we all take for granted that the experiences of the few hundred people who make a movie are less important than those of the thousands or millions who watch it; experiments like Watkins’s La Commune are rejected out of hand as disrespectful to the audience and ineffective as vehicles for propaganda. But in a product-oriented society, in which so few experience films as invitations to action rather than consumerism, perhaps a few hundred people participating in an empowering process could be more significant than any blockbuster viewed by millions.

Moreover, if this comes across on the screen as something that really happened, perhaps it could challenge the passivity of the audience as well. In that spirit, we invite you to watch and discuss Peter Watkins’s La Commune, to reflect on the historical events of the real Paris Commune, and to participate fiercely and bravely in the struggles of our own time.

To quote Amiri Baraka, “A new reality is better than a new movie.” The revolution will not be televised.

La Commune: taking aim at spectatorship itself.

From Punk to Indigenous Solidarity: Four Decades of Anarchism in Brazil : An Interview

2021-02-18T11:51:33Z

In the following interview, two longtime anarcho-punks recount the reemergence of anarchism in Brazil after the end of the military dictatorship, trace the fortunes of social movements through the rise and fall of the left Workers Party government, and describe the situation for Indigenous peoples and Indigenous solidarity efforts under the far-right Bolsonaro regime today.

Andreza and Josimas have been involved in anarchism and activism for several decades—playing in bands, organizing events, and releasing records and zines and books. Josimas was one of the people who founded Germinal (2000) and Andreza participated in founding Espaço Impróprio (2003), two important autonomous anarchist collectives in São Paulo. Josimas has played in the bands Execradores, Metropolixo, Clangor, Diskontroll, and Amor, protesto e ódio. Andreza has played in Skirt, One Day Kills, Out of Season, and Retórica. In addition, they have played together in Você Tem que Desistir and TuNa.

Their current projects include Semente Negra (“Black Seed”), an ecological project in the Atlantic rainforest and the location of Cultive Resistência (“Cultivate Resistance”), a collective promoting do-it-yourself culture, permaculture, anarchism, punk, feminism, anti-racism, veganism, LGBTQIA+ issues, and Indigenous rights; No Gods No Masters, both a distribution and an annual festival that hosts anarchists, punks, and Indigenous people from all over the world; and Vivência na Aldeia, a nine-year-running Indigenous solidarity project.

Thanks very much to Karen for assisting with translation.

The entrance to Semente Negra, an ecological project in the Atlantic rainforest. “Starting here, we will be sharing space with many other living beings. Animals and plants interact and depend on each other. Take care! Do not destroy.”

In the 1980s, when anarcho-punk emerged in Brazil, what legacy remained from the earlier generations of Brazilian anarchism? How significant was that in the renaissance of anarchism in Brazil in the 1980s and 1990s?

The anarcho-punk movement in Brazil emerged in the late 1980s, as the result of a more active political consciousness within the punk movement in general. In Brazil, there had long existed several punk gangs that fought among themselves; this created the need for a sharper political awareness. In the mid-1980s, when Brazil was still ruled by a military dictatorship, some anarchist groups resumed their organizing and a few punks decided to get involved. There was the pro-COB (Confederação Operaria Brasileira) hub and Juventude Libertária (the first Brazilian Libertarian Youth group), in which one could find some punks already. However, when the Social Culture Center (Centro de Cultura Social) got back on its feet—a project over half a century old that had been persecuted and shut down under the military dictatorship—these young punks found themselves a reference point.

Against militarism—the anarcho-punk movement.

Anti-militarist punks in Belo Horizonte.

The older fellows from CCS reopened the project in 1985. They had a lot of willpower and organized several activities on political awareness and anarchist culture. They also assembled a library with a wide range of anarchist books and newspapers, which served as the basis for a powerful convergence between punk culture and anarchism.

The military dictatorship ended in 1985. When older anarchists returned to the streets, punks approached them; there were several discussions about these young folks from the urban outskirts with their weird clothes and hairstyles and loud music. Some of the older anarchists served as an inspiration—especially Jaime Cuberos (1926-1998), who saw punks as the new anarchists. They offered crucial sources of learning for a new generation that was looking for a social struggle that went beyond rebellion.

Two libertarian¹ punk gatherings took place in Brazil in 1989 and 1990, bringing together punks who already identified with anarchism. In the early 1990s, the Anarcho-Punk Movement arose, especially in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. It soon spread to other cities as well, especially in the states in the northeast of Brazil—one of the poorest regions of the country. There was a radical need to organize collectively and federatively in the political scenario that arose after the military dictatorship. The social situation of people in the country was horrible; the monthly inflation rate reached 140%. In response, the youth called on people to organize and fight—and a considerable part of this youth was comprised of Brazilian punks.

Intergenerational transmission: Santos, 1993.

Consequently, anarcho-punk collectives appeared in most of the big cities around Brazil, and also in several smaller cities. These collectives worked together to organize demonstrations, concerts, discussions, and study groups and to write articles. Many bands formed at this time, as well.

Some of these groups eventually got involved in other social struggles, including feminism, anti-racist struggles, and anti-fascist social groups.

It is important to say that in Brazil, anarcho-punk has always been a political definition, not a genre of music. In Brazil, anarcho-punk bands are bands formed by people who are involved in the anarchist movement and the punk underground.

Anarcho-punk congress, Rio de Janeiro, 1995.

Anarchists and punks in Belo Horizonte in the 1990s: “Love doesn’t follow rules—Viva sexual liberty!—Punks against homophobia.”

Did punk take a different form in Brazil because of the ways that the racial and colonial context differs from Europe?

Yes, in Brazil, punk arose as part of a social opposition to the military dictatorship. In Brazil, over 60% of people are Black; punk arose in the urban outskirts, where this number represents 85% of the population. In a scenario in which young Black poor people had no hope of any improvement in their quality of life, there were no social or cultural programs supporting them, either. At the same time, there was often open violence as part of this oppression. Consequently, anarchist struggle and the struggle for survival were interlinked.

This scenario is less common in countries where people have a higher standard of living, as in Europe, for example. In Brazil, punk arose as a rebellious response to state oppression, as a struggle for survival as well as a cultural alternative. This is common in Latin America. These countries have been invaded and exploited; they are inhabited by the descendants of enslaved peoples. The social and economic disparities here are vast. In Brazil, young Black men living in some of the urban peripheries rarely reach 25 years old without being incarcerated or killed. This reality determines how we struggle as Latin Americans; it also illustrates the differences between Latin American and European countries. Many punks are descendants of either Indigenous or Afro-diasporic enslaved populations. Here, people are struggling to stay alive, above all.

May 1, 1995. Note the display with the portraits of the Haymarket martyrs from 1886, the origins of May Day as an anarchist holiday.

May 1, 1995.

The literature distribution table on May 1, 1995. “The first of May is a day of protest, not a party!”

How did punks and anarchists relate to the autonomous movements of the 1990s?

As the anarchist movement returned to the streets and anarchist political awareness arose within punk circles, there was a convergence between different social struggles evoking the need for working together with different groups.

When the MST (Movimento Sem Terra, the Landless Workers’ Movement) started to expand and to occupy farms, that was very inspiring. This was direct action against the injustice inflicted on a tremendous number of people who do not have access to land on which to live and produce their own food while a few people own entire states of unused farmland. At the same time, people involved in the MTST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto, the Homeless Workers’ Movement) occupied abandoned buildings in large cities to serve as homes for those living on the streets.

These two movements were inspiring for us because they were legitimately popular actions involving people who are deprived as a result of their history. Initially, we engaged with these movements through solidary actions, support, and participating in the front lines of demonstrations. Some anarcho-punks moved to MTST occupations and MST-occupied lands, becoming an effective part of these struggles.

In the 1990s, anarchists and anarcho-punks worked side by side with many struggles, both learning from them and teaching and supporting them. This included support groups for anti-militarist struggles (including conscientious objection), support groups for incarcerated populations, ACR (Anarchists Against Racism), and anti-capitalist groups… There was a feeling that rebels who were involved in struggle should be united.

“Against violence and war! End militarism!” A demonstration in Curitiba in the 1990s.

“Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal!” A demonstration in Curitiba in the 1990s.

In the early 2000s, the anti-globalization movement arose in Brazil. It had an anarchist basis, but it was also in line with several other growing struggles around the country. This organization brought together several anarchist fronts as well as other movements of social struggle. After several study groups, people formed People’s Global Action—a radical anti-capitalist movement that organized several demonstrations in Brazil. The participants experienced considerable police repression, but there was also a lot of strength on the rebel side.

Demonstration for International Women’s Day, March 8, São Paulo.

How did the election of (Workers’ Party presidential candidate Lula Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva) affect the political terrain in which you were organizing and the movements that you were participating in?

Before Lula was elected, we had been having several debates about our position regarding the election. We had been advertising the null vote since the “re-democratization” (the end of the dictatorship) and the first election. However, at that first election, in 1989, some anarchist and punk groups from the working class area had a tendency to vote for Lula, as it was an area where Lula used to live and where several union struggles also took place. In the following elections, support for Lula increased significantly among left movements including the MST and MTST as well as other popular groups. We were interconnected with several groups involved in social struggles, including some that supported Lula, which also included some anarchists. By this time, the anarcho-punk movement was no longer organized the way that it had been previously. Several collectives had ceased to exist and some of those people joined other diverse struggle groups.

In 2002, Lula was elected and there were high hopes that he would support popular social struggles in Brazil. Several social and collective struggle groups expected changes. There was a very long period of social stagnation in Brazil. Several groups discussed basic problems concerning single-issue struggles as a manner of addressing specific needs. Unfortunately, we feel that this weakened us a great deal when it came to collective struggle. To give just one example—during the PT (Workers’ Party) governments, we saw very few victories in Indigenous land demarcation, actually even fewer than before, though there had been high hopes that this would be different. It was as if we had hit pause in many fights.

“A good Nazi is a dead Nazi!” Punk anti-fascists in Belo Horizonte.

Anarcho-punks demonstrating in Belo Horizonte.

What role have social centers played in punk and anarchist organizing in Brazil?

The Centro de Cultura Social (Social Culture Center) has been one of the most important social centers in Brazil. They began in 1933 and have been active until today. They organize lectures, meetings every Saturday, and theater groups. They also have a huge historical collection. Several other social centers emerged from the union of anarchism and punk. In Salvador, in the northeast part of Brazil, the anarchist project Quilombo Cecilia united anarchism, punk, and Black struggles; the name is a reference to Colonia Cecilia [a Brazilian anarchist commune that existed in the 1890s]. In São Paulo, there was Comuna Goulai Poulé, an anarcho-punk cultural center; Centro de Cultural Social da Vila Dalva; Centro Cultural O Germinal; and Espaço Improprio, a social center that was active for eight years and united anarchism, punk, veganism, feminism, and queer politics and hosted several collectives. People squatted a few buildings in the 1990s, as well—some of which remain occupied today. In addition, several anarchist homes became social centers where people would meet to build projects, hold meetings, and share experiences.

These places have always served as resources for young people to gather, find anarchist material, and participate in political outreach events.

Capitalism and the huge social differences that exist in the country are significant problems that impact us. The history of these social centers is shaped by this reality, which has forced several social centers to close down due to the costs of maintaining these spaces.

Anarcho-punks demonstrating in June 1995.

How did anarchist organizing and autonomous movements set the stage for the powerful movements of 2013 in Brazil?

After the Partido dos Trabalhadores (the PT, or Workers’ Party) took power, quality of life increased among parts of the Brazilian population and a few benefits and rights were achieved. However, the forms of social change that were most necessary had never been part of the PT plan, and this became obvious when PT candidate Dilma Rousseff was elected president after Lula. Most of what anarchists had warned about before the elections became clear to many people. Rebelliousness increased among different sectors of the society. Movements such as the MST and others that hadn’t organized demonstrations for years decided that it was time to show their dissatisfaction, concluding that they still had a lot to fight for. During the ensuing uprising involving the social movements that had been waiting for over ten years for what Lula had promised, the government focused on criminalizing demonstrators; this attitude caused the demonstrations to really explode. It started with the fight against the increase of the cost of bus fare. Soon, protests regarding many other necessities were incorporated into the demonstrations. The country burst into flames. Although there was no unity, people were eager for change.

At the same time, an ascendant part of the population that would soon become a strengthened middle class turned against the poor and those living in the urban outskirts. What took place seemed to be a movement to prevent those who were really badly off from getting out of the bad situation they had always lived in. It was something like the poor people against the poorer, and a right-wing atmosphere began to emerge at many demonstrations. Even though radical groups were divided into small affinity groups, they were linked together; demonstrations continued in 2013 and in 2014, before and during the 2014 World Cup.

We do not believe that we were really prepared for these demonstrations. Groups and people did what they could do with the tools they had. They managed to connect with each other little by little in an attempt to build a network. Perhaps we were better prepared before the PT took power, but the period of the PT government dismantled some of our connections and eroded some of our strategies. People seemed to be waiting to see what would happen—and they saw it. Looking back, we believe that we made the mistake of not creating an autonomous structure in opposition to the state, regardless of which party is in power.

Describe the festival you organize, No Gods No Masters fest.

The collective we are part of, Cultive Resistência, uses several tools for action. One of these tools is the press and distribution No Gods No Masters, which edits, publishes, and distributes books, zines, and records.

A band performing at Espaço Cultural Semente Negra, the Black Seed Cultural Center.

The idea of the festival emerged as we perceived the urgency of coming together in one place in order to discuss the issues we write about in the zines and books, the issues that impact people’s lives. For three days, music, lectures, workshops, films, exhibitions, and discussions take place in our house, Espaço Cultural Semente Negra, which is located in the forest in a small town, Peruíbe, in the state of São Paulo. Our proposal is to bring together different forms of resistance including anarchism, queer politics, feminism, veganism, Black and Indigenous struggles, punk, and other proposals relating to struggle.

Black anarchists have presented activities at the festival, bringing their different realities and expectations to this mixed collectivity.

There are several Indigenous communities where we live. We have developed a project for supporting these communities and we have worked with them since 2012. It has been very important to involve Indigenous people in the festival. They bring their culture, their way of seeing the world, their music, their experience with medicinal herbs, and their forms of resistance. These are people who exist as resistance all the time. They have no choice whether or not they can be resistance. If they stop resisting, they die.

A capoeira teacher at the No Gods No Masters festival at Espaço Cultural Semente Negra.

A graffiti workshop at the No Gods No Masters festival.

A silkscreening workshop at the No Gods No Masters festival.

How did the election of Bolsonaro change the political context for popular movements?

There were some pretty complicated processes during the 2018 presidential campaign. It was perhaps the most violent election we’ve ever seen. Some anarchists chose to vote for politicians running against Bolsonaro as a strategy to support women, Black people, and Indigenous people; others maintained the campaign for the null vote, which generated a very complex discussion within Brazilian anarchism.

After the election, there was a certain panic, as we experienced a wave of right-wing violence on the streets. This violence is still very strong, but we also saw a regrouping of social movements. Groups that had been organizing themselves in affinity groups opened up in order to join forces and build something stronger. Several strikes took place as well as many anti-fascist and anti-racist demonstrations. We believe that people have come to understand that it is necessary to support each other’s struggles rather than just fighting for a specific need.

The countryside around Espaço Cultural Semente Negra.

What is the situation for Indigenous people under Bolsonaro? How are Indigenous people organizing?

This may be one of the worst times since the arrival of Europeans in the Americas. When it comes to criminal actions against native peoples, the perpetrators are granted legitimacy and impunity. Indigenous lands have been invaded and attacked, forests have been set ablaze, Indigenous leaders have been murdered, Indigenous rights have been taken away, popular hatred against Indigenous people is being promoted. And all this is a plan organized by the Bolsonaro government.

At the end of 2019, Bolsonaro began the process of militarizing FUNAI [the Fundação Nacional do Índio, or National Indian Foundation], a public institution responsible for Indigenous land demarcation and addressing the needs of Indigenous peoples. Immediately, there were occupations in FUNAI buildings against this militarization. Here, in our region, 300 Indigenous people occupied the building and people fought against the militarization of FUNAI for 28 days. This also happened in other cities in Brazil. Unfortunately, the military took over the leadership positions at FUNAI and as a result, FUNAI has stopped supporting families and social projects that aim to support Indigenous communities. Consequently, the fight has become more intense but also more dangerous, especially in the Amazon and in states where there are massive cattle farms. Across Brazil, people are fighting for survival and it is important that we rebels stand by this resistance.

An indigenous demonstration at a Fundação Nacional do Índio (FUNAI) building against the repressive policies of the Bolsonaro regime.

Describe the solidarity work that you are involved in.

We use several tools of struggle and we aim for autonomy. One of these tools is permaculture: planning sustainable environments and using ecological techniques to build houses with soil and local material. In 2012, we were invited to support the new Indigenous communities that were being built in our region. The area had been previously dominated by a mining company that had expelled the Indigenous people from their own land and exploited its natural resources for over 50 years.

At first, we started by supporting the construction of houses in the communities. Then, over time, we got involved in helping to address several other needs relating to the families and their struggles.

Volunteers helping to construct houses in reclaimed Indigenous land adjacent to Espaço Cultural Semente Negra.

Our main role is to serve as a means of supporting the projects of the Indigenous communities. The idea is to build up community self-esteem, breaking down prejudice, holding joint events in order to bring the dreams of the community into reality, but especially, to stand together in resistance and struggle.

These families have been fighting for their land all their lives. They have been persecuted by the Jesuits, by farmers, by real estate speculators, by mining companies. Since the year 2000, the year that they were able to take over their land, they have been fighting to stay in this territory, while restoring their culture and their way of living.

We support them in their struggles; in the construction of their houses, community kitchens, vegetable farming areas, and ecological sanitation; in courses and workshops; and in their struggles against the state. All this is built through horizontal relations and our starting point is always the wishes of the community.

Anarcho-punks helping to construct houses in reclaimed Indigenous land adjacent to Espaço Cultural Semente Negra.

Are there other examples around Brazil of anarchists and Indigenous communities working together?

There are people who support this struggle and some anarchists whose grandparents are Indigenous have also sought to live within Indigenous communities and their struggles. There are also a few solidarity groups that work with different ethnic groups in several places in Brazil.

Now, with the pandemic, this has become more effective and there is a network federating anarchist groups that support Indigenous struggles. This is currently an ongoing process.

Punks at the No Gods No Masters festival at Espaço Cultural Semente Negra.

Participants in the No Gods No Masters festival.

What are some of the challenges in Indigenous solidarity work?

In Brazil, there are countless struggles and we need to be aware of many different things at once. There are groups that focus on specific issues, but we understand that it is important to support the largest possible number of struggles so that we don’t leave anyone behind. Due to the number of struggles and an economy in decay, supporting populations that live on the edge of misery or in absolute misery becomes a challenge, as they can no longer maintain their ways of living. The lives of Indigenous families are eternal struggles for survival and, most of the time, it is necessary to do everything based on solidarity and with scarce resources.

Lack of resources and the small number of people fighting on so many fronts are enormous challenges along with our struggle for survival. Embracing the Indigenous struggle, which is the most constant struggle in Brazil, means letting go of ourselves full time to minimize the impacts of occidental culture and capitalism on these families.

Are there common threads that connect your experiences in the anarcho-punk movement and Indigenous communities?

Yes, there are incredible connections that we have noticed over time, living close to the communities. The mutual support network, the assemblies, the importance of music as a tool for fighting, the relationship with education, consensus-based decision-making, traveling from one community to another, taking care of each other. All this is familiar to us from the punk traditions that we believe in and that we want to keep alive in our own lives.

The main difference, in our opinion, is their relationship with nature, with the planet. Our Indigenous comrades see themselves as a part of nature alongside all other animals and plants, while we, as the people of civilization, try to disconnect ourselves, creating crises inside and outside of ourselves.

“Here, there are no authorities but yourself.” No Gods No Masters festival at Espaço Cultural Semente Negra in 2019.

How can people support your projects and other important anarchist and Indigenous projects in Brazil?

We are focusing on three projects. Semente Negra, our social center, which is located in the middle of the Atlantic forest, is the place where we are working with permaculture as well as a silkscreen studio, a recording studio, our printing house, and our home. No Gods No Masters is our publisher and distribution for punk, anarchism, feminism, veganism, and other materials related to struggle. And Vivência na Aldeia is our solidarity project working with Indigenous communities.

Maintaining all these projects is laborious, but it has been part of our lives for many years. This is what we are and we put our energy into all of this. Sometimes we are forced to take smaller steps and choose what to prioritize because we don’t have the money for all the things we would like to do. We put special effort into all the things that can be accomplished without involving money. This has a very important meaning because it is the space where we can practice things in a more personal manner, through relationships of love and friendship. This is what we seek to build in all of our projects and with all the people we collaborate with.

During normal times, we try to raise money for the solidarity campaigns and for projects within Indigenous communities through the events we organize and the sale of T-shirts. All the activities themselves are done collaboratively with the communities. However, we are never able to raise enough due to the number of issues these communities face, the struggles they have to fight, and the dreams they aspire to fulfill.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, we have created an online store to help sell handicrafts by our comrades in order to ensure that they will not have to leave their land to sell them and to keep families living and producing through their culture. Soon after, we helped start a campaign called Alimentação e Vida na Aldeia [“food and life in the village”], which aims at achieving food sovereignty for the eleven communities in the area, a total of approximately 500 Indigenous people. Unfortunately, as we said, this land is located in an area devastated by a mining company, so planting is still a big challenge. Therefore, the campaign aims to bring food and information to the communities.

We need to raise awareness about the reality of the social struggles in Brazil and the situation that Indigenous people face. We need to build support for a wide range of projects. Solidarity, struggle, and mutual support are our best weapons.

You can learn more about these projects through the websites:

cultiveresistencia.org

nogods-nomasters.com

vivencianaaldeia.org

In the United States, the word “libertarian” has been appropriated by those who only care about the freedom to profit at others’ expense and defend their ill-gotten gains. Everywhere else around the world, it means exactly what you would expect it to mean: anti-authoritarian. ↩

Breaking the Fourth Wall: Revolt in the St. Louis Jail : On Repression, Representation, and Revolt

2021-02-14T22:08:06Z

The year of the COVID-19 pandemic has seen fierce struggles against imprisonment, intensifying what was already a powerful movement against jails, prisons, and detention centers from both within and outside their walls. In the following report from St. Louis, an anarchist reflects on the meaning of the revolt of February 6 in the context of efforts from many different quarters to represent and manage what people imagine to be the interests of prisoners.

In the early hours of February 6, an uprising broke out inside the jail in downtown St. Louis. This came on the heels of two other riots within the past three weeks. We know little about the first two riots beyond the fact that activists and city officials described them as “disturbances” triggered by the lack of COVID-19 protocols and overcrowding. On February 6, however, the prisoners achieved a breakthrough.

Enterprising prisoners figured out how to jimmy open both the cell doors and the pod doors on the fourth floor. It came out later that the locks have been known to be glitchy and hackable for months. Overwhelming the guards, they engaged in destructive revelry—chipping away at the jail for hours by breaking whatever they could, clogging toilets to flood the floors, setting fires, and fighting off the guards.

Eventually, they reached the outer hallway that runs along their pods and broke through the windows of the jail, making contact with the outside world. Workers arriving for their shifts at City Hall across the street saw a group of prison rebels at the open window, lighting fires and throwing jail detritus out of the windows. The workers started livestreaming; this drew more people downtown to cheer on the rebels and sing anti-police songs with them from the street below.

Supporters outside the jail piled up the debris that prisoners threw out to create a makeshift barricade blocking the door to the jail.

The city’s public safety director, Jimmie Edwards, claims that the prisoners made no demands, alleging that they were just seeking to create “mayhem” for its own sake. More sympathetic commenters, including activist groups, once again cited COVID-19 or overcrowding to explain the outbreak. Still others claim that the riot was also caused by prosecutors keeping arrestees locked away indefinitely as a consequence of the suspension of trials because of the pandemic. From our perspective, it is presumptuous to speak for those inside. Presenting a legible reason for an uprising—or claiming that it is inexplicable or simply a way to create “mayhem”—is a way of using politics to manage and conceal the agency of the imprisoned. In situations like this, the prisoners can never really be heard—not only because of the restricted forms of communication available to them but also as a consequence of the power imbalances that shape any discourse that emerges.

For years, people have been demanding that the government close the city’s other jail, known as the Workhouse. The Workhouse has also been the site of many demonstrations, including one that broke through its perimeter fence in 2017. Last summer, surprisingly, the city government agreed to close the Workhouse by December 2020. At that time, the Workhouse was fairly depopulated, which contributed to making arguments for closing it unanswerable. But looking at how this closing would be implemented by the city government, it’s clear that it would make little difference in the experience of the incarcerated. The city government proposed sending whoever remained in the Workhouse to the downtown jail, and to some extent, the community organizations accepted this. The city government also proposed sending prisoners to jails in other towns, some as far as four hours away, though this would hinder court proceedings and families looking to visit their loved ones.

December 2020 is long over and the Workhouse is still open. Now the city is using this uprising as a justification to keep it open. It appears that the government never intended to close the Workhouse and is simply making excuses for not doing so. In the aftermath of the revolt, dozens of prisoners have been transferred from the downtown jail to the Workhouse. At the same time, activist organizations are using the events of February 6 as ammunition for their campaign to close the Workhouse.

A supporter outside the jail wearing a shirt thrown out by the rebels within.

It looks like the Workhouse is not closing anytime soon. Even if they do close it, capitalism and the various complementary and competing governmental powers that create the conditions for “crime” and define what constitutes it will persist, along with their strategies for managing the results. All this defining and managing tends to play out along class and racial lines, but that doesn’t mean that there is necessarily some kind of implicit solidarity within those classifications that is inherently opposed to that defining and managing. Outside the bubble of social justice activism, there is pressure from various loud-mouthed groups in St. Louis to impose more “law and order,” especially in response to the dramatic increase in the number of murders over the past few years. Some are calling for surveillance planes to monitor us from the sky; others have begged the National Guard to come to their neighborhoods to stop the daily shootings. The wonderful and terrible dynamics of living in a lawless city and the various definitions of what constitutes safety are all in play here. Appealing to the government to improve things has only inflamed the situation.

In the end, this classifying and managing and policing always fails to fulfill its purpose. This is the cause of the conflicts that persistently break through the thin veneer of order, like the prisoners who broke through the windows of the jail. Every day, politicians come up with new solutions to the problems created by the system they perpetuate—and every day, their solutions fail. Every day, people engage in personal and collective gestures against the status quo, and these outbursts don’t fit easily into a politicized description of why people do what they do. Most of these explosions go unseen and unstudied, but sometimes there is an explosion—like the one on February 6—that can’t be concealed, and people scurry to integrate it into some kind of recuperative narrative.

Revolt is not an agenda to represent, but an agency to expand. Solidarity with the rebels in the St. Louis jail.

The following poem is by a St. Louis anarchist who witnessed the revolt from the street outside.

i never knew i’d see the broke out windows of a jail
a cold, rotten one—like them all—
where you’re stacked in a holding cell 40 deep
or locked in a pod eating moldy sandwiches
fighting over the garbage bag of juice cartons the guards throw in your cell

the one right across the street from city hall
where they make the law and order of daily misery
the one next door to the court house
where they adjudicate the miseries
the one called the “justice center”
or in the word of a fellow prisoner
i briefly met in a crammed cell years ago
America

i never knew i’d see prisoners poking their masked heads
out of broken windows
singing together, proverbially yelling FREE ME
in all sorts of ways
setting signal fires for us to see down below,
throwing jail components they’ve deconstructed from the inside outside
door handles, ramen noodles, sandwiches, bars of soap, springs, uncomfortable plastic chairs, metal pieces, sticky mattresses, brooms, pillows, linens, mirrors

i never knew that
we’d be cheering
screaming for more
more!
i never knew we’d be able to freely communicate
through broken windows
instead of unbreakable plexiglass

i never knew i’d see ejected jail components fed back by
an old man in the crowd
driven by a stubbornness
enraged thinking about his past experiences inside
tying all the springs and other pieces of metal to the handles of the jail entrance stacking the rest of the artifacts in front of the doors
taunting the guards who are screaming at him to STOP

i never knew i’d see people locked up
taking off their jail uniforms
throwing them out
never realized i’d see them profaned
a powerless fabric
submitting to gravity
reaching the ground for us to retrieve
as souvenirs

Remembering Aragorn! : A Zine, a Video, and a Poem

2021-02-13T23:18:20Z

One year ago today, after a life of adventures and polemics, longtime anarchist Aragorn! passed away. Among other things, Aragorn! distinguished himself by maintaining an array of infrastructure projects providing information to thousands of people across North America and the world. Some of the projects that survive him include the Anarchist Library, the distribution Little Black Cart, and a constellation of online resources under the Anarchy Planet umbrella, to name just a few. His publishing efforts helped to keep Indigenous, ecological, and post-left perspectives in circulation, even if he rarely agreed in full with anything he helped to publicize. Aragorn! could be a polarizing figure, but it is impossible to understand the contemporary US anarchist movement without recognizing his contributions.

For a full review of Aragorn!’s life and activities, you can read our eulogy for him, “Elegy for an Antagonist,” which includes recollections from many comrades who shared some part of his journey. Alternately, you could begin with his own account of his development as an anarchist, captured in an interview conducted in summer 2018.

We’ve prepared a zine presenting the 2018 interview, in hopes that people will print and distribute them and pass on his memories to the next generation.

Click on the image to download the zine.

You can access many of his works here. Some of those who survive Aragorn have assembled this collection of selections from his writing to mark the anniversary of his passing.

https://twitter.com/AragornBang/status/493173246066307072

We’ve also tracked down video footage of Aragorn! speaking on a panel entitled “Anarchism and the 21st Century Paradigm” on April 26, 2002, at the Total Liberation Project at Evergreen State University in Olympia, Washington. Other participants included members of the Green Anarchy collective, the Number 3 Collective, Arthur Miller, and Mary Margaret.

In this video, starting at the 24:16 mark, you can see Aragorn! speaking on a panel with other anarchists in 2002.

The second part of the 2002 panel discussion. Near the beginning, Aragorn! concludes his remarks characteristically: “Anarchism has proven itself, in its lack of victories, to be more willing, than most… to be right, instead of having friends.”

Finally, we include the following poem by an acquaintance of his, “The Time I Visited Aragorn!” It was not originally composed for public release, but it captures some of what it was like to share a milieu with him.

Kriminala Sekta “Punks Not Dead” poetry series #1

The Time I Visited Aragorn!

heard I was in town
invited me to dinner
asked about my project
paid for my dinner!
invited me over,
showed me his project,
proceeded to tell me,
point by point,
how his project
was better.

to the point that he literally asked me why I was spending
any
effort
on my project
at all?

he asked about this one guy involved
and talked about a woman he didn’t like
but they were in for their own reasons
and when I talked about mine
Aragorn! nodded and said stuff like, “well yeah,” and, “ok.”

that was the moment I realized that Aragorn! wasn’t so intimidating.
perhaps, even, it was my intellect that intimidated Aragorn!!

but if that rubs you the wrong way,
I invite you to consider that hierarchies
like who’s smarter than who
aren’t a desirable way to order the world.

put another way:
unbelievable as it may be to some people,
it seemed like we agreed on some things.
he, of course, would disagree.

ask any of his friends and comrades and family and people and concrete lots and animals and and machines and wild places and non-material metaphysical abstractions he loved that survived him.
ask maximum rocknroll.
consult his texts in his library.
and you’ll agree:
he would disagree.
but he’d take you out to dinner first.
punks not dead

The Time Aragorn! Visited Me, Well Us, Well Our Town, or Maybe He Saw It as Our Region Because He Had a Very Detailed Taxonomy of the Kinds of Regions in the United States Where the Biology Could Support a Free Society

turned onto 40
tuned in to 89.3
dropped into town
walked through the front door
to the left, the wall of dead anarchists (and bob sheldon)

there’s brad will
loukanikos
a black and red rubbing of the haymarket martyrs’ tomb: “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today.”

Aragorn! isn’t there today.
would he even want a people’s history poster?
I’ll tell you what he’d say about it,
he’d cackle about it eventually getting carried in some anarchist “presence rather than protest” at a politician’s inauguration.

he could be big on grudges.
grudges and having a ~~good~~ chaotic time.

“good” was one of those words he probably ctrl+f’d for whenever somebody submitted a new something.

this is why,
for fault of our own,
without protest or party previous to the bookfair,
Aragorn! fronted an impromptu Minor Threat cover band
that spurred Atlanta to kick their boots around
until one went right through the glass.

two panes, lots of shards, it was bad.
Aragorn! was glad.

we were far too busy playing our parts to fix… anything in our lives.
let alone a window.
so cardboard and tape
to stop the cruel fall
from cooling the moshing room heat.

insert cliché about anarchists and broken windows and Aragorn! training his aim on the lifelovers and nihilists and rejects and outcasts—everyone who lives on the edge of society:

His chief opponents weren’t faceless corporations or every organized body with an acronym.
His focus was on the people in this world who are so close to conceiving a free life,
yet hold themselves back out of concerns for security, comfort, clout, legacy, or any other currency of value. If you feared freedom, you were his enemy.

but there were other ways to be his enemy, too.
he left wreckage in his wake
and grinned back from his sporty motozoomer
cruel
cool
watching everyone else’s flabs aghasting.

after he was gone,
dead,
the broken window was still there.
his broken window
landlord never even said nothing
but it was ugly,
and it was next to the wall of dead anarchists (and bob sheldon)

poetic and shit

but because fuck poetry

a punk came through town

crashed at our pandemic pad

and she masterfully fixed the window out of gratitude

free

punks not dead

A Poem by Kenneth Rexroth, Painted across the Rooftops of the World : On the Occasion of His Birthday

2020-12-22T21:16:26Z

To celebrate the birthday of Kenneth Rexroth, poet and anarchist, we have prepared this photoessay presenting his poem “Noretorp Noretsyh” painted across the walls and rooftops of three continents. We’ve added annotations illuminating Rexroth’s numerous historical references.

We don’t know anything about the painting, of course. We just found the photographs.

Rexroth is one of the unknown progenitors of contemporary anarchism. His work was formative for a generation of anti-authoritarians in the 20th century, but aside from a quotation¹ in the book Desert, the average contemporary anarchist may not have heard of him at all.

After the Second World War, when radicalism had given way to authoritarianism worldwide, Rexroth was one of a small number of people who set the stage for the countercultural movements of the 1960s to emerge. One of the vehicles for this process of regeneration was a reading and discussion group called the Libertarian Circle, arguably a predecessor of the Berkeley Anarchist Study Group. In his autobiography, Rexroth recalls:

The place was always crowded, and when the topic of conversation for the evening was “Sex and Anarchy,” you couldn’t get in the doors. People were standing on one another’s shoulders, and we had to have two meetings, the overflow in the downstairs meeting hall.

There was no aspect of Anarchist history or theory that was not presented by a qualified person and then thrown out to discussion. Even in business or organizational meetings, we had no chairman or agenda, but things moved along in order and with dispatch. Our objective was to refound the radical movement after its destruction by the Bolsheviks, and to rethink all the ideologists from Marx to Malatesta… This also contributed to the foundation of the San Francisco Renaissance and to the specifically San Francisco intellectual climate.

Rexroth also maintained a program on the listener-supported Berkeley radio station KPFA, where the anarchist news project It’s Going Down offers a regular show today.

You can read Morgan Gibson’s biography Revolutionary Rexroth here. Ken Knabb, best known for translating the works of the Situationist International, has also written a biography, The Relevance of Rexroth, which is available online along with an archive of Rexroth’s work.

“Every revolution has been born in poetry, has first of all been made with the force of poetry… Real poetry […] brings back into play all the unsettled debts of history.”

Situationist International, “All the King’s Men”

Rexroth’s “Noretorp Noretsyh” uses the Hungarian uprising of 1956 as a point of departure to describe how history’s unsettled debts come back into play in every new upheaval. Omnia mutantur, nihil interit—everything changes, but nothing is lost.

Those who wish to read the poem in full first before taking in the art and annotations may jump to the appendix.

NORETORP-NORETSYH

The title spells out “hysteron proteron” backwards—the Greek rhetorical term for beginning with a later event and then referring to an earlier one in reverse chronological order. The first shall be last and the last shall be first, as it says in the Gospel of Matthew. Reversing the order of the letters, Rexroth further complicates the relationship between past and present. The poem that follows begins in the present and pans back to a past that continues to unfold, unconcluded.

A walking path, seen from above.

Rainy, smoky Fall

The poem is set during the Hungarian uprising that took place in fall 1956. Following Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, movements for political freedom and workers’ self-management gained ground in Hungary, peaking in late 1956—when the Soviet Union used tanks to reinstall a loyal puppet government in order to preserve Hungary’s status as a vassal state.

You can read a selection of anarchist and anti-state communist accounts of the uprising here. Though Stalinists have long sought to smear those who criticized the Russian invasion as advocates of capitalism or even fascism, principled Marxists also disapproved. In crushing the anti-capitalist opposition, the authorities in Moscow rendered it inevitable that when state socialism finally collapsed in the Eastern Bloc, it would be succeeded by capitalism and far-right nationalism.

The term “tankie” originated as a way to describe hardline party loyalists who supported the Russian invasion of Hungary.

The Pacific Northwest.

Clouds tower
In the brilliant Pacific sky.

The Midwestern United States.

In Golden Gate Park, the peacocks
Scream, wandering through falling leaves.

Peacocks inhabited San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park from the 19th century until at least the 1950s. A decade after the poem is set, the Diggers served free meals in the park at 4 pm, a precursor to Food Not Bombs; thirty years later, it was the site of the annual Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair. Today, there are no more peacocks in the park. Their screams, which represent immediate, present-day sensuous reality in the poem, reach us today as echoes alongside the other ghosts Rexroth summons.

Over a river that flows to the Atlantic Ocean.

In clotting nights in smoking dark,
The Kronstadt sailors are marching
Through the streets of Budapest.

In February 1921, after the conclusion of the Russian civil war, the crews of two Russian battleships stationed at the island naval fortress of Kronstadt held an emergency meeting in response to Communist Party crackdowns on labor organizing and peasants’ autonomy in the emerging Soviet Union. Many of these were the same sailors who had been on the front lines of the revolution that had toppled the Tsar in 1917. They agreed on fifteen demands, and rose in protest against the Soviet authorities.

The following month, on the 50-year anniversary of the Paris Commune, 60,000 Red Army troops under the command of Leon Trotsky carried out Lenin’s directive to crush the uprising at Kronstadt, killing and imprisoning thousands.

One of the best ways to learn about the goals and values of the Kronstadt uprising is to read the periodical that the provisional revolutionary committee published, which is available in English here in full. You can also read accounts from Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman.

Pacific Northwest.

The stones
Of the barricades rise up and shiver
Into form.

Two decades earlier, in 1936, Rexroth had treated the Kronstadt uprising in his poem “From the Paris Commune to the Kronstadt Rebellion”:

They go saying each: “I am one of many”;
Their hands empty save for history.
They die at bridges, bridge gates, and drawbridges.
Remember now there were others before;
The sepulchres are full at ford and bridgehead.

Richmond, Virginia.

They take the shapes
Of the peasant armies of Makhno.

Nestor Makhno was one of countless Ukrainian peasants who fought against a succession of occupying Tsarist, capitalist, and Communist Party troops in the course of the Russian Revolution of 1917-21.

“After seven years in the Tsar’s prisons, Makhno was released from prison by the upheavals of 1917. He eventually became a leader in the anarchist forces that fought in turn against Ukrainian Nationalists, German and Austro-German occupiers, the reactionary Russian White Army, the Soviet Red Army, and various Ukrainian warlords in order to open a space in which anarchist collective experiments could take place. Makhno and his comrades repeatedly bore the brunt of the White Army attacks, while Trotsky alternated between attacking them with the Red Army and signing treaties with them when the Soviets needed them to keep the reactionary White Army at bay. On November 26, 1920, a few days after Makhno had helped to definitively defeat the White Army, the Red Army summoned him and his comrades to a conference. Makhno did not go; the Bolsheviks summarily murdered all of his comrades who went.”

-The Russian Counterrevolution

Makhno and the other surviving rebels continued fighting—but as the Red Army was now able to concentrate all its forces on them, they were forced to flee into exile in August 1921. Makhno died of tuberculosis in Paris in 1934. The best introduction to Makhno’s story remains Alexandre Skirda’s biography.

Brazil.

The streets are lit with torches.

The American South.

The gasoline drenched bodies
Of the Solovetsky anarchists
Burn at every street corner.

After the Communist Party defeated the opposition in the Russian civil war of 1918-1921, they exiled anarchist and communist dissidents to the Solovetsky Islands, creating one of the first prisons of the Gulag system (G(lavnoe) u(pravlenie ispravitelʹno-trudovykh) lag(ereĭ), “Chief Administration for Corrective Labor Camps”).

The ancient monasteries in the town of Suzdal and on the Solovetskii Islands in the White Sea were converted into prisons for hundreds of political offenders, who staged demonstrations and hunger strikes to protest their confinement. A few desperate souls resorted to self-immolation, following the example of the Old Believers who, 250 years before, had made human torches of themselves while barricaded in the Solovetskii Monastery. During the mid-1920s, the anarchists were removed from Solovetskii and dispersed among the Cheka prisons in the Ural Mountains or banished to penal colonies in Siberia.

-Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists

Rust Belt, USA.

Kropotkin’s starved corpse is borne
In state past the offices
Of the cowering bureaucrats.

The widely known anarchist author and scientist Peter Kropotkin returned to Russia in 1917 after four decades of exile. Desiring to legitimize Bolshevik authority with the reputation of a universally respected anarchist, Vladimir Lenin maintained cordial relations with him, without taking his concerns seriously.

In March 1920, Kropotkin wrote to Lenin to report the desperate hunger of the postal-telegraph department employees in his town. He argued that because the peasants and workers had not established any local self-managed structures, but rather had been put at the mercy of a vastly inefficient bureaucratic system, they were unable to meet their basic needs, while the relief provisions promised by the government were two months late:

I consider it a duty to testify that the situation of these employees is truly desperate. The majority are literally starving. This is obvious from their faces. Many are preparing to leave home without knowing where to go. And in the meantime, I will say openly that they carry out their work conscientiously… to lose such workers would not be in the interests of local life in any way.

On October 15, 1920, the following news item appeared in the New York Times from a correspondent in Berlin:

KROPOTKIN IS STARVING.

Prince Kropotkin is dying of hunger. One of the German trade unions has received information that the veteran political fighter is suffering so much from want of food and clothing that his death is practically certain during the coming Winter.

Kropotkin is now 78 years of age. His whole wealth always has been devoted to the cause of democracy and the report referred to, which there is no reason to doubt, paints a sad picture of the misery of the grand old man and his daughter Sascha.

An appeal is being made by Socialists of all sections here to send help to the Prince and his daughter, and it is hoped this will reach them through the Red Cross Society. It is also hoped that the Russian Government will be persuaded to grant Kropotkin and his daughter a pass to Italy or Switzerland, which hitherto has been refused. There they would be looked after by friends.

Peter Kropotkin passed away a few months later, on February 8, 1921.

Kropotkin’s funeral on February 13 was arguably the last anarchist demonstration permitted in Russia until the fall of the Soviet Union. Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman and many other prominent anarchists participated. They managed to exert enough pressure on the Bolshevik authorities to compel them to release seven anarchist prisoners for the day; the Bolsheviks claimed that they would have released more, but the others supposedly refused to leave prison. Victor Serge recounts how Aaron Baron, one of the anarchists who was temporarily released, addressed the mourners from Kropotkin’s graveside before vanishing into the jaws of the Soviet carceral system.

You can see footage of Kropotkin’s funeral here.

Rexroth had referenced Kropotkin starving to death in an earlier poem, “August 22, 1939,” named for the date of the executions of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in the United States:

Kropotkin dying of hunger,
Berkman by his own hand,
Fanny Baron biting her executioners,
Makhno in the odor of calumny,
Trotsky, too, I suppose, passionately, after his fashion.
Do you remember?
What is it all for, this poetry,
This bundle of accomplishment
Put together with so much pain?

–“August 22, 1939,”

The Fanny Baron he references here is Fanya Baron, Aaron Baron’s spouse, who was shot without trial by the Russian authorities in September 1921. Trotsky excused the execution on the grounds that she and the other twelve anarchists detained with her were not “real anarchists, but criminals and bandits who cover themselves by claiming to be anarchists.”

Northern Germany.

In all the Politisolators
Of Siberia the partisan dead are enlisting.

The “Politisolators” (Political Isolation Camp) were institutions within the Gulag system in which anarchists, communists who had fallen out of favor with the Party, and others were entombed—much as anarchists and other political prisoners in the United States have recently been buried in Communications Management Units (CMUs).

Arizona.

Berneri, Andreas Nin,
Are coming from Spain with a legion.

Luigi Camillo Berneri was a well-known Italian anarchist organizer who traveled to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War. He was offered a position in the Council of the Economy, but refused to participate in the government.

When clashes between anarchists and the Stalin-controlled Communist Party broke out in Republican Spain, the house Berneri shared with several other anarchists was attacked. He and his comrades were labeled “counter-revolutionaries,” disarmed, deprived of their papers, and forbidden to go out into the street. On May 5, 1937, Stalinists murdered Berneri along with another Italian anarchist, Francisco Barbieri.

Andrés Nin was involved in the leadership of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) in Spain until 1937. The month after Berneri was murdered—at the height of the civil war against Franco—the Spanish Communist Party pressured the Spanish Republican government into declaring the POUM illegal and arresting much of the leadership, including Nin. He was tortured and murdered under the supervision of Russian agents.

Austria.

Carlo Tresca is crossing
The Atlantic with the Berkman Brigade.

Carlo Tresca was an Italian-American newspaper editor and labor organizer involved with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). A friend of Julia Poyntz, he spoke out when she was apparently disappeared by the Russian secret police. Tresca was murdered in 1943, likely by organized crime. Nunzio Pernicone’s biography is an excellent source on Tresca’s life.

The Berkman Brigade is likely a fanciful reference to the Lincoln Battalion, a international group of communist volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War. Longtime anarchist author and organizer Alexander Berkman passed away in June 1936. Had international anarchist volunteers converged in Hungary in 1956 to fight against the occupying Russian forces—a flight of fancy, to say the least, as most anarchists had been imprisoned or killed by then—they might well have organized under such a banner.

East Coast of the United States.

Bukharin has joined the Emergency
Economic Council.

Starting out as a left communist, Nikolai Bukharin swung to what was described as the right wing of the Bolshevik party. He rose to the upper ranks of the Communist Party, ultimately working with Stalin to expel Trotsky and their other colleagues from power. Promoting economic liberalization, he clashed with Stalin over collectivization, and was executed March 15, 1938.

“I feel helpless before a hellish machine,” Bukharin allegedly confessed to his wife shortly before his execution, exhorting her to memorize his last testament: “Know, comrades, that on that banner, which you will be carrying in the victorious march to communism, is also a drop of my blood.”

It is interesting that Rexroth chose to include Bukharin, whose politics hardly resonated with him. Arguably, in Rexroth’s poetic resurrection of the dead, each figure gets the opportunity to redeem his or her own errors as well as avenging defeats.

Next to an occupied community garden.

Twenty million
Dead Ukrainian peasants are sending wheat.

The reference is to the series of famines that struck Ukraine during the upheavals of the early 20th century, including the Holodomor famine of 1932-33 in which millions of Ukrainians died of starvation. Most historians number the dead significantly lower than Rexroth’s estimate, with the low estimates beginning at 3 million—still a lot of deaths by any measure. Some charge that Stalin deliberately sought to kill off an unruly part of the population by intentional mismanagement.

The issue has been confused by right-wing reactionaries who have sought to utilize the story of the Holodomor to justify their own authoritarian projects. Yet capitalism, too, has produced countless famines and needless deaths—as has fascism. Returning to Kropotkin’s letter to Lenin, the question is how to organize the distribution of resources and power in such a way that no one is able to deny anyone else access to what they need to survive.

A hospital during the COVID-19 crisis.

Julia Poyntz is organizing American nurses.

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, a hereditary member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and, later, a class president and valedictorian, Julia Poyntz described herself in 1912 as “a woman’s suffragist or worse still a feminist and also a socialist (also of the worst brand).” Joining the Communist Party in hopes of advancing the cause of the working class, she became involved with the Russian secret police, then distanced herself from the Party in 1936, disillusioned with its methods. She disappeared without a trace in early June 1937, the same month that Andrés Nin was murdered. It is widely believed that she was kidnapped and executed by the Russian secret police.

Midwestern United States.

Gorky has written a manifesto
“To the Intellectuals of the World!”

Maxim Gorky grew up in Tsarist Russia in extreme poverty. He came to be a successful writer, a voice of the Russian underclass. Gorky participated in the socialist movement alongside the Bolsheviks, though there was often friction between him and members of the intelligentsia like Lenin and Trotsky. Disappointed with Communist Party repression of socialists in Russia, he lived outside of Russia from 1921 on. In the end, he made peace with the Stalinist authorities and returned to his homeland, where he died of pneumonia under house arrest in June 1936.

The Bay Area where Kenneth Rexroth lived.

Mayakofsky and Essenin
Have collaborated on an ode,
“Let THEM Commit Suicide.”

Sergei Yesenin (Essenin) and Vladimir Mayakovsky were among the most successful poets of the early Soviet Union. Invigorated by the struggles of the Russian Revolution but stifled by the atmosphere that emerged afterwards, both of them committed suicide—Yesenin in 1925, Mayakovsky in 1930.

The concluding lines of Yesenin’s final poem read:

Don’t stir up the old expectations;
Don’t wake up all that didn’t come true—
I’ve endured loss and much exhaustion,
Yes, and endured them quite early, too.

Determined to keep his head in the fight, Mayakovsky responded to the dead Yesenin’s poem with a living poem of his own:

Isn’t it truly absurd,
allowing cheeks to flush with deathly hue?
You who could do such amazing things with words
that no one else on earth could do?

…Forward march! Let time burst behind us like rockets in the air.
Let the wind blowing back to the old days carry
Nothing but clumps of our hair.
Our planet is poorly equipped for delight.
We have to snatch our joy from the days to come.
In this life
it’s not difficult to die.
To make life
is more difficult by far.

But Mayakovsky, too, was ultimately crushed. In his last published poem, “At the Top of My Voice,” he cries out to us across a century of totalitarianism and tragedy, investing every phrase with double meanings in order to speak to us, today, across the heads of the officials who made him a public icon while policing his work:

Agitprop sticks in my teeth too,
and I’d rather compose romances for you—
more profit in it
and more charm.

But I subdued myself,
setting my heel on the throat of my own song.

Listen, comrades of posterity,
to the agitator, the rabble-rouser.

Stifling the torrents of poetry,
I’ll skip the volumes of lyrics;
as one alive,
I’ll address the living.
I’ll join you
in the far communist future,
I who am
no Yesenin super-hero.

My verse will reach you
across the peaks of ages,
over the heads
of governments and poets. […]

When I appear before the Party’s Central Control Commission of the coming
bright years,
by way of my Bolshevik party card, I’ll raise
above the heads
of a gang of self-seeking
poets and rogues,
all the hundred volumes
of my
communist-committed books.

Here is Mayakovsky’s own suicide note, written in April 1930 in the comparative liberty of one who has chosen death over keeping up appearances:

It’s after one. You’ve likely gone to sleep.
The Milky Way streams silver, a river through the night.
I don’t hurry, I don’t need to wake you
Or bother you with lightning telegrams.
Like they say, the incident is closed.
Love’s little boat has crashed against the daily grind.
We’re even, you and I. No need to tally up
Mutual sorrows, mutual pains, and wrongs.
Look: How quiet the world is.
Night cloaks the sky with the tribute of the stars.
At times like these, you can rise, stand, and speak
To history, eternity, and all creation.

Paris, France.

In the Hungarian night
All the dead are speaking with one voice,

Over the Mississippi River.

As we bicycle through the green
And sunspotted California
November.

A parking deck in the Southern United States

I can hear that voice
Clearer than the cry of the peacocks,
In the falling afternoon.

New York City.

Like painted wings, the color
Of all the leaves of Autumn,

Detroit.

The circular tie-dyed skirt
I made for you flares out in the wind,
Over your incomparable thighs.

Near the end of the poem, we encounter a historical enigma. It was written in 1956-57, intended for an issue of the Evergreen Review. Yet it is widely believed that the expression “tie-dye” did not appear until a decade later, when the practice was popularized in the Bay Area—some, indeed, attribute it to the aforementioned Diggers. Did Rexroth invent tie-dyeing a decade before its acknowledged origins?

“Indubitably: things do not begin; or they don’t begin when they are created. Or the world was created old,” as Macedonio Fernandez put it in his novel, The Museum of Eterna’s Novel. Fernandez, another little-remembered yet influential anarchist author, was Jorge Borges’s quasi-fictitious mentor.

Southern California.

Oh splendid butterfly of my imagination,
Flying into reality more real
Than all imagination,

In an expression of despair, Rexroth attributes more reality to the realpolitik of the Soviet Union and its toadies than all the desperate bids for freedom born in the imaginations of the oppressed.

At an abandoned recreation center somewhere in the United States, during the COVID-19 lockdown.

the evil
Of the world covets your living flesh.

Though Rexroth ends on this grim note, we must not read him as a mere pessimist. Earlier in his aforementioned poem “August 22, 1939,” Rexroth holds out an ambiguous hope that the struggle against authoritarianism might be nearing its conclusion, even as he reckons its scale on the level of millennia, as Fredy Perlman did:

These are the last terrible years of authority.
The disease has reached its crisis,
Ten thousand years of power,
The struggle of two laws,
The rule of iron and spilled blood,
The abiding solidarity of living blood and brain.

Detroit.

Appendix

“NORETORP-NORETSYH”

Rainy, smoky Fall, clouds tower
In the brilliant Pacific sky.

In Golden Gate Park, the peacocks
Scream, wandering through falling leaves.

In clotting nights in smoking dark,
The Kronstadt sailors are marching
Through the streets of Budapest.

The stones
Of the barricades rise up and shiver
Into form.

They take the shapes
Of the peasant armies of Makhno.

The streets are lit with torches.

The gasoline drenched bodies
Of the Solovetsky anarchists
Burn at every street corner.

Kropotkin’s starved corpse is borne
In state past the offices
Of the cowering bureaucrats.

In all the Politisolators
Of Siberia the partisan dead are enlisting.

Berneri, Andreas Nin,
Are coming from Spain with a legion.

Carlo Tresca is crossing
The Atlantic with the Berkman Brigade.

Bukharin has joined the Emergency
Economic Council.

Twenty million
Dead Ukrainian peasants are sending wheat.

Julia Poyntz is organizing American nurses.

Gorky has written a manifesto
“To the Intellectuals of the World!”

Mayakofsky and Essenin
Have collaborated on an ode,
“Let THEM Commit Suicide.”

In the Hungarian night
All the dead are speaking with one voice,

As we bicycle through the green
And sunspotted California
November.

I can hear that voice
Clearer than the cry of the peacocks,
In the falling afternoon.

Like painted wings, the color
Of all the leaves of Autumn,

The circular tie-dyed skirt
I made for you flares out in the wind,
Over your incomparable thighs.

Oh splendid butterfly of my imagination,
Flying into reality more real
Than all imagination,

the evil
Of the world covets your living flesh.

“It is my opinion that the situation is hopeless, that the human race has produced an ecological tip over point… but assuming there is a possibility of changing the society’s “course in the darkness deathward set,” it can only be done by infection, infiltration, diffusion and imperceptibility, microscopically throughout the social organism, like the invisible pellets of a disease called Health.” -Kenneth Rexroth, “Radical Movements on the Defensive,” San Francisco Magazine, July 1969. ↩

WR: Mysteries of the Organism—Beyond the Liberation of Desire : Revisiting Makavejev's Subversive Classic

2020-10-13T15:33:16Z

On the occasion of the birthday of Yugoslavian director Dušan Makavejev, who passed away last year, we explore what his classic 1971 film WR: Mysteries of the Organism has to offer today’s struggles against nationalism, fascism, and dogmatism.

Nowadays, when we think of resisting fascism, we think of collecting intelligence on avowed fascists, doxxing them, deplatforming them, physically confronting them and the police who defend them—in short, we think of a very narrow range of activities, strategies, and desires. Yet in the mid-20th century, anti-fascism was a much broader philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic current extending from the Surrealists to the Existentialists, from Wilhelm Reich and Theodore Adorno to Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri, and Dušan Makavejev.

Today, in the Trump era, as in the mid-20th century, authoritarianism is not an aberration, but a norm grounded in a deeply repressive and hierarchical society. Like our predecessors, we have to combat it on every level, using a wide range of strategies and tools—from street tactics to pedagogy, philosophy, and cinema. This is the spirit in which we turn our thoughts to Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism.

The following essay was solicited for and published in the second issue of Antipolitika, the premier Balkan anarchist journal, in a theme issue engaging with the legacy of Yugoslavia. All texts from both issues of Antipolitika—issue 1 on militarism and issue 2 on Yugoslavia—are available in English here. Antipolitika is also printed in Serbo-Croatian and Greek. A third issue on the topic of nationalism is currently in preparation.

You can order print copies of Antipolitika here. You can also download this text as a zine to print and distribute.

WR: Mysteries of the Organism—Beyond the Liberation of Desire

Anarchism, crushed throughout most of the world by the middle of the 20th century, sprang back to life in a variety of different settings. In the US, it reappeared among activists like the Yippies; in Britain, it reemerged in the punk counterculture; in Yugoslavia, where an ersatz form of “self-management” in the workplace was the official program of the communist party, it appeared in a rebel filmmaking movement, the Black Wave. As historians of anarchism, we concern ourselves not only with conferences and riots but also with cinema.

Of all the works of the Black Wave, Dušan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism stands out as an exemplary anarchist film. Rather than advertising anarchism as one more product in the supermarket of ideology, it demonstrates a method that undermines all ideologies, all received wisdom. It still challenges us today.

The struggle of communist partisans against the Nazi occupation provided the foundational mythos for 20th-century Yugoslavian national identity. After the Second World War, the Yugoslavian state poured millions into partisan blockbusters like Battle of Neretva and other sexless paeans to patriotic self-sacrifice. These films depicted a world of moral binaries: heroism versus cowardice, austerity versus indulgence, communism versus fascism.

A poster for Battle of Neretva, a classic of overt militarism and repressed sexuality. Compare this with the closing scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest.

At the same time, Tito’s break with Stalin in 1948 set the stage for the Yugoslavian experiment with socialism to take its own road. Geopolitically, Yugoslavia represented a third power alongside the Eastern and Western Blocs; economically, “self-management” was official government policy; socially, Yugoslavia supposedly offered a more tolerant and egalitarian alternative to US capitalism and Soviet totalitarianism.

Makavejev set out to test the limits of Yugoslavian permissiveness. Exploring the variants of Marxism, he found a road not taken in the works of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. A protégé of Sigmund Freud, Reich had founded the German Association for Proletarian Sexual Politics (Sex-Pol) to promote sexual liberation; in books like The Mass Psychology of Fascism, he sought to identify the role of psychological factors in the rise of authoritarianism. Hounded out of the Communist Party by pro-Soviet puritans and driven from Europe by the Nazi seizure of power, Reich fled to the United States. He died in prison, having spent the final years of his life as a crank promoting orgone accumulators, cloudbusters, and other pseudoscientific inventions, convinced he was still the target of “red fascist” persecution as the Food and Drug Administration burned his books.

Wilhelm Reich in 1927.

Traveling to the United States in Reich’s footsteps, Makavejev interviewed Reich’s remaining disciples and recorded footage of therapists, artists, and entrepreneurs associated with what Reich had dubbed the sexual revolution. Returning home, he filled out the material with clips from Soviet propaganda films like The Vow and shot a fictional sequence of his own.

The fictional sequence forms the backbone of WR’s unconventional plot, dividing the film into two “Sex-Pol” shorts. The first 25 minutes is ostensibly a documentary about Wilhelm Reich and his legacy in the US, captioned “May 1, 1931, Berlin”—when Reich’s original Sex-Pol might have made this film, in the alternate universe Makavejev concocts. The remainder of the film, captioned “May 1, 1971 Belgrade,” is set in an imagined Yugoslavia, in which the protagonist, Milena,¹ attempts to implement Reich’s philosophy as a form of orthodox party communism.

WR: Mysteries of the Organism earned cult status when it was first screened in 1971, but the socialist authorities set out to suppress it almost immediately. The film was banned in Yugoslavia for a decade and a half.² Makavejev himself was driven into exile in the West following a complaint brought against him by veteran partisans.

Speaking to an interviewer in 1995, Makavejev attributed the banning of WR to the continuing influence of the Soviet Union in Yugoslavia. Yet the capitalist West was ultimately no more supportive of his iconoclastic filmmaking. In view of his tribulations on both sides of the divide, we can see that the repression Makavejev exposed and experienced was not confined to a single national context, but characterizes every nation under capitalism and communism alike.

Wilhelm Reich and his family in exile in Maine.

“There is nothing in this human world of ours that is not in some way right, however distorted it may be.”

This quotation, which Makavejev attributes to Wilhelm Reich, is the key to understanding the whole film. Setting out to expose the distortions that repression has inflicted on humanity, Makavejev presents one of the 20th century’s fiercest denunciations of authoritarianism. Yet his ultimate motives are compassionate and affirmative. He is like a physician trying to diagnose the ailments afflicting the patient and the medical profession at once; this is why the film can appear so self-contradictory.

Given two ostensibly opposing positions, Makavejev always refuses to take sides, instead revealing the common threads that connect them. Then he introduces a third possibility as a counterpoint to the first two, and this serves as a point of departure for a new opposition to be transcended via the same method. In this way, he undermines and transforms the binaries that were essential to both Yugoslavian cinema and Cold War politics.

Beginning with Marxism and the (puritanical, repressive) Soviet Union on one side and capitalism and Western (commodified, exploitative) sexual liberation on the other, Makavejev takes the teachings of Wilhelm Reich as the basis for an imagined Yugoslavia representing a communist model for sexual liberation.³ Then he mounts a critique of sexual liberation as ideology, portraying an alternative communism in which sexual liberation could be as repressively realized as workers’ liberation was under Tito.

Like the Dadaists before him, Makavejev presents his critique via collage: montage is his answer to dialectics. He juxtaposes his documentary footage from the US with propaganda films from the Soviet Union, communist China, and Nazi Germany, along with his own fanciful Yugoslavian propaganda film. It is as if the viewer is switching between several different channels with both the soundtracks and the themes bleeding over from one to the next; each transition complicates and intensifies the web of associations.

For example, following a portrait of the conservative townspeople in the part of Maine where Reich settled, Makavejev cuts back to the streets of New York City, presenting Andy Warhol starlet Jackie Curtis promenading through the bright lights of the business district with her boyfriend. Over this scene, Makavejev dubs a radio commercial: “You own the sun with Coppertone.” The US is at once a bastion of small-town conservatism and a land of freedom in which sexual difference manifests as the commodification of the self on the market of identity. Provincial intolerance alongside the repressive tolerance of the metropolis—what Herbert Marcuse called “repressive desublimation.”

In the opening scene of WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Makavejev decodes the undertones of the famous Mao Tse-tung quotation, “If you want to make an omelette, you’ve got to break a few eggs,” regarding sex, reproduction, and destruction.

The protagonist of the sequences set in Yugoslavia is Milena, an apostle of Wilhelm Reich’s prescriptions for sexual liberation. Milena is the ideologue incarnate: passionate and doctrinaire, she has substituted advancing the party line for the actual fulfillment of her program. We see her reading Reichian propaganda, smoking a cigar à la Sigmund Freud, and sitting in her orgone accumulator while her housemate, Jagoda, makes love.

Milena’s voice in the film is also Reich’s voice, but behind that, it is Makavejev’s voice—the voice of a Yugoslavian making a documentary about Reich. Milena is Makavejev’s double, a dogmatic sendup of his own interest in Reich’s ideas as an emancipatory program—and of Yugoslavia’s dalliance with Marxism. Milena’s martyrdom is an allegory of Reich’s persecution and exile, foreshadowing Makavejev’s own misfortunes in his homeland and then in the West.

In the most famous scene of WR, Milena steps out onto the balcony of her apartment to harangue her neighbors in a sequence that channels the greatest Soviet propaganda films. “Socialism must not exclude human pleasure from its program!” she declaims to proletarian applause, a demagogue of sexual freedom. “The October Revolution was ruined when it rejected free love!” (The camera cuts to her housemate Jagoda, who gasps “War of liberation!” as she tries—playfully?—to escape her male lover.) “Frustrate the young sexually and they’ll recklessly take to other illicit thrills… political rallies with flags flying, battling the police like pre-war Communists! What we need is a free youth in a crime-free world!”

Clad in a mini-dress and an army jacket, Milena builds to her climax. “Sweet oblivion is the masses’ demand! Deprive them of free love and they’ll seize everything else! That led to revolution. It led to Fascism and Doomsday!” At first viewing, it could appear that Milena is championing sexual liberation. In fact, she is laying out a prescription for repressive desublimation as a vaccine against revolution.

The scene ends like a classic partisan film, with everyone singing a Yugoslavian folk song together—and suddenly, the film cuts to a rally in Beijing at which tens of thousands of people are raising Mao’s little red book in the air in unison. Stalin, glamorized in a Soviet propaganda film, strides out to the tune of a zither: “We have demonstrated our ability not only to destroy the old order, but to build in its place a new socialist order.”

This is the problem—how order succeeds order, the dictator replacing the Tsar just as Oedipus replaced his father. The film cuts to a scene in which an inmate in a mental hospital is undergoing electric shock therapy, and the zither resumes, driving home the association between patriarchal leadership, state power, and the institutional enforcement of mental health. The norms of sexual liberation are no more liberating than the norms of Marxism, which are no more liberating than the norms of capitalism.

Milena smoking a cigar like Sigmund Freud or Che Guevara.

As the movie shifts into high gear, Milena goes to see a Russian figure skating troupe perform. She and her housemate are in the company of two young soldiers: “Consider yourself protected by the Yugoslav People’s Army,” one says flirtatiously.

“But who will protect me from you?” Milena’s housemate responds.

Milena is not impressed by low-ranking Yugoslavian soldiers. She sets her sights on the star Russian figure skater. He is nationalistic manhood personified; the stage makeup of his profession only accentuates his icy masculinity. When she approaches him backstage for an autograph, he recites his answers directly out of a Communist Party phrasebook. His name is Vladimir Ilich—an overt reference to Lenin.

Milena’s attraction to Vladimir Ilich underscores the point that our current desires will not necessarily lead us out of the order that produces them. (“You are locked into your suffering,” sings Leonard Cohen, “and your pleasures are the seal.”) Earlier in the film, we hear Jackie Curtis describe her lover Eric as “an American hero” while Tuli Kupferberg prowls Manhattan with a toy machine gun, aping a US soldier. At the opening of the movie, Kupferberg⁴ intones, “He who chooses slavery—is he a slave still?”

Milena takes Vladimir Ilich back to her apartment to introduce the haughty Russian to the ideas of her mentor, Wilhelm Reich. “His name is World Revolution,” she explains, giving us another way to decode the title of the film. “He teaches that every nice person like you and me hides behind his façade a great explosive charge… A great reservoir of energy that can be released only by war or revolution.”

“In me? Me too?” interrupts Milena’s housemate, having stripped naked. “Love and crime. Give me some.“

At this moment, to the sound of a madcap Balkan horn line, Milena’s ex-lover, the lumpen-proletarian Radmilović, comes smashing through the wall like a cartoon superhero out of Deleuze and Guattari.⁵ Radmilović functions as a sort of Shakespearean fool: because he is a sexist, drunken lout, he can say and do things that would otherwise be inadmissible in Yugoslavian film. When we first encounter him, he is barricading a road; he accuses a BMW driver of being a member of the red bourgeoisie. Makavejev puts his own anarchistic ideas in the mouth of a communist caricature of an anarchist in order to save the authorities the trouble of having to caricature him themselves—a comic lampoon of a timeless socialist tactic.

Interrupting the conversation about Reich, Radmilović cheerfully hustles Vladimir Ilich into a wardrobe and commences nailing it shut. Milena is mortified: “Free the People’s Artist!”

The Id traps the Superego in the closet: turnabout is fair play!

Milena attempting to explain to Vladimir Ilich how patriarchal power and personality structure figure in the emergence of fascism. “Speaking truth to power” is a time-honored liberal strategy—and if it generally fails, it is not only because power is unimpressed by truth, but also because the speaker is usually not aware of the footholds the attraction to power has already established within her.

The scene returns to New York, where Nancy Godfrey is preparing to make a plaster cast of New York entrepreneur Jim Buckley’s phallus. While Godrey massages Buckley to erection, we see Milena reading aloud from Lenin’s The State and Revolution, in which Lenin quotes Engels:

“The proletariat needs the state, not in the interests of freedom, but in order to subdue its enemies, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom, the state as such ceases to exist.”

In other words, the state (the concentration of power and authority in the hands of a few) is to create the conditions for freedom (the distribution of power and agency to all on a horizontal basis). “Kill for Peace” by The Fugs kicks in on the soundtrack, a comparably oxymoronic program.

As Godfrey packs plaster around Buckley’s erection, the soundtrack shifts to Czech classical composer Bedřich Smetana’s patriotic theme, “The Moldau.” Smetana’s composition connects naturalism and nationalism, evoking the reverence with which male sexual potency is venerated in patriarchal society. The camera cuts briefly to Jackie Curtis paying obeisance at a Catholic shrine; the virginal saint above her is holding a skull. Briefly, we glimpse Milena releasing Vladimir Ilich from the wardrobe.

In the plaster casting scene, Makavejev is depicting the reduction of living sexuality to a commodity, an inert representation. What seems like a celebration of manhood and male power is actually a substitution tantamount to castration: the inorganic for the organic, the artificial for the real, the rigid for the flexible, the statue of the hero for the flesh of the human being. Those who seek patriarchal status and political power willingly make this exchange, not understanding that these supplant rather than supplement their personhood.

The classic example of this is Lenin’s corpse, preserved in Red Square for workers to file dutifully past. Posters around the USSR blazoned Vladimir Mayakovsky’s words: “Even now, Lenin is more alive than the living.” Raised to superhuman status as an icon, Lenin not only ceased to be a living, breathing human being—he also drained others of life and freedom.⁶

When the duplication of Buckley’s organ is complete, WR jumps back to the Soviet propaganda reel, equating Stalin with the ersatz phallus. “Comrades, we have successfully completed the first stage of communism!” Stalin proclaims, joining everyone in applauding his own declaration.

This is Makavejev at his bitterest. Stalin’s “first stage of communism” is the reduction of life to inorganic matter—the substitution of duplicate for original, of ideology for experience, of program for desire, of permanence for presence, of power for pleasure, of nation for people. The film cuts to a man in a straitjacket slamming his head against a wall over and over to the sound of another communist hymn: “We thank the Party—our glorious Party—for bringing happiness to every home.”

At a time when the Yugoslavian government relied on filmmaking as one of the chief means of promoting patriotism and obedience, Makavejev was a mutineer turning his weapon against his superiors. Today, when access to the means of media production has become so widespread, it’s difficult to grasp how forcefully subversive this was in 1971.

The balcony scene—arguably, one of the high points of world cinema.

The argument thus formulated, WR speeds towards its catastrophic conclusion. Milena and Vladimir Ilich are walking through a snowy park together. Finally, they kiss, and, as the soundtrack swells with plaintive violins, Vladimir Ilich soliloquizes about Beethoven:

Nothing is lovelier than the Appassionata. I could listen to it all day! Marvelous, superhuman music! With perhaps naïve pride, I think, “What wonders men can create!” But I can’t listen to music. It gets on my nerves!

It arouses a yearning in me to babble sweet nothings, to caress people living in this hell who can still create such beauty. But nowadays, if you stroke anybody’s head, he’ll bite your hand off! Now you have to hit them on the head. Hit them on the head mercilessly, though in principle we oppose all violence!

At the culmination of this speech, he strikes Milena for attempting to touch him.

These words, of course, are straight from Lenin’s mouth, via Gorky’s memoirs of the Great Leader. As the ultimate homo politicus, Lenin feared eruptions of strong feeling. From the perspective of the tactician, all sentiment should be strategic, all raw energy should be channeled into rationalized systems. In place of spontaneous expressions of love for humanity, merciless violence.

Mikhail Bakunin, the revolutionary anarchist, is also remembered for his love of Beethoven’s music. Yet he never fled from his passions. In Paris, he lived with a pianist so as to hear Beethoven every day. Shortly before the final uprising of the revolutions of 1848-49, Bakunin went to hear his favorite composition, the 9th Symphony, performed in Dresden; afterwards, he was accused of burning down the opera house in which it had been performed. In 1876, in the final weeks of his life, he set out on one last journey to visit the pianist one more time: “All this will pass away,” Bakunin confided to him, “but the Ninth Symphony will remain.”⁷

In the contrast between these two Russian revolutionaries, we see two fundamentally different ways of relating to the tides of emotion that surge through us. On Lenin’s side, we see control, austerity, order, violence. On Bakunin’s side, freedom, indulgence, excess, passionate love, the river bursting its banks.

Shocked at his own aggression, Vladimir Ilich entreats Milena to forgive him. Furious, she responds:

You love all mankind, yet you’re incapable of loving one individual, one single living creature! What is this love that makes you nearly knock my head off? You said I was as lovely as the revolution. But you couldn’t bear the “Revolution” touching you!

Milena’s indictment of Vladimir Ilich is Reich’s indictment of Lenin and Hitler and Stalin; it is Makavejev’s indictment of Tito and of all patriarchal power and personality structure. It’s also one of the fiercest expressions of disillusionment with state socialism to reach us from the 20th century.

As Milena concludes her speech, Vladimir Ilich embraces her, remorseful and abashed. They make love.

Then, unhinged by postcoital shame, he kills her, beheading her with an ice skate, the emblem of his profession. It is not safe to sleep with patriarchy.

The movie concludes with two powerful gestures of affirmation and forgiveness.

We see Milena’s disembodied head on an autopsy tray. As the camera zooms in past the forensic investigators, her head comes to life and addresses us, describing the outcome of her liaison with Vladimir Ilich, “a genuine Red Fascist.”

“Comrades!” she proclaims, indomitable even in death. “Even now I am not ashamed of my communist past.”

This is Milena speaking for Wilhelm Reich, but it is also Makavejev speaking—and through him, it is Yugoslavia speaking, and the entire 20th century. Milena’s refusal to feel shame about her fate is Makavejev blessing humanity: all our clumsy efforts to free ourselves, all the revolutions and liberation struggles that ended in dictatorship and dogma, all our human frailty. There is nothing in this human world of ours that is not in some way right, however distorted it may be.

Then the camera cuts to Vladimir Ilich, her murderer. Utterly bereft, he is staggering through the snow, his hands soaked in blood, recoiling in horror from himself. Imagine if all the dictators, mercenaries, and rapists in the history of the world suddenly came to understand all the harm they have done, experiencing in full the tragedy they have inflicted.

Makavejev has Vladimir Ilich sing “François Villon’s Prayer” by Russian singer Bulat Okudzhava, whose recordings were suppressed in Russia at the time:

Before the earth stops turning
Before the lights go dim
To each one, Lord, I pray thee
Grant what is needful to him…

To the one whose hand is open
Grant rest from charity
A gift of remorse to Caine
But also, remember me…

Oh Lord, thou art all-knowing
I believe in Thy wisdom then
As the fallen soldier believes
That in heaven he’s alive again…

As all men must believe
They know not what they do…
Grant to each some little thing
And remember, I’m here too.

“And remember, I’m here too,” entreats Vladimir Ilich, begging for an impossible absolution at the end of a century of holocausts. “Remember, I’m here too,” repeats Okudzhava, and we see Milena’s smile become Reich’s.

In giving remorse to Caine, Makavejev implores us to compassion—not just for Milena, Reich, himself, and all who have suffered at the hands of authoritarians, but also for Lenin, for Stalin, for Tito and Eisenhower, for all of humanity locked in cycles in which we do harm to those we love. This is Makavejev’s answer to the moral binaries of the partisan blockbuster.

Makavejev’s trialectics: Milena, protagonist of WR, both dead and alive, and director Dušan Makavejev himself.

Speaking about WR years later, Makavejev reflected:

You can die from freedom, like you can die from too much fresh air, if you are not used to it… I think that over-controlled people have very good reasons for saying that freedom is dangerous. When over-controlled people relieve their irrationalities, they often become chaotic, narcissistic, murderous, or suicidal because they just can’t stop.

This implies that the proper road to liberation is a carefully managed process in which the free expression and satisfaction of sexual desire can be properly moderated. In other words, repressive desublimination. But can you really die of too much fresh air?

As so often occurs, the tale is wiser than the teller. It’s not too much freedom that kills Milena and makes Vladimir Illich into a murderer. Radmilović, the representative of chaos and irrationality, does no harm to anyone, and almost succeeds in quarantining Vladimir Ilich. The problem is not too much freedom, but too much control, too much certainty, too much doctrine. The realization of any totalizing system brings all its flaws and fault lines into relief, magnifies them—like the USSR—to the size of continents.

The dismembered corpse of Yugoslavia in 2018.

We can read WR as a simple allegory of 20th-century international relations: smitten with the USSR, Yugoslavia throws herself at him, only to be betrayed. But if we read Vladimir Ilich more abstractly as a symbol of patriarchal nationalism, it appears that Makavejev foretold the civil war of the 1990s twenty years in advance.

Like Milena, Yugoslavia was murdered, torn apart by authoritarian currents that had never been rooted out by the sham self-management of state socialism. Just as no dictatorship can create the conditions for the liberation of humanity, in the final analysis there is no such thing as an anti-fascist state. The same seeds of fascism and civil war lurk within all nationalisms, within all valorizations of power and duty. Every nation will be a time bomb like Yugoslavia until we disassemble all of them down to their deepest foundations, which are rooted deep within ourselves.

Should we attribute Yugoslavia’s collapse to an excess of id or a surfeit of superego? Did the nationalist wars that tore up the country represent unfettered desire giving rise to violence, or were they caused by the forces that have always distorted and repressed desire? Was the problem too much freedom on the scale of the nation—or too much despotism on the molecular level, the scale of the individual?

How we answer these questions will determine how we respond to nationalist violence in the 21st century: whether we understand it as an excess interrupting the present order or as the purest manifestation of that order. Is desire itself the problem, to be controlled with laws and interventions from transnational military bodies? Or is control the problem, which we can only undermine from the bottom up by means of autonomous subversion and transgression? Is the solution a greater nationalism—Yugoslavian rather than Serbian and Croatian, for example—or to abolish all forms of nationalism once and for all?

And how can we set out to do that without replacing nationalism with another dogma, another ideology? Makavejev’s methodology and compassion give us a point of departure.

“Men [sic] fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.” -William Morris, A Dream of John Ball

July 4 in Minneapolis: The Logic of Autonomous Organizing : A March Celebrating the Revolt of May 28

2020-07-06T22:29:28Z

July 4 saw fiercely ungovernable demonstrations from Olympia to Atlanta. The following report from south Minneapolis describes a march that took place that evening, exploring the logic of autonomous organizing and concluding with a gallery chronicling the graffiti that the march left in its wake.

A.C.A.B.
Say it with me baby
Fuck the pigs
Like it’s Minnehaha and Lake Street

-Finna, “Say”

On the night of July 4, a small but rowdy crowd took to the streets of south Minneapolis to celebrate the the recent uprising and express support for those still facing charges from it. About forty people retraced a now-familiar route from George Floyd Square along Lake Street to the burned-out carcass of the Third Precinct, shooting off fireworks, burning American flags, and covering the area in fresh graffiti. Above all, the night affirmed the joy of the revolt—a joy born of thousands finding their power in acting collectively.

This celebration was organized autonomously. Autonomous organizing can be confusing for those more familiar with traditional protests choreographed by activists and “community organizers.” Instead of building a coalition of organizations to coordinate the event, networks of friends self-organized to set the stage for an open-ended evening. Rather than concentrating agency in a formally designated leadership, this approach invites all the participants to understand themselves as active contributors. In this case, several different people arrived with fireworks to set off; some handed fireworks out to others who wanted to join in on the fun. A few people got to light fireworks for the very first time!

Even without established leadership, there can still be planning. In contrast to a protest organized according to top-down logic, however, the plan can be loose enough to allow for spontaneity; in some cases, plans may not be openly communicated until the moment of opportunity, in order to prevent police intervention and retain the element of surprise. When the plan is shared with those assembled, it can be modified based on others’ input. For example, the route from Chicago Avenue to Lake Street has been traversed a number of times since the beginning of the uprising, but the participants could have chosen an alternate route if the police had decided to respond. The Hong Kong-inspired slogan “be water”—which was spray-painted on the walls of Minneapolis during the uprising and again on Saturday—emphasizes the value of being mobile and flexible in order to be able to change routes and destinations as needed.

On Saturday, the police never showed up, likely due to the opaque organizing and shifting department priorities following the rebellion—not to mention it being a busy holiday weekend.

Standing together in front of the empty shell of the Third Precinct with fireworks booming overhead as people spray-painted every available surface, we felt just the smallest reverberation of the uprising we experienced just weeks before. Unlike protests, which employ a means (e.g., a march or a blockade) to reach an end (e.g., sending a message or making demands), the events of the uprising and this past Saturday night blur this distinction. They create a kind of means-as-end, or means-without-end, in which the purpose is inextricable from the lived experience of the event itself. To fuse means and ends in this way, we have to move beyond the predetermined choreography of protest to a more transformative paradigm of action. “I’ll never forget that night” reads the latest graffiti written on the barricades surrounding the precinct, referring to the night of May 28 on which unrelenting crowds forced police to retreat from their station and established a brief yet real police-free zone—abolition in real time.

If the crowd intended to send a distinct message on July 4, it is that those who are currently facing the harshest repression from the uprising will not have to endure it alone. Hundreds are facing charges, including several people who are charged with arson by federal authorities. They will need our utmost support as they begin what will be a long and grueling process through the legal system.

While the revolt has subsided and momentum shifts gears, that does not mean that peace has returned to Minneapolis. In the words of Minneapolis-born rapper Reeves Junya, which are now inscribed on the walls of Lake Street,

“We don’t know peace, only gun smoke.”

Postscript on George Floyd Square

Meeting up at George Floyd Square seemed like fairly common sense, but it caused a mild local controversy. Some critics suggested that the square is a memorial, a somber place of Black mourning, and therefore the crowd’s celebratory vibe would be unwelcome and disruptive.

While the space is anchored by the large memorial to George Floyd, it is also large and heterogenous. There are barricades on each street for at least one block extending in every direction from 38th and Chicago. The square has also expanded to include an adjacent park. Within this area, in addition to the memorial, DJs play music, people cook and share food, preachers lead prayers, merchants sell T-shirts, supplies are distributed freely, gardeners tend a garden erected in the street, and lots of people hang out. Multiple demonstrations gathered at this square and departed from it on July 4.

This projection of the site as a space for mourning is not incorrect, but it fails to capture the full breadth of what is going on in the square or the emotional complexity of the environment. The uprising itself was driven by a powerful surge of joy emerging from the collective expression of rage and grief. As the sun set this past Saturday night, several fireworks exploded directly above the memorial itself, showing that the atmosphere of the space cannot be neatly summarized. It is a mistake to impose a false dichotomy between supposed (white) agitators who want to celebrate and (Black) mourners who want peace and quiet. Meeting at George Floyd Square could have created opportunities for people to make more connections outside already-existing social circles by inviting people who had not heard about what was going on.

Instead, confusion about autonomous and leaderless organizing methods sparked warnings that circulated around the square to discourage people from joining. As a result, the only participants were the ones who traveled to George Floyd Square with the intention of joining; even some of those who had showed up intending to participate but lacked personal relationships with other participants apparently chose not to join the march in the end. Those who were concerned about representing and managing groups of people ensured that those who marched to the precinct were separated from everyone else at the square, illustrating how such forms of political analysis can give rise to self-fulfilling prophecies.

Appendix: Graffiti from July 4

Behind the Third Precinct: Chinga la migra; Fuck 12; From the bottom of my heart… RIP to George Floyd and all victims of slave catcher violence.

Fuck MPD-Mpls; Revolution forever; Quit your job; Say her name Sandra Bland; Fuck 12; Literally ACAB; 1312.

Next door to the Third Precinct: Free ‘em all; Kill cops; Let me breathe; BLM; Fuck MPD.

In front of the Third Precinct: Fuck you; Fuck cops/1033, Fuck COVID/5G, Fuck Soros; Black trans lives matter; Autozone the pigs.

Free them all; ACAB - every last one; Fuck 12; No retina scanners; Kill the pig in ur head; You lose pigs.

No peace; <3 HK [Hong Kong]; MPD [crossed out].

Burn em all; Smells like bacon; Free the prisoners.

Burn ‘em all; Torch em; Fuck 12; Kill killer cops.

Street barricades untouched from the night before: Burn more of these [arrow pointing to precinct].

I’ll never forget that night; Be H2O.

<3 HK; Fuck MPD; Burn 5 more.

Lets burn another; Lets kill cops.

We don’t know peace; 612 ain’t nothin to fuck with.

Fuck the pigs like its Minnehaha and Lake street [lyrics to Finna’s “Say”].

Burn the plantation; Kill pigs on sight.

Free all prisoners.

Free the prisoners; Kill cops; Remember May 28.

Burn them all; Layleen Polanco [transwoman of color killed in prison in New York]; George Floyd; Fuck 12.

Another can burn; Fuck 12.

Kill cops; Kill all cops.

Outside the former Autozone: I had a dream I got everything I wanted.

Outside the former Arby’s: No cops yes now [lyrics to Four Fists’s “Nobody’s Biz”].

On Lake Street: Abolir la policia.

ACAB; Free all arsonists; Kill all cops; George Floyd; Fuck USA; ACAB.

Free em all; Fuck 12; America is canceled.

Be water; Kill the cop in ur head; (And the other ones); BOES [moniker].

Fuck 12; Kill every cop.

Fuck 12; ACAB; RIP Layleen Polanco Xtravaganza; Round 2 when?

ACAB; Defend looters; Fuck USA.

Fire to the prisons; We don’t know peace only gun smoke [lyrics to Reeves Junya’s “City on Fire”].

Free all rioters.

America is canceled.

Fuck 12; Autozone the MPD.

Stand with HK.

Burn another precinct; Layleen Polanco; Free ‘em all.

Two countries one virus, be water <3 HK; Layleen Polanco.

The owner of Cadillac Pawn shot and killed Calvin Horton, a Black man alleged to have been looting the store, during the uprising. The store’s facade is regularly defaced: Fuck you!!; Fuck this store; RIP Calvin; Fuck 12; Fuck this.

Amnesty for all rioters.

Free the rioters; and all prisoners.

We dream of a better world for everybody; Fuck 12; Everybody hates the pigs; No justice no peace; abolish the cops.

Free the rioters; Free all rioters.

Another untouched street barricade: ACAB.

Fuck cops; George Floyd; F12.

ACAB; Fuck 12; Fuck 12; ACAB; ACAB.

CrimethInc. : Categories : Arts

Survival : A Story about Anarchists Enduring Mass Raids

Escape

Resources

Communications

Attack

Further Reading

Capitalism Thrives on Death—Death to Capitalism : Two Posters

Capitalism Is the Dance of Death

Capitalism Thrives on Death—Death to Capitalism

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

Stories from the Making of

Notes on Love

Notes on Love

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

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

Scenes from the Life of Alfredo Maria Bonanno

Further Reading

Camera, Action! : A Film Festival at the Gathering of Anarchist and Anti-Authoritarian Practices against Borders

Call for Participation

A Tradition of Transgression

The Defense of Lützerath : A Photoessay and Poster Documenting Ecological Destruction and Resistance

Lützerath: Before the Assault

The Eviction

Demonstration: Saturday, January 14

Decentralized Actions: Tuesday, January 17

Further Reading

Appendix I: Tracking the Adventures of the Mud Wizard from the ZAD to Lützerath

Appendix II: A Poster

Poster: We'll Go Where Flowers Grow

We’ll Go Where Flowers Grow

Punk—Dangerous Utopia : Revisiting the Relationship between Punk and Anarchism

Punk: Dangerous Utopia

Unions, Hippies, Punks, Millennials

Coda: Testimony

Further Reading and Viewing

Whose Tweets? Our Streets : A New Poster and Zine for an Offline Media Offensive

They Don’t Give a Fuck about You

Terra Incognita: A Travel Zine in Portuguese : Reports on Two CrimethInc. Tours in the So-Called Americas

From South to North

Appendix I: Our “Reach” in the Digital Age

Appendix II: Audio and Video Footage

Hands Off : A Poster and Resources Supporting Reproductive Freedom

Further Reading

Every Flag Is Black in a Fire : The Black Flag—Emblem of Rebellion, Negation, and Hope

Louise Michel: In Mourning for Our Dead and Our Illusions

Le Drapeau Noir: War on All Laws, Codes, Judges, and Police Officers

The Alarm: The Emblem of Hunger

Sergei Eistenstein: Red Flags, Black Flags, White Flags

André Breton: The Colors of Freedom

Jean Genet: “The Kind of Revolution I’d Like to See”

Howard J. Ehrlich: Why the Black Flag?

Anonymous: The Opposite of Surrender

Appendix: On Anarchist Identity

We Are Now: The Story of an Armed No-Cop Zone in Atlanta : A Documentary Film

Further Reading and Action

The Making of

Life Is Ecstatic Intercourse between Destruction and Creation : A Poster in Homage to the Previous Generation

The Illustration

The Text

Maggots and Men : Building a Queer and Trans Utopia from the Memory of Kronstadt

Kronstadt as Gender Anarchy : An Interview with Cary Cronenwett, Director of Maggots and Men

Peter Watkins: The Paris Commune, 1871 : Revisiting a Revolutionary Film on the 150-Year Anniversary of the Paris Commune

The Film

La Commune de Paris, 1871 by Peter Watkins (1999; 5 hours 45 minutes)

Further Reading and Viewing

From Punk to Indigenous Solidarity: Four Decades of Anarchism in Brazil : An Interview

Breaking the Fourth Wall: Revolt in the St. Louis Jail : On Repression, Representation, and Revolt

Remembering Aragorn! : A Zine, a Video, and a Poem

The Time I Visited Aragorn!

The Time Aragorn! Visited Me, Well Us, Well Our Town, or Maybe He Saw It as Our Region Because He Had a Very Detailed Taxonomy of the Kinds of Regions in the United States Where the Biology Could Support a Free Society

A Poem by Kenneth Rexroth, Painted across the Rooftops of the World : On the Occasion of His Birthday

NORETORP-NORETSYH

Appendix

“NORETORP-NORETSYH”

WR: Mysteries of the Organism—Beyond the Liberation of Desire : Revisiting Makavejev's Subversive Classic

WR: Mysteries of the Organism—Beyond the Liberation of Desire

Further Reading

July 4 in Minneapolis: The Logic of Autonomous Organizing : A March Celebrating the Revolt of May 28

Postscript on George Floyd Square