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Announcing The Beautiful Idea : A New Podcast

2024-12-15T23:26:20Z

Participants in CrimethInc. projects are collaborating with veterans of other anarchist media platforms on a new podcast, The Beautiful Idea, which will offer reporting and analysis of current events. The first episode of The Beautiful Idea has just been released!

In their own words:

We are happy to announce the first episode of The Beautiful Idea, a new project from a collective of several anarchist and autonomous media producers scattered around the world. We’re bringing you interviews and stories from the front lines of autonomous social movements and struggles, as well as original commentary and analysis. We plan to put out about two episodes a month; one will be more focused on action news and include shorter interviews with front-line activists and organizers, and the other will feature longer, more deep-dive interviews on specific topics, including theoretical and historical analysis.

On today’s show, we feature our “Behind the Barricades “roundup of movement news, events, and updates, along with a look at the recent burst of media coverage following the shooting of a United Healthcare CEO in New York. Then we speak with someone involved in a new campaign to support Stop Cop City defendants facing both RICO and domestic terrorism charges. Finally, we consult a longtime anarchist to look back on the historic mobilization against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999.

Festivals of Resistance : A Call for Gatherings the Weekend Before Trump Takes Office

2024-12-03T07:23:11Z

Along with others around the country, we invite you to join us in organizing festivals of resistance on the weekend of January 18, immediately before Donald Trump takes office. This is a crucial opportunity to engage in outreach, education, and action ahead of what it is sure to be a tumultuous time.

Once Trump takes power, it will only become more challenging to make connections with our neighbors, create the networks that we will need to face down his assaults, and share the skills we will need to survive his reign. Right now, we have a precious window of time in which to prepare. Let’s make the most of it.

For an incomplete list of events, start here.

When Donald Trump enters office on January 20, he will order mass deportations, escalate the repression of protesters, dismantle the few judicial and legislative provisions that still protect ordinary people, and consolidate a propaganda ecosystem intended to stupefy us all into obedience. The Democratic Party is willingly handing power to an autocrat they say will bring democracy to an end; the Democrats show every intention of continuing to ratchet their own politics to the right. Authoritarian leftist groups are simply treating this as a recruitment opportunity.

But from Texas to the West Bank, millions of people’s lives are about to get even harder. We owe it to each other to meet the second Trump era side by side in solidarity.

The chaos that will accompany the return of the Trump administration represents an opportunity as well as a challenge. This is a chance to assert an autonomous pole of organizing, carrying forward the lessons of 2020 and the movement against Cop City while continuing the fight against patriarchal violence, white supremacy, and colonialism.

By organizing ahead of Trump’s inauguration, we can seize the initiative and set our own timeline rather than being caught flat-footed and forced to react. We need to welcome new participants into these struggles and foster a revolutionary perspective that can orient us through the challenges ahead. No amount of internet activity could substitute for gathering face to face. The most important battles ahead will not be fought online, but in the streets of our communities.

January 18 is observed as the Day of the Forest Defender. It will be the two-year anniversary of the murder of Tortuguita in Weelaunee Forest. It is an important date to gather, honor the memory of the fallen, and pledge ourselves to resistance and to one another.

How to Participate

You could start by calling for an assembly bringing together everyone who wants to participate in organizing. It could be a public gathering—if you think you can facilitate something on that scale—or an invitation-based conversation bringing together people who have already worked together or at least have cause to trust each other.

For the event proper, you could host workshops and distribute literature teaching security culture, digital security, protest safety and first aid, direct action, reproductive autonomy, forms of organization including affinity groups, and other skills that may be relevant in the years to come.

Local organizers could share stories and lessons from the history of resistance in your area during the first Trump era. You could facilitate discussions to identify what people need to do to prepare for the years ahead—both for their own safety and to ensure the safety of their communities—or to strategize about how to prepare to confront the Trump agenda in your region. You could do an art build for future demonstrations and an organizing fair to connect people to local projects. This will be a chance to expand rapid response networks for community defense and mutual aid.

In some places, the gatherings could conclude with public actions—a first salvo in the resistance to Trump’s plan for mass deportations. Elsewhere, there will be open assemblies, spaces for people to encounter each other and learn new ways of working together and sharing ideas. Small towns can screen documentaries or invite speakers to share their expertise.

It’s up to you and your community to decide what best fits your local context. The important thing is to create a space that can serve as a point of entry for everyone who needs to get connected ahead of the next round of struggles—a space where people can hone their skills and begin to think of themselves as a collective force.

No matter who Trump’s administration targets—whether immigrants, Palestine solidarity organizers, sex workers, schoolteachers, trans people, environmentalists, or people seeking abortions—we must show that we will love and protect one another. If we all pull together, showing everyone who wants to resist that there are movements that they can join, we can begin to build the strength that we will need to overcome the challenges ahead.

Events like this are already being planned in dozens of cities and towns. But time is tight. If we want to be ready, we have to get started now.

Please repost and circulate this call! If you want your event to be listed, please contact us.

Events

These are some of the events being organized in relation to this call.

January 11

Chicago, Illinois: A training about fighting deportations, as part of the week-long “Regroup and Strategize” series.
Sacramento, California: “Call to Action” conference and gathering, featuring a “day of skillshares and trainings” along with workshops, panels, and a keynote presentation from anarchist author Dean Spade. You can find more information and a full schedule here.

January 18

Atlanta, Georgia: A mass mobilization and day of resistance on the two-year anniversary of the murder of Tortuguita.
Austin, Texas: Day of the Forest Defender, 5 pm
Brooklyn, New York: A community gathering including workshops.
Carbondale, Ilinois: In fact, three days of events, January 17-19, as described on this flier:
Cleveland, Ohio: 3 pm Coventry Peace Park, 5 pm Rhizome House
Corvallis, Oregon: Liberation Assembly, 11 am to 2 pm, West M, 101 NW 23rd Street
Dayton, Ohio: 5 pm, Union Hall, 313 South Jefferson; a community discussion followed by music
Durham, North Carolina: The Triangle Festival of Resistance, a weekend-long festival focused on community defense, resilience, and liberation. For updates and information about how to contribute, consult Triangle Radical Events.
Gary, Indiana: A demonstration against mass deportations.
Humboldt, California: In fact, a full week of events; the list is here
Medford, Oregon: 40 South Central Avenue, starting at 10 am on Saturday (and continuing at 11 am on Sunday)
Milwaukee, Wisconsin: 6 pm at Nice Hair, with workshops on trans defense, migrant defense, self-defense, and movement defense
Minneapolis, Minnesota: A screening of Fell in Love with Fire with letter writing to prisoners and a discussion about the next phase of struggle at the Seward Cafê at 6:30 pm.
Montpelier, Vermont: In fact, a full weekend of events, described at the link.
Oakland, California: A march to a community assembly, departing from Wilma Chan park next to the Lake Merritt BART at 1 pm.
Olympia, Washington: The People’s March, 12 pm, departing from Heritage Park; followed by the Festival of Resistance.
Phoenix, Arizona: 3-8 pm, Margaret T. Hance Park, featuring a Really Really Free Market, food, literature tables, and a number of educational workshops
Portland, Oregon: A gathering in a COVID-safer, sober space. Families with and without children are welcome to attend. Food will be provided.

You can read the schedule for a full day of events in Portland here. You can also find updates about event organizing in Portland here.
Providence, Rhode Island: 3 pm - 9+ pm, AS220
Richmond, Virginia: A community assembly involving panel discussions, workshops, and food, followed by a benefit concert.
Throop, Pennsylvania: Community organizing fair with food and music, 2-7 pm
Tucson, Arizona: Day of the Forest Defender, Parade of Resistance, Catalina Park, 4:30 pm
Urbana, Illinois: A day of workshops, 10:30 am to 8 pm
Vallejo, California: Day of the Forest Defender, Vallejo Waterfront, 2 pm

Events are also being organized in Salt Lake City, Utah and elsewhere.

January 19

Asheville, North Carolina: “Rad Fair,” 1 to 3 pm; resistance to mass deportations with author Jessica Pishko and CIMA at 4 pm; a screening of “Fell in Love with Fire,” a documentary about Chile’s 2019 popular uprising, at 6:30 pm.
Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The second day of the Triangle Festival of Resistance.
New York City, New York: Empires starve, people feed—mutual aid teach-in and collection drive at Herbert Von King Park in Brooklyn at 1 pm

January 20

Corvallis, Oregon: Festival of Resistance, 11 am to 5 pm, Westminster House 101 NW 23rd
Indianapolis, Indiana: A Mutual Aid Convergence at Ujamaa Community Bookstore.

January 21

Arcata, California: A march departing from Arcata Plaza at noon—against Donald Trump, in solidarity with Palestine, and in memory of Tortuguita.

January 25

Rio Grande Valley, Texas: Organizing fair in Ramiro Guerro Park, McAllen, Texas, 1-4 pm
Tampa Bay, Florida: A community gathering and organizing fair for “politics beyond the ballot box.” “Organize with your community to fight for transformative change! Connect with a local project from anti-capitalist orgs, labor and tenant unions, mutual aid orgs, and more!”
Wichita, Kansas: A community organizing assembly at Safe Streets Wichita, 3-5 pm

Posters

These posters are available for promoting events in response to this call. Fill in the details of your particular event in the blank space!

Download the printable PDF here

In Memory of Luciano Pitronello, also Known as Tortuga

2024-08-14T00:10:56Z

We are heartbroken to report the untimely passing of Luciano Pitronello, known as Tortuga, an anarchist from the territory dominated by the Chilean state.

In 2011, at age twenty-two, Tortuga was severely injured during an attempt to carry out an attack on a Santander bank in downtown Santiago. The explosion resulted in Tortuga losing one hand and suffering severe damage to his other hand as well as his eyes, skin, and lungs. At first, it was unclear to what extent Tortuga would recover. Many anarchists around the world followed news about his condition with great concern as he remained in the hospital under police guard.

Despite these debilitating injuries and the prospect of decades in prison, Tortuga remained unapologetically committed to revolutionary struggle. He refused to share information about another participant in the action. Demonstrating admirable determination, he survived the ordeal and exceeded expectations in the speed and extent of his recovery.

In 2012, Tortuga was acquitted of terrorism charges, sentenced to six years of probation, and released from prison. After his release, he helped to establish and maintain the self-managed social center and autonomous library Sante Geronimo Caserio, named for an Italian anarchist who was guillotined at the age of twenty.

Two days ago, while Tortuga was working in Santiago, he came into contact with electrical cables and was killed by an electrical shock. This tragedy illustrates that the most dangerous thing is not resistance—it is not taking intentional risks in hopes of paving the way to a better world. Rather, the most dangerous thing, the thing that kills the most people, is ordinary life at the mercy of capitalism.¹ We honor all of the ways that Tortuga contributed to the struggle for a better world, not least the example that he set in confronting hardship.

We urge people to read Tortuga’s letters from prison, which are collected here. In these letters, Tortuga describes his experience treading the challenging path to medical recovery in the midst of incarceration. You can also hear an interview with him here.

Below, we offer a few words from Tortuga, followed by some recollections from a comrade who knew him.

Luciano Pitronello, also Known as Tortuga.

Some Words from Tortuga

“So, you want to know about me? Well, I will fight in order to live, and live in order to fight until I am free and wild. I do not trick myself in thinking that I am less wild if I breathe artificially, because I believe that it is in situations like that when the wildest human instinct blossoms—the instinct of survival.”

“A rebel becomes a warrior when one is able to get back up stronger than one fell, who is able to see reality even though one has everything to lose; a warrior does not necessarily have to know how to make a bomb or handle one, nor to have techniques of camouflage, those are things one learns by addition. Warriors are dangerous for their ideas and principles because they see all the way to the final consequences, always firm, steadfast, because they do not betray themselves nor their comrades, because they are always aware, because they don’t let themselves be carried away by fuck-ups or rumors, because if they have problems they confront them, if they feel pain they cry, and if they are happy they laugh; because they know to live out a full life, though it will not therefore be peaceful—those are the true warriors; now in this war, there are many joyful occasions, but there are also moments of bitterness, because it is a war, not a passing phase, and to confront the system of domination utilizing these conclusions can carry disastrous consequences and we should know that beforehand, because an error, a small carelessness changes everything… Regarding my wounds, they have all healed; unfortunately, the marks will always remain, but I carry them with the same pride as my tattoos, because they are the best evidence that I am convinced in my ideals—how could I not be? I carried that bomb with dreams and hopes and those remain intact.”

“The important thing is to never lose the fighting spirit, never, no matter how terrible things look, but as long as your mind and your heart do not betray you, the rest becomes almost a detail. Our bodies can weaken, it is true. But what makes us great has nothing to do with flesh and bones, what makes us great is our convictions, our spirit, knowing that we are doing the right thing. The abyss does not stop us.”

Graffiti calling for Tortuga’s freedom while he was held in prison.

Some Words about Tortuga

I first met Tortuga when he was tabling at a D’linkir² show at a squat in Santiago. His was the only literature distro at the show—it was more of a drunk punk show than an underground anarchist occasion, but Tortuga loved neon, spikey, pinned up punk rockers. Seemingly contradictorily, he was also a die-hard teetotaler—though this totally made sense once you got to know the guy. That night, the most charming part of his literature table were the well-done, hand-drawn sharpied stickers for sale reading “Drug free: against all authority!” and “Self-determination begins with a drug free mind.” The stickers were all the more impressive once I saw Tortuga’s arms and hands.

In 2011, a bomb that Tortuga intended to place at a downtown bank exploded in his hands, resulting in his being hospitalized for a considerable period of time as well as losing one of his arms and much of his other hand. When I met him, Tortuga was using a prosthetic claw to produce those beautiful stickers.

I already knew who Tortuga was, but I didn’t know that the man at the literature table was the one whose letters I had read. Our anarchist podcast had reviewed a North American release of his collected prison letters from the time he did for the 2011 bomb case. Leaving the show, I commented to my friends “Damn, I had a great conversation with that dude at the literature table. We somehow went from 1920s propaganda by the deed to 1980s street punk.”

When they responded, “Oh yeah, Tortuga is great for that kind of thing,” my jaw dropped.

“Oh shit. That was Tortuga?”

“Yeah man, you didn’t see his claw?”

Some stickers made by Tortuga.

A few weeks later, I arranged to conduct an interview with Tortuga at the house he shared with his partner. We met up downtown and took a bus there. It was on the outskirts of the city, very much in the hood. Looking out the front window of the bus, we could see a visible cloud of tear gas wafting into the road just outside the Universidad de Santiago de Chile. As the bus passed in front of the University, police tanks moved into the road, halting traffic and stopping us directly within the tear gas cloud. We covered our mouths and noses while tearing up, looking at each other as conflicts erupted outside between rebellious students and the mercenaries of the state. He leaned over to me and said “Quite a way to start an interview, eh?”

Once at their house, I realized that they had turned all of the common areas into an anarchist social center with regular open hours: Biblioteca Sante Caserio. They even maintained a library with a system for checking out books. The two of them walked me through the house, showing me the infrastructure for events: the kitchen, the stolen university lunch trays, the stackable chairs, their prized projector.

I explained our podcast to him and showed him the script for the episode that included a review of his book.

“My book?”

“Yeah… you know… your book of prison letters?”

“Someone turned my prison letters into a book? Wait, people translated my prison letters into English?!”

He had no idea, but he was thrilled. I couldn’t start the interview for another forty-five minutes while Tortuga painstakingly google-translated our podcast’s book review into Spanish and read the whole thing.

On my next trip back to Chile, I brought him a copy of his book (generously gifted by someone who could not believe the story about him not knowing about the book’s existence) and started attending events at Biblioteca Sante Caserio. The crowd at the Sante Caserio events was young and extremely punk—think mohawks and animal print and spikes and colorful vegan leather. They were into insurrectionary anarchism, veganism, and being drug free. It was heartwarming to see these wild-looking youngsters earnestly debating the merits of different approaches to revolutionary struggle.

An announcement of an event at Biblioteca Sante Caserio.

Later, when I was living in Chile more permanently, I had more encounters with Tortuga. A vegan straightedge friend of mine had recently been released from prison after doing time for alleged thoughtcrime concerning animal liberation. His case had been controversial in anarchist circles. Whereas most anarchists in Chile assert a line of “neither innocent nor guilty—simply an enemy of the state” in response to cases of repression, this prisoner had defended his innocence from the state’s charges; some anarchists saw this as a small betrayal of those who proudly claim the actions for which they are sentenced. Upon this guy’s release, Tortuga asked me to pass on an offer to talk if he ever wanted to communicate with someone else who had done time for political charges. My friend was upset that I would even offer such a thing: their cases were different, their politics were different, their experiences of incarceration were different, and he didn’t need to be associating with known bomb-makers now that he was free.

A few months later, the two caught up with each other at a show. Afterwards, my friend reflected back to me, “Damn, I should have accepted that invitation sooner. We had a really good talk about drug-free vs. straightedge and what it’s like in prison. He was cool.”

Tortuga was great to talk to. He had a real enthusiasm, a vigor for life that was contagious. It was always enjoyable to be in his presence. He loved punk rock, loved chaos, and lived anarchy. I thought about him earlier this year when Aaron Bushnell self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy in protest of the genocide in Palestine. While honoring that the choice to use his life in that way was Aaron Bushnell’s alone, I couldn’t help but think of the wisdom Tortuga shared with me one afternoon in his home-turned-social center:

“We are far too valuable to be needlessly putting ourselves at risk. I think my most focused advice today would be, more than anything, that this comrade value herself, that she not feel like her life is just a material contribution to the struggle… that the struggle is for your whole life, it won’t change by waiting one more night.”

Now that Tortuga is dead, as the consequence of a work-related accident that could happen to anyone at any time, I’m almost tempted to draw the opposite conclusion: use your life as a weapon now before it is extinguished by the ever-present banal dangers of industrial capitalism and work.

In Chile, when an anarchist passes away in an attempt to attack capitalism, people try to throw down on the date of their death every year. The ways that people keep the memory of Mauricio Morales alive are just one example of this. I hope that people bring their best work to actions remembering Tortuga, considering that he survived his own bomb, continued to struggle with everything he had, and was killed by routine employment in our industrialized society.

I’m heartbroken that I won’t be able to see Tortuga’s bright smile once more when I return to Santiago. You will be missed, dear comrade.

Tortuga expressing his scorn of corporate media.

Reportedly, Tortuga was electrocuted in the neighborhood La Reina (state) clearing debris from a park named after one Padre Hurtado (church) while working for a company (capital). The holy trinity: they rule you, they fool you, they electrocute you. ↩
D’linkir was the punk band formed, in part, by Marcelo Villarroel—an urban guerrilla in the late 1980s and the Pinochet dictatorship’s youngest political prisoner, not to mention an alleged bank robber and a dedicated punk rocker. During Villarroel’s first bid in prison, he founded the Kamina Libre political prisoner collective, whose organizing behind bars exercised so much leverage against their jailers that the prison was forced to allow D’linkir to host shows with outside punk bands inside the prison. ↩

Three Classic CrimethInc. Books in Portuguese : Receitas para o Desastre, Espere Resistência, & Dias de Guerra, Noites de Amor

2024-01-23T20:49:14Z

Our comrades in Brazil have done new print runs of three of our books in Portuguese: Recipes for Disaster, Expect Resistance, and Days of War, Nights of Love.

Across three decades of activity, our books have appeared in many different languages—Work, for example, has appeared in German, Spanish, Russian, Serbo-Croat, Lithuanian, Korean, and Portuguese, most of which are available here. We offer material in a grand total of 43 different languages on this site. We believe that it is crucial to build bridges between people in different communities and different parts of the world, and to do so by working directly with native speakers rather than relying on automated translation software.

In addition to offering ongoing coverage of social struggles in Brazil, CrimethInc. cells in Brazil have already published various CrimethInc. books, newspapers, and zines in Portuguese, as well as organizing speaking tours in both South and North America. Now, to begin 2024, they have published new and improved versions of three of our best-known books in Portuguese.

These will be available at infoshops and book fairs across Brazil in the coming weeks. You can also purchase them online via the infoshop 1000contra, here:

Recipes for Disaster

Recipes for Disaster is a tactical handbook for direct action, extensively illustrated with technical diagrams and firsthand accounts. It combines decades of hard-won knowledge about everything from collective organizing and antifascist action to squatting, graffiti, and sabotage.

Days of War, Nights of Love

Your ticket to a world free of charge. The first book we published, Days of War, Nights of Love, is the perfect starting place for anyone seeking a life of passionate revolt. It is a visionary manifesto, a daring challenge to everything we take for granted, a riotous explosive experiment of a book.

Expect Resistance

A hybrid field manual and tragic novel, Expect Resistance picks up where Days of War, Nights of Love leaves off, extending the analysis and recounting the adventures of those who staked everything on their wildest dreams. An epic of personal secession and collective resistance.

In Memory of Klee Benally: An Interview with Blackfire

2024-01-03T12:42:39Z

Early on December 31, 2023, the Diné land defender, organizer, author, and musician Klee Benally passed away at the age of 48. In his memory, we present an interview that we conducted in 2009 with Klee and his siblings in the punk band Blackfire. At that time, they had already been making music together for twenty years.

A dedicated and demanding proponent of Indigenous liberation, Klee fought on a wide range of fronts, emphasizing the importance of both concrete and spiritual forms of resistance and critically exploring the possibility of an Indigenous anarchy.

As the eulogy published by Anarchist Agency recounts,

Klee was living in Flagstaff, Arizona at the time of his passing. He was born October 11, 1975 in Black Mesa and worked nearly all his life at the front lines of struggles to protect Indigenous sacred lands. Klee was a driven organizer with projects such as Indigenous Action Media, Kinlani Mutual Aid, and Indigenous Mutual Aid. He also helped establish Táala Hooghan Infoshop, Protect the Peaks, and Outta Your Backpack Media, and volunteered with Haul No.

Haul No is a campaign against Uranium mining in the Grand Canyon. Land defense struggles were especially important to Klee.

In addition to all this, Klee was a filmmaker and musician. You can view many of Klee’s films here. In addition to his decades in Blackfire, Klee also played in the band Appropriation and recorded various solo projects.

“Nothing for Ourselves” by Appropriation.

For a glimpse into Klee’s thinking, you could read the interview that Aragorn! conducted with him. It has only been a couple years now since Klee spoke at Aragorn!’s memorial service. It is a grievous tragedy that we have lost two Indigenous anarchists in such a short time, and both of them so young.

Please donate to Klee’s family, the Táala Hooghan infoshop, or Haul No! to honor his memory. You can do so here.

Another song by Klee Benally.

Detritus Books has published a book of Klee’s work, entitled No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred. The first printing has already sold out, but a second printing is in the works. Klee had also just designed and published the game Burn the Fort, receiving the copies in late December 2023.

You can learn more about Klee’s projects here. You can read the eulogy for him in the Navajo Times here.

We locate ourselves in the springs where our ancestor’s footprints have worn a path like an umbilical cord. We know the land and the land knows us. Where and who we are mean the same thing. This is an understanding that is cultivated through generations upon generations of mutuality. This is where our thinking comes from. It is a place where no government exists. Indigenous liberation is the realization of our autonomy and mutuality with all life and the Earth, free from domination, coercion, and exploitation. This is also an anarchist assertion, so we locate a connection.

-Klee Benally, Unknowable: Against an Indigenous Anarchist Theory

Klee Benally answering interview questions from The Elements of Mutual Aid on August 14, 2022.

Interview: Blackfire

This interview originally appeared in issue number 7 of Rolling Thunder, in spring 2009.

Who is Blackfire? When and how did you start?

Jeneda: Blackfire is a family. We didn’t start playing music with the intention of starting a band. My brothers and I always played together when we were young; it didn’t matter if we were making movies or organizing the neighborhood kids into a ninja camp. We are close in age, so we always did everything together. While growing up, we all gravitated towards different instruments, luckily! Otherwise, who knows—we might have all been kazoo players.

Where are you from?

Jeneda: We are originally from Black Mesa, Arizona on the Dine’ (Navajo) Reservation. Many people have heard about the ongoing land and cultural survival struggles that our relatives are still facing. We grew up protesting a nearby coal mine called Peabody Coal that was depleting our precious aquifer. The coal slurry line also dried up the sole source of water in our high desert homeland.

Klee: Peabody Coal Company has been strip mining a large part of Black Mesa for decades. Our family has been directly impacted by “United $tates” policies of forced relocation that result from efforts to further exploit the resources beneath the land there. Many people have heard of the struggle at Big Mountain, which really is a larger area from which more than 14,000 of our people have been forcibly relocated and where some are still resisting. When we first started our band in 1989, our songs were about this issue. Our name, Blackfire, comes from the burning of the coal from Black Mesa; it also comes from one of our warrior society’s smoke signals, meaning “the enemy is near.”

The San Francisco Peaks in Northern Arizona—including the mountain that the Navajo honor by the name Dook’o’oosłííd—are sacred to thirteen Tribes and culturally significant to twenty-two.

You also perform as the Jones Benally Family; can you explain that as well?

Jeneda: We are the Jones Benally Family. Our father, Jones Benally, has traveled throughout the world many times to educate people about our Dine’ (Navajo) culture. My brothers and I have been educating people since we were still in diapers. Many of the dances that we perform have been carried on since the beginning of time. Some of the dances we share are parts of ceremonies that are allowed to be seen by the public. We feel that it is important to educate people about our ancient living culture. We are not going to share everything, but we do want to educate people so we can build understanding and respect among different cultures and communities.

I’ve heard you describe yourselves as an independent band. Why is this important?

Klee: We don’t answer to anyone but ourselves when it comes to the music we make. We book our own tours, design our own albums and website, produce our own videos, print our own shirts. When we can’t do it all or don’t have the time, we work with folks we know. This enables us, as artists, to express ourselves in the ways we want. This is in contrast to mainstream music production where bands become businesses that are controlled by large or small corporations. It’s no secret that the record industry is based on the exploitation of artists and listeners; that’s why we, like so many other groups out there, are trying something different. Some bands say, “We’re signing to a label to reach a wider audience with our political message.” I’ve yet to see that be effective on any tangible basis towards the social transformation that our communities really need. We’re not building community that way, we’re just building our own capabilities on the terms of an industry that’s still based on exploitation.

What are some of your motivations and goals as a band?

Clayson: Blackfire has always been a tool to address the issues that face our communities. When we started, our message was directed at our peers on the Navajo reservation. We could see the impact of assimilation—the degradation of our culture, the hopelessness that remains when all has been taken from you. By addressing the root causes of the symptoms that afflict us, we see our music as an element of the healing process. It’s not so much a goal, but a need! This is what keeps us moving forward.

Politically, how do you define yourselves as a band and as individuals?

Klee: I think each of us has our own self-identification. You could say as a band we are Dine’ traditionalists seeking balance in the contradictions of our times. We believe in the natural law and we are struggling to maintain our cultural identities in this modern world. In this way, politics define us. We actively stand against the destruction of Mother Earth, racism, sexism and sexist oppression, homophobia, ageism, and fascism. We’re into whatever is effective towards those goals; sometimes we’ll urge people to vote and support a Democratic candidate for Congress, other times we will be organizing or demonstrating and rejecting any perceived authority established by the so-called United $tates. Current political labels don’t encompass our traditionalist views—some may say we act more like anarchists.

Clayson: Dine’ translates to “the people.” This is who I am and how I relate to the world. Many people have lost their identity, and thus they have no cultural foundation from which to relate to the rest of the world and its indigenous inhabitants. Only seeing differences in a fear-based society can lead to the dangers of intolerance.

Blackfire.

How have your family and larger community shaped your politics and worldview?

Klee: When you grow up seeing your family members face forced relocation, arrests, constant racism, health effects from uranium mining, and so on, you don’t have many options. We were practically raised at meetings and protests, but we were also raised traditionally. Our father is a traditional medicine practitioner, so we’ve grown up with that as our foundation as well. Hozho’, or the Beauty Way, is the basis of our identity as Dine’. This would take too much time to explain, but ultimately it establishes your relation to all life and Mother Earth.

Do you believe punk music and the punk subculture can be a force for change?

Klee: The reason we got into punk-style music was because of the high energy and social-political expression. From bands like Dead Kennedys to Subhumans there was a unique aggressive quality of resistance to the same dominant culture that we are in conflict with. So in certain respects punk music has changed us and many young people on our reservation. But just because bands are punk, or a person is punk, doesn’t mean they have a social-political agenda. I do think, though, that individuals find political affinity through punk music more than any other style today. It also depends on what kind of change we’re talking about here. If it’s some kid from the suburbs who gets connected to a conscious band, and that leads to her getting involved in community organizing, that’s a force of social change, but it’s limited. This is because the US punk subculture is limited to scenes and is patently white and middle class. You can see how organizing efforts reflect the ways that folks compartmentalize themselves in these scenes—but I’ve also seen strong squatter punk groups that effectively organize against fascists and build bridges to other groups in their community.

What roles have you seen punk music and subculture play in social movements in the US over the last ten years?

Clayson: Joey Ramone, the godfather of punk, once told me that the Sex Pistols cast a negative image on the ideals of punk. He felt that the energy of punk was something that everyone could relate to and that it was a liberating process in the evolution of music. I’ve seen punk in its purest form when it’s confronting oppressive systems in communities throughout the world. But here in the states punk has been devalued to nothing more than another way to sell a product.

Klee: The inevitable commercialization of punk has come and gone and come and gone again, but the anarcho-punk scene seems to have really defined itself as more actively oriented. As far as their role in social movements, I can only speak to my experience as an Indigenous organizer, and their role has yet to be seen. We see a lot of attention given to direct action and anti-globalization actions but not really to our Indigenous struggles. While we’re organizing our communities to protect the environment and our cultural survival, we don’t see much support unless there’s some “exciting” action element. I feel that the way some folks celebrate and promote the “exciting” actions undermines the constant hard work that needs to happen to sustain movements to build healthy communities. It’s the same anywhere; lots of people show up for the party, and a few are left doing all the work. Sure we need to celebrate, but we need to sustain as well.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, did you address the elections when you performed? What are your thoughts on the 2008 election in general, and specifically what do you think about the election of Barack Obama?

Klee: We organized in the Dine’ (Navajo) Nation a lot around the 2004 elections. We did two outreach tours, one for registering people to vote and one to remind people to get to the polls. We also did a short documentary on our reservation addressing voter apathy. We were trying to communicate that when we are being negatively impacted by political decisions, we have an imperative to find out how we can affect those decisions. We didn’t really do any outreach for this election, I think mainly because we were touring Europe and wanted to put more energy and resources into organizing around issues in our community.

Sure, voting is validating the system that is oppressing us, but until someone can step forward and offer another tool to give some relief from the energy policies that target our lands, I’m going to do pretty much whatever I can. The 2008 elections were an absurd political circus that displayed how ignorant the mainstream media is about racial and gender issues, and the most costly exercise of social control parading as democracy in US history. For that reason, I chose to abstain from voting in this election.

Obama is another political tool of a nation where racism is systemic. Of course it is historic to have a Black man sit in an office that was designed and reserved for rich white men. If Obama getting into office will be a means to deconstructing white privilege, than I’m all for it, but I don’t think that’s going to be the case—he may just be a tool to validate it. While I think the image of a Black man in the White House could demonstrate the transformation this country needs, it’s hard to say that it’s as meaningful as it could be in relation to matters of abolishing white privilege. The power structure that is screwing us over will now have a black face instead of a white one; it complicates matters a bit but doesn’t change the situation.

Describe the social movements you’ve observed in the course of your travels.

Klee: Everywhere we go we connect with inspiring individuals or communities that are taking action. In Mali, Africa our friends in the Tuareg band Tinariwen started their group within a rebellion. We went to their land twice and saw how the US military is attempting to move into their lands to secure access to natural resources. Today, Tuareg people are being killed in Mali and other areas due to efforts to mine uranium in their lands. In Europe, the anarchist scenes comprise a movement defined by resistance to corporate globalization. It appears similar to the dynamics in the US, where folks will rage against the G8, WTO, IMF, or World Bank in force, seeming to be more present for protest than sustaining a process of organized resistance. It was very interesting playing in Belgrade, Serbia; we actually played there twice, but the first time everyone we knew said, “Don’t go there; they’re all just neo-Nazis.” But when we went and played it was powerful. Folks were sharing stories of how they creatively organized against [Former President of Serbia Slobodan] Milošević and faced severe punishment for it. They talked about how they would throw parties on rooftops while NATO was bombing them ‘cause they were tired of living in fear. In Mexico we’ve been encouraged by the visibility of Indigenous people’s resistance and meaningful support for their struggles for self-determination. I think that non-Indigenous folks there have a better sense of how Indigenous people’s resistances are related to their own personal struggles as well. No matter where we go, though, we see the increased criminalization of dissent.

Jeneda and Clayson, both of you recently had children, and you now travel with them. How has this affected your experience of touring and playing in a band?

Jeneda: I feel like I could write a book on this topic. I love being able to share my work with my daughter. I am so blessed that she also enjoys the adventure life. Since becoming a mother my entire being is enriched with compassion, patience, and absolute love. Of course, when children grow up with a particular lifestyle, like touring, they learn to be adaptable. My daughter has rock and roll hours and enjoys sleeping in. She is not yet school age, so we will see how it all changes when she’s older.

Clayson: I also have a baby girl, and of course she travels with us when she can. It’s the best way to experience life. I grew up on the road sharing and learning. This is one of the best educations that life offers.

Jeneda Benally of Blackfire.

Talk about the work you do outside of the band: what are some of your other projects?

Klee: We all are part of the Save the Peaks Coalition which was formed to stop a small ski business from desecrating an Arizona mountain held holy by more than thirteen Indigenous Nations. I founded and am a coordinator for a non-profit media justice group called Indigenous Action Media which produces documentaries on Indigenous issues and does consultation and support for grassroots campaigns in Indigenous communities, including graphic design and website development for Indigenous organizations. We also have a project called Outta Your Backpack Media where we hold workshops and empower young people to make their own media. I also helped establish and now volunteer with Taala Hooghan, an Indigenous-established/oriented infoshop and youth media arts center in Flagstaff, Arizona.

What is “Peak’s Song” about?

Jeneda: “Peak’s Song” is about protecting the holy San Francisco Peaks. The San Francisco Peaks are located in Northern Arizona and are holy to 13 Tribes and culturally significant to 22 Tribes. This holy place is managed by the Forest Service, which presently leases a portion of the mountain to a ski resort. This ski resort wants to make snow out of reclaimed wastewater. Not only would this be an environmental catastrophe in the making, it would also be an extreme desecration to our holy place, an act of cultural genocide.

Klee: Right now the Save the Peaks Coalition is awaiting a decision by the Supreme Court on whether it will hear the case or not. Whether the Court will hear the case and do the right thing is uncertain, especially considering history. While we are forced to take our fight to the courts, we also urge everyone to join us wherever they can in the struggle for self-determination and the protection of our Mother Earth.

The song ends with a chant, “Protect Sacred Sites, Defend Human Rights,” and mentions many different land struggles through out the United States.

Jeneda: Hopefully people will recognize that a mountain or natural place can be just as holy as a Catholic or Christian church. I hope people will remember that there were and still are civilizations that hold natural places holy—that we are still practicing our ancient ways and we need these places intact to continue these ancient living practices that are essential to cultural survival.

Klee: Wherever there is an environmental crisis, there is a cultural crisis, because we are part of the earth. We don’t have guaranteed protection for our religious freedom in the US as Indigenous peoples. Hundreds of sacred sites are either being desecrated or face the threat of desecration right now and we have no legal mechanism to stop this. The struggle to protect these sacred places is the struggle for our cultural survival.

At best, what effect do you hope to have on those who hear your songs?

Jeneda: I hope that people become inspired not only to understand their connections to these struggles, but also understand their own indigenous connection, perhaps even learn about their own heritage. The basis of all indigenous teaching is about respect and our delicate balance with Mother Nature. All of our songs are about different issues that we see and experience… to open someone’s mind and heart so they might want to make positive change in their own community, that’s what I hope our music will inspire.

Is there anything else you would like to add, in closing?

Klee: Solidarity Means Action.

Jeneda: If you see injustice in your community, speak out about it. Do what you can in what time you have to create healthy and respectful communities. Remember that we all have the power to make a difference in the world and in people’s lives with the decisions that we make and the actions that we take.

When we originally published this interview, we included this list of Indigenous struggles, which offers a snapshot of that time.

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.

Introducing "Ink Lite" for Zine Printing : For When You Need to Make a Little Toner Go a Long Way

2023-09-15T05:43:54Z

We’ve introduced a new option for printing our zines in case you need to go easy on the toner.

When you’re printing zines, do you pay for toner? We certainly didn’t, back in the day. But times change, and means of photocopying come and go. The one thing that doesn’t change is the necessity to mass-produce and distribute zines by the thousand.

It has come to our attention that some of our zine designs burn through toner at an alarming pace. This could be an obstacle for those who are paying for toner themselves. What possesses a designer to fill a zine layout with vast swathes of pitch black? Probably, among other things, never having to be the one responsible for acquiring toner cartridges. Nice work if you can get it!

Fortunately, as often happens, one industrious CrimethInc. agent had already solved this problem autonomously, preparing her own toner-lite versions of nearly three dozen of our zines. It only remained for us to make her solution accessible to everyone else.

So we’ve added a new feature to the zine library on this site: Ink Lite. If you select this option when you are downloading a zine, it will take you to a version of the design that is modified to save ink.

Don’t sleep on our zine library! It includes 126 different titles—something for everyone. We’ve recently added the zine version of our classic Civilian’s Guide to Direct Action, which has existed since 2017 but somehow never made its way into the collection until now. We’ve also added a zine version of our coverage of the RICO charges in Atlanta.

Ink Lite is not to be confused with the lite version of our site, which you can use if you don’t have a lot of internet bandwidth at your disposal and need to load this website without images. You can find the option to switch to the lite version at the very bottom of every page on the site, or just navigate directly to lite.crimethinc.com.

The good old days, when pirating copies was a collective activity and you never paid for toner.

Some of the Zines We Offer in “Ink Lite”

Out of the box, we have almost four dozen titles ready!

A Hell of a Mistress, the Beautiful Idea—An Interview with Aragorn!
Accounting for Ourselves—Breaking the Impasse Around Assault and Abuse in Anarchist Scenes
Against the Logic of the Guillotine—Why the Paris Commune Burned the Guillotine—and We Should Too
The Anarchists versus the Plague—Malatesta and the Cholera Epidemic of 1884
Anarchy & Alcohol—Wasted Indeed, How the Fiends Came to be Civilized, et al
Atlanta Police and Georgia State Patrol Are Guilty of Murder—The Evidence and the Motive
Balance Sheet: Two Years against Cop City—Evaluating Strategies, Refining Tactics
Beneath the Concrete, the Forest—Accounts from the Defense of the Atlanta Forest
Blinding the Cyclops, Wrecking the Panopticon—Camera Hunting in the Metropolis
The City in the Forest—Reinventing Resistance for an Age of Climate Crisis and Police Militarization
A Demonstrator’s Guide to Responding to Gunshot Wounds
Doxcare—Notes on Prevention and Aftercare for Those Targeted by Doxxing or Political Harassment
Emmanuel Barthélemy—Proletarian Fighter, Blanquist Conspirator, Survivor of the Galleys, Veteran of the Uprisings of 1848, Fugitive, Duelist, Ruffian, &—Very Nearly—Assassin of Karl Marx
Ferguson and Beyond—Fighting the Police and White Supremacy
A Field Guide to Wheatpasting
Fighting For Our Lives—An Anarchist Primer
Fuck Abuse, Kill Power—Addressing the Root Causes of Sexual Harassment and Assault
Gaetano Bresci—Tyrannicide and Defender of the People
How To Form an Affinity Group—Essential Building Blocks of Anarchist Organization
How to Throw a Squatted Dance Party
How to Survive a Felony Trial—Keeping Your Head up through the Worst of It
I Was a J20 Street Medic and Defendant—How We Survived the First J20 Trial and What We Learned along the Way
Living in an Earthquake—The Fight Against Cop City Confronts Unprecedented Repression
Punk—Dangerous Utopia—Revisiting the Relationship between Punk and Anarchism
Russia: Anarchists against the Invasion of Ukraine
The Secret World of Duvbo
Self as Other—Reflections on Self-Care
Seven Myths about the Police
The Siege of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis—An Account and Analysis
Surviving a Pandemic—Tools for Addressing Isolation, Anxiety, and Grief
Surviving the Virus—Global Pandemic, Capitalism in Crisis, Rising Totalitarianism, Strategies of Resistance
The Art of Politics—A Primer for Community Self-Defense
The Fight for Gender Self-Determination—Confronting the Assault on Trans People
The Forest in the City—Two Years of Forest Defense in Atlanta, Georgia
The May Days—Stories of Courage and Resistance
The Secret World of Terijian—A Children’s Story about the Magical World in Your Own Backyard
There’s No Such Thing as Revolutionary Government—Why You Can’t Use the State to Abolish Class
This is Anarchy—Eight Ways the Black Lives Matter and Justice for George Floyd Uprisings Reflect Anarchist Ideas in Action
Ukraine: Background on the Russian Invasion
Understanding the RICO Charges in Atlanta—A Sweeping Indictment Seeks to Criminalize Protest Itself
The Uprising in Kazakhstan—An Interview and Appraisal
We Are All Very Anxious—Six Theses on Anxiety and Why It is Effectively Preventing Militancy, and One Possible Strategy for Overcoming It
What Will It Take to Stop the Police from Killing?
Exercise: What Would an Anarchist Program Look Like?
Why We Don’t Make Demands
WR: Mysteries of the Organism—Beyond the Liberation of Desire

Now get out there and distribute zines!

Atlanta Police and Prosecutors Target Legal Support Activists

2023-05-31T18:23:20Z

Seeking to protect their cash cow, Cop City, Atlanta police have arrested three legal support organizers connected to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund and charged them with “money laundering” and “charity fraud.” This comes less than a week before Atlanta City Council will decide on whether or not to allocate additional millions of taxpayer dollars to fund Cop City.

This move marks a new low for Atlanta police and prosecutors in their descent into totalitarian tactics. Since December, in addition to murdering one protester, they have pressed trumped-up domestic terrorism charges against practically every defendant they have arrested. Now, in order to ensure that defendants in the movement to protect the forest in Atlanta cannot get proper legal defense, they are attacking activists who help to raise bail and provide legal support.

There are no well-known precedents for pressing such charges against those who raise money for bail funds and legal defense. If this effort succeeds, it could have far-reaching implications for a wide range of forms of activism and solidarity around the United States.

https://twitter.com/atlanta_press/status/1663907536813031432

Reviewing other instances of trumped-up charges will show why defending legal support organizers is so important.

The J20 case is one of the most well-known recent examples. Emboldened by Donald Trump’s election, far-right prosecutors charged hundreds of people arrested at random at Trump’s inauguration with eight identical felonies, including two charges that did not even exist, legally speaking. Ultimately, all of those who went to trial were declared innocent and prosecutors were forced to drop the charges against over a hundred defendants, while a judge threw out the rest of them. But if those who coordinated legal support for those arrestees had themselves been targeted with trumped-up charges, it might have ended differently.

This is why Atlanta police and prosecutors want the arrestees in the movement to defend Weelaunee Forest to be defenseless against their blatant miscarriage of justice. Police and prosecutors know that, unless they cut off the support systems that protect activists, their strategy of pressing blanket domestic terrorism charges against everyone will likely fail.

Since February, prosecutors in Atlanta have been threatening to indict activists on Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) charges. Although they have not done so, yet, the “money laundering” and “charity fraud” charges are either a substitute for those or a step towards a larger RICO case.

There are precedents for frivolous RICO charges, as well.

Corporations and police have repeatedly used RICO charges to intimidate perceived adversaries. For example, from 2016 to 2019, Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the Dakota Access pipeline, brought RICO charges against the well-known nonprofit organization Greenpeace. Greenpeace ultimately succeeded in quashing these absurd charges.

It’s worth reading the verbiage of the original charges against Greenpeace in full, as it shows how lawyers and PR firms serving the interests of corporations and police will misrepresent even the most milquetoast nonprofit organizations as criminal cartels.

For example, the original criminal complaint against Greenpeace alleges that:

Over several decades, certain once legitimate not-for-profit groups have been corrupted by money raised from individuals and a network of foundations and special interests willing to “contribute” to advance their own political or business agendas. More recently, many smaller, more violent eco-terrorist organizations and radicalized individuals have begun exploiting the same lucrative business model using the proliferation of web-based fundraising tools to make money, much of which is diverted for personal gain and not used to further any environmental cause.

In its simplest form, this model has two components: (1) manufacturing a media spectacle based upon phony but emotionally charged hot-button issues, sensational lies, and intentionally incited physical violence, property destruction, and other criminal conduct; and (2) relentlessly publicizing these sensational lies, manufactured conflict and conflagration, and misrepresented “causes” to generate funding from individual donors, foundations, and corporate sponsors. These putative “environmental” groups accept grants and other consideration from foundations and special business interests who use the groups’ environmental mantle to advance their own ulterior agendas.

The market leader among purported international not-for-profits is a network called “Greenpeace.” The Greenpeace network has fraudulently induced people throughout the United States and the world into donating millions of dollars based on materially false and misleading claims about its misrepresented environmental purpose and the sham “campaigns” it mounts against targeted companies, projects, or causes.

Anyone who is familiar with the actual track record of Greenpeace—a legalistic nonprofit—will recognize how preposterous these allegations are. One could certainly accuse Greenpeace of directing funds away from more effective uses in the struggle against ecological devastation, but the idea that they might do so illegally is laughable. Likewise, if anyone is making “materially false and misleading claims,” it is the corporations and government institutions seeking to inflict damage on the natural environment for the sake of profiteering and police militarization—not environmental activists.

Despite the considerable financial power and state support of the corporation that brought these charges, the courts were compelled to conclude the matter in favor of Greenpeace. When we see police and prosecutors use similar language to misrepresent the defendants in Atlanta, we should bear in mind how readily they employ such smear campaigns.

Just like the charges against the J20 defendants and the RICO charges against Greenpeace, the charges against the three legal support organizers in Atlanta are hasty and poorly thought-out attempts to bully activists. To begin with the pettiest indication of this, the warrants for the three arrestees contain multiple typographical errors:

RECORDS AND REPORTS OF CERTAIN CURRENCY TRANSACTIONS

FRAUDULENT, MISREPRESESNTING [sic], OR MISLEADING ACTIVITIES REGARDING CHARITABLE SOLITATIONS [sic] PER 43-17-12

More significantly, the affidavit (which a careless judge seems to have dated “May 25, 2024”) alleges that the arrestees used funds for “various expenses such as gasoline, forest clean-up, totes, covid rapid tests, media, yard signs, and other miscellaneous expenses.” If this is their grounds for “money laundering” and “charity fraud,” this case is no stronger than the case against Greenpeace was.

However frivolous these charges are, they might still stick unless people around the United States mobilize in solidarity with the defendants. The authorities in Atlanta and the Republicans who govern Georgia are attempting to legitimize totalitarian tactics for suppressing social movements. If we let them succeed, they will not stop until they have crushed protest movements of all kinds, even those as innocuous as Greenpeace.

All around the world—from Russia to Turkey, from Hungary to the United States—authoritarianism is on the rise. In some places, this is taking place under the flags of nationalism and fascism; elsewhere, as in Atlanta and New York City, Democrat politicians are the ones channeling more resources to murderous police and attempting to set new precedents for repression. It’s up to us to stop them.

The National Bail Fund Network is collecting donations for the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. You can donate to them here.

Supporters of the arrestees will mobilize in protest at the DeKalb County Jail at 6:30 pm today (May 31). Another Week of Action against Cop City will occur in Atlanta June 24-July 1.

We Remember Jen Angel : A Eulogy

2023-02-10T17:09:52Z

We mourn the passing of Jen Angel, a tenacious anarchist organizer whose efforts spanned the better part of four decades. Below, we’ll review some of Jen’s many contributions over the years and share some memories from those who love her.

You can donate to a memorial fund for Jen here. You can read a selection of her writing here. Justseeds has published another tribue to Jen here.

We were fortunate to know Jen. Her generosity and exuberance inspired us and we worked together in a variety of ways.

Like many of us, Jen got her start in do-it-yourself print media and counterculture at an early age, before the internet brought digital connectivity to the average North American household. Her career extended from the high point of the do-it-yourself counterculture through the turn-of-the-century movement against capitalist globalization to the Occupy movement, the Trump era, and the George Floyd uprising.

Jen had an ampersand tattooed on her wrist. You could say that this represented her approach to organizing, taking on responsibilities, and addressing differences and conflict in her community: “Yes, and.”

She was a dependable friend, affectionate and curious, who brought an even keel and considerable stamina to her projects along with an unpretentious Midwestern demeanor. She dedicated herself to a wide range of collective undertakings, providing thankless behind-the-scenes work and offering the kind of warm-hearted hospitality that enables people to put down roots together.

The penultimate issue of the zine Jen started as a teenager, Fucktooth.

In high school, Jen started out as a classical musician. Although the punk scene was to play a central role in her life story, this was the closest she got to playing in a band.

“I played the bassoon. Nobody would let me in their punk band.”

-Jen Angel

“I learned a lot from punk,” Jen later explained in an interview: “to assert myself, to express my opinion… those are all important things, things that are also inherent in independent media. Independent media outlets like Clamor allow regular, everyday people, not experts, to get their opinion out in the world.”

Starting in her mid-teens in 1991, Jen published the zine Fucktooth. Like many of us, she cut her teeth as an author and organizer by bringing out a publication of her own, learning by doing. This was how she developed the skills that she later put at the disposal of an array of social movements.

As a teenager, Jen also explored non-monogamous relationship models, at a time when non-monogamy was unthinkable for many people of her generation, especially in the Midwest, where she grew up. She was at the cutting edge of a variety of experiments that later spread far and wide.

Jen became involved with punk infrastructure where she lived in Columbus, Ohio, including the notorious Legion of Doom punk house and Columbus More Than Music Fest. In 1996, she participated in the Active Resistance gathering in Chicago, providing a counterpoint to the Democratic National Convention. Active Resistance was an important forerunner of subsequent anarchist convergences such as the mobilizations in Seattle during the protests against the 1999 World Trade Organization summit and, later, in response to the 2000, 2004, and 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

That same year, Jen got involved with publishing the Zine Yearbook, drawing on her experience in do-it-yourself publishing to collect the best of the underground press. The Zine Yearbook appeared annually from 1996 until 2004.

The third Zine Yearbook.

At the invitation of Tim Yohannan—longtime editor of Maximum Rock’n’Roll, arguably the most influential do-it-yourself punk magazine—Jen moved to the Bay Area in 1997 to help coordinate MRR. At the time, the magazine had a monthly circulation of 14,000 copies. As Jen put it, “I’ve been doing zines for a really long time and Maximum is the biggest zine there is.”

You can read a lively and entertaining interview with Tim and Jen here, and another interview with Jen from that era here.

During this stint in the Bay Area, Jen worked at Punks with Presses, another classic punk institution of that time. But Tim died of cancer in April 1998, and Jen was forced out of her position at Maximum Rock’n’Roll shortly thereafter.

Jen published the 24th and final issue of her first zine, Fucktooth, in 1999. In the intervening years, the punk underground and the zine culture it helped sustain had developed into a massive global network interwoven with other movements worldwide. This culminated in riotous demonstrations against the 1999 summit of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, confirming the arrival of a new global era of protest. Jen moved back to Ohio, where her partner Jason Kucsma was attending Bowling Green State University, and the two founded a new magazine together, Clamor. The first issue appeared in early 2000, including—like every like-minded publication of that time—breathless accounts from the WTO demonstrations.

Jen and Jason working on Clamor.

Jen helped to organize the annual Underground Publishing Conference in Bowling Green, initially founded as the “Midwest Zine Conference” in 1999 and later rebranded as the Allied Media Conference, which continues to this day in Detroit. Jen and Jason moved to Toledo in 2002, where they continued working ceaselessly on Clamor.

Ultimately, Jen and Jason published 38 issues of the magazine. When their distributor went under, Clamor collapsed; the last issue came out in fall 2006. Jen’s romantic relationship with Jason came to an end, as well, illustrating the risks for activists who afford themselves no breathing room between their relationships and their projects. You can read all the issues of Clamor on their website.

Clamor magazine.

With the end of Clamor, Jen shifted her attention to organizing publicity for authors. This developed into the collective Aid & Abet, through which she worked with David Graeber, Jacob Conroy of the SHAC 7 and Will Potter of Green Is the New Red, Margaret Killjoy, Frank López of SubMedia, scott crow of Common Ground, and many other authors, filmmakers, and organizers over the next several years.

Jen moved back to the Bay Area in 2006, fostering a community through collective dinners and other traditional punk and Midwestern forms of conviviality. Though many radicals who experiment with alternative family structures withdraw to nuclear families later in life, Jen continued to invest her energy in living collectively and nourishing a dense network of polyamorous relationships; these remained important to Jen throughout her adulthood. At that time, the Bay Area was rapidly gentrifying, but it remained an epicenter of radical activity, including the movement responding to the murder of Oscar Grant in 2008 and Occupy Oakland in 2011.

In addition to public organizing, Jen made her home into a space of encounter drawing together people of a variety of interests and walks of life. For example, when we published After the Crest, reflecting on the waning phase of the Occupy movement, dozens of the fiercest participants in the Oakland Commune crowded into her living room to discuss it. Years later, during the To Change Everything tour in the United States, participants in the tour got to inspect an early version of the game Bloc by Bloc at a salon Jen hosted.

Revolutionary potential blossoms when people give it space and resources the way that Jen did.

Jen became a core organizer of the Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair, the longest-running anarchist book fair in the United States. Behind the scenes, she helped several radical projects to balance their books, aiming to protect them from the fate that had befallen Clamor. From 2013-2014, she helped organize the Bay Area Radical History Project, a series of presentations focusing on Bay Area activism over the preceding three decades, seeking to connect the wave of people who became involved in radical politics through the Occupy movement with veteran activists from earlier movements.

In October 2014, she joined Ryan Only in debuting Anarchist Agency, a project dedicated to interfacing between anarchists and mass media.

The goal is to raise awareness of anarchism as a whole, and we are completely prepared to do promote diverse (and contradictory) parts of anarchism as long as the ideas, groups, and individuals we are working with identify publicly as anarchists and share our core beliefs…

This is not an attempt to water down or make palatable the more militant parts of anarchism or of the community. Some anarchists run child-care programs and some anarchists smash windows and engage in sabotage. Sometimes the same individuals do both things.

Helping anarchists be more transparent about what they are doing and why, and with what goals, will make anarchist ideas more accessible in hopes of allowing more folks to understand that a different world is possible.

-Jen Angel

With considerable support from the community that she cultivated around her, Jen also got her cupcake business off the ground and sustained it through a series of challenges. This ensured that she could make decisions in her activism on the basis of her values rather than financial pressures, even as life in the gentrifying Bay Area became nearly untenable.

Organizing involves ceaseless challenges and, often, a tremendous amount of heartache. Despite decades of stress, disappointment, and grueling unpaid labor, Jen continued forward cheerfully. She helped to make the 2022 Bay Area Book Fair a success and was involved in the organizing for the 2023 Book Fair at the time of her passing.

Reviewing Jen’s life, it’s easy to be reminded of Aragorn!, another Midwesterner who grew up making zines in the do-it-yourself punk scene, moved to the Bay Area, worked on Maximum Rock’n’Roll, and distinguished himself as a publisher and a fixture in the anarchist milieu. During Occupy Oakland and its aftermath, Jen and Aragorn! lived only a few blocks apart in Berkeley.

It has been almost exactly three years now since Aragorn!’s untimely passing—three years that have seen such a spate of tragedies that it’s hard not to feel desensitized. But the losses of Aragorn! and Jen are linked, for both erode our access to the generation of anarchists who emerged from the crucible of the 1990s.

In attitude and approach, the two could not be more different. While Aragorn! pursued confrontational critique almost as an end in itself, Jen focused on logistics nearly to the exclusion of ideology. Coming out of the motley crowds of the punk scene and the heady optimism of the Seattle WTO protests, Jen took for granted that theoretical cohesion was not as important as openness and inclusivity. While Aragorn! wrongly interpreted Jen as an appendage of his perceived rivals at AK and PM Press, Jen couldn’t see what there was to gain from sectarian debate—even when there were real strategic differences at stake.

The important thing to understand is that Jen’s and Aragorn!’s approaches to anarchism evolved in continuous response to each other over a period of decades. Each sought to correct the shortcomings of the other’s strategy. Consequently, although neither would acknowledge it—or rather, precisely for that reason—their efforts add up to a complementary whole. Those who wish to learn from one of them must also understand the other.

The credits for the June 1997 issue of Maximum Rock’n’Roll, listing the names of both Aragorn! and Jen Angel—but as far apart as possible.

“There’s this misconception that anarchism means chaos. But the term means ‘without rulers.’ We don’t expect people to organize for us. We organize for ourselves.”

-Jen Angel

Jen’s untimely passing is a senseless tragedy. She lost her life as the consequence of an apparent robbery attempt. As her loved ones emphasized, she would be furious if anyone were to use this as an excuse to justify more police violence:

Jen’s family and friends ask that stories referencing Jen’s life do not use her legacy of care and community to further inflame narratives of fear, hatred, and vengeance. We do not support putting public resources into policing, incarceration, or other state violence that perpetuates the cycle of violence that resulted in this tragedy.

Anyone who has spent time in the Bay Area over the past decade knows that one of the primary forces driving violence in the East Bay is the skyrocketing cost of living. The real estate profiteers who have heartlessly filled the streets of Oakland with desperate evictees and the politicians who have funneled money into the pockets of the police with no concern for the processes that are immiserating millions bear the lion’s share of responsibility for the risks that Bay Area residents face today.

Jen spent her life working to create a world in which everyone would have access to the food, shelter, medical care, and community that they need—a world in which there would be no incentives for anyone to do harm to others for the sake of material gain. No amount of violence from police, courts, or prisons could bring us an inch closer to such a world. We owe it to her to continue her efforts to abolish capitalism, the state, patriarchy, white supremacy, and all the other forms of hierarchy that contribute to violence and precarity in our communities. To the extent to which we make progress towards those goals, the world will be a safer place for everyone.

Nothing we can do will bring Jen back, but we can honor her life and her unflagging commitment to social change by taking up the torch she passed to us.

“The core tenets of anarchism are autonomy, mutual aid, voluntary association, and direct action. These are all positive things.”

-Jen Angel

Jen and Jason in the Clamor days.

How I Remember Jen

I’m a teenager at our local infoshop. I overhear two of the volunteers debating the value of a new magazine, Clamor.

“I think it’s trying to be too accessible,” says one.

“Yeah, but it’s Jen Angel’s magazine. You know why she has that name right? Because she really is an angel.”

Accessible is a four-letter word to me, because I like punk rock. But, somehow, because I like punk rock, I’m also drawn to four-letter words and to that which is disparaged. Plus the magazine is for sale at our infoshop, and our infoshop is cool. So I pick up a copy. OK, I think to myself, it’s not dripping with sweat and slobber the way Slug and Lettuce or Profane Existence are, but the articles are provocative.

It’s good. Because when Jen did things, she did them well.

I’m in my twenties. My best friend from that infoshop invites me to launch an anarchist communications collective with him and Jen Angel. I remember that name.

“Clamor, right?”

“Yeah, she’s got her shit together.”

She did. They both did, but I didn’t. After a few years, I fell out of the project, but I remained friends with Jen.

I’m in the Bay Area and I need somewhere to crash for a couple nights. Last time Jen was in my town, on a speaking tour with a recently released political prisoner, she offered “Next time you’re in the Bay and need somewhere to crash…”

I hit her up and I get to sleep in a padded and mirrored room next to hers. She has always been kind to me, grounded, has had her shit together. But this is the trip we really become friends.

Her house is beautiful. You can tell how much intention and collectivity goes into how the house functions. Especially the kitchen.

I can’t believe it when she tells me that she was an editor at Maximum Rock’n’Roll—having been passed the torch from none other than Tim Yohannan. We had been friends for a few years at this point, but I had no idea.

“Maximum Rock’n’Roll?!”

“Yeah.”

“You’re punk as fuck!”

“I guess.”

What an angel. We spend an evening around the dinner table swapping dumb punk stories about stupid bands. My jaw dropped at the Maximum Rock’n’Roll reveal, but it completely detaches when I learn that she founded the punk house where I experienced my first kiss with the first girl I fell in love with: The Legion of Doom. She was the one who gave it that name.

The next day, I pick my jaw up from the floor so I can munch on one of Jen’s cupcakes. It’s good, like really good. Because when Jen did things, she did them well.

I’m at the San Francisco anarchist bookfair. There has been hella online drama for the weeks leading up to it because the bookfair is huge—thanks, in part, to Jen’s role in the organizing collective—and the best venue they could find is a former armory belonging to a high-profile pornography company. Some threatened to boycott, others threatened worse.

The day of the bookfair comes and I catch Jen for a second. She’s busy, I know it, but she barely seems it. “How are you doing with all the chatter?”

“Oh, it’s going fine. I put together a discussion later to talk about the decision-making that led to us choosing this venue, but frankly, we just needed more space, and they were happy to have us.”

She’s grounded, relaxed, and seems to be enjoying the event—not burdened by responsibility, just happy to be in the company of so many comrades sharing, communing, participating. I see friends from far away and long ago. I meet Gee Vaucher and Penny Rimbaud from Crass. I take my mom’s new boyfriend to a performance put on by some of my friends and collective-mates, and he’s wowed by it. It’s everything an anarchist bookfair should be. When Jen did things, she did them well.

I’m at Point Reyes, walking along the beach with Jen on her birthday. Her new boyfriend sees a pod of dolphins, strips down, and runs into the water to swim with them. We’re both like, “Whoa,” but I welcome it, because the dude is kind of, um, enthusiastic, and now we can really talk.

She just seems happy. Another birthday, life is going well, she’s busy and entertained and fulfilled. I don’t remember her fretting or worrying about her life much in all the times we talked. She was never distracted when we talked, and she was purposeful in the projects she put her effort into.

Jen Angel had a good life, because when she did things, she did them well.

I’ll miss you, Jen.

Remembrances

I met Jen before I knew I was an anarchist. I already was one at the time, and on some level, probably always had been, but I didn’t have the words or even know it was an option until shortly before meeting her.

I remember her asking me what made me think I WASN’T an anarchist, and when I said that I didn’t agree with some of the things that a lot of other anarchists thought and did, she laughed and told me that disagreeing with other anarchists is probably the one thing all anarchists agree on.

She helped me understand that agreement isn’t what makes us anarchists, so much as how we go about disagreeing, and whether we respect that other people are still free to do as they will even when we don’t agree with it.

It still took me a while before I was ready to consider myself an anarchist, but I don’t know if I’d ever have gotten there without those early conversations with Jen.

Jen and I worked together for a long time, but I’m struggling to find anything to say about those years because no matter how much of herself she poured into the bakery, she was bigger than the business she built to survive under capitalism.

Jen wanted to live in a world where we could bake cupcakes and lovingly share them with our community because we wanted to, not because we need to sell them to earn a living.

-Elle Armageddon

Jen wasn’t usually the loudest person in the room or the center of attention in Bay Area anarchist and activist spaces. But she was almost always working behind the scenes to build, sustain, and promote the crucial infrastructure that we all relied on (and sometimes took for granted). She rarely let sectarian infighting distract her from her ongoing work or undermine her long-term vision.

Jen was always a champion of the projects her friends and comrades pursued, a constant source of encouragement and sage advice. She was an early supporter of Bloc by Bloc (the board game inspired by social insurrection that I designed) and organized some of the first playtests of the game at her house in 2015. Jen’s optimism, perseverance, and consistency should be an inspiration to us all. She will be missed.

-T.L. Simons

Jen’s legacy to political hardcore punk started as a Midwest emo kid who made it OK to be emotional and passionate and political, but most of all, smart. She gave the best hugs. She was a writer’s writer, someone you could sit with discussing which word fit best here or there. She gave workshops in the 1990s at the Columbus More Than Music Fests and Chicago Active Resistance, drawing people in and explaining the most difficult things in everyday language. Perhaps her biggest impact came through publishing indy-media, anarchist and political punk zines and magazines, from the photocopied Fucktooth to the glossy hardbound Zine Yearbook and Clamor. Tim Yohannan even chose her to take over publishing Maximum Rock’n’Roll before he died. She used words to connect us and ideas as sinews for our community. For Jen Angel, it was always about more than music.

-Eric Boehme

Jen Angel was loving, was loved, and was love. She exuded a presence which was magnetic and powerful. It was an invitation for like-minded souls to join hands with her and together reach forward into a better world.

As I’m typing, the very writing of this eulogy makes no sense. Jen isn’t supposed to be dead. This world isn’t supposed to go on without her in it. She is supposed to be here as she was last week, and every month and year before this one. I started typing this thinking that finding the right words would be possible, but all of this is wrong. All I can say is that connecting with Jen was pure fire.

I’m holding her close tonight. I’m in shock that all this has happened. And I am hoping anyone reading this feels, amidst the shared pain we are all experiencing, that you are not alone. We will remember her together. And mourn together. And we will hopefully, on whatever level we can, help make the world better together. This would be a fitting legacy. None of this makes sense. But knowing that Jen would want us all connected, does.

-Greg Bennick

Jen Angel believed in my work and took it and me seriously before I even really took myself seriously. She was always doing thankless behind-the-scenes work, but with an eye towards being strategic, towards building the better world we’re fighting for, and specifically, towards building each other up, providing venues for sharing ideas and coming to know one another.

-Margaret Killjoy

Over the last 30 years, Jen Angel has been a visionary influence and pioneering participant within multiple movements and subcultures that have significantly informed and shaped our world in the here and now, from punk rock and anarchism in the 1990s, through the Global Justice and anti-war movements of the early 2000s to Occupy in 2011 and contemporary fights for racial justice, climate justice, economic justice, and beyond.

-Ryan Only

As Anarchist Agency recounted, on her 48th birthday, a few days before her death, Jen posted this poem by Mary Oliver on social media:

“Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”

New Series: Audio Versions of CrimethInc. Articles : Brought to You by the Ex-Worker Podcast

2023-01-28T02:55:42Z

The Ex-Worker is back! After a hiatus to work on other projects, our newly reassembled audio affinity group is leading the charge to produce audio versions of a wide range of CrimethInc. materials. Stay tuned for updates!

Listen to the Ex-Worker #85: Stop Cop City / Defend Weelaunee Forest, Part I: History and Analysis

Listen to the Ex-Worker #86: Stop Cop City / Defend Weelaunee Forest, Part II: Accounts and Solidarity

Listen to the Ex-Worker #87: The Twitter Ban and the End of Social Media

Listen to the Ex-Worker #88: 2022 in Review—A Year to Endure

Listen to the Ex-Worker #89: The Battle of York, January 2002—Anti-Fascism, Then and Now

Listen to the Ex-Worker #90: Solidarity with Alfredo Cospito, Italian Anarchist Prisoner on Hunger Strike

Since Elon Musk kicked us off of Twitter at the urging of a certain far-right troll, we haven’t slowed down—you’ll find us publishing regularly here at crimethinc.com and circulating our texts and ideas through accounts on Mastodon, Kolektiva, and other platforms. But we want to make sure that the analysis, reporting on current events across the globe, historical accounts, calls for action, and other anarchist content we’ve been providing for over two decades can reach the widest possible audience.

To that end, the Ex-Worker Podcast has committed to producing audio versions of most of the new content we produce. Beginning this month, you’ll be able to find links at the top of each page to an audio version of the article you’re reading. You’ll also be able to get the latest audio releases from the Ex-Worker by streaming or downloading directly from the podcast page, through your favorite podcatcher, or from other audio/video platforms including YouTube and Soundcloud—stay tuned for updates as we roll these out.

Today, we’re releasing the first of two episodes on the struggle to Stop Cop City and defend the Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta, Georgia. In the coming days, you’ll see episodes appear on our banning from Twitter and our analysis of social media, navigating fascism and left electoralism in Brazil, and an audio version of our article on the Battle of York in 2002. Stay tuned!

Additionally, we’re working our way through the back catalog of our most popular articles and zines that haven’t had audio versions produced yet. You can already find audio versions of some classics, including To Change Everything, From Democracy to Freedom, and our book No Wall They Can Build. Coming soon, you’ll be able to listen to a wide range of articles and zines, including Why We Don’t Make Demands, Against the Logic of the Guillotine, There’s No Such Thing as Revolutionary Government, and many more! If you’ve got requests for audio versions of your favorite article or zine, you can drop us a line to podcast at crimethinc dot com.

Finally, in response to popular demand, we’re working on a major project to produce an audiobook version of Work, our classic analysis of capitalism, economics, and resistance. Today, revolt against work is spreading across the world in the aftermath of the pandemic, and a wave of strikes and union organizing offers possibilities but also limits. We want to make sure that as many people as possible have tools for understanding the functioning of the economy from the bird’s-eye-view down to the cash register and the factory floor—and ideas about how to challenge the mythology of work and take action to escape from its clutches into a freer world. Stay tuned!

Since 2013, the Ex-Worker Podcast and our comrades at The Hotwire have offered an audio strike against a monotone world. The project has evolved over the years, and will continue to change as our lives and the terrain we’re fighting on goes on shifting. When we got started nearly ten years ago, other than our friends at The Final Straw Radio (who are still going strong!), there were hardly any anarchists working in the medium of podcasting. Today, we’re a part of the Channel Zero Network, which has hosted dozens of different audio projects produced by anarchists and anti-authoritarians. We have participated in international gatherings networking with podcasts, radio shows, and radio stations across dozens of countries.

But we still think there’s a vital role for audio projects in support of our broader mission to hasten the end of all forms of hierarchy and domination and dream a free world into being. From your headphones to the streets, we’ll be seeing you!

In solidarity,

The Ex-Worker Podcast Collective

Elon Musk Bans CrimethInc. from Twitter at the Urging of Far-Right Troll

2022-11-25T21:52:54Z

On November 25, at the urging of a far-right troll, Elon Musk banned the @crimethinc Twitter account. Musk’s goal in acquiring Twitter had nothing to do with “free speech”—it was a partisan move intended to silence opposition while opening up space for the far right. This underscores the hazards of depending on corporate social media platforms.

Update: Two months after this article appeared, leaked documents confirmed that it was Musk himself who personally ordered the purging of anti-fascist accounts as soon as he took control of the platform.

Please follow us on Mastodon and Telegram and subscribe to our RSS feed. You can even find us on YouTube, Tumblr, and Reddit—and we’ve just signed up for Bluesky (look for @crimethinc.bsky.social). If you want to help us continue to reach people offline, order stickers and others materials to distribute here.

On November 24, a white nationalist¹ who speaks at conferences alongside Richard Spencer posted a tweet approving of a wave of bans on Twitter. Elon Musk responded favorably to him, and far-right troll Andy Ngo answered Musk, specifically requesting that the @crimethinc account be banned from Twitter. Within a couple hours, Musk had fulfilled Ngo’s request.²

The @crimethinc account on Twitter dates from May 2008. The account has never been suspended or received a warning throughout fourteen years of Twitter administrations. Ngo was not bringing any new material to Musk’s attention, but reposting years-old screenshots. Other Twitter users were banned under similar circumstances today, as well.

Musk’s rhetoric about making Twitter a venue for “free speech” was a lie. Musk bought Twitter in order to impose his agenda on what he saw as the most influential social media platform remaining outside the control of people like himself. Like Donald Trump, Musk brazenly says the opposite of what he means, and his supporters interpret this as a show of strength.

At the same time that he welcomes Donald Trump, white nationalists, and fascists back to Twitter, Musk is purging those who stand in the way of their authoritarian aspirations. Make no mistake, the point of silencing our voices is to prepare the way for other kinds of violence.

A part of the ruling class has always aligned with the far right and fascists. In this regard, Elon Musk is treading a path already worn by Henry Ford, promoting reactionaries who explicitly aim to attack broad sections of the population and popular movements. As in Ford’s day, the rest of the ruling class, including centrists and liberals, hope to benefit from the forcible removal of radical voices from public discourse without having to get their hands dirty.

This is possible, in part, because the majority of employees at Twitter have resigned or been fired. The remaining employees are disproportionately dependent on their employment at Twitter for visas to remain in the United States—a grim example of how borders serve to impose the agenda of the ruling class on workers, even relatively wealthy workers.

When Musk says he’s building Twitter 2.0, he is referencing the transition from the original iteration of the internet—message boards, indymedia, a more or less open and participatory model—to Web 2.0, in which all interactions are shaped by the algorithms of a few tech overlords. They aim to determine what we are able to imagine as well as what we are able to say and do. What has already happened on Facebook and Instagram and is now occurring on Twitter is the inevitable consequence of increasingly widespread dependence on corporate media platforms.

In response, we encourage you to diminish your dependence on Twitter and other corporate media platforms, to explore other sources of information and means of communication. We urge you to mobilize against the far right on every terrain they attempt to seize and to continue organizing against capitalism, state violence, white supremacy, patriarchy, and other forms of oppression. We invite you to talk with your friends and neighbors about what it would take to create a world in which a single billionaire would not be able to control how everyone else can communicate.

Let’s meet in a space where no algorithms or autocrats can determine what we are able to dream and create together.

Always a Problem, Always a Solution : Like a Phoenix from the Ashes

2021-12-24T13:48:16Z

Last week, a catastrophic fire destroyed our mail-order space along with thousands of books and posters and many other things. It was a stunning blow. But in response, people around the world immediately mobilized to support us, raising tens of thousands of dollars for us and flooding us with messages of encouragement. We will be able to resume our activities shortly—and we owe it all to you. Here, we present a full update on the situation.

Footage of the fire.

No, none of us were injured in the fire, thank goodness. No, unfortunately, we did not have insurance of any kind, nor did the building owner. Yes, if you might ever be in a situation like ours, you should probably consider getting insurance. Yes, you’re absolutely right, it’s easier to afford insurance if you are a wealthy capitalist profiteer, not a scrappy band of volunteers who sell everything at break-even prices. No, the fire does not appear to have been an arson attack targeting us, though many online fascists have celebrated it as if it were. Yes, our spirit is unbroken—we remain as eager as ever. The most important elements in a project like ours are the determination of the participants and the goodwill of those we work with, and we are fortunate to have both of those in abundance.

All we ask in all the world is to be able to continue our chosen task—and you have made this possible for us. This is the most profound gift we could receive. It is humbling to be presented with so much care and support from so many people we admire and aspire to build solidarity with. You have conferred a tremendous responsibility upon us, and we will do everything in our power to deserve your faith in us.

As soon as we have succeeded in securing a new space, reprinting all the material we lost, and catching up on backlogged orders, we will look for new ways to resume fulfilling our mission to equip rebels in all walks of life with the information and ideas they need to thrive. We’ve been at this for over 25 years now, and we are ready to put in another quarter century. The struggle continues.

https://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1472099583660593154

When the fire broke out, we were in the middle of raising the funds to reprint two of our older books—Days of War, Nights of Love, originally published in the year 2000, and the Contradictionary, published in 2013. Yesterday, we completed that fundraising process. To our surprise and gratitude, we raised more than twice what we had asked for in that campaign, as well, receiving preorders for roughly a thousand copies of each book.

As soon as we get those books back from the factory, we will send them out. That process should not be significantly delayed by this mishap. The original run of pins that we made for backers is now a shapeless lump of melted metal in the burnt-out, cordoned-off husk of what was once our mail-order space, but we have already gotten the wheels in motion to mint another round of them and they should be ready in time. As we have said for decades now, always a problem—always a solution.

Other Ways to Help Us

Some people have asked for other ways to help us besides financial assistance. Here are a few possibilities:

If you have access to a printer, print copies of the zines and posters available as PDFs in our online library and mail them to us. Failing that, just make them and distribute them yourself!
Likewise, if you are a designer, we often need help designing new print materials.
Send shipping supplies to our mailing address in Olympia: envelopes, bubble wrap, packing tape, and other office supplies. For best results, email us in advance to hammer out the details.
If anyone has the means to make stickers or other such materials, let us know!
We need help translating our texts. Any language you speak, we can host it on our site.
Contribute writing or reporting to the site.
Are you a web designer or programmer? Help us design and maintain and expand the site. You can work on any issue in our backlog to-do list. Email our tech desk for more information with questions.
We need another zoom recorder for our future audio projects.
Consider signing up at https://crimethinc.com/support to make a reoccurring monthly donation in order to help us sustain what we are doing in the future.
Above all, focus your energy and resources on your own long-term efforts to bring about revolutionary change. We don’t intend to represent anyone else’s aspirations for a better world, only to strive for collective freedom side by side with you. Inspire us with your own creative efforts!

Appendix I: Support Gallery

This is just a minute fraction of the messages that we saw on only one out of many different platforms on which people reached out. If you see a message here that you posted and you would prefer we not display it in this context, we’ll gladly remove it.

https://twitter.com/spencerhaugh/status/1472657860932870147

You can download the Catharsis album in question for free here, along with all the other music we have released over the years.

We were also pleased to see contemporary underground musicians supporting us:

https://twitter.com/DawnRayd/status/1472500794180124676

https://twitter.com/Antifa_Stripper/status/1472584668142735371

Yes, someone donated $10,000 to the fundraiser. Yes, that surprised us, too. No, we don’t know who it was.

https://twitter.com/IGD_News/status/1471846098163621890

Our colleagues from It’s Going Down are currently in the midst of a fundraising effort of their own.

https://twitter.com/23Meridian/status/1472366459317735425

https://twitter.com/blocbybloc/status/1472300539715141634

https://twitter.com/PUPr3ss/status/1472288490800893953

https://twitter.com/decolonialatlas/status/1472272914074710016

https://twitter.com/CynicalSyndie/status/1472260258508718089

This is correct. We call for the abolition of the police, the state justice industry, and the prison-industrial complex. A fire is certainly not going to change our political aspirations. And just like the alleged “crime wave” that conservatives of all stripes have been referencing as they seek to counter abolitionist gains, we note that this fire occurred under the prevailing police state, not as a consequence of defunding police or fire departments.

Cops don’t keep us safe. We have to look out for each other.

https://twitter.com/Davey_TNT/status/1472054790951784450

A charming homage to our classic poster.

https://twitter.com/myliquidlibrary/status/1472038846065950722

https://twitter.com/Gays_4_Galleani/status/1472035466840981504

“CrimethInc. LLC” seems to be a figment of someone’s imagination.

https://twitter.com/muffinsurrecta/status/1472020140250345475

https://twitter.com/IanColdwater/status/1471855371266498561

https://twitter.com/AKLAnarchists/status/1471977880435392513

https://twitter.com/Jericho4PPs/status/1471937055978668036

The Jericho Movement—an organization for supporting political prisoners—calling on people to assist us is humbling indeed. Please, whatever you do with your resources, think first of those who are held captive by the state.

The same goes for the support we received from various chapters of the Anarchist Black Cross:

https://twitter.com/nycabc/status/1471866350935105542

https://twitter.com/la_abcf/status/1471870036956659720

And the same goes for the support crew for anarchist prisoner Eric King:

https://twitter.com/SupportEricKing/status/1471870087153991686

…And the comrades who produce the Certain Days calendar:

https://twitter.com/CertainDays/status/1471869905519665157

But it’s especially moving to receive direct support from a long-term earth liberation prisoner:

https://twitter.com/thetinyraccoon/status/1471869623800844303

https://twitter.com/littleblackcart/status/1471925886622396416

We are deeply grateful to LBC for supporting us in memory of Aragorn!

https://twitter.com/asiaarttours/status/1471928228277374981

https://twitter.com/BlackFlagsLA/status/1471915235501957120

https://twitter.com/IntFedAnarchist/status/1471914395567628296

We were overjoyed to see messages from around the world in German, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Russian, Indonesian, even Turkish:

https://twitter.com/barikatmedya/status/1471911729974202368

https://twitter.com/AKPressDistro/status/1471892987349065728

AK Press experienced a similar fire a few years ago. The comrades from AK Press reached out to us immediately with a profound gesture of support and care. We can’t thank them enough.

https://twitter.com/PMPressOrg/status/1471906182365204480

https://twitter.com/EmmaAintDead/status/1471903587349499908

https://twitter.com/AnarchistAgency/status/1471878457416052736

We have been fortunate to work with the people from Anarchist Agency repeatedly over the years and are very grateful for their efforts, quite apart from their support for us in this instance.

https://twitter.com/sarahgilbert/status/1471877490507333632

https://twitter.com/dcylf/status/1471875409264640001

It’s an honor for us to be supported by chapters of the Youth Liberation Front!

https://twitter.com/dreadpiratejene/status/1471862666578780169

https://twitter.com/RedoubtAFA/status/1471859944454758401

Really, we can only blush.

https://twitter.com/butchanarchy/status/1471833400600195078

https://twitter.com/PallasRiot/status/1471833205569474574

https://twitter.com/Anarkism_info/status/1471779848708313096

https://twitter.com/Freedom_Paper/status/1471813425554726916

Freedom press, no less!

Once more, thank you to everyone. See you on the streets.

Appendix II: Further Reading and Listening

POŽAR NI POGASIL OGNJA UPORA—An interview about the fire and related subjects on the Slovenian anarchist radio program ČRNA LUKNJA

Help Us Recover from the Fire that Destroyed Our Mailorder Space : Burnt Down—But Not Out!

2021-12-17T08:25:20Z

On December 15, 2021, the mail-order space of the CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective was destroyed in a catastrophic fire that reduced three large buildings to burned-out shells in downtown Olympia, Washington. Yes, that’s the fire in the photo above. Thousands of our books, posters, and stickers were entirely consumed, not to mention equipment and supplies. We lost everything that was in the space.

Help us here:

This represents a tremendous setback to us. To resume operations, we will need to replace the books, posters, stickers, computers, printers, packing materials, furniture, and many other things, and to secure a new space.

https://twitter.com/OlyFireDept/status/1471272047477071874

We are an all-volunteer operation. We have always run on a shoestring budget, selling all our print material at break-even prices. We’ve been doing this for 25 years; for us, it’s just one part of supporting the social movements that we participate in. We don’t receive grants or any other source of outside funding. We are determined to get back on our feet and continue our mission, but we’re going to need help.

It is especially unfortunate that this occurs now when we are on the cusp of completing a Kickstarter campaign to reprint two of our books. The good news is that since those books are still in the printing queue at the factory, they were not destroyed in the fire. They will still go out as promised as soon as we receive them. It feels daunting to ask for more help now, but we really have no other choice.

Tax-deductible donations can also be made directly at https://crimethinc.com/support. Consider signing up to make a reoccurring monthly donation to help us sustain what we are doing in the future.

Thank you so much to everyone who has helped us make it this far. If we can get through this, we promise to keep doing this work for decades to come.

An aerial view of the fire that consumed our space.

More aerial footage.

Help Us Reprint Days of War, Nights of Love and the Contradictionary

2021-11-23T20:28:48Z

We are reprinting two of our classic books, Days of War, Nights of Love and the Contradictionary. If we can raise enough money to do long-lasting print runs of each, we will make them freely available in high-quality digital editions forever.

Go to the Kickstarter campaign.

We’re doing a Kickstarter campaign to raise the funds we need. In return for your assistance, we’ve prepared special limited editions of the books for you. We’re especially excited about the brand-new Unicorn Edition of the Contradictionary. If you’ve missed one or both of these important works, this is your chance.

Here’s our pitch.

The Trump era presented a non-stop series of crises; some things got lost in the shuffle as we navigated the climactic final months. Consequently, these two classic books have been out of print for over a year. We’ve spent most of 2021 regrouping and preparing our next round of ambitious projects. This is the last loose end we need to tie up.

We’ve arranged Kickstarter levels for those who want to order the books wholesale in order to distribute them. At each quantity, the books are priced below what their wholesale prices will be upon release. This is the best time to order the books and help the campaign. We’ll also email PDFs to backers a month before the general release.

A preview of the Contradictionary Unicorn Edition beside the original design. This mock-up doesn’t do justice to the holographic rainbow foil stamp, which is truly over the top.

In addition to contributing money to the campaign, you can assist us by spreading the word on social media. Use the following share links to raise awareness of the project:

Twitter :: Instagram :: Facebook :: Mastodon :: Tumblr

Update: December 2, 2021

Thanks to the generous assistance of hundreds of people, we have met our funding goal! We are deeply grateful to all of you. This campaign will keeping running for three more weeks for everyone who wants to get copies of the books and the other rewards.

To express our appreciation for all your support, if we reach our stretch goal of $20,000, we will add another element to this project: a sticker in homage to our friend David Graeber, who passed away far too soon last year. David said, “The principle of direct action is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.”

Everyone who has pledged $10 or more will receive one sticker printed on holographic vinyl, which gives the stickers an otherworldly rainbow sheen. For every book in your order, you’ll also receive 5 stickers printed on recycled paper (in order to make it difficult to remove them once applied).

Unfortunately, the printers have told us that due to production issues at the plant, they have pushed back the estimated arrival of the books to March or even April. Rest assured that the job is already submitted for printing and we’ve secured our place in the queue.

On the left, the paper version, for public deployment; on the right, a mock-up of the holographic vinyl version, which does not do justice to it.

Days of War, Nights of Love

Days of War, Nights of Love presents a passionate appeal for a politics of liberation that approaches life as a joyous adventure. It was the first book we published—it has been more than twenty-one years now since we got the first printing back from the factory. A classic foundational document of 21st-century anarchism, it has introduced several generations to radical ideas and possibilities. More details here.

Days of War, Nights of Love Hardcover Edition.

The Hardcover Edition of Days of War, Nights of Love is the best version of the book that we’ve ever made, featuring Smyth sewn binding between heavy boards complete with sewn-in black ribbon bookmark. These are limited to 1000 copies, reserved for special occasions like this. Detailed photos here.

Days of War is clearly the work of enthusiastic young people—but there are some truths that starry-eyed young people can perceive and articulate more clearly than anyone else, truths that all of us would do well to keep close to heart throughout our lives.

Whatever medical science may profess, there is a difference between life and survival. There is more to being alive than just having a heartbeat and brain activity. Being alive, really alive, is something much subtler and more magnificent. Their instruments measure blood pressure and temperature, but overlook joy, passion, love, all the things that make life really matter. To make our lives matter again, to really get the most out of them, we have to redefine life itself. We have to dispense with their merely clinical definitions, in favor of ones which have to do with what we actually feel.

From within Days of War.

The Contradictionary

We published the Contradictionary in 2013: a glossary of revolution exploring the war in every word. In the tradition of The Devil’s Dictionary and other works of alphabetized audacity, the Contradictionary assembles a wide range of wit and whimsy. It is no mere miscellany, but a lighthearted work of serious literature, concentrating a wealth of ideas and history into aphorisms and anecdotes. More details here.

We’ve designed the Unicorn Edition of the Contradictionary exclusively for those who help us with this reprint. Like a photonegative of the original edition, it features a white faux leather cover. The title is stamped in holographic rainbow foil. Like the Days of War hardcover edition, it is the best version of this book that we have ever prepared, and it’s only available through this fundraiser.

From within the Contradictionary.

Whence do Stockholm Syndrome and Broken Window Theory derive their names? What is the common root of aristocracy and democracy? Who gets diagnosed with Anarchia and Drapetomania? How did voting kill Edgar Allen Poe, and why is a crater on the dark side of the moon named for the man who blew up the Tsar? Alternately scathing and sublime, the Contradictionary pulls back the curtain from the war within every word, revealing the conflict behind the façade of the commonplace.

Supporters will also receive an enamel pin presenting our classic bulb & bones logo.

Enamel Pin

We’re making enamel pins featuring our classic bulb & bones logo to express our appreciation for your help. Again, these will not be available in our online store or via any other venue. They are exclusively for those who help us to get these books back in print.

If you can’t contribute to this particular fundraising drive, please consider signing up to become a monthly supporter. This fund helps us to cover our day-to-day operating costs—to keep all our stickers and posters in print, pay for storage space and mail-order supplies, and the like. With a bit more help, we’ll be able to publish some new print projects. We don’t receive any outside funding; your assistance determines everything that we can do.

We rarely ask for donations. We know how to do a great deal with very little and we never keep any profit for ourselves. But some costs, like book printing, are inescapable.

We are CrimethInc.—an international network of aspiring revolutionaries. For twenty-five years, we’ve published a wide range of material by and for people fighting for a better world—all copyright free, composed collectively and anonymously, produced and distributed by volunteers. Thank you for helping us to continue this work.

Surviving the Social Media Crackdown : The Instagram Ban—and How to Keep Following Us

2020-12-21T16:43:12Z

In the early hours of Saturday, December 19, one day before their new terms of service took effect, Instagram shut down a page associated with CrimethInc. with no explanation or justification. The account had never been suspended before, nor received so much as a warning. Well over 40,000 people were following it. The issue was not a violation of the terms of service—rather, this is a political measure to suppress the voices of dissidents, expanding Facebook’s August 2020 decision to ban an array of pages associated with anarchist journalists and publishers.

This comes at the same time that Instagram is suppressing the voices of sex workers and their supporters, among other groups. These are not isolated incidents, but steps in a systematic crackdown intended to exclude millions of voices from public discourse in order to render the communities that these platforms serve more vulnerable to other forms of repression.

Meanwhile, Facebook continues to offer a platform to far-right conspiracy theories, militia groups, and fascist organizing. In one of the most glaring examples of this, last August’s militia mobilization in Kenosha, Wisconsin—in which far-right paramilitary Kyle Rittenhouse murdered two people and shot a third—was organized over Facebook a few weeks after the company took down the pages of dozens of anti-fascist journalists who would otherwise have reported on it.

As we wrote in August:

Facebook’s decision to ban pages associated with anarchism is a strategic step in a much bigger unfolding conflict. It is analogous to a military knocking out a village’s lines of communication before carrying out a bombing. […] Anarchists are only one out of many groups on the list of targets; many immigrants, Black people and other people of color, Muslims, trans and queer people, and others are experiencing far worse forms of oppression. But this precedent, like all the previous precedents, will only embolden government agencies and fascist groups to carry out more attacks, not all of which will occur online.

Thousands of public figures including Noam Chomsky, David Graeber, Cory Doctorow, and Chelsea Manning came together to publish an open letter protesting the banning of anarchist journalists from Facebook and rejecting the company’s false equivalence between right-wing groups that organize violent attacks and anti-fascist groups that report on them. Yet controlling the largest monopoly in the history of interpersonal communication, Facebook has little incentive to be accountable to public opinion. It is especially telling that they are continuing this crackdown as we enter the Biden era, when they have no need to curry favor with the outgoing Trump administration.

Profit-driven social media corporations have never had the best interests of the public at heart. With the exception of Twitter, where we have contacts among the original programmers, we shunned corporate social media platforms for the first two decades of our publishing. Four years ago, in recognition that a new generation was becoming politicized via social media and not wishing to cede the terrain entirely to authoritarians, CrimethInc. accounts appeared on Facebook, Instagram, and elsewhere. Today, we are rapidly entering a world in which doing without Facebook and Instagram will not be a question of boycotting, but rather the consequence of a widespread crackdown.

If nothing else, this means that our efforts to establish other venues of communication will be relevant to many others as well. It’s high time to foster our own resilient communication channels so that relying on corporate platforms will not be our Achilles heel.

Surviving the Crackdown

Here’s how to keep up with us despite the Facebook and Instagram bans.

Facebook and Instagram

While we ourselves no longer use these platforms, we endorse this Facebook page and this Instagram page as sources providing updates similar to what we used to offer. If you are still able to maintain Facebook and Instagram accounts and you choose to do so, please follow these.

There is a brand-new Telegram channel to announce CrimethInc. projects and provide a forum to discuss them.

At the turn of the century, CrimethInc. cells established and curated some of the early online spaces for horizontal discussion and coordination, such as the now long defunct forums crimethinc.net and crimethinc.info. As emerging 21st-century megacorporations integrated communications networks into Internet 2.0, designing them to promote competitive individualism, we focused our attention on offline collective collaborations. Today, we are excited to participate in a new experiment in anonymous online discussion, without the pressure to curate a personal brand that other contemporary platforms promote.

Mastodon

There is a CrimethInc. account on the decentralized open-source platform Mastodon instance todon.eu, a server run by and for anti-authoritarians. Comrades have recently started another Mastodon “instance” called Kolektiva Social specifically for anarchist groups, projects, and individuals. The different decentralized instances on Mastodon all interact with each other, so there is no problem in signing up on todon.eu and following projects on Kolektiva Social.

Mastodon’s format will be familiar to Twitter users. You can “favorite” or “boost” posts (unfortunately named “toots”), follow accounts, and the like.

RSS

You can also go “old” school and subscribe to our RSS feed, which will automatically send you our new articles as they appear. All you need is an RSS client, such as NetNewsWire on macOS / iOS.

WT.Social

The people behind Wikipedia have formed another alternative to corporate-owned social media. Our account is at https://wt.social/u/crimethinc-ex-workers.

Print Media

We still passionately believe in print media. Books and zines enable the reader to step out of the relentless flow of information to digest an idea or narrative; once a print project enters circulation, no corporation or government can easily suppress it. We aim to start a new initiative providing zines to those who are not able to print them themselves from our online library. If you can help supply us with print materials for this purpose, please contact us. Thank you!

The networks offered by Facebook aren’t new; what’s new is that they seem external to us. We’ve always had social networks, but no one could use them to sell advertisements—nor were they so easy to map. Now they reappear as something we have to consult. People corresponded with old friends, taught themselves skills, and heard about public events long before email, Google, and Twitter. Of course, these technologies are extremely helpful in a world in which few of us are close with our neighbors or spend more than a few years in any location. The forms assumed by technology and daily life influence each other, making it increasingly unthinkable to uncouple them.

…This isn’t a criticism of technology per se. The point is that it’s not neutral: technology is always shaped by the structures of the society in which it is developed and applied. Most of the technologies familiar to us were shaped by the imperatives of profit and rule, but a society based on other values would surely produce other technologies. As digital technology becomes increasingly enmeshed in the fabric of our society, the important question is not whether to use it, but how to undermine the structures that produced it.

-The Internet as New Enclosure: Digitized Capitalism, the Attention Economy, and the Surveillance State

Writings on the Wall : A New CrimethInc. Collection in German

2020-12-03T16:00:17Z

Working with the German publisher Unrast, our friends from Black Mosquito have published a collection of our writing from 2012-2020 in German, entitled Writings on the Wall. Together, these texts offer a view from the front lines of struggles from Minneapolis to Kurdistan, exploring some of the most urgent subjects of debate in contemporary social movements—violence, vengeance, consent and consensus, how to persevere in the face of seemingly impossible odds, what revolution could mean in the 21st century. In the introduction, presented below in English, we describe the times and conditions we were writing in and what our experiences might offer the struggles of the future.

The German version of this page will be updated on an ongoing basis with information about presentations, reviews, and readings of the book. The contents of the book are listed after the introduction.

First Principles

No government possesses inherent authority. No contract, procedure, or tradition has any legitimate claim on us beyond what we agree to voluntarily. No law should override our consciences. Rather than offering some version of the Nuremberg defense to excuse our decisions—be it religious, political, economic, or legal—we must take personal responsibility for the impact that our actions have on the world.

History is not an inexorable process that plays out according to iron laws. It is the chaotic conjuncture of innumerable forces including our own agency. “Theory” has no value except as a set of hypotheses we continuously test and refine in the course of our efforts to intercede in events. Revolutionary analysis must not be not the domain of a priest class that cites Marx the way earlier ideologues cited the Bible. It can only belong to those who learn about the world in the process of attempting to change it.

When we act, we act without guarantees. We cannot be certain of the result in advance; the end of this story has yet to be written. We risk everything because we know that death is inescapable, but to live—to achieve the full unfolding of our collective potential in spite of a social order that isolates and stunts us—to live is the rarest thing of all.

This is what we mean when we say that we are anarchists.

We believe that it is most ennobling to engage with other people as equals rather than as authorities to obey or subjects to rule. Let there be no one above us—and no one below. We believe that everyone stands to gain from the abolition of hierarchies, even those who ostensibly benefit from them, for in alienating us from each other and from what is most beautiful in ourselves, they drain our lives of meaning. For us, anarchism is not the blueprint of a possible future world, but the necessity of immediately taking sides in the conflicts that are taking place today—with the aim of disabling the mechanisms that impose disparities and seeking to foster self-determination and solidarity wherever they can take root.

In our experience, ungovernable grassroots movements that rely on direct action are far more efficient and effective than legalistic top-down campaigns that set out to win reforms. If we limit ourselves to petitioning our rulers for change, there will always be rival petitioners who can bribe them more effectively than we can. It is only when we show that we are capable of bringing about the changes we want directly that politicians come running after us offering to grant the concessions they fear we will take by force. Of course, if we can make the changes we wish to see ourselves, we don’t need rulers in the first place.

We saw this confirmed yet again shortly before this book went to press when rebels burned down the Third Precinct of the Minneapolis police in response to the murder of George Floyd. Until people saw rioters defeat the police by main force, it was unthinkable that mainstream political discourse in the United States could ever entertain the proposal to abolish police. Afterwards, police abolition became a widespread discussion topic, forcing liberals to try to undermine the movement against police by watering it down from within.

Our greatest obstacle is that we don’t know our own strength.

The Times We Wrote in, the Times to Come

This book brings together a selection of our work from 2012 to 2020.

Our collective has been publishing since the early 1990s. A quarter of a century ago, when we embarked on this project, anarchism manifested itself chiefly as a refusal of paradise. Neoliberal capitalism and state democracy appeared to have triumphed in what Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history,” but we—willfully damned souls—rejected the utopia they offered us as a mirage. “Better self-determination in hell than service in heaven,” we declared, like Milton’s Satan, refusing to sell ourselves on the market and eking out a precarious existence in the margins.

Fukuyama and his cronies thought they were finished with history, but history was not finished with them. As we warned, a global system driven by the imperative to turn a profit can only progressively impoverish the vast majority of humanity while concentrating power in the hands of the most rapacious. Today, the disastrous effects of neoliberal capitalism are plain for all to see, and more and more people are taking up the tactics we spent decades refining.

In the interceding years, we have developed networks spanning five continents and dozens of languages. Together, we try to think through the strategic questions confronting us, comparing our experiences in different struggles and contexts in order to formulate new proposals to employ in social movements. Like the global anarchist movement as a whole, we have no party line, only the intellectual biodiversity of debate and the shared determination to create a world in which no human being may rule another.

The last global wave of revolt arrived hot on the heels of the last recession. It opened with the Greek insurrection of December 2008, a precursor of the so-called “Arab Spring” and the various Occupy movements. Arguably, it concluded in 2014 with nationalists hijacking the uprisings in Brazil and Ukraine and with the militarization and ultimate defeat of the revolutionary movement in western Syria. In our book From Democracy to Freedom, we explored some of the limits that these movements reached as a result of focusing on trying to legitimize new institutions of governance rather than seeing the revolt through to its logical conclusion.

For six years, we have reaped the bitter harvest of this defeat in the form of a global wave of reaction. Just as the eclipse of the “anti-globalization” movement at the turn of the century enabled nationalists like Donald Trump to come to power by falsely presenting themselves as adversaries of neoliberalism, the eventual failure of the Gezi Park resistance enabled Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to establish autocracy in Turkey and invade Rojava—and similar tragedies have played out all around the world. This wave of reaction has taken many forms, from the consolidation of one-party dictatorships in Russia and China to nationalist electoral victories in the United States and Brazil and a resurgence of authoritarian politics among leftists.

Yet every order that does not encompass the whole inevitably gives rise to its own opposition. Years of bare-knuckled capitalism have fostered a bitterness that has yet to find a political outlet. While a minority of people have gravitated to outright fascism, greater numbers have lost faith in electoral politics altogether without finding an alternative to invest themselves in. It’s up to us to supply a model for what they can do with their rage.

A new phase of unrest began at the end of 2018 with the emergence of the Gilets Jaunes in France. At first, this movement was hardly promising, pitting “apolitical” consumer protesters including far-right elements against a neoliberal centrist government that was trying to offload the cost of its “ecological” policies onto the working class. But over the next several weeks, anarchists and other rebels used vandalism to carve out a space where an anti-capitalist current could take hold. In the course of the following year, revolts broke out in Hong Kong, Sudan, Haiti, Ecuador, Chile, Honduras, Lebanon, Iraq, Catalunya, and elsewhere. Almost all of these were sparked by cost-of-living increases (a fuel tax in France and Ecuador, a tax on WhatsApp in Lebanon, a spike in subway fare in Chile), confirming that the economic recovery from the recession of 2008 had done little to benefit ordinary people. On a deeper level, the revolts were driven by questions about the legitimacy of authority, even if these questions assumed distorted forms such as demands for independent national sovereignty.

Just as the 2008 uprising in Greece foreshadowed the revolutions that began in Tunisia two years later, we guessed that the unrest from Hong Kong to Chile presaged another global wave of revolt. Yet in the United States, the year 2020 opened upon a political wasteland. Anarchists were exhausted from three years of scrambling to respond to atrocities, and many of those who had joined us in the streets at the beginning of Trump’s presidency had returned to seeking change via state channels—the centrists pursuing a doomed strategy of partnering with the FBI to impeach Trump, the socialists reprising their equally naïve campaign to elect Bernie Sanders president.

By the time the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world, all of these efforts had failed. Trump exacerbated the situation, seizing the opportunity to transfer billions of dollars to the richest stratum of society in the midst of the worst economic recession in living memory. Millions of people in the US, alongside billions worldwide, spent mid-March to late May in isolation contemplating their own mortality and seething at their rulers’ cruelty. It had never been clearer that the institutions of power are fundamentally destructive to the lives of ordinary people.

When video circulated depicting the senseless murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, those who suffer most from racism and poverty recognized that it was now or never. Heroically, all around the US, they staked their lives in an all-out attack on their oppressors—and millions of stir-crazy people of all classes and backgrounds joined them in marching through cities, attacking police, burning police cars, blocking freeways, and looting shopping districts. In the midst of the pandemic, even white middle-class liberals felt the tragedy of George Floyd’s death viscerally. In impacting people from all walks of life, the virus had suspended some of the mechanisms that ordinarily prevent the privileged from identifying with the most marginalized.

Trump and other politicians have expressed shock at the riots that followed George Floyd’s murder, alleging that anarchists must have coordinated them. In fact, the ruling class did more to provoke the riots than we ever could. It was the policies of the state itself that spread the collective intelligence that guided the revolt—marking police, banks, and corporations as legitimate targets and making it easy for just about anyone to understand why it made sense to attack them. Trump’s explicit support for white supremacists, his xenophobic border policies, his efforts to abolish healthcare access, his decisions to accelerate global warming, and his refusal to provide any sort of support for those threatened by unemployment and COVID-19 showed everyone that we are all facing a life-or-death struggle, not just those who are regularly murdered by police.

Perhaps the darkest hour does herald the dawn, after all.

As this book goes to press, in the United States, we are hoping that we are already past the apex of the global wave of reaction that brought Trump to power. But the struggles of the future will continue to be three-sided, pitting autonomous social movements against both neoliberal centrists who seek to reestablish the “impartial rule of law” and far-right nationalists who aim to ride out the declining phase of capitalism by redefining whose interests the state exists to serve. Both sides are advancing proposals about how to preserve capitalism and the state; they only differ over how violence and suffering should be distributed. Yet we must not make the mistake of strategizing as if we are in a binary conflict. Each of these adversaries would benefit from our concentrating only on eliminating the other one, enabling them to concentrate on eliminating us. We have to fight in ways that reveal what centrists and nationalists have in common and that show what distinguishes our proposals for the future.

The pursuit of autonomy has been central to many of the struggles of the past two years, albeit in the distorted form of a demand for independent national sovereignty. Kashmir seeks independence from India; Hong Kong seeks autonomy from China; Catalunya seeks autonomy from Spain; Rojava seeks autonomy from Syria, and the whole world—Turkey, Syria, the United States, Russia, and the United Nations—conspires to crush it. National independence—which reproduces the internal hierarchies of the imperialist nations on a smaller scale—is not the solution to these conflicts. Conflict between nations is the domain of the state, whether or not the nations in question have received formal recognition from the United Nations. Autonomy is not a matter of separating from others, but of establishing horizontal relations of mutual aid and collective defense that are strong and wide-reaching enough to deter attacks.

Likewise, as the conflicts of our age intensify, it will be tempting to resort to militarizing our movements, but this represents a dead end for the same reason that the pursuit of national independence is a dead end. In the short term, leadership in military conflicts goes to whoever can access the most arms, as we saw in the Syrian revolution; in the long term, the outcome of such conflicts is determined by whichever party has the biggest air force, as we saw in the subsequent Syrian civil war. “The force of insurrection is social, not military,” as the Italian insurrectionists wrote. Our goal should not be to compete with the state on its own territory, the field of military conquest, but to identify all the needs and desires that the state cannot fulfill—a tremendous number, today, when governments can do so little to mitigate the impact of capitalism—and take those as the point of departure for contagious grassroots uprisings that can render us all impossible to govern.

If we want revolution rather than war, we have to organize on both sides of every border. This goes for every other form of identity alongside national citizenship. We must seek to spread resistance to domination across all boundaries—national, ethnic, religious—transcending all forms of constructed identity. The only thing that could secure the freedom of Kurdish people in Rojava would be a revolution in Turkey; the only thing that could secure the freedom of people in Hong Kong would be a revolution in China; the only thing that could secure the freedom of people in Syria and for that matter the Baltic states would be a revolution in Russia; the only thing that could secure the freedom of people in Mexico and Honduras and likely Chile as well would be a revolution in the United States, just as the only thing that could secure the safety of Black people in any of those countries would be the abolition of all the different forms of policing that maintain the privileges known as “whiteness.” We have to intensify our efforts to build connections across all of these gulfs alongside our efforts to build the capacity for collective self-defense, understanding these two projects as one and the same.

The state excels at concentrating, subsuming, subordinating, and dividing. To stand a chance against it, we must act like a hydra—dispersing, reproducing, connecting, and proliferating.

This book is comprised of our reflections on the struggles we have participated in over the past decade—our efforts to learn from our successes and failures, to identify the real problem at the root of each situation, to make the most of our tremendous potential on our own terms. May it serve you in your own efforts to do the same.

As some of us wrote at the turn of the century, when the world was young, the best reason to be a revolutionary is that it is simply a better way to live.

The backstories of the various contents of the book follow, by section.

—Anarchy—

We published To Change Everything at the beginning of 2015 in collaboration with collectives on five continents. The idea was to offer an accessible introduction to anarchist ideas.

Altogether, approximately 250,000 print copies of To Change Everything circulated in over 30 languages. We helped the publishers in Brazil, Argentina, Romania, and Slovenia to fund their print versions. Versions in Arabic and Farsi were distributed along the Balkan route during the so-called “migrant crisis” of 2015; we also arranged for prisoner support groups to send thousands of copies to prisoners in the US. To our knowledge, it seems to be the only anarchist text printed in Maltese.

—Revolutionary Movement—

This selection of texts concentrates many of our conclusions about movement strategy and ethics, accumulated in the course of a period that saw the shape of protest in the United States change dramatically.

We published “The Illegitimacy of Violence, the Violence of Legitimacy” in March 2012, during the waning phase of the Occupy movement, in response to liberals like Chris Hedges who attacked some participants for concealing their identities from surveillance and defending themselves from police attacks. Hedges’s rhetoric reappeared verbatim in the mouths of the authorities that May, when they made statements to the media explaining FBI efforts to entrap activists in Cleveland and Chicago. The years-long prison sentences those activists consequently served show just how useful Hedges was to US government efforts to repress the movement.

On the one-year anniversary of the beginning of the Occupy movement, we forced Hedges to debate a member of our collective in front of a thousand people in New York City. We arranged to broadcast the debate simultaneously at live showings around the country. This demonstrated that the perspective that Hedges was trying to delegitimize was too powerful to silence. Just two years later, the uprising in Ferguson confirmed that we had been right to argue that to be effective, future movements would have to be confrontational and involve anonymity. This time, many people understood why protesters were wearing masks and fighting the police.

“Breaking with Consensus Reality” appeared a few weeks after “The Illegitimacy of Violence.” It was the first chapter of Terror Incognita, a reflection on the dynamics of insurrectionary desire—the forces that can make it contagious or prevent it from spreading.

In late 2013, we published “After the Crest,” a series of articles reflecting on what anarchists can accomplish during the waning phase of social movements—beginning from the premise that, as movements tend to explode into being, they spend most of their time in decline. Only the introductory text is included here. The original series included case studies from the Occupy movement in Oakland, the student movement in Montréal, and the series of strikes, occupations, and riots that swept Barcelona between 2010 and 2012.

The uprisings against police and white supremacy that burst onto the world stage with the revolt in Ferguson in August 2014 changed the atmosphere in the United States and the way that people thought about protest movements. We published “Why We Don’t Make Demands” in spring 2015, immediately after the uprising in Baltimore in response to the murder of Freddie Gray, arguably the high-water mark of anti-police uprisings until May 2020.

“There’s No Such Thing as Revolutionary Government” and “Against the Logic of the Guillotine” appeared in 2018 and 2019, in the midst of the reactionary Trump era, when some authoritarian leftists sought to imitate the success of far right at employing populism to acquire power.

The first version of “We Fight Because We Like It” appeared in “Conflictual Wisdom: Revolutionary Introspection towards the Preservation of the Anarchist Individual & Community.” It was composed at a grim moment at the beginning of 2018, when the Trump era was just getting underway, many of our comrades were still facing the likelihood of decades in prison as a consequence of the demonstration on the day he took office, and it was not yet clear how bad things would get.

—Skirmishes—

“Music as a Weapon” represents our reflections on decades of experimentation in connecting the punk underground with the international anarchist movement. The first version of this text appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of our biannual journal Rolling Thunder. This slightly revised version appeared on our website in late 2018 when we finally grudgingly set about digitizing all the music released through the record label facet of CrimethInc. from the 1990s into the early years of the 21^st century.

“The Climate is Changing” first appeared in December 2009 during the demonstrations outside the “COP-15” United Nations conference on climate change in Copenhagen. We included it in our book about capitalism, Work, which has also appeared in German. The version in this collection is a revised translation that has not been published before.

“Accounting for Ourselves” appeared in 2013. It represents another aspect of the same conversations about consent and accountability that produced “Breaking with Consensus Reality.”

“How to Stop the Police from Killing” appeared on the last day of May 2020, when the revolt in response to the murder of George Floyd was beginning to spread around the country. A zine version of the text was widely distributed at the various occupations and police-free zones of June 2020.

—Reportbacks—

We published “From Germany to Bakur” in late 2015, at a tense point in the struggle in Rojava and Turkey against the Islamic State and the autocracy of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Tragically, in 2019, we were compelled to publish “Remembering Xelîl,” eulogizing one of the contributors to that earlier text who was killed in the process of that struggle.

“Surviving the Virus” and the follow-up text “And After the Virus?” appeared in March and April 2020, in response to the arrival of COVID-19 and the state-ordered quarantine. We feared that panic occasioned by the pandemic would drive people to embrace authoritarian politics, imagining strong top-down control to be the only way to avert to mass casualties. Instead, state governments from China to the United States botched their responses to the pandemic, while grassroots networks emerged around the world to organize mutual aid projects according to anarchist principles. To our surprise, “Surviving the Virus” reached hundreds of thousands of people in sixteen different languages. Apparently, people were hungry for an anarchist alternative.

Finally, “The Siege of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis” offers a participants’ analysis of the historic attack on the police precinct in May 2020. We published it in early June at the high point of the movement responding to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black people. It represents a necessary corrective to subsequent liberal mystifications of the movement that seek to conceal how multiethnic, decentralized, confrontational tactics were essential elements in its most important victories.

We can fight the police and win. We can organize our own means of survival and face down the state. Together, we can take hold of our tremendous untapped potential and create the lives we deserve to live. Never forget this.

“Become ungovernable,” a stencil included in the book.

Writings on the Wall, 2012- 2020

Preface: First Principles

Introduction: The Times We Wrote in, The Times to Come

—Anarchy—

To Change Everything

—Revolutionary Movement—

There’s No Such Thing as Revolutionary Government

Why We Don’t Make Demands

The Illegitimacy of Violence, the Violence of Legitimacy

Against the Logic of the Guillotine

Breaking with Consensus Reality

After the Crest: What to Do while the Dust Is Settling

We Fight Because We Like It

—Skirmishes—

How to Stop the Police from Killing

Accounting for Ourselves

The Climate is Changing: False Solutions to Global Climate Change

Music as a Weapon: The Contentious Symbiosis of Punk Rock and Anarchism

—Reportbacks—

From Germany to Bakur

Remembering Xelîl

Surviving the Virus… And After the Virus?

The Siege of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis

Open Letter: "Stand with Anarchist Publishers Banned by Facebook" : Announcing a Solidarity Statement from Anarchist Agency

2020-08-22T22:36:21Z

The anarchist public relations project Agency has published an open letter signed by hundreds of publishers, journalists, educators, authors, and activists condemning Facebook’s decision to ban pages associated with anarchism on the basis of a false equivalence between anti-fascist organizing and fascist violence. You can view the statement in full here and sign on via Change.org here. We urge everyone to add their names or the names of their organizations to this list—not because we think Facebook will relent, but to publicize the fact that Facebook has aligned itself with the far-right Trump administration and to catalyze pushback against the company itself.

https://twitter.com/AnarchistAgency/status/1296957855187308544

This decision from Facebook has targeted everyone from hip-hop musicians and journalists to filmmakers and community groups. Nathan Goodman and Kelly Wright, two authors whose pages were banned, have published a response noting the many forms of violent conduct from state and far-right entities that Facebook endorses, by contrast with the forms of speech for which it is banning publishers and individual users.

Many commenters have pointed out Facebook’s intentional effort to conflate groups that organize to carry out racist attacks with adherents of the philosophy of anarchism. As the solidarity statement argues,

Facebook categorizes anarchists with far-right militias that support the Trump administration, linking two groups that are fundamentally dissimilar and opposed… drawing a false equivalence between those who orchestrate white supremacist attacks and those who organize to protect their communities against them.

The statement first appeared signed by hundreds of people, including well-known journalists Abby Martin, Jason Wilson, and Christopher Mathias. Other signatories include novelists Cory Doctorow, Rachel Kushner, and Alain Damasio and a wide range of academics, including Noam Chomsky—programmers, including Twitter founding team member Evan Henshaw-Plath—activists, including Chelsea Manning—musicians, including Andrew Hurley—and the editors of Jacobin, Semiotext(e), and AK Press, among many other publishers. Since then, over a thousand more people have endorsed the statement on Change.org.

This is not the first wave of bans Facebook has perpetrated against pages associated with anarchism. For example, in May, we published a report from a Greek anarchist news publisher that was similarly banned:

In early May, the Facebook page for RadioFragmata was shut down abruptly without reason. We expect nothing else from Facebook, but over 30,000 people followed the page, which served as a far-reaching platform spreading information about the struggle in Greece and abroad. We have organized a new page and continue to maintain a blog and twitter account. We assume Facebook took down our page in response to a request from the state, but Facebook has not given any justification for their action whatsoever.

This time around—and once more with no warning, justification, or notification—the bans have included MC Sole, Truthout writer Chris Steele, an Anarchists Worldwide archive page, the European news source Enough is Enough, and pages belonging to the John Brown Gun Club, Redneck Revolt, Molotov 5.7, and many other projects, as well as the pages belonging to the administrators, including users from Australia to Turkey. This, in turn, affects other pages run by these administrators; Facebook has banned some of them, while leaving others without administrators, effectively disabling them.

Other pages have received notices from Facebook, but have not yet been removed.

“And if you ban us from your clubs, it’s the right time, with the right mind.”

-Bad Brains, “Banned in DC”

It’s not surprising that Facebook is siding with the Trump administration in the its war against dissent and those who oppose fascism. We have always argued against entrusting unaccountable Silicon Valley corporations with the power to shape public discourse and carry out surveillance to pass on information to the government. We should focus our efforts and resources on building communications infrastructure that is not vulnerable to corporate executives’ desire to pander to the agenda of the Trump administration or any other government.

At the same time, Facebook’s decision to ban pages associated with anarchism is a strategic step in a much bigger unfolding conflict. It is analogous to a military knocking out a village’s lines of communication before carrying out a bombing. The Trump administration intends to intensify its attacks against protest movements and they want to minimize our ability to report on these or mobilize against them. Anarchists are only one out of many groups on the list of targets; many immigrants, Black people and other people of color, Muslims, trans and queer people, and others are experiencing far worse forms of oppression. But this precedent, like all the previous precedents, will only embolden government agencies and fascist groups to carry out more attacks, not all of which will occur online.

This is why it is essential to respond. We act now, in hopes that we won’t have to mobilize later in worse circumstances. Please circulate the statement published by Agency and stand up against every effort to suppress the voices of those who fight for a world without oppression.

Individual Statements of Support

The solidarity statement includes a number of statements from individual signatories, excerpted below.

“In a moment where large numbers of people around the world are coming together to resist police violence and racism, it is particularly bleak that Facebook has chosen to ban some of the most insightful and thoughtful analysis that provides context, history, and additional voice to these events as they unfold. Rather than honestly reckoning with the content and online behaviors they are incentivizing through algorithms designed to maximize advertising returns rather than public good, Facebook has instead decided to blunder through banning some of the most needed voices and outlets focused on creating a more just world for everyone.”

—Moxie Marlinspike

“As a nonprofit dedicated to advancing human rights by creating and deploying free and open source anonymity, privacy, and censorship circumvention technologies, we are very concerned about the bans of the affected pages. The bias in this decision shows a disregard for important free speech, and demonstrates how far social media companies still have to go to implement effective content control without violating human rights.”

—The Tor Project

“Facebook’s actions show how much power tech capitalists have over free speech and should be viewed as an attack on the entire workers’ movement. We stand in solidarity with all those targeted.”

—Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin

“I have no words for the callousness and cruelty of Facebook’s decision. They did it for political cover so the right-wing media they fear would be less angry about the banning of various militia and QAnon pages. But by banning Crimethinc, It’s Going Down, MC Sole and numerous anti-fascist accounts, Facebook has equated nonviolence with mass murder and dissent with genocide. They announced their willingness to participate with the U.S. government in the purges that are to come.”

—Robert Evans, investigative journalist with Bellingcat and host of the Behind the Bastards podcast on iHeartRadio

“From the Myanmar genocide scandal to the constant censorship of Kurdish activism, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg have proven time again that they are in favor of censorship and state oppression. This recent wave of removal of anti-fascist accounts is just another example of their willingness to shut down anything that isn’t advertiser friendly. It’s no surprise, but due to the sheer grip Facebook has on the internet, their censorship must be called out at every opportunity.”

—Jake Hanrahan, independent journalist and documentary filmmaker. Founder of Popular Front.

“The ban of ‘Antifacist’ accounts on Facebook is simply driven by political agenda. Mainly that of our current presidential administration and its right-wing following, that are ofttimes of a violent extremist nature themselves. If you truly wish to reduce harm, ban the president’s image, for he spreads false information and abstract hatred with his every statement. These bans are a direct and deliberate assault on the first amendment rights of individuals whose political ideologies don’t fit the current administration’s views.”

—Cory Elia, Managing Editor for Village Portland, podcaster, radio news broadcaster with KBOO Community radio, and board member for PSU’s Student Media Board

“When neo-Nazis were planning terrorism and violence in Charlottesville, they took to Facebook to organize. There, they were allowed to share posts calling for the raising of an army, the rasing of able-bodied fighters, and the harassment of Black and Jewish people in Charlottesville. When local organizers pushed back to prevent the violence, CrimethInc. was one of the only outlets to publish local concerns accurately and openly. As a survivor of the terrorism and violence, I find it unconscionable that Facebook can take action against one of the few organizations who was willing and able to help my community and me prevent the violence, when Facebook was a passive participant in helping those promote and encourage the terror.”

—Emily Gorcenski, creator of First Vigil and neo-Nazi terror survivor

“The recent unfair Facebook ban of anarchist publishers and artist is like banning love. These folks are writing about and fighting for a better and just world. One where dignity and autonomy replace state and corporate violence and suffering. We desperately need these dreamers and voices to imagine a way to save the planet and all living beings on it. To silence these voices is coming out supporting the corporate ruling class, and the injustices that continue to grow under these brutal systems.

—carla bergman, anarchist, organizer, and co-author of Joyful Militancy

“Facebook’s decision to ban anarchist publishers has nothing to do with ‘stopping violence’ and everything to do with silencing those who speak out against a brutal, repressive system that no longer works for 99% of the world. We could point to supporters of violently racist ideology such as Breitbart or Daily Wire, whose advertisement money Facebook welcomes, but the hypocrisy is beyond the point. Anarchists dream of a world where peace and dignity for all is the norm, and no longer something that must be fought for by staring down the barrel of a tear gas launcher. By banning publishers who openly advocate for building a better world without unquestioned power and oppression, Facebook has very much made it clear where they stand on the issue of ‘violence.’”

—Sydney Anarcho-Communists

“This is the latest wave in oppressive Facebook censorship that has cast a wide net targeting radicals and leftists around the globe. While fascist pages, persons and groups are allowed to openly call for violence, those who stand against fascism and for justice are not only sidelined but silenced. We must amplify these voices now more than ever, but more than that, we must find ways to organize, tell our truths and build without having to rely only on the structures and platforms of the oppressors.”

—Eleanor Goldfield, artist, organizer, journalist, filmmaker

“We have all known for some time that Facebook does not exist for any reason except to maintain their own profits, which rest squarely on the bedrock of a repressive government doing everything it can to quell dissent. Silencing the voices of anti-fascists and anarchists, who publish news and analysis about people who fight for a better world, comes as no surprise in this context of state and corporate interests colluding to maintain their existing power structures. They actively work to keep us from even communicating about standing up against the countless injustices our world has to offer, and at the same time, continue to promote corporate cheerleading for state sanctioned violence at the hands of the polcie. We stand in solidarity with all those silenced by Facebook, and our resolve is only hardened by this act as we press forward with our struggle for a better world.”

—Black Powder Press

“Banning antifascists, anarchists and other related dreamers and resisters of fascism and totalitarianism on facebook leads us to only one conclusion – a side is being taken, and it is not the one of freedom and antifascism. Silencing dissent of totalitarians and movements against racists and xenophobes is a slippery slope to siding with those same people and movements. We are living in a moment when sides need to be taken, a time period we have seen before, and siding with the silencing of antifascists and anarchists is to side with totalitarianism and potential fascism.

—Marina Sitrin, Associate Professor at Binghamton University and author of Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina.

“With this wave of bans, facebook has attempted to claim that they are neutral, or centrist in their approach to censoring political speech. What they have actually done is controlled the dialog, towards their own political aims, towards a conservative and capitalist worldview. Under the guise of neutrality they have made it so that anyone wishing to exist in their online space must not oppose fascism and far right violence in any meaningful way. They have thrown the weight of their platform behind the very notion that resisting genocide is violent in nature. What is considered acceptable political dialog in society generally creeps to the right over time. It is not often that we see such a blatant action taken to push the dialog in that direction. These are moments that we cannot allow to pass by silently. Fascism has brought about the most horrific acts of violence the world has ever seen. Opposing fascism is non violence by definition.”

—Portland Anarchist Road Care

“At a time when elites in media and academia fret about ‘cancel culture’ and object to principled criticism, facebook is showing the world that the real ‘cancel culture” is corporate control of media platforms. Self defense is not violence. Anarchists are trying defend against us all against fascist violence and the nightmare future it portends. Facebook and other corporate media platforms are complicit in the violence of the fascists that they platform. We shouldn’t let liberals and others vested in the status quo muddle the issue by normalizing false equivlency between fascists and the anarchists and anti-authoritarians resisting them. Down with fascism! Stand with all anti-fascists!”

—Brendan McQuade, Assistant Professor at the University of Southern Maine and author of Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision

“That the U.S. government is working overtime to suppress dissenting voices is nothing new, nor is its dangerous revulsion for anarchists specifically, but each time they attack our community and ideology, more damage is done to the broader struggle against fascism, and for liberation. Facebook’s decision to ban a number of anarchist, antifascist, and anti-capitalist pages has made clear both their bias against the left, and their commitment to furthering the same “both sides” rhetoric that Trump and his lapdogs have used to deflect from their own firm support for violent white supremacist groups. The fact that this ban specifically targeted vital movement publications like It’s Going Down and Crimethinc only underlines the fact that the so-called free press is under attack, and yet the mealy-mouthed centrists and liberals who spend their time hand-wringing over “cancel culture” have said nothing. Those outside of the anarchist and antifascist community ignore this at their peril, because as we know full well, first, they’ll come for the radicals–but they’ll be coming for everyone else next.”

—Kim Kelly, journalist, author, and A12 Charlottesville attack survivor

“It has been three years but Facebook has never taken responsibility for the deadly Unite the Right event being planned and propagandized on their platform. It is nothing short of shameful for Facebook to now sit in judgment of the same groups and people who stood up against white supremacist violence that day.”

—Megan Squire, Professor of Computer Science at Elon University, Sr. Fellow at Center for Analysis of the Radical Right

“Facebook’s recent decision to ban radical leftist and antifascist groups that call for fighting back against the forces of fascism, genocide, and those that would wipe out our communities, while allowing, and even glorifying state-affiliated and sponsored groups that call for violence as well as right-wing militias is yet another example of tech companies finding it easier to punch down. Facebook’s decision reinforces the dangerous and false rhetoric emanating from right-wing media and politicians that seeks to demonize left-liberation movements at a time when they are being actively targeted and hunted by those in positions of authority. While hardly surprising, this decision by Facebook once again shows a willingness to put profits and access to politicians above scruples or access to diverse viewpoints.”

—B. Remy Cross

“Facebook’s decision to ban anti-fascist and anarchist pages at the same time they ban violent Militia’s and QAnon pages is unfortunately unsurprising and all too familiar. This is done as a visual sacrifice in the name of misguided attempts at centrism and being ‘fair.’

“Anti-fascist and anarchist resources on the internet seek to create community defense against bigoted violence and share information about how communities can take care of problems that governments don’t prioritize as important to address. The problem with this decision is that the very real problems created by violent racist militias and absurd conspiracy theories are actively opposed in cities all around the work by anti-fascists and anarchists. This decision does not help communities become safer, in fact it makes them even more vulnerable. This decision shows Facebook’s lack of a spine and lack of a moral compass. I am proud to stand in solidarity with Anarchist Publishers to condemn this ban; but I am furious that I need to do so.”

—Jake Johnson, artist, writer, reporter

“The ban of Crimethinc and other anarchist groups by Facebook is a clear step farther into a fascist American state. The Earth First! Journal stands in firm solidarity with all anarchist groups currently facing repression. Smash the state, for the wild!”

—The Earth First! Journal

“Facebook’s ban has nothing to do with stopping violence and everything to do with cracking down on protest movements. The banning of CrimethInc., It’s Going Down, Truthout author Chris Steele, musician MC Sole, and other left media outlets and journalists in the name of opposing violence is disingenuous. Facebook continues to host and profit off of right-wing media outlets like Daily Wire that regularly promote violent racist ideology and conspiracy theories that have catalyzed and influenced violent fascists and white supremacists on the right. This is political censorship, plain and simple.”

—scott crow, longtime anarchist organizer and author of Black Flags and Windmills

On Facebook Banning Pages Associated with Anarchism : And the Digital Censorship to Come

2020-08-19T21:11:42Z

Facebook has taken down multiple Facebook pages they believe to be connected with crimethinc.com and itsgoingdown.org, among other anarchist and anti-fascist publishing projects,¹ officially on the pretext that they “support violence.” This has nothing to do with stopping violence and everything to do with suppressing social movements and the publishers that cover them.

For months, Donald Trump has demanded this crackdown in a series of social media posts explicitly blaming anarchists and anti-fascists for the countrywide wave of protests precipitated by persistent police violence in the United States. A decade ago, Facebook representatives proudly touted their role in the Egyptian uprising. Today, their decision to ban publishers who discuss social movement activity shows that they are eager to play a role in ensuring that the only forms of activism that can emerge are the ones that are beneficial to the current authorities.

https://twitter.com/nickmartin/status/1296175961260482560

The defining of violence is not neutral. The way Facebook currently defines violence, it is legitimate for police to kill a thousand people per year while evicting, kidnapping, and imprisoning millions—it is legitimate to drop bombs on civilians, so long as the aggressor represents an official government—but it is “violence” to prevent a white supremacist from assaulting a crowd or return a smoking tear gas canister to the police who shot it. Suppressing the voices of those who seek to protect their communities from institutional and white supremacist violence is an intentional decision to normalize violence as long as the ones employing it hold institutional power.

Lumping anarchists and anti-fascists together with far-right militias who explicitly support the current administration is a strategic move to muddy the issue. This is the same operation that William Barr performed in creating a Department of Justice task force focused on “anti-government extremists” that targets self-proclaimed fascists and anti-fascists alike. In the case of the Department of Justice, this enables them to point to far-right and militia attacks in order to demand resources with which to crack down on those who are on the front lines of defending communities against such attacks. Barr and other members of Trump’s administration are attempting to do the same thing to Black Lives Matter activists, associating them with neo-Nazis and white nationalists as “racially motivated extremists.”

After a self-described fascist murdered Heather Heyer during the “Unite the Right” mobilization in Charlottesville, tremendous grassroots pressure arose to remove fascists and white supremacists from social media platforms. Now, by contrast, the push is coming from the very top of the hierarchy, at a time when protest movements have been essential to creating a nationwide dialogue about state violence and oppression. This is a counterattack from those in power against websites that published perspectives from those who mobilized against the fascists in Charlottesville. It is not a coincidence that it occurs on the heels of Trump mobilizing federal forces to Portland, Oregon, precipitating weeks of street conflict, and just a matter of days after spokespersons for the extreme right referred specifically to crimethinc.com and itsgoingdown.org in prepared testimony to the Senate.

While far-right groups continue to organize on Facebook and spread dangerous misinformation about COVID-19, Facebook is prioritizing taking cues from the Trump administration to suppress dissent. Make no mistake, if this goes unchallenged, it will not stop here. The more it becomes normalized for governments to crack down on publishers that report on social movements, the further such censorship will penetrate into every sector of society, and the more it will shape what it is possible to think, what it is possible to imagine.

If you are concerned about this, please use all the means at your disposal to share this news far and wide. Facebook should not get to determine for you what constitutes responsible speech. Together, in solidarity, we can create a better world, in which no one of good conscience need fear that fascists, governments, or billion-dollar corporations can threaten or silence them.

“CrimethInc. are the poets and intellectuals of a truly free society, and if anarchist publishing has any common theme, it is to dream of a society in which organized violence and the threat of systematic violence would not exist, where there would never be a situation in which groups of men with sticks and guns and bombs would be able to threaten others. This is not just a legitimate political position, it’s a vital, essential, necessary one. Nothing could conceivably be more violent than to tell us—and particularly our young people—we are forbidden to even dream of a peaceful, caring, world.”

-David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5000 Years and professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, responding to the news of the Facebook ban

Coverage

Facebook’s Secret Blacklist of “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations”

Open Letter: “Stand with Anarchist Publishers Banned by Facebook”

Anarchist Activists Say Facebook Banned Them to Placate the Right

The Intercept: Facebook’s Ban on Far-Left Pages Is an Extension of Trump Propaganda

Vice: Facebook Is Treating Anti-Fascism the Same as Murder-Linked Conspiracy Groups

Truthout: Facebook Has Begun Purging Accounts Tied to Anti-Fascist Groups

The Eugene Weekly: Banned Media—Anarchist and Antifascist Media Groups Are Being Taken Down by Facebook

Truth or Fiction: “A Pound of Flesh”—Facebook’s Provides Little Explanation for Anti-Fascist Takedown

Democracy Now: Facebook Bans Anti-Fascist and Anarchist Groups Along with QAnon Conspiracy Pages

Sydney Criminal Lawyers: Facebook Censorship—Silencing Anarchist and Anti-Fascist Groups

Red & Black Notes: Facebook Announce Crackdown against Anarchists

Freedom News: A Note on Facebook’s Crackdown against US Anarchist Groups

Neues Deutschland: Facebook sperrt linke Accounts—Das Kollektiv »Crimethinc« klagt über Kriminalisierung

Anarkism.info: Auktoritär stenkastning i det digitala glashuset

https://twitter.com/mcsole/status/1296450732405788673

https://twitter.com/ROAR_Magazine/status/1296491483344838656

https://twitter.com/DavidNeiwert/status/1296212476950769664

https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/1296163907938091008

https://twitter.com/GrimKim/status/1296536454244573184

https://twitter.com/alibreland/status/1296162193482932229

https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1296466133932023808

Some of the other Facebook accounts that were banned today on this same pretext belonged to the musician MC Sole, Truthout writer Chris Steel, and a European news source, Enough is Enough.* ↩

CrimethInc.com Now Fully Multilingual : Help Us Add Translations!

2020-05-13T15:17:08Z

Thanks to a tremendous amount of work from comrades around the world, we are finally realizing our longtime dream of making this website fully accessible in a wide range of languages besides English. This is taking place on two fronts. First, it means translating the infrastructure of the site itself, such as the navigation bar and the site map; at the same time, it means translating the content of the site, such as articles, books, and zines. As of now, we have the infrastructure of the site functioning in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish—and we have scores of articles, zines, posters, and books available in all of those languages and a dozen more. Here, we will review the progress we have made and describe how you can help us with the next steps.

As authoritarian governments lock down their borders and nationalists attempt to foment new divisions between people, we are ever more determined to build connections internationally. Revolutionary movements are most effective when they can learn from each other and extend solidarity transcontinentally. We put a great deal of effort into maintaining communication between anarchists and other rebels all around the world, with the goal of cultivating decades-long relationships.

Although our collective began in the early 1990s as an anglophone project and English is used as a lingua franca in many contexts in which people do not speak it as a first language, we aim to de-center English in order to make our projects more inclusive and to work towards developing analyses that are informed by a global range of experiences. To this end, we seek to publish perspectives from all around the world and to make these available in as many languages as possible.

Translating Content

CrimethInc. materials have already appeared in over three dozen languages; our introductory primer, To Change Everything, is available in 30. You can see all the different materials that we offer in different languages at crimethinc.com/languages.

You can choose your preferred language at crimethinc.com/languages in the footer of every page on our site.

Eventually, we hope to archive every version of every text of ours that has appeared in any language. Although we have expanded this site to include a tremendous number of articles, zines, posters, and books in languages other than English, we have not been able to find everything. If you can help us to track down CrimethInc. translations that are not available on this site yet—whether in a document file, a PDF, or in print—we would be very grateful. Contact us here.¹

If you are willing to translate anything on our site, please write us at foreignlegion@crimethinc.com. You can see which languages an article is already available in below the title. If you translate a book, zine, or poster, our designers may be able to help you plug your translation into the existing layout as well.

Likewise, if you are involved in a publishing project in a language other than English, feel free to publish translations of our material. Everything we produce is copyright free. With your help, we can make our work accessible to people everywhere.

Beneath the title of each article, you can choose the language you wish to read it in.

Translating the Infrastructure

The infrastructure of the site includes the navigation elements, labels, and other material that structures the content. So far, we have the infrastructure of this site fully functional in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

If you have your preferred language set in your browser, we automatically detect it and direct you to that version of the site. For example, if your browser is set to Italian, we will automatically direct you to it.crimethinc.com.

The header navigation bar in English, German, and Spanish.

When you open a page on our site, if we have a version of that page available in the language you are using, we’ll redirect you to it. If not, we’ll show you the English version of the page. If you are viewing the site itself in one language and you want to switch to another, you can do so by going to the languages section of the Site Map in the footer of the site and selecting your preferred language.

With a little help, we could make the site functional in a dozen more languages. If you are willing to assist us with translating the infrastructure, please email tech@crimethinc.com.

If you are already familiar with GitHub, the website we use for organizing the work on this site, you can get started immediately. Download this file from our GitHub repo and change all of the values in the file, translating into your language. Then you can create a pull request on GitHub or email the new file to us. Here’s the file:

https://github.com/crimethinc/website/blob/master/config/locales/en.yml

If you already know your way around GitHub, you can submit a pull request for any files in this directory:

https://github.com/crimethinc/website/blob/master/config/locales

If you don’t know your way around GitHub, that’s ok. Just email us your translated YAML file and we’ll handle the rest.

Thank you so much!

🌍🌎🌏

Our wish list for non-English CrimethInc. texts includes the Russian and Korean printings of our book Work, the Turkish printing of our children’s book The Secret World of Terijian, the Serbo-Croat version of Evasion, and the original printings of the Spanish and Portuguese versions of our outreach paper, Harbinger, titled Heraldo and Arauto, respectively. If you can help us obtain any of these, we would be very grateful! ↩

Aragorn!—Elegy for an Antagonist : On Hostility and Its Limits

2020-02-19T20:53:29Z

On Thursday, February 13, longtime anarchist Aragorn! passed away. A tireless polemicist, Aragorn! established and maintained a great deal of anarchist infrastructure, much of which he never sought credit for. Here, we’ll explore the ways that his legacy challenges us and conclude with remembrances from comrades who shared some of his journey.

We recommend this in conjunction with the lengthy interview we have published with Aragorn!, “A Hell of a Mistress, the Beautiful Idea.”

What He Did

Tracing Aragorn!’s work across the years, we can start with early zines such as Oppression Song and ATR (“After the Revolution”), the latter of which he collaborated on with sometime Inside Front contributor and Catharsis roadie Eric Boehme. Emerging from the vegan straightedge hardcore scene, he published reviews in Maximum RocknRoll and HeartattaCk; he contributed to Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed and Green Anarchy, the flagships of “post-left” theory and green anarchist agitation, respectively, and helped to edit the latter. He founded the anarchist news outlet anarchistnews.org, just one aspect of the larger platform anarchyplanet.org, which included online forums, an anarchist review project called The Anvil, and the introductory page Anarchy 101.

Aragorn! helped start Ardent Press, which expanded into the publishing and distribution project Little Black Cart. He helped launch a variety of journals, including Attentat and Black Seed. He was involved in a wide array of podcasts, from the early TCN Radio to the more recent Anews podcast, Anarchy Bang, and the Brilliant. He hosted countless websites for other anarchist projects from a broad range of perspectives.

As a young person, Aragorn! participated in the collective that maintained the Che Café, a decades-running autonomous space in San Diego. Later, he was involved in the Long Haul infoshop in Berkeley and the Berkeley Anarchist Study Group, likely the longest-running anarchist reading group in the United States. Alongside comrades from these circles, he helped organize the annual BASTARD conference and the East Bay Anarchist Book Fair.

Among the most important resources he leaves to us is theanarchistlibrary.org, a far-reaching collection of anarchist texts. You can find a selection of his work there. A good starting place is his essay “Anarchy without Road Maps or Adjectives,” which still feels fresh today.

None of the aforementioned projects were his alone, but all of them show the stamp of his approach to anarchism.

The Fight for Turtle Island and Boom: Introductory Writings on Nihilism, two books involving Aragorn!.

Aragorn! helped to foster a variety of contentious currents in the anarchist milieu while critiquing each of them in turn. These include “post-left” anarchism (though he came to believe that “post-left” was an insufficient framework); green anarchism (though he criticized anarcho-primitivism); queer anarchism (he helped publish the Bash Back! Anthology, while suggesting that the authors did not realize that they had failed to escape the tractor beam of identity politics); the French current exemplified by Tiqqun, Appel, and The Coming Insurrection (though he charged that their US adherents were trying to start a cult); and insurrectionist anarchism of the Italian variety (though once again, he believed that US anarchists reduced it to its most superficial aspects). He paid to print a free newspaper collecting all the communiqués from the student occupation movement of 2009-2010 that set the stage for the Occupy movement, despite being critical of the new trend of “anti-state communism” exemplified therein.

Over the past few years, he turned his attention again to indigenous anarchism, publishing a series of interviews in Black Seed. His essays Toward a non-European Anarchism and A Non-European Anarchism remain valuable contributions on the subject, along with his recent book, The Fight for Turtle Island.

Aragorn! took the initiative to broaden and deepen the anarchist critique on a variety of fronts. As he said about LBC, “our project is primarily about delivering other people’s messages to the world.” There was very little he agreed with unreservedly, but he was driven by a personal ambition to create a thriving space of thought and conflict that could challenge the existing order. He saw a value in conflict itself that we owe it to ourselves to understand.

Aragorn! in Athens, Greece, demonstrating his proficiency with a yo-yo.

Above all, I remember the mischievous gleam he always had in his eye, as if we were sharing an inside joke, even if the joke was on me. I remember how his laughter would overpower him—laughter at others’ pretensions, at everything sanctimonious and foolhardy, at his own pettiness, laughter that stood above the world, affirming it, but not for grandiose reasons.

But I also remember that when we were eating, sometimes he would hold his hand demurely in front of his mouth as he chewed. For me, that furtive gesture encapsulated the other side of his personality—his small-town charm and vulnerability. However iconoclastic and bombastic he was, however confrontational, on a personal basis, he preserved a certain decorum.

Who He Was

To chart how Aragorn!’s ideas developed across the course of his life, we can begin with the origin story Aragorn! provides in his own mythology, Stories of the Raccoon People:

The Raccoon people live by simple rules: live life to its fullest, no concession to a world of misery, and run to fight another day.

I first met one of the Raccoon people when I was only a child. He was visiting my parents, dressed in the fashion of the time, and he treated himself to our food and our company. I had never met a happier person. I alternated between bouncing on his knee, wrestling with him over the last piece of bread, and racing around the jungle of our backyard with him, an adult unlike any I had ever met before, or since.

He left behind a little buckskin figurine to remember him by. “Rub this between your palms and say my name. I will not promise that I will come back to you but I promise that my memory will, and often times that will be enough.”

When he left our house my parents stopped speaking to each other. Something about his visit reminded them that they were not working out the way that they expected and each of them began to look for something else. Other people passed through, glass was broken, voices were raised not in song, and eventually feet walked in different directions.

Later in life I found more Raccoon people. They usually did not have time for me because I was looking and they had already found. They were a merry people, running in groups, speaking in code, dressing like explosions and carousels, Bottles in hand, holes in shoes, scabs on joints; these were a people worth knowing.

(Picture me reading this to a lover on Saturday, February 15, 2020, tears running down our faces.)

All the elements we need to extrapolate a young person’s development are present in this origin story: the first glimpse of possibility, the expulsion from paradise, the search for belonging in a secret society that was not particularly welcoming.

Following the trail of the raccoon people, Aragorn! came into his own through a series of gestures of courageous refusal that brought him into contact with other rebels. Looking back in 2015, he described one of these watershed moments, his Situationist-influenced departure from a collective house:

“I can’t imagine having these ideas without the benefit of seeing what impact they had on relationships as they were tested out. One of my clearest experiments of this sort was when I moved out of a group house (the very next day as I recall) when they wrote my name to an objectionable task on the chore wheel because I was at work. I had Debordian fantasies and put my body on the line in their pursuit. But I did not do it in a vacuum. The day I left the house I drove across the state to a warm, waiting room with friends who were happy to see me. The situation would have been miserable if I didn’t have those friends, that shared understanding about Debord, or the money to have a car to make that drive.”

An earlier version of this story appears in Stories of the Bear People as “The Bear Who Wouldn’t Do the Dishes.” In this version, Aragorn! casts the protagonist as a bear—i.e., an individualistic and headstrong survivor of an earlier generation of anarchists—who rejects the chore wheel itself on principle.

Which came first, the conflict or the principles?

Aragorn! and friends at a punk show in 1989.

Hardcore

Let’s return to the hardcore scene Aragorn! grew up in, the crucible in which he and thousands of other rebellious young people of his generation discovered and asserted themselves.

The 1980s hardcore scene was premised on a starkly individualistic concept of the subject, not unlike the medieval Icelandic epic hero: a fiercely independent protagonist guided by a personal code of honor, maintaining intense yet fraught ties with a few close friends, boldly declaring war upon the entire world without hope of victory. If that sounds like an exaggeration, go back and read the lyrics of Side by Side, one of Aragorn’s favorite hardcore bands in his skinhead days. This lone warrior ethos set the stage for epic battles in which one could prove one’s mettle against rivals, jocks, cops, bosses, Nazi skinheads, the necessity of selling one’s labor on the market, and other monstrosities—not in order to bring about the end of their rule so much as to embody something outside them.

Some who grew up in this scene remained individualistic and were consequently isolated and defeated; if it’s you against the world, bet on the world. Others, whose fortitude had been premised on an imagined “unity” with others in the scene, gave up and assimilated. Aragorn! joined the punks of the 1990s who sought a third option, attempting to rebuild their relations on entirely different premises—to fuse the best of independence and interdependence. He traveled the US in these networks, living from job to job and scam to scam, reading the Situationists and developing his analysis.

Decades later, Aragorn! was still entertained by everything joyous and ridiculous about hardcore. But he also regarded the hardcore scene with mixed emotions. Towards the later 1990s, Aragorn! stepped back from the scene after being called out for his conduct in sexual relationships.¹ He recounted later that this taught him the importance of being self-aware about the effects of his actions. But it also underscored the risks of what could happen when others controlled the narrative.

https://twitter.com/AragornBang/status/565919351832731648

This is hardly the only way to interpret Aragorn!’s youth. But it gets at some recurring themes: arriving as a poor Midwestern teenager in wealthy Marin County, participating in mostly white punk and anarchist circles as a descendant of an indigenous people subjected to genocide, Aragorn! repeatedly experienced the tensions between individual and collective rebellion—and the dynamics that divide even rebels into included and excluded.

Aragorn! in 1990.

We met for the first time early in 2008 at the last NCOR (National Conference on Organized Resistance) in Washington, DC. He experienced his first cerebral aneurysm the following year, in October 2009. The first time he and I interacted outside a conference or book fair, he had just experienced his second episode. I didn’t think much about it at the time. Although several friends of mine had passed away, somehow I still took it for granted that all who were still living would go on doing so forever, immortal.

The Gadfly

Fast forward into the 21st century. By 2012, anarchistnews.org had become the chief news and discussion venue in an anarchist resurgence driven by a burgeoning insurrectionist current. The collective around Little Black Cart was publishing a new book every month. Yet although the infrastructure Aragorn! and his comrades had established was central to what thousands of anarchists were doing in the United States, he remained a polarizing figure.

Part of this was for reasons that preceded his tenure. Murray Bookchin’s hit piece Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism had declared “an unbridgeable chasm” in 1995, imputing a made-up identity to all anarchists who did not embrace Bookchin’s specific brand of anarchism and seeking to excise them from the historical tradition. So-called “lifestyle anarchists” had responded in kind, triggering an escalating conflict that embittered many groups against each other, including AK Press and Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed. Aragorn! inherited this conflict—and embraced it.

In this context, Aragorn! adopted a fundamentally combative approach to infrastructure. He would pick a target—nearly always what he perceived to be a tame, conservative anarchist project—and attempt to supplant it with his own version. As a venue for news and discussion, anarchistnews.org was designed to displace infoshop.org, which it succeeded in doing when online discourse became more antagonistic. Similarly, Little Black Cart emulated the model of PM Press. At its worst, this approach was reactive, limiting his efforts to imitating existing models rather than establishing new experiments alongside longstanding anarchist projects.

Whenever he was faced with a contest, Aragorn! was determined to win. As he declared in “Be Relentless,”

“This commitment to tension, competition, and conflict […] makes me a generally not-pleasant person to be around but it makes me awesome. When I turn my attention to a problem or an interest I feel like I am relentless in attacking, building, or nurturing it. I have taken my failures (especially interpersonal) seriously and continue to search for other relentless people to surround myself with. I think you should do the same.”

It is easy to dismiss this as mere ambition for power. But the logic behind his combativeness bears further reflection.

First, as he never tired of emphasizing, Aragorn! was pursuing a different idea of anarchy than his rivals. He saw the value of revolt as immanent rather than prefigurative—in other words, he believed that to be meaningful, an act of rebellion should have intrinsic value without any certainty that the future will return interest on the investment. He was so suspicious of the idea of revolution as a grand cause to serve that he often accused comrades who were pursuing their own self-directed projects of engaging in what he derisively described as “activism” or “strugglismo.” As he declared to an interviewer in summer 2018,

“For me, the idea, the beautiful idea, is about—how do you connect ideas to living? It’s not about ‘the struggle.’”

In some ways, this is precisely the attitude Bookchin decried as “lifestylist,” refined and theorized as a critique of alienation. Aragorn!’s analysis could seem maddeningly incoherent; for example, while opposing the politics of sacrifice, he retained a soft spot for regicides.

But there is something more to this dispute than the question of what it means to be subversive. In Aragorn!’s writing, we see him problematize agreement itself while championing an agonistic vision of social relations based on generative conflict. In a society in which adherence to consensus reality is one of the chief obstacles to revolt, he aimed to foster discomfort and discord:

“It is the cops who implement, the middle managers who hammer out the terms, the teachers and parents who convince us there is no outside, and the shoppers, wage laborers, and protesters who consent to the terms of the agreement… My feeling is that the agreement is the problem and the process by which one figures out exactly what we agreed to is one I continue to be capable of being seduced by. I may hate you but in your stupid, ill-advised, immature, silly yearning I still love you. Both are true at once.

-Aragorn!, “As much as I hate you, work is worse,” July 4, 2015

The same ambivalence in this passage reappears elsewhere when Aragorn! describes his feelings about the anarchist milieu: “Obviously it is love and hate but if love is a decision about who you want to live and die with… I’m still here.”

Aragorn! with his friend scott crow.

If agreement is the problem, how does one conduct oneself towards those one loves? Near the end of his life, Aragorn! returned to the question of how to describe the basic principles of anarchism, settling on “attack” as an expression of love:

“I desire freedom and think that timing, attack, and my voluntary associations are necessary to achieve it. Before I am free I think the preconditions of freedom are worth methodically going through, I do this by way of publications but I recognize there may be better ways that require a different social organization than the one I have access to. But in this space of creating preconditions I attempt to be transparent, poetic, and open with who I work with and how we do it. I strive for an environment that is both/and rather than either/or. Indifference, exclusion, and isolation are forms of hate. Attack is a form of love.”

-Aragorn!, “Anarchist Principles redux,” October 23, 2018

This should help to elucidate Aragorn!’s persistent contrarianism. Maintaining the combative ethos of the hardcore scene filtered through Nietzsche, he set out to attack and critique everything contrived and pietistic in his comrades as well as society at large. He was especially exasperated by performative virtue and Manichaean notions of good and evil:

“One common hostility I have towards many anarchists is the general attitude I find that anarchists tend to be for good things and against bad things… We are against bad things, therefore we are also against ourselves.”

“Both/and” means acknowledging positive and negative, good and bad, all of which can be targets for critique.

Critique is the gadfly’s weapon of choice, a weapon with which he often performs a beneficial role. But in a milieu predicated on ideological agreement, the line between gadfly and scapegoat is narrow indeed.

Aragorn!, ready for a cold motorcycle ride.

The Scapegoat

The contrarian whose defiance enables him to break with the ruling order but ultimately costs him the company of other rebels: this is a story much older than the anarchist movement.

Aragorn! understood the risks of becoming ensnared in grudge matches. He summarized much of what he learned from the misfortunes of the previous generation of post-left anarchists in a kiss-off to Bob Black. Yet if you go through that essay replacing the name “Bob Black” with “Aragorn!” much of it still rings true. Patterns are very difficult to break—as Aragorn! often emphasized.

Aragorn! struggled with envy of others’ success, having reason to fear on the basis of his experience that if others could control the narrative, he might find himself isolated and excluded. This became a self-fulfilling prophecy: what others perceived as his accumulation of power without concern for their well-being drove them to establish projects that left no space for him. Any totalizing model that fails to encompass the whole inevitably gives rise to its own opposition.

Aragorn!’s various conflicts with other anarchists are not as interesting as the fact that these conflicts played out according to a pattern so familiar that the details are practically immaterial. Stubbornness giveth and stubbornness taketh away. Likewise, in the claustrophobic atmosphere of the milieu, every younger generation hurries to repeat the Oedipal rites of patricide, guaranteeing that the cycle of bloodletting will repeat as soon as the next generation comes of age.

This sums up what kind of person Aragorn! was: he kept hosting the webpage for the Seattle Anarchist Book Fair even after Little Black Cart was banned from participating in it. Many different aspects of his story are interwoven in that single anecdote.

In every group, there is one person who is widely regarded as the worst of all, the most execrable. Scapegoats serve the function of enabling everyone else to come together and feel that they share something: if nothing else, they all have in common the fact that they are not the scapegoat. The others hurry to demonstrate how much they belong by heaping scorn upon the scapegoat—until one day the scapegoat is not there anymore and the role is transferred to the next in line.

If we were part of a community bound together by compassionate and sustainable ways of relating, we would recognize that the scapegoat plays an essential role, a sacred role. We would have customs by which to secretly honor and protect those in danger of occupying the role of scapegoat, without making the situation explicit to anyone involved. We would not hurry to exclude and isolate scapegoats, we would not hasten the time when we might find ourselves in their shoes. By keeping those who are different safe among us, we keep ourselves safe. That goes for the most frustrating, the most outré, the most controversial.

How can we be critical without excluding people? How do we maintain space for difference without inviting in toxicity? How can we respect older generations and continue to include them without exalting their errors? How can we transform even attack into an expression of love? These are the questions to which we must apply ourselves.

I will always remember the last time Aragorn! stayed at our house. The night before the book fair, my housemate decided that we needed to have some proper punk rock entertainment and taught herself all the songs by Minor Threat on her guitar in the course of a couple hours. She found someone in town who could play the drums and at midnight, a Minor Threat cover band performed in our living room for the benefit of the couple dozen anarchists quartered in our neighborhood.

All we had for a microphone was a bullhorn. We passed it around, moshing and stagediving and accidentally kicking out one of the front windows as we shouted the lyrics together. Aragorn! ended up with the bullhorn for one song—I remember it as “Small Man, Big Mouth,” but my friend says it was “Filler”—and he sang it in the style of the old Clevo hardcore bands, roaring “WOOOOOAAAH!” during the buildup before the chorus came in, a gesture that was only legible to me as the only other 40-something hardcore kid in the room.

Five and a half years later, that window remains broken, a monument to a time when we were all together. I still remember the expression of joy on his face, that same mischievous gleam in his eye, though afterwards he insisted that he was over hardcore and didn’t really miss it. I didn’t believe him for a second.

Ultimately, Aragorn!’s contest was not with us, but with death. It had been stalking him all along, more lethal than scene drama—just as it awaits us all.

When one of us passes away, we are reminded of how interconnected we all are, of how much we depend on each other and take each other for granted, even those we consider our enemies. We have the opportunity to reaffirm our appreciation and care for each other, to do right by each other—by both the living and the dead.

We cherish Aragorn’s memory above all because of how intensely and passionately he lived—because he took his way of being to the maximum, demonstrating all its advantages and disadvantages for everyone to see, absolutely unique and irreplaceable. We can all aspire to do the same before our time comes.

“Perhaps we can begin a set of conversations about how each of us, how each type of personality and skillset can add to a complex social environment that shares a love of the Beautiful Idea and respects others who do the same. Perhaps that respect can mean something more than the Internet is capable of demonstrating. I know that for me, the projects of this large group of people, striving for the Beautiful Idea always interest me, even if I disagree with them.”

-Aragorn!, “Cooperation,” April 22, 2017

Some Remembrances

Fuck you Aragorn! for leaving us. You can’t just up and leave.

But that was also totally the thing you would do in social settings. It was like your mic drop, some bullshit thing to flaunt your confidence to us humble Midwesterners. I remember telling you to not forget your roots—that you come from the land of polite behavior and it won’t kill you to be nice once in a while. And then of course you’d tell me to get assertive and honest once in a while. Fair enough.

The projects we worked on, the hours spent fighting and laughing on the phone, I could never recall them all. We connected over our Western Michigan roots; the evolution of punk and hardcore and anarchy in Grand Rapids that strung our generations together; the people and culture here that both of us knew deeply; and the trees and the glow of autumn and the lakes. You told me not to buy a snowmobile one time because you were convinced they were too dangerous. You were overly protective of me. You scolded me for not getting my chimney cleaned right away one winter because you thought my house would go up in flames. It never did. But I also got it swept the following week. Thanks for the reminder.

You cared about shit towns and shit projects that were just trying to find a different and beautiful place in this wretched world. You truly gave those spaces and ideas and people the time of day. The diligence, patience, and endurance you surprisingly held for putting up with such frustrating things is beyond inspiring. Fuck, there is just so much more I could say about that.

You were vulnerable and open about so much to me. Dreams and hardships. I would defend you constantly when your name came up. Always prefacing my defense of you with a “Sure, Aragorn! can be a total asshole, but…” and go on to humanize you, most of the time.

We tromped through the snow. You introduced me to your parents’ graves and the creek not too far from there. You showed me the pines and maples that surrounded the house that was a home to you. We made really gross spaghetti there one time and you blamed me for it. I still have no idea how that was my fault. Your aunt told me I “seemed like a really sweet girl” and you laughed that really frustrating, high-pitched laugh where you’d talk through giggles and wave a hand and manage an “I’m sorry, but…” another giggle “if you actually knew her…” What a piece of shit.

And you also taught myself and others the endless possibilities we carry in our hearts while often laughing in our faces. Remember that one time I invited you over to meet some new folks from Occupy or something while you were in town? I was so embarrassed by your behavior that evening. You told them how they should be thankful for how cheap it was to live in the Midwest and said, “In the Bay, some people only make $15 an hour and you just can’t survive on that!” Then one kid goes, “Hold up. You can make $15 an hour out there? Drug dealers don’t even make that much here. Trust me, I’ve tried.” You laughed so hard you almost fell out of the rocking chair you were sitting in. Then another kid goes, “Wait, why is that so funny?”

And remember when we talked late into the night around the wood stove at my house, you were probably in that same rocking chair, and pondered for hours how one might “create” indigeneity? Our conversation went deep and on and on and we found our way into another project collaboration. I will always appreciate the ways our brains spun dreams and unearthed fears and centered our words and hearts around the beautiful idea. I miss you, dear friend.

Chi-miigwech for everything you gave to us.

My experience with Aragorn! was not particularly unique. It started with observing his online presence in the Infoshop News comments sections, usually while he was arguing with the site’s administrator, Chuck0. I came out of a similar punk subculture that valued conflict and sought humor in sarcasm and playful ribbing with friends (and maybe less playful versions of both with enemies). So the harsh edge that A! could bring to the table never bothered me the way it has others. I could find in conflict a form of friendship.

The first time we met in person, he told me that his whole nihilism/nothing matters thing was a joke, and that other people (friends of mine) had taken it too far in their willingness to steal from hypothetical neighbors in a hypothetical future post-collapse world. There were several other times when I heard him lament the outward effects of his words and actions, and often wondered where those reflections would lead him.

Through the early 2000s, my anarchist perspective was influenced by his essays and editing in Green Anarchy magazine and Anarchy: Journal of Desire Armed, which at the time was the most widespread anarchist publication in the US. The local magazine store carried A:JODA, making it an easy (yet difficult) gateway into anarchist thought that didn’t presume that the Spanish Civil War was the end-all-be-all of anarchist praxis.

Not long after LBC was started, A! agreed to carry one of my projects, which I’m sure he hated. A! wasn’t one to mince words or hold back, even if the words he held forth weren’t necessarily clarifying or constructive. But the destructive urge is a creative urge as well. Even within A!’s negativity, positive threads could be teased out, possibly to his dismay. Years later, when we collaborated on a project, I was endlessly frustrated by our differences in work method. Only in hindsight can I see that he was telling me I was doing a good job by not telling me I was doing a bad job.

In a discussion about how difficult his thoughts and feelings are to pin down, he told me that his philosophy sat at the intersection that was his publishing project. I doubt that anyone who didn’t share immediate space with him will ever know how many projects he facilitated, serving as a sort of midwife. But the casual observer can look at the Little Black Cart catalog and tease out a vague notion of how A! felt about the world. This vague notion was often maddening for me; I can’t count how many times he told me that something I voiced was wrong, or just that he disagreed with it, only to refuse to explain further. This only made me crave his thoughts more, even though I knew that I might disagree with his analysis. But he forced me to think harder about what I was saying and doing with my time and energy.

In recent years, Aragorn!’s decisions and actions have made larger numbers of anarchists angry. The vague tendency people call Antifa(tm) has become a sacred cow. A! was critical of this, despite being an indigenous person who was stabbed by a Nazi before most of his detractors had ever even heard of Nazis or anarchists. A! arrived at this criticism through an experience that most of us will hopefully never have. Whether or not we agreed with his criticisms, we should have valued them more than we did—we should have recognized them as born of blood and fire, the same blood and fire that inspire us. Aragorn! and his projects have been “cancelled,” banned, deemed “dangerous.” But what is anarchy without danger? What is it without disagreement and conflict? A homogenous mass of missionaries, replicating the values of the society that created us in the first place.

Of all of us, Aragorn! was maybe the least understood, the least comprehensible. He came off as contradictory and vague. This led to positions being attributed to him that he didn’t actually hold. For a time, he was often accused of being against “positive” projects. But his life was as full of “positive projects” as one could imagine. He produced an enormous amount of anarchist material; his influence extends far beyond books. His whole life was one big positive project with a lining of negativity.

It pains me to recall how many of us kept quiet while he reaped the ire of internet drama from people who misunderstood and misrepresented his words and positions. It pains me that I probably didn’t do enough to counter the homogenization of an anarchist milieu that has now lost a powerful anti-homogenizing force. Fear of social repercussions is the mindkiller. Our milieu moved several steps towards homogeneity this week, a homogeneity that can only weaken us.

When I met Aragorn!, he told me that he didn’t really consider people to be his friends until they had been around for five years. I thought that was a bit extreme but I respected it, and I really looked forward to the five-year mark. I think he gave in with me a little before five years had passed, but it was definitely a few years before we got to know each other better.

Around the time I met him, I was hanging out with the first all-anarchist crew of friends I had ever had. It took me many years of coming in and out of contact with anarchists to figure out where I wanted to be in relation to them. I was full of excitement and energy about the new direction my life had taken at this time… but also often disheartened and frustrated at the lack of kindness and the abundance of terrible communication that I was experiencing in these circles. So many well-read, super-deep-into-theory anarchists were so good at dismissing me, not caring what I had to say or what I thought. I was new to so much of it. Thankfully, it didn’t scare me off completely—though if it hadn’t been for experiences like the one I had with Aragorn!, it might have. He never made me feel stupid or talked down to me. Aragorn! had a way of being interested in people and what made them who they were that was unique and very encouraging. He often asked what I thought of things and would even send me writing he was working on from time to time to get my opinion. I am a person who’s never been very good at theory-heavy stuff. It takes me months to read a book, if I even finish it. Despite these things, Aragorn! cared what I had to say and was interested in my ideas. He frustrated me with how much he disagreed with everything, but always challenged me in interesting ways. It’s impossible to express how important this has been for me.

Aragorn! was so much more soft and sensitive than many people knew. He was truly such a kindhearted creature. I cried in front of him multiple times. One of those times was when my sweet pit bull died; another was during some dark personal shit I was going through. Both times, he was so fully present and supportive and kind. From those lows to some ridiculous highs like sharing piles of ice cream on top of a pile of brownies or feeling super cool when he gave me a ride to my welding class on his motorcycle… he always made me laugh and remember what was important.

His playfulness is highlighted in my memory of visiting his place during a book fair weekend in 2013. He suddenly and gleefully ran through the yard, sun blasting behind as he carried a black flag, darting around and dodging all the friends, furniture, and dogs around him. Every time we shared space, I was drawn to that spark that he had.

What I love the most about Aragorn! is the intangible, the unexplainable. The fiery trickster villain energy that’s impossible to duplicate or capture. Maybe he is an actual spark now, existing in the unfolding of explosions forever. I bet he’d find this cheesy but semi-secretly like it. I love you my friend!

Aragorn! at the A Fire at the Mountain Book Fair in Flagstaff, Arizona in 2013.

Aragorn! loved mentoring young people. Not in that way where people who go to punk shows too long build cred by talking endlessly about how all their peers sold out. Rather, while he lived with people from the old days and worked on projects with them, he always brought those projects to spaces full of young people to discuss the ideas with them, to show them new things. He’d ride a motorcycle halfway across the country to a book fair in the middle of nowhere that amounted to little more than a garage show slumber party because he thought young people there might enjoy what he’d published.

That’s not to say he didn’t talk about the past. He was a wealth of first-hand anarchist history. But he never made you feel like you had missed the hey-day and were now living in some sort of epilogue. He would just give you information that could help you understand yourself and your friends in a much longer context.

Aragorn! loved discussing, debating, questioning, and explaining ideas—and he structured his life in a way that provided him maximum time to do just that. When I worked at Little Black Cart, the compound was a modest book nerd’s paradise. A diverse bunch of folks living in a couple houses with a big yard with happy dogs and a park-style picnic table with people nearly always sitting at it, right outside of a print shop with everything necessary to make a hundred copies of a book—or just one for yourself or a friend. When not traveling all over the country on a motorcycle, meeting people through his books, this is where he spent nearly all his time. If that’s not killing it, I don’t know what is.

Aragorn! is exactly the kind of foe I wanted to have. All differences aside, including the time he accused my friends and me of being a cult after we had spent a seemingly enjoyable few days together, nobody can say that Aragorn! didn’t work tirelessly, year after year, to maintain, develop, and share a vicious, dangerous, and unforgiving anarchist ideology. Through the years, even as our politics diverged more sharply, it was always reassuring to know that someone dedicated and focused was facilitating the development of a completely parallel and uncompromising politics, a vast conversation involving young, inexperienced, jaded, burned out, and elderly people, involving brilliant loners and just plain lonely or difficult people. Aragorn! published works he disliked by people he loathed; he circulated texts and pamphlets he thought were stupid. He built platforms for anarchist ideas to be read, discussed, and embraced in their most furious, their most cruel, their most impossible formulations.

Anarchist conflicts do not sacrifice the enemy for the fatherland. They elevate all the participants in the contest, refining us, bringing us to higher, sharper, more dignified positions. Without Aragorn!, it falls to the rest of us to preserve the sufficient negativity, the requisite cynicism, the appropriate nihilism, to meet the problems we all face, separately and together, side by side and head to head.

ARAGORN! is dead! LONG LIVE ANARCHY!

I am so sad—it is very sudden. I am at Exarchia Square, just finished the national assembly of Anarchist Federation in K-Vox, eight hours non-stop talking about all possible ways to turn social apathy into social revolt with crazy motherfuckers from all over Greece. I walk to the square. Friends from London, Arizona, and Greece just started this new group Obsedian and they have a public gathering at the square against the police. It is winter in Athens, Athens is sad in winter. Suddenly, an American anarchist friend grabs me: “Man, I tell you this because I know he is a friend of yours—ARAGORN! IS DEAD.”

You cannot hate God—because God is dead. The void is around us, inside us, and between us. The void doesn’t keep us apart; it connects us.

I am sad. It has been so long since I lost a beloved friend in sudden death that I almost forgot how sad it is. Aragorn! was an amazing being, real dynamite in a Nietzschean kind of way. I wonder how it is possible for a fanatical Stirnerist to offer all his life for all of us, the global anarchist movement. In Aragorn!’s life, Max Stirner’s vision about free human beings makes sense. Aragorn! and Paul Simons, the other amazing comrade we lost last year, were two persons from the same anarchist cell that manifested the core of the ideas of Stirner. You have to be a free individual to be a part of a revolution—and this freedom, you must take it for yourself—nobody will ever give it to you.

All of us hope to die having offered a lot of things to Anarchy. Although Aragorn! died so suddenly, he leaves having offered so much for the revolution—the revolution exactly as he had it in his own mind. In this way, he created amazing anarchist non-sectarian projects and at the same time he was a part of some amazing sects. He ended debates and started plenty of them, he helped anarchism to spread and also to change. Aragorn! was a real provocateur, sometimes intentionally positioning himself in the middle of dangerous and delicate debates. He was a peaceful person at war with the universe, a cyber-primitivist, a social individualist, an insurrectionist nihilist—a real friend.

Aragorn! always had one thing in mind: anarchists are here to fight for individual emancipation and also for social freedom and this is not easy at all. We are fighting against the state, against capital, but also against the obedient society that supports them. We have to find ways to walk at this thin line between freedom and misanthropy, chaos and death, hate and compassion. If you fight for a world without police and organized armies, you have to cultivate yourself to accept and respect people around you in a way that is not easy at all even to imagine now. We are living in a cannibalistic human era and we walk around year after year in fear and confusion. If you search for someone else to take you by the hand and lead you to anarchist paradise you will never have the chance to recognize that all possible freedom is inside you and it needs a lot of courage and a lot of determination to manifest it and defend it here, now and for ever.

Aragorn! was a great person and I had the feeling that he would stay with us much longer. Now I realize that I felt this because he was so dedicated to anarchism, like almost having a dialogue with the long, long future of Anarchy. There are very few comrades around this planet regarding whom you can feel that they will be part of the movement for all of the decades to come no matter what will happen. They will not have children—or if they do, it will not change anything. They will not work bullshit jobs—or if they do, it will not change anything. They will not miss the assembly because they are in a meeting, they don’t look busy to be cool, they will be available in any moment, under all kinds of circumstances, they will be here, no matter what is going on, they will be here. Aragorn! is one of them.

If all of us and each one of us would dare to offer even 10% of the time that Aragorn! spent organizing and spreading revolutionary anarchism during his lifetime, we would destroy capitalist civilization forever in one summer.

All of us from Void Network and Exarchia express our deepest and sincere respect for this amazing revolutionary and great friend. Good night Aragorn!—we will meet soon in Nothingness.

Life is short—NOW we have to destroy all chains and run wild, FREE.
ARAGORN! IS DEAD! — LONG LIVE ANARCHY!

-Tasos Sagris, Void Network – Athens

Aragorn! was a challenging person in the best ways possible, and at times in very… challenging ways. A lot of criticism was leveled at him by a lot of people he rubbed the wrong way. In the 15 or so years I’ve known him, I’ve always felt like he cared about me, I’ve always appreciated the ways he made me think. He could be gruff and seem callous on the outside, but he was truly a sensitive and creative person who cared more deeply than most people know is even possible.

His steadfast and lifelong dedication to the beautiful idea of anarchy and against a world of hierarchy and domination earned him numerous enemies throughout his life, both on the left and on the right. He didn’t like to talk about it (understandably), but in the 1990s in Sacramento, he was stabbed during a brawl with Neo-Nazis and lived with the consequences for decades.

His commitment to the projects he took on and the contributions he made to Little Black Cart, the Brilliant podcast, Black Seed, Ardent Press, hosting dozens of rad websites, AJODA, his series of interviews with other indigenous anarchists, Green Anarchy Magazine, and the East Bay Anarchist Book Fair (to name just a few) helped shape the ideas of thousands of people around the world. He encouraged everyone to think critically about how they engage with ideas and with the world. He didn’t hold back or mince words. He inspired and frustrated people to be better.

I don’t think we will even begin to realize all the consequences of his death for years, and my sincerest hope is that we all can find something of value from what he offered the world.

Whether you loved him or hated him, his contributions are undeniable. He is gone at far too young an age, with so much left to do. I hope we can find it in ourselves to live life with even a fraction of the perseverance and ferocity that Aragorn! did and apply ourselves to our projects and ideas with a dedication even he would appreciate.

He definitely would have hated this attention and disagreed with most of what I’ve written here, but I’ve never let his disapproval stop me from doing anything before. Yet I know for sure I’ll think about it more critically because of his influence.

Long live anarchy.

Other Eulogies

“He wasn’t running in a popularity contest, he was trying to flesh out what it means to be an anarchist at the end of the world.”

-Rotten, fellow former editor of Green Anarchy

All we know about this period comes from Aragorn!’s own accounts, as he spoke openly about this. Our effort to honor Aragorn!’s life, accomplishments, and the deep loss felt by those who survive him is not intended to discredit anyone who experienced harm from him. ↩

CrimethInc.com Now Fully Functional in Portuguese : Including Books, Zines, Posters, and Articles

2020-01-07T20:56:14Z

After a tremendous amount of work, we are finally able to announce the Brazilian Portuguese version of this site, pt.crimethinc.com. In addition, we have uploaded a large number of books, zines, posters, and articles in Portuguese. From now on, you can access a full list of our articles in Portuguese at crimethinc.com/languages/português-brasileiro. Below, you can find a full list of all our books (all freely available in PDF), zines, and posters in Portuguese, as well.

This is part of our ongoing effort to fully internationalize our efforts, making them equally inclusive across all national borders and boundaries of language.

We first made contact with Brazilian anarchists in the 1990s; our material has appeared in Portuguese going back as far as early issues of our paper, Harbinger, which appeared under the name Arauto. Since the June 2013 uprisings we have published articles from comrades, directly from within the mobilizations. In addition, comrades in Brazil and Portugal have translated a vast amount of CrimethInc. material from English and other languages into Portuguese. All this material can now be gathered here in a unified platform.

We hope to continue our efforts to build tools and networks for communication and solidarity across the decades to come. We aim to establish strategic dialogue between anarchists and anti-authoritarian rebels active on all seven continents. Not just to translate analysis from one language or region for others, but also supporting voices of resistance wherever people are fighting against the oppression of capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and the state.

If you would like to help with translations to or from Portuguese and other languages, or if know of any material already translated and not yet on this site, please contact us by email: false.flag@riseup.net.

Thanks—and see you on the streets!

Below, you can click the image to download the pdf.

Livros

Da Democracia à Liberdade: A Diferença entre Governo e Autodeterminação – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

Para comprar cópias impressas de Da Democracia à Liberdade clique aqui.

Trabalho: capitalismo . economia . resistência – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

Espere Resistência: um guia de campo – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

Receitas para o Desastre: um livro de receitas anarquista – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

Dias de Guerra Noites de Amor: Crimideia para iniciantes – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

Zines

Para Mudar Tudo – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

Voto vs. Ação Direta – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

Você Está Sob Vigilância – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

A Internet Como uma Nova Cerca – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

7 Mitos Sobre a Polícia – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

Anarquia e Álcool – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 01 Black blocs, bloqueios & bombas de fumaça – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 02 Coletivos, coalizões & cultura de segurança – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 03 Saúde, comportamento & violência doméstica – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 04 Sabotagem, infiltração & evasão – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 05 Grafite, estêncil, serigrafia, adesivos & lambes – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 06 (Portugues Brasileiro) Manifestações, bicicletadas, festas & festivais – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 07 Desemprego, okupas, caronas & lixeiras – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 08: Solidariedade, apoio jurídico & minando a opressão

Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 09: Feitiços, performances, música & reservatórios de ideias

Receitas para o Desastre Vol. 10: Mídia, propaganda & formas de chamar a atenção

Posters

A Polícia – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

Vamos Mostar Quem Manda: Ninguém – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

Democracia é Burocracia – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

Democracia é Fronteira – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

Democracia é Guerra – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

Democracia é Polícia – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

Democracia é Prisão – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

Democracia é Vigilância – Clique na imagem para baixar o PDF.

Textos

Sexta-feira, 29 de novembro: Ninguém paga! Chamado Internacional para uma Greve Contra o Aumento do Custo de Vida
O “Cessar Fogo” é uma Fraude Mortal—Mensagem de um camarada em Rojava
A relevância da invasão turca—Abordando as duras questões sobre imperialismo e solidariedade
Chamado para a ação: Solidariedade a Rojava – contra a invasão turca! Uma Apelo Urgente de Organizações Internacionais
Nacionalistas e Jihadistas Unidos—E Contra Eles, apenas Resistência Autônoma
O que queima a Amazônia—Um apelo de anarquistas do Brasil
A nova guerra contra imigrantes e anarquistas na Grécia—Uma entrevista com anarquista em Exarchia
Relato de Viagem: Turnê Brasileira lançando Da Democracia à Liberdade—Incluindo um panorama de movimentos e lutas anarquistas pelo Brasil
Polícia: Um Estudo Etnográfico—Foto-Ensaio Sobre a Obediência Armada
A ameaça a Rojava—Anarquista na Síria fala sobre o real significado da retirada das tropas estadunidenses da Síria por Donald Trump.
Todas Contra Bolsonaro! Todas contra Bolsonaro e a nova direita!

Para Mudar Tudo, Comece de Algum Lugar!

2019: The Year in Review : Including a Short Report on Our Efforts

2020-01-06T19:11:11Z

The beginning of a new year offers us an opportunity to look back over our accomplishments and the things we stand to learn from the previous year. In the following report, we will review our efforts throughout 2019, set in the context of world events. This has been a year of stalemate in the US, while elsewhere, a new wave of confrontational movements has inspired some commentators to predict a global revival of anarchism on an unprecedented scale.

While this strikes us as optimistic, it adequately describes the stakes of the situation today. The first decade of the 21st century saw the end of the era of capitalist triumphalism; the second decade saw an explosion of uprisings followed by a wave of repression and reactionary nationalism. The decade ahead of us marks a decisive turning point in the history of our species. Increasingly polarized and nationalistic geopolitics are producing one war after another now. Desperate and oppressed people are rising up—though often without a clear analysis of the causes of their misery—while governments and corporations race to develop technology that can effectively surveil populations and suppress revolt. Meanwhile, industrially driven climate disruption is generating ecological disasters that threaten the biosphere itself.

We will either figure out how to break down the existing mechanisms of control on a massive scale, as people have been doing in Chile over the past several months, or we will enter a period of worldwide tyranny from which humanity may never emerge.

Currently, we are hardly prepared for the struggles this coming decade will bring. Still, it is helpful that some projects and networks persist from the struggles of the previous decades—including this particular project, the CrimethInc. ex-Workers’ Collective. At the bare minimum, we have to pass on the lessons of past struggles, update our analyses and strategies for the current era, and form much more ambitious and wide-reaching networks and initiatives. The price of failing to do this will be unspeakable.

Chilean anarchists and other rebels celebrating New Year’s Eve in Plaza de la Dignidad by driving back the police and honoring the dead.

Everything our collective accomplished in 2019—from writing articles and recording podcasts to programming this site and mailing out book orders—we achieved by means of 100% volunteer labor, working collectively and anonymously the way we have since the mid-1990s. We seek neither financial gain nor personal fame for what we do. We are driven solely by the desire for liberation—liberation for all, in all the different forms it takes.

As others recently put it,

“For our part, we seek to live without masters or bosses, in harmony with nature and animals, in a dignified and responsible manner, respecting each other, understanding that each one has different abilities, but that each is of equal value… [we believe in] self-education, sharing in free association for the pleasure of doing so and not for the need to survive, relying on values such as solidarity, altruism, honesty, and mutual support.”

If you like what we do, the best thing you can do is do it yourself—take action in your own community, develop and refine your own analyses and strategies, reach out to others and mobilize for social change. You can also contribute to our efforts in a variety of ways, or, failing that, donate to us to help us print new outreach materials. Please contact us if you want to help in some other way! Later this week, we’ll publish a more specific request for assistance with our next round of projects.

For further reading in the vein of the following report, you could consult the 2019 overview from Anarchist Agency, a similar report from our Brazilian counterparts, and the reports we published looking back on 2018 and 2017.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B6zTfnUFK5q/?igshid=1elun49u98kka

A New Year’s Eve dinner in Plaza de la Dignidad bringing together anarchists and other front-line fighters in the Chilean uprising with supporters from the older generation and the hungry and needy. Scenes like this show us how inspiring mutual aid practices can be in the midst of our ongoing struggles.

In the US, an Ongoing Impasse

Over two years later, 2017 remains the high point of struggles against Trump and the repressive agenda his regime represents. For good or for ill, the airport blockades, the deplatforming of Milo Yiannopoulos in Berkeley, and the groundswell of anti-fascism that followed the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville mark the high-water mark of contemporary direct action efforts. This is instructive: the moment of greatest possibility often occurs at the opening of a new era, when the horizon of what can happen has not yet been fixed in the popular imagination. Rather than planning to slowly build momentum, it is sometimes important to seize the window of opportunity and figure out how to build from there.

Conversely, one of the reasons anarchists in the United States are experiencing a relative lull in activity is that, since 2017, we have been compelled to put more energy into mobilizing in response to emergencies than into slowly, steadily cultivating communities that can act together. The subcultures that nourished generations of rebels have largely melted away or been coopted; online networking is a poor substitute for long-term networks based in shared activities.

But we should not hold ourselves solely responsible for the current lull. It takes place in the larger context of massive institutional efforts to substitute the spectator sport of electoral politics for the revolutionary practice of direct action.

As we argued in “Life in ‘Mueller Time’,” the Democratic Party has intentionally introduced a series of spectacles aimed at centralizing itself in the popular imagination as the chief representative of anti-Trump sentiment and the only hope for social change. Foremost of these spectacles are the Mueller investigation, the recent impeachment proceedings, and the ongoing Democratic primaries. Neither the Mueller investigation nor the impeachment have threatened Trump’s power—and the 2020 election may not, either. But all three of them serve to focus attention on institutional processes and invest legitimacy in existing authority figures—including career politicians, judges, and the FBI.

Against those who count on the authorities to resolve the problems caused by those in authority…

…we know it’s up to us to deal with the situation.

In this context of cooption, 2018 saw an impasse emerge in struggles between the nationalists around Trump, the centrists around the Democratic Party, and social movements, in which none of these three forces was able to definitively gain the upper hand. This impasse continued throughout 2019.

We can see the evidence of this impasse in the desperately needed but not yet successful efforts to get a powerful new ecological movement off the ground in the US, despite the spread of Extinction Rebellion overseas; Extinction Rebellion is too legalistic and pacifist for our tastes, but its popularity speaks to a real need for ecological action. We can also see the impasse in the comparatively tame response to the Turkish invasion of Syria, at least outside the Bay Area and a couple other hotspots, and in the limits that solidarity efforts reached mobilizing against the latest wave of state attacks on the undocumented. Unfortunately, one of the more effective efforts in that struggle may have been the action Willem Van Spronsen carried out on the Northwest Detention Center, a private immigration detainment facility. Police killed Van Spronsen in response. But a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official subsequently explained to the media that the dramatic increase in anti-immigrant raids that Trump had called for had not taken place in part because of the fear Van Spronsen’s action had generated among the mercenaries serving ICE.

We do not believe in canonizing people as heroes. Likewise, we strongly urge against people intentionally sacrificing their lives. If anti-border movements had found more effective collective means of action against ICE operations, maybe Van Spronsen would still be alive—and some of the millions of people who have been deported from the United States would still be at liberty. We honor the long-running efforts to support undocumented people that our comrades have maintained in the face of repression. The question of how to build on them remains a challenge for all of us.

Click the image to download the PDF.

Escalating Conflicts

Meanwhile, outside the United States, from France and Hong Kong to Sudan and Haiti, protracted struggles were playing out between governments and powerful social movements. This ferment reached as far as Puerto Rico, a United States territory, though denied equal status to the states proper.

In October, conflict came to a boil on many fronts at once. Trump had been threatening to let Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan invade Rojava since December 2018; at the beginning of October, he finally did exactly that, giving Turkey carte blanche to slaughter and displace hundreds of thousands of people on the Syrian side of the border.

We scrambled to respond, publishing a call for solidarity actions against the Turkish invasion that was endorsed by well over 100 organizations, alongside a series of articles on the situation, including “Why the Turkish Invasion Matters” and “The ‘Ceasefire’ Is a Deadly Fraud,” debunking Vice President Mike Pence’s lie that he had brokered a ceasefire in the region.

At the same time, the wave of uprisings that had begun with Haiti, Hong Kong, and Sudan spread to Ecuador, Chile, Honduras, Catalunya, Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere. As our networks extend throughout many parts of the world, we went to great lengths to present on-the-ground reporting and analysis from many of these upheavals.

Street fighters holding back the police during clashes in Catalunya, October 2019.

International Coverage

In 2019, we published firsthand reports on struggles around the world, from Lebanon to Sudan. Here are some of the highlights.

Hong Kong

Corresponding with anarchist participants in the powerful social movement against the Chinese-backed government of Hong Kong, we were fortunate to publish two of the most influential texts expressing the perspectives of anti-authoritarians within the movement, “Anarchists in the Resistance to the Extradition Bill” and “Three Months of Insurrection.” We recommend these two interviews as some of our best and most thought-provoking work in 2019.

Three Months of Insurrection: An Anarchist Collective in Hong Kong Appraises the Achievements and Limits of the Revolt.

Greece

This year, Greece saw the inevitable end of the disappointing left government of Syriza, which was replaced by the aptly-named far-right New Democracy party. New Democracy immediately declared an all-out war against refugees, anarchists, squatters, students, and the world-famous Athenian neighborhood of Exarchia. In response, we worked with comrades in Athens to chronicle resistance and repression from one month to the next:

Earlier in 2019, we also published “Putting Ideas on Trial: The Greek State’s Laboratory of Repression,” an interview with Greek anarchist prisoner Nikos Romanos.

Ecuador and Chile

In Ecuador, a state austerity package prompted an uprising that nearly overthrew the government. We interviewed a participant immediately before the government caved in and canceled the package, while barricades still stood in the streets of the nation’s capital: “Inside the Quito Commune.”

The uprising in Ecuador helped to inspire a similar uprising in Chile, which continues to this day. We published two articles charting its first days, “Chile: Resisting under Martial Law” and “On the Front Lines in Chile: Six Accounts from the Uprising.” Since then, we have continued to publish updates and interviews from the streets of Chile via our podcast.

Altered billboards in Chile: “Looting is how a university student has to pay over twenty years what a congressman makes in two months.”—”Violence is when the police burst into a high school and shoot at the students.”—”The destruction of something man-made is called ‘vandalism,’ while the destruction of nature is called ‘progress.’” From our text, “Not Falling for It: How the Uprising in Chile Has Outlasted State Repression.”

Catalunya

Following our critical coverage of the independence movement in Catalunya two years ago, we published a report on the clashes that broke out in Catalunya in October 2019. We followed it up shortly afterwards with a first-person account from the front lines of the fighting, one of the most exciting texts we published this past year.

France

Throughout the first half of 2019, we continued to publish reports from the Yellow Vest movement in France as it slowly wound down and transitioned into other movements. Continuing the analysis we began in From Democracy to Freedom, our most important text about the Gilets Jaunes in 2019 was probably “Between the Reaction and the Referendum,” a look at nationalism and “direct democracy” in the Yellow Vest movement.

At the same time, a year after the state raids and evictions at la ZAD—the Zone à Défendre (Zone to Defend) at Notre-Dame-des-Landes in western France, where occupiers had successfully blocked an unwanted airport—we published “Reflections on the ZAD: Another History.” While some activists steer away from dealing with the complex internal dynamics of inspiring projects like the ZAD, we feel that in the pursuit of liberation, it is just as important to learn from internal struggles as it is to learn from conflicts with the authorities; failing to do so will doom us to repeat the same mistakes.

La ZAD in France.

Doing What We Do Best

Like many other anarchists, we spent much of 2019 scrambling to react to emergencies rather than making progress on our own beloved projects. Especially in October and November, we put everything else on hold. One of our longer-term goals is to expand our capacity to such a point that we can continue to make progress towards our long-term projects while responding to current events.

Unexpectedly, one of our most widely read texts of 2019 was “Against the Logic of the Guillotine,” a critique of fantasies about using the institutions of the state to exact revenge. The popularity of articles like this suggests that we should be putting more energy into reflective and theoretical writing.

We also reached many readers with “Storming the Gates,” an analysis of the importance of uncompromising anti-carceral movements, and “The Wrong ICE is Melting, The Wrong Amazon is Burning,” emphasizing the importance of direct action to ecological movements. We followed up the latter article with “What Is Burning the Amazon?”, a perspective from Brazil.

In 2020, we aspire to step back from the constant commotion of events to publish more reflective texts like these.

Storming the Gates: The New Wave of Frontal Attacks on Prisons, Jails, and Detention Centers.

Mobilization

By and large, participants in CrimethInc. projects do most of our direct action organizing in other venues. However, we do occasionally coordinate mobilizations, such as our decade-running annual day of action, Steal Something from Work Day.

In February 2019, facing another potential government shutdown over funding for Trump’s xenophobic border wall, we announced a call to action under the watchword “Block the Wall.” This campaign brought together a network of anti-border activists, giving rise to a variety of small outreach actions and longer-running solidarity efforts including a freestanding website.

As mentioned above, our most significant mobilizing effort was our call to action against the Turkish invasion of Syria, which was endorsed by everyone from the Democratic Socialists of America and Cooperation Jackson to Noam Chomsky, David Graeber, and Debbie Bookchin.

Finally, at the end of the year, we announced a call for a day of action against the rising cost of living on November 29, 2019 under the banner #NobodyPays. This was inspired by the fare-dodging protests that had helped to catalyze the uprising in Chile. The call also appeared in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Swedish, and Finnish.

In the United States, following two major demonstrations in New York City against police violence on public transit, #NobodyPays actions took place in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, Minneapolis, Toronto, and elsewhere, as chronicled here. Although the actions did not trigger a countrywide upheaval, like the evasión masiva actions in Chile, nor give rise to a fare-dodgers’ union, like planka.nu in Sweden, they did put the tactic of fare-dodging in the public consciousness as a means of taking collective direct action to counter austerity measures.

https://twitter.com/IGD_News/status/1200962321251733504

History

As we emphasized above, one of our missions is to pass on the experiences and lessons from recent anarchist efforts. Tomorrow’s rebels will be better equipped to act effectively if they are informed about the movements of the past several decades as well as classical reference points like the Paris Commune.

At the beginning of 2019, two years after the #J20 demonstrations at Trump’s inauguration, we published a series of articles appraising the mobilization and the legal case that followed it. This included “Anarchist Resistance to the Trump Inauguration,” a minute-by-minute analysis of the events of January 20, 2017 in Washington, DC; “I Was a J20 Street Medic and Defendant,” a narrative from one of the first defendants to go to trial in the subsequent conspiracy case; and “We’ve Got Your Back: The Story of the J20 Defense,” a full retrospective on the solidarity and legal support strategies that ultimately resulted in the dropping of charges against the vast majority of J20 defendants.

Anarchist Resistance to the Trump Inauguration: Understanding the Events of January 20, 2017.

We published two other lengthy accounts of anarchist participation in 21st-century upheavals: “Looting Back,” chronicling the uprising that took place in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 in response to the police murder of Michael Brown, and “The Battle for Ungdomshuset,” recounting the history of Denmark’s most combative social center.

Following the Turkish invasion of Syria, we published “The Roots of Turkish Fascism,” charting the rise of fascism in Turkey across a century in order to explain the context of Erdoğan’s assault. For lighter reading, we observed Valentine’s Day with “Love, Anarchy, and Drama,” exploring several classical anarchists’ experiments with non-monogamy.

Finally, continuing our series on the Russian Counterrevolution that we began on the 100-year anniversary of the seizure of the Winter Palace in 1917, we published “When the Bolsheviks Turned on the Workers,” a retrospective on the Putilov and Astrakhan strikes of 1919.

Looting Back: An Account of the Ferguson Uprising.

Podcasts

In 2019, we published a full audiobook version of our book No Wall They Can Build: A Guide to Borders and Migration across North America. We hope this can set a precedent for us to release audiobook versions of future books, as well.

The podcast crew also mobilized to respond to the Turkish invasion of Syria, releasing a four-episode series within only ten days. Then they did the same thing in response to the uprising in Chile, releasing three fully bilingual episodes from on the ground at the center of the uprising, with a fourth episode to be released shortly.

Going Multi-Lingual

At long last, we are poised to make this site fully functional in a wide range of languages in addition to English. Already, we have es.crimethinc.com and de.crimethinc.com functioning for those who access the site from Spanish-speaking and German-speaking parts of the world; already, you can peruse crimethinc.com/languages to find a list of the articles we have available in each of ten different tongues.

A considerable number of posters, zines, and book pdfs are also available on this site now in Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, and other languages, and we hope to add a lot more soon. In 2019, we also added a Japanese version of our anarchist primer To Change Everything to the site, bringing the total number of language options for that project to 32. Currently, it is our most translated project; soon, we hope to make much more of our material available multilingually.

If you can help us translate texts, or simply collect and proofread existing translations, please contact us.

Ludic Pursuits: Arts and Games

We didn’t do as much with the arts in 2019 as we hope to in 2020. Our most widely circulated creative work was probably “Police: An Ethnography,” a photoessay exploring the common threads that tie together police psychology all around the world. In the art-for-art’s-sake category, for Valentine’s Day we published two works of pure fiction, “Injury against Erasure/Damage against Time.”

We also published two games this year—our acclaimed J20 Protest Simulator, a choose-your-own-adventure game enabling the player to participate in the black bloc that interrupted the spectacle of Trump’s inauguration, and Up against the Wall, Motherfucker, a simulation of the 1968 occupation of Columbia University.

Click here to play our J20 Protest Simulator.

Outreach

Throughout 2019, CrimethInc. agents distributed literature at events across the United States, including the Asheville Anarchist Book Fair, the Olympia Zine Fest, the Boston Anarchist Book Fair, the New York City Anarchist Book Fair, the East Bay Alternative Book and Zine fest in Oakland, the Howard Zinn Book Fair in San Francisco, and the Humboldt County Anarchist Book Fair, among others.

CrimethInc. agents also conducted tours of the southern half of Brazil between June and July and the West Coast of the United States in December, promoting the English and Portuguese versions of the book From Democracy to Freedom and speaking about various forms of contemporary anarchist struggle. The report from the tour in Brazil includes an overview of anarchist projects and popular struggles throughout the country.

This report only covers a fraction of what we did in 2019. We have a lot planned for 2020, but as usual, it’s better not to promise things—but simply to do them. We’ll see you on the front lines this year.

Celebrants in the Plaza de la Dignidad on New Year’s Eve, 2019: “Only by fighting do we advance.”

Merry Crisis and a Happy New Fear : Repression and Resistance in Greece, December 2019

2019-12-25T21:12:00Z

Continuing our coverage of the struggle in Greece between the new repressive New Democracy government and the longstanding anarchist movement, we present the following report, drawing on eyewitness accounts from street mobilizations and the defense of several squats. The Greek state continues to throw its full weight behind an all-out assault on refugees, anarchists, and student movements, encouraging gratuitous police brutality against both human beings and their animal companions while seeking to exonerate right-wing murderers including members of the Neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn who faced conspiracy charges in the murder of Pavlos Fyssas and the police officer who murdered the 15-year-old anarchist Alexis Grigoropoulos 11 years ago this month.

We hope to inspire international solidarity actions with the movement in Greece and to equip readers for action and analysis in other contexts in an era in which state violence and grassroots resistance are escalating worldwide. The struggle continues.

A police officer doused in paint during the eviction of the squats in Koukaki.

An Update from an Ongoing Fight

This month the eviction of three inspiring squatted spaces in the Koukaki region of Athens has driven me to compose this urgent update. I aim to keep the struggle in Greece alive in international dialogue—not only in discussion but also in the actions taken to demonstrate international solidarity—in order to remind the Greek state that the foundation and spirit of our struggle goes beyond their borders and to keep this spirit strong and warm in such heinous and cold times.

Many things have happened since the last update; I will do my best to mention them. However, I want to start with the eviction of Koukaki.

The Eviction of the Koukaki Squats

At dawn on the morning of December 18, dozens of police from various agencies attacked the three squats in the Koukaki neighborhood, employing weapons including stun grenades and rubber bullets. These three occupations—45 Matrouzou Street, 21 Panetoliou Avenue, and Arvalis 3—were well-known and widely loved spaces helping to preserve an anarchist presence in one of the most expensive and rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods in Athens. While some property owners in the neighborhood considered these spaces threatening, many Koukaki locals appreciated them for maintaining free clothing and food distribution projects and for maintaining a significant voice against Airbnb and similar capitalist efforts.

Located very close to the Acropolis with a predominantly upper-middle-class population, Koukaki has been one of the neighborhoods most impacted by Airbnb. The squats evicted represent immediate opportunities in real estate speculation; this may have helped to push their eviction to the top of the state’s priorities.

Police invaded the two smaller squats (21 Panetoliou Avenue and Arvalis 3) following a short but courageous defense effort ending in four arrests at Panetoliou and two arrests at Arvalis. The arrestees were later released pending trial on charges including damage to property, disobedience, resisting arrest, and assault on an officer; in addition, police are attempting to use the same laws typically applied to gun possession to prosecute the arrestees after finding ordinary kitchen knives, bits of rock, and a crossbow on the premises.

One of the arrestees sustained a shot impact from a plastic bullet at close range and required two hospital visits during imprisonment. Despite this, the arrestees remain resilient. From inside the cells of Athens’ main pre-trial prison, they managed to send out the following statement:

Today, December 18, the state and its army attacked our community, evicting all three of our homes. Crowds of EKAM, Delta, and MAT scum assisted in the eviction of our homes. We were hit by a flash of lightning, and our companion was shot by a plastic bullet at close range. At the same time, neighbors of the M45 were beaten and tortured when they refused entry to the cops, as there was no public prosecutor. At the time of writing this text, we do not know where and how our companions from the occupation M45 are. This comes as part of a larger campaign to assault all those who resist power and fight for freedom. This is a time where the state is spreading its tentacles of repression against squats in order to meet the needs of tourists, replace permanent homes with Airbnb, and continue a violent campaign of gentrification. We do not recognize the notion of property and ownership that the state protects. We have used these empty buildings to foster a community of revolutionary desire, beauty, and the rejection of capitalism.

Solidarity to the squats!
We will spread across all the land!
Power to everyone who resists state violence!

Repression does not scare us, it persuades us to continue our struggle for a world of solidarity, equality, and self-organization.

[For background, Delta police are designated for beating demonstrators at close quarters; MAT police are riot squads; EKAM are Greece’s SWAT and the most “organized” police department.]

Nearby, at 45 Matrouzou Street, a great battle took place in which people stood up to the state for an hour. Cops were covered in paint and faced a hailstorm of debris while blinded with the smoke of fire extinguishers. The police equate the protective measures those inside the squat took to defend themselves to attempts on the lives of the officers who attacked their home. These measures included reinforced doors, windows, and other typical security mechanisms. Any sensible person will recognize such measures as simple self-defense.

Amazingly, all the occupants of Matrouzou succeeded in escaping after this battle, despite all the forces and resources the state had mobilized against them. Embarrassed by this, the invaders punished the immediate neighbors.

The consequences of the eviction of the squats in Koukaki.

Hoping to capture the escaped squatters, officers knocked on a neighbor’s door, expecting to be welcomed. The mother of the household demanded that they present a warrant in order to enter; as she was requesting this, she heard other officers illegally entering her balcony and rooftop. When she and her husband demanded a warrant once again, the police beat her husband and their two sons, handcuffed them, put black bags put over their heads, and detained them in the cold outside on their roof. While the police did not present a warrant, they claimed they had done this with the supervision of the prosecutor in charge of the raids. The sons and father of the family were both arrested alongside the squatters from the other two occupations.

The police justified the brutality they inflicted on the family on the grounds that the family members were aiding the squatters in their escape. Yet in searching their home, the police found no evidence to support this claim. Grasping at straws, representatives of the state claim that they will test DNA found inside the squat and the DNA of the family members they arrested to prove there was a connection. An anonymous statement from Matrouzou following the raid claims that this family did not help them in any way. The father who was arrested also happens to be a prominent director who has received a lot of media attention. He has made his disdain for the police apparent, but his distance from the anarchist movement is also obvious.

The family has no formal connection to the squat, though they had witnessed the brutality involved in prior evictions, as the squat was also evicted in 2018—under Syriza—only to be re-occupied shortly after. In view of what they had already seen police do, it is not surprising that the family did not feel comfortable allowing police officers into their home if they were not legally obliged to do so.

Evidence of torture and brutality against the family is widely available via the mainstream media. The police continue to make conflicting statements, even claiming that the family members went for a gun—a desperate lie which has slowly disappeared from their narrative. Despite this, the father and sons are facing charges of resisting arrest and disrupting a police operation.

This assault on the neighbors has hit the mainstream press harder than the evictions themselves, in ways that are significant in light of Greek history and the current political polarization of Greece. Like police everywhere, Greek police perceive themselves to be heroes, regardless of how most people see them. Lacking maturity or self-awareness, they tend to lash out when rejected. So when a family that does not resemble the image of their target asserts that officers are not welcome without a warrant, they become aggressive. This incident has generated a dialogue reminiscent of the days of the Greek Junta.

Police have gone so far as to argue that the family’s balconies and roof are public spaces, so they do not need to present a warrant to enter. Imagine what would happen if people tried to enter the pools on the roofs of the rich in the upscale neighborhood of Kolonaki! Much of the right-wing media is attempting to blame the woman for defying the police, regardless of the laws. We see this in a discussion between the mother and a condescending anchorman in which he explains that what the officers did was wrong, but it’s actually her fault for defying their demands.

The polarization of Greece is playing out in the mainstream media. The proponents of the Junta whine that under the dictatorship “we slept with our doors open”—others joke that “we slept with our doors open because we didn’t want to have to wake up to open them for police raids.”

In any case, the three evicted spaces that provided a voice for the residents of Koukaki who celebrated community over profit are now boarded up with bricks. It is fortunate that many of the occupiers escaped; all of them demonstrated remarkable courage. They published a statement which is available below.¹

While many of the non-human animals residing at the three occupations in Koukaki were also able to escape, it is unclear whether some of the cats that lived at Matrouzou remain boarded up inside. The police have taken to intentionally trapping animals inside evicted squats as a way to terrorize squatters; they did this during the eviction of the Vancouver squat on November 2. Considering that the residents of Matrouzou escaped, it is not surprising that police would contain animals inside the building until they die of hunger in hopes of luring the escapees into a trap or, failing that, tormenting them.

We should also mention that Dimitris Armakolas, the comrade who died in a tragic accident while raising a banner in solidarity with prisoner Marios Seisidis, was also a resident of the Koukaki squats before his passing.

Immediately after the eviction, a small solidarity demonstration took place. Police kettled the demonstrators, arresting five of them, then attacked the subsequent gathering at police headquarters to support the arrestees. That evening, after an emergency assembly, a surprise mob appeared in the heart of Athens’ shopping district in Monistraki, a well-known hang out of the rich and comfortable. While the beneficiaries of capital sipped their drinks, over 200 people marched disruptively through the area throwing flyers, painting graffiti on various stores, and smashing out the windows of a bank, a corporate grocery franchise, and a Starbucks. The police could not carry out any arrests and were forced to issue a public warning.

This action demonstrated that the movement does not only exist in squats and in Exarchia; it can arise and strike anywhere.

Surprise action in Athens’ shopping district in Monistraki, December 18.

Targeting Animal Companions: A New Tactic of State Terror

As remarked, it is becoming a pattern for police to target the animal companions of squatters. This bears more comment.

In the Vancouver squat, for example, the squatters kept dogs and cats carefully separated in order to avoid the possibility of a violent dispute between the creatures. Signs on doors informed people of the dangers of letting certain dogs or cats out of the rooms they lived in. When the police raided Vancouver, they handcuffed and beat those who were defending the squat. While in handcuffs, one of the detainees begged officers to keep the animals apart for their safety. The officer replied by elbowing this person in the face. In spite of this person’s requests, the cops intentionally placed the two dogs in the room occupied by four cats and closed the door—at a time when all of the animals were extremely distressed. One of the cats died as a consequence.

The closest companion of the cat who died learned of the death while inside prison. Absurdly, the cops claimed that the cat had been dead for two weeks, alleging that the squatters were lying in order to gain access to the squat again in order to reoccupy it. This broke the heart of the cat’s closest companion, considering they had spent time together just recently.

Following the cat’s death, animal control took the two dogs; the police threw the deceased cat in a dumpster and denied that the surviving three cats remained inside, claiming that no animals were left on the premises. Only after a bricklayer who was sealing up the entrances of the building was attacked by a cat to such an extent that it necessitated a visit to the hospital was anyone permitted to enter to search for the remaining cats. Then the state allowed animal welfare officials in for one hour, but they found only one of the three remaining cats. Vancouver is a very large building and cats are highly skilled at hiding, especially from police that they recognize as lethal antagonists.

Finally, with two cats remaining inside, an animal liberationist conducted a hunger strike outside Vancouver. At first, police attacked and threatened the hunger striker; when a prosecutor sent an order to allow for a proper search for the remaining cats, the police chief denied the request, claiming there were not enough police to safeguard the search—the same day that hundreds of police poured into Exarchia following an attack on a motorcycle belonging to a Delta cop. After a week of hunger strike and the spreading public accusation of animal cruelty, the cops finally gave in and allowed people to find and release the remaining cats. According to comrades from Vancouver, if not for the mainstream attention resulting from a social media campaign to get the cats out, they are certain that the prosecutor would have never called for their release. It is all too easy to torture and kill the voiceless in order to torment those with more “rights.”

Shortly after the raid of Vancouver, in the course a string of raids against the group Revolutionary Self-Defense, police raided a home in Exarchia. The cops found nothing to charge the residents with. The cops conducting the raid were the same ones who had attacked Vancouver. Leaving in frustration, they attacked a cat that lived there, breaking the cat’s front legs and smashing the cat’s jaw. When asked what they were doing, one responded, “Are you gonna do a hunger strike too?”

In another home invasion in the same string of anti-terror raids, officers kidnapped all the dogs on the premises—apparently for no reason other than to cause pain to their human companions.

Police in the United States often murder animals—for example, shooting dogs; maybe this news will not surprise many readers. But it is important to record the brutal cowardice of the police carrying out these evictions and to emphasize that the free hand that New Democracy has given them amplifies the cruelest and most sordid aspects of humanity.

Two cats impacted by evictions in Athens. Kolonia, on the left, was intentionally murdered by police during the eviction of the squat Vancouver. They later threw her body in a dumpster and claimed she had been dead for two weeks already. Sara, on the right, is a blind cat who was found on the streets of Athens and given love and housing at a squat in Koukaki. She remains alive and well and among caring friends, but the police have stolen her home.

Coddling Golden Dawn

Meanwhile, the state prosecutor has suggested dismissing conspiracy charges against the Neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn in the case of the 2013 murder of anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas, aka Killah P, while at the same time charging two individuals for alleged attacks against the offices of Golden Dawn. Such attacks have happened repeatedly in the last few years, usually claimed anonymously by communiqués signed with the names of victims of Golden Dawn—for example, the Pavlos Fyssas brigade and the Sahzat Luqman brigade. (Sahzat Luqman was a Pakistani laborer murdered by members of Golden Dawn.) According to corporate media, police allege the suspects to be linked to a November 1 attack on Golden Dawn’s office on Deligianni Street in downtown Athens as well as an earlier attack on May 23 in the West Attica area of Acharnes. Both attacks used makeshift explosives that damaged the premises but caused no injuries.

If the state allegations are pushed forward, it is likely that the prosecution will attempt to charge the two under new anti-terror measures, with the possible result that both of them could receive longer sentences than any of the murderers convicted for killings Golden Dawn has perpetrated, not to mention all the Golden Dawn murders that have never even been investigated. If Killah P had not been a white Greek citizen, his case likely would have never have made headlines—a tragic reality in Greece and around the world.

To the surprise of many people, the two arrestees were not remanded into custody on the day of their arraignment. Typically in cases involving terrorism, the state will hold those accused until their trial. Most likely, they are being allowed to await trial outside of jail as a result of a calculated effort by the state to moderate outrage. In view of widespread domestic and even international outrage against police brutality in Greece and the outcome of the Golden Dawn conspiracy case, the theatre of Greek politics will appear to remain in accordance with the laws of neoliberal democracy. But despite the flimsy evidence, the two comrades still have to report to the police four times a month and pay 15,000 euro bail, and they cannot travel abroad until the trial begins. If their case proceeds as others have, their trial could be delayed for years—using bureaucracy to punish the unconvicted.

It is not a coincidence that the state is dropping the conspiracy charges against Golden Dawn while cracking down on their enemies. New Democracy attempted to distance themselves from Golden Dawn during the elections, but they continue to make it clear that they are allies of the openly fascist group, even if somewhat wealthier and better mannered. When Killah P’s mother left the courtroom after the conclusion of the prosecution at the end of six years of traumatizing trial, she said “Today, you have stabbed Pavlos.”

Now Golden Dawn stands to be awarded 8 million euros as compensation for the case. This is a substantial amount of money in Greece for a political group. Political parties in Greece’s parliament are entitled to state funding. However, when the trial began six years ago, the state froze this funding. If Golden Dawn receives this large sum at once now, we will no doubt see them attempt to make up for their recent setbacks in the 2019 elections; it will also dramatically increase the resources available to support fascist street violence.

As an anarchist, I never expect justice from the state. I won’t use my limited voice to demand that anyone be imprisoned, not even fascist murderers. However, it is necessary to point out that a great deal of evidence was presented in the case against Golden Dawn. Beyond the obvious evidence of their Nazi connections and politics, investigators presented an array of intercepted phone calls and messages in the court, as well as written instructions explicitly organizing fascist violence. In view of the hierarchical organization of Golden Dawn, it’s very difficult to imagine that autonomous actions would take place without the approval of higher party members. Despite this, all 65 accused members of the conspiracy were acquitted of their charges. Only the individuals accused of actually stabbing Killah P will face any punishment, despite the large number of Golden Dawn members who coordinated throughout the neighborhood to converge on him, threatened him, surrounded him, and attacked him on the night he was murdered.

Graffiti on a state monument in Athens, December 6, 2019.

December 6

Now let’s back up and start earlier, to cover what else has happened this month.

From November 20, when the government announced that it would evict all squats, until the deadline of December 5 that they set for the occupiers to gain legalization or vacate, squats across Greece organized daily events and coordinated demonstrations across the country to show the strength of our movements and solidarity.

On the day of the deadline, anonymous comrades reclaimed 15 new squats across Athens to be used if existing squats were evicted. Anarchists also boarded up an office of New Democracy with bricks the same way they have assaulted our spaces. This is one of many recent actions against the offices of New Democracy across the country.

On December 6, demonstrations took place across Greece in memory of Alexis Grigoropoulos, the 15-year-old murdered by police in 2008, and the insurrection that followed; Greek anarchists have observed this date for ten years now. Clashes occurred in Patras and Thessaloniki.

In the morning of December 6, an autonomous demonstration of anarchist students set out, surrounded on all sides by the police and isolated from other left demonstrators. This clearly illustrated which movement the state recognizes as a threat to its power. That night, a huge demonstration marking the anniversary of the murder of Alexis Grigoropoulos took place with thousands of anarchists attending.

At the end of the demonstration, many took small actions, destroying advertisements on bus stations, pelting banks and state offices with paint bombs, and attempting to remove the barricades at universities, which are aimed at preventing public use of campuses. While these actions were fairly limited, once the demonstrators began to make their way back to Exarchia, where the memorial to Alexis is, without provocation or direct confrontation against the cops, police attacked brutally, beating people at random. Video footage shows the violence; even the state has been forced to pretend to investigate its own brutality, though we can be sure this will come to nothing.

One of the important pieces of evidence is a video showing police beating an unarmed man screaming “I surrender.” While they beat many people that night, this video caught mass attention not only due to the cowardly assaults carried out by officers, but also because, intent on humiliating him, they were stripping him of his clothing. This, too, has become a common police tactic aimed at humiliating arrestees and detainees, reported by many individuals who have been kidnapped by the riot police around the center of Athens. It is reminiscent of the kidnappings and torture done under Greece’s Junta.

One reporter from a mainstream television station was compelled to comment on the brutality live on the air on the night of December 6. A reporter from the mainstream channel Kontra couldn’t help reacting to the beating he witnessed of a person filming with a phone near the events. The reporter said, “People were beaten for truly doing nothing,” and that if he hadn’t had a professional camera crew, he would have been beaten as well. Shocking many people, he added that “While many take to the streets, we must chant the chant that unites us all: ‘cops, pigs, murderers.’”

Dozens were arrested across the country on ridiculous allegations by the state. A deliveryman delivering food near the assault by police was beaten and arrested; while he was identifying himself, police asked him why he was running. All arrestees have been released and are currently awaiting trial.

At the same time as the demonstration in Athens, people carried out clandestine actions outside of Exarchia in thirteen other Athenian neighborhoods. Communiqués claim that people attacked approximately thirty state and capitalist targets in solidarity with the spirit of the day and against new state measures.

As of now, the deadline for squats to seek legalization has passed. All remaining squatted social centers and residences are in open war with the government. Yet our solidarity and the spirit of the anarchist movement here is rooted too deeply to be vulnerable to any material attack they could make on anarchist infrastructure.

Numerous counterattacks have taken place since the last update. People have targeted expensive cars specifically in affluent neighborhoods to remind those benefiting from the displacement of anarchists and immigrants that they are not safe. The movement is getting hit hard, but we are not out of action. On the contrary, many more people have passionately woken up.

Demonstration in Athens, December 6, 2019.

The Eviction of Kouvelos Squat

On December 17, 2019, police evicted the Villa Kouvelos squat in Marousi, a northern district of Athens, in the early morning hours.

The empty and dilapidated building was occupied by anarchists in April 2010 and rapidly renovated it into a regionally-known social center that enriched the district with concerts, lectures, discussions, and political events. The neighborhood of Marousi is known more as a bland middle-class district of Athens. Kouvelos was important to many youth as a safe place to explore revolutionary ideas.

Being close to one of the offices of Golden Dawn, the squat was a frequent target of fascist attacks. However, many locals in the surrounding neighborhood appreciated Kouvelos as a friendly and safe space offering an alternative to Marousi’s bland normalcy. As of now, there remains no fabricated reason for the eviction—there are no plans to use the building or sell the land. The eviction was most likely prioritized because state officials perceived it to be an easy operation on account of its location.

When the cops began the evacuation, at 7:30 am, many local residents gathered outside to voice their opposition to the operation and solidarity for the occupation. Later that day, a demonstration of 300+ people took place in Marousi, smashing many banks and spraying graffiti for Kouvelos around the neighborhood.

The weekend after the evacuation, a spontaneous demonstration of 300+ anarchists converged in Marousi to re-enter Kouvelos. They asserted the resilience of our movements, hung a banner, and reclaimed the squat for a period of time, during which they surveyed the damage done by the EKAM (Greek SWAT police), documented the investigations police were carrying out (such as marked DNA samples), and noted what will be needed in order to fully re-occupy the squat in the near future.

Exiting the squat, the demonstration took the streets, attacking some local corporate franchises and the metro station of Marousi, where the glass turnstiles were smashed. While the participants had not intended to battle the police, riot police attacked the march, and demonstrators defended themselves against asphyxiating tear gas and riot police assaults. During the demonstration, some people identified an undercover police officer taking pictures and video of the demonstrators. A demonstrator confronted him and punched him.

In response, corporate media outlets flexed their muscles of deception. Due to the perceived old age of the undercover officer, media claimed that anarchists attacked an old man wearing a hearing aid without reason. Quickly, it became clear that the hearing aid was actually a device to communicate with other officers and the supposedly old man was an active-duty police officer. However, the press turned this lie into prime time news, solely focusing on the footage, playing the attack on the cop over and over again and purposefully neglecting to remind viewers of the original point of the demonstration.

Still, an action like this occurring with so much strength in a neighborhood such as Marousi underscores the resilience of our movements. Those resisting on behalf of Kouvelos emphasize that the squat will be re-occupied, stating that their revolutionary desires will outweigh any campaign of repression.

No Gentrification for Christmas

Leading up to Christmas, the state has also targeted Exarchia Square with surreal efforts to “normalize” the area. Police raided and surrounded the square to hose down the sidewalk and install a Christmas tree. The tree was burned twice the first day. The police did the same thing the next day; the tree was burned again. These highly symbolic efforts to “clean up” the area indicate the way the state hopes to use Exarchia to send a message to its base. On top of this, the Mayor of Athens is discussing organizing state events in the square. If this happens, the festivities will only take place surrounded by the police who protect them; the real point is to provoke the defenders of Exarchia and to send a message to those who never go there that the state has recaptured it.

The burning of the Christmas tree recalls the famous event during the 2008 insurrection when demonstrators burned the iconic Christmas tree in front of the Greek parliament to convey a willingness to continue fighting even as many Greeks returned to their villages for holiday festivities.

https://twitter.com/th1an1/status/1208133100347305986

Advancing Technology in Repression

The Greek state is also continuing efforts to modernize its surveillance methods. While they have always been open about their ability to monitor classic phone and SMS conversations, they are looking to move forward in the digital world, openly mentioning their efforts to get consulting in the UK for the purposes of investigating Viber and Whatsapp users. This effort to collaborate with foreign tech-spy agencies follows the formal incorporation of drone technology into Greek policing.

Further Attacks on Refugees

While all this plays out, New Democracy is hurrying to meet its promise to relocate 20,000 refugees to mainland Greece. They aim to move refugees off islands such as Lesvos and further from the public eye. Over 50,000 refugees remain in camps on various Aegean islands across the water from Turkey, in conditions so appalling that NGOs and human rights groups have publicly called out the state for them. Local fascists frequently attack these camps. The numbers in these camps are slowly increasing again as more immigrants arrive in Greece. However, the government passed new laws to limit and deter asylum requests in November; they aim to define refugees as migrants in order to weaken the standards of protection that are due to them. Additional new measures to slow the already drawn-out asylum procedure have gone into effect in order to deter refugees from following proper procedure as a way to lower the acceptance rates of asylum requests.

Alongside all these measures, new cuts will go into effect in 2020 that will leave refugees without the support programs that have helped them to survive; they will be expected to fend for themselves during their application processing. The existing support programs were never enough to begin with; in many cases, a refugee awaiting asylum was expected to survive on 150 euros a month, while being unable to seek legal employment. Now they will face even worse challenges.

All these measures are intended to deter refugees and immigrants from coming to Greece and to torture those who already live here, having made the daring journey across the Aegean Sea. If people are pushed to work illegally, or forced to steal to eat, or if they travel abroad hoping for better opportunities, all of these are grounds that can be used to reject their applications and deport them.

This month, heinous overcrowding and institutional degradation set off an inspiring uprising on Samos Island, a short distance from Turkey. According to No Borders, a refugee camp on this island originally designed for 650 people is housing 8000. That means roughly one toilet per 300 people and one shower per 500 people. Camps like this are spread across other islands near Turkey. This month, residents of the camp came together to spark an uprising against the police. Facing tear gas and brutality by local riot forces, they demonstrated their humanity despite a terrible situation and harsh winter. This follows another uprising in October, when a massive fire necessitated the eviction of the over-crowded camp. Both uprisings have resulted in the shutting down of schools and other major institutions on the island. Riots and resistance in these camps are ongoing; they account for some of the reasons the new government prefers to move them out of sight rather than being forced to meet the demands of the migrants.

A tour of Samos camp by Euronews.

Corporate coverage of the December 2019 uprising in Samos.

In Conclusion

Entering the holiday season, we wish to bring to mind the hunger strike of political prisoner Kostas Sakkas, a Greek anarchist charged with belonging to a terrorist group and with aggravated possession of weapons after his arrest at a warehouse. He is accused of participating in the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire, though both he and the CCF deny this. Throughout his imprisonment, he has conducted frequent hunger strikes. His hunger strikes became so frequent and so effective under the prior administration that they considered releasing him under the same bill that led to the release of anarchist prisoner Nikos Romanos. New Democracy has dismissed his struggle, suggesting that “the law should never apply to anarchist terrorists” while using that same law to release the murderer of Alexis Grigoropoulos as soon as they took power.

Many of Sakkas’s hunger strikes have been aimed at winning the option to work or gain access to education. His most recent hunger strike was intended to compel the government to transfer him from the Nigrita prison in northern Greece to Korydallos prison in Athens in order that he could be closer to his family. After going into a hypoglycemic shock and facing other life-threatening health issues, he won his demand and will be transferred to Korydallos prison. His courage should be an inspiration to us all.

May the names of fallen comrades, such as Alexis Grigoropoulos, and those struggling behind bars, such as Kostas Sakkas, resound around the world during this cold time of the year. May our struggles demonstrate that our passion for freedom is stronger than any prison, inspiring others to connect their struggles with ours.

Alexis Grigoropoulos.

Kostas Sakkas.

Sources for Updates from Greece

In English

Act for Freedom
Exiled Arizona
Further English coverage of some of the events described in this text can be found here.

https://twitter.com/exiledarizona/status/1209066332953731079

In Greek

The famous burning of the Christmas tree in front of the Greek parliament in 2008.

The following is an online statement of 45 Matrouzou St. regarding the escape and defense, entitled “From the Koukaki Occupation Community.”

This is a statement by comrades who defended the Matrouzou 45 building and escaped the MAT, OPKE, and EKAM police forces of repression. While facing a police raid, we were informed to the fate of the other houses in our squatted community.

We immediately fortified the house and entered conflict with the forces of repression. Furniture, electrical appliances, boilers, paint, fire extinguishers, everything and anything in the house fell upon their heads. They responded by shooting and injuring us with plastic bullets as well as with stun grenades thrown directly into our home. We shouted “Here we live, here is our home, here we will die!”—”Fuck your development and Airbnb.”

When they finally did get in, completely chaotic factors and a survival instinct offered an escape path. The memories that push us forward were awakened as inspiration by the forces of repression. These mercenaries could not accept that those who resisted them had escaped. We assume they were sad they couldn’t catch us to beat and torture us. In response to this embarrassment, they turned to accuse random neighbors of arranging our escape. Like true mercenaries, the cops targeted the first house they found in front of them. They carried out an armed invasion, beating and capturing an entire family, concluding by arresting the father and both sons.

The state that claims to protect the institutionalized Greek family and the sanctity of private property lost their focused target. Not having captured those resisting, they took to beating people at random.

We send our respect to the woman and her family who refused to let the cops enter their home illegally, paying the price for their choices.

We send infinite love to our companions and to every person who supported us.

Solidarity with those arrested in the occupation of our community.

We may have lost all our belongings, we remain without clothes and shelter, they may have temporarily erased from the map three houses and three years of continuous and painstaking work for social solidarity and resistance; but we know they are afraid, our momentum and power is uncontrollable.

Solidarity with the occupation of the Villa Kouvelos and all squats.

Let the evictions of squatters become the reason for the escalation of the struggle on every social front. ↩

CrimethInc. West Coast Tour: December 2019 : From Democracy to Freedom / The New Upheavals

2019-11-19T20:26:35Z

In December, CrimethInc. agents will traverse the West Coast of the US, distributing anarchist literature at three book fairs and offering three different presentations in at least ten different cities. This is a crucial moment, with clashes intensifying in various parts of the world; it’s a good time to strengthen our connections, sharpen our analyses, and strategize together for the next round. We’ll be revisiting our book about the last cycle of struggles, From Democracy to Freedom, as it relates to the questions confronting social movements today, and drawing on dialogue with participants in the movements unfolding right now. Come join us!

Schedule of Events

The descriptions of the talks follow the schedule, below.

December 4 - Portland, Oregon—Dismantle Change Build Center, 14 NE Killingsworth Street, 7 pm, presenting “The New Upheavals: Strategizing for an Era of Nonbinary Conflict”
December 5 - Williams, Oregon—Sugarloaf Community Center, 206 Tetherow Road; “From Democracy to Freedom” presentation at 7 pm

Click the image to download the poster.

December 6 - Oakland, California—OMNI Commons, 4799 Shattuck Avenue; dinner at 6 pm, “From Democracy to Freedom” presentation at 7 pm

Click the image to download the poster.

December 7 - Oakland, California—By day, tabling at the East Bay Alternative Book & Zine Fest; by night, presenting at Tamarack, 1501 Harrison Street, Oakland, at 8 pm, in a panel discussion: “Catching the Wave: A Reflection on History in Progress”

December 8 - San Francisco, California—tabling at the Howard Zinn Book Fair
December 9 - Los Angeles, California—The Public School; “From Democracy to Freedom” presentation at 7 pm
December 10 - Tijuana, Mexico—Enclave Caracol, Calle Primera 8250, Zona nte., “From Democracy to Freedom” presentation at 7 pm
December 11 - San Diego, California—Che Café Collective, 1000 Scholars Dr S, La Jolla 92093, “From Democracy to Freedom” presentation at 7 pm

Click the image to download the poster.

December 12 - La Puente, California, Bridgetown DIY, 1421 Valinda Avenue, 7 pm—”From Democracy to Freedom” presentation
December 13 - Chico, California, Blackbird infoshop, 7 pm—”Democracy in the Age of Disaster Capitalism” presentation
December 14 - Humboldt Anarchist Book Fair, Arcata, California; presenting “The New Upheavals: Strategizing for an Era of Nonbinary Conflict”
December 17 - Santa Cruz, California—SubRosa, “From Democracy to Freedom” presentation

Presentations

From Democracy to Freedom

All the events except the three specified below.

Democracy is the most universal political ideal of our time. From the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to Occupy Wall Street and the autonomous region of Rojava, practically every government and popular movement calls itself democratic. Today, the far right has also appropriated the rhetoric of direct democracy, as a wave of populism has swept demagogues like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro into power.

What is democracy, precisely? How does the rhetoric of democracy serve various agendas? Is there a difference between democracy and self-determination? Are there other ways to describe what we are doing together when we make decisions? And how can this inform our participation in struggles against capitalism and state oppression?

Drawing on From Democracy to Freedom, the latest book from the CrimethInc. collective, we will explore these questions and more. Join us for a lively discussion!

The New Upheavals: Strategizing for an Era of Nonbinary Conflict

Portland, Oregon on December 4; Humboldt Anarchist Book Fair, California on December 14

Once upon a time, anarchists saw ourselves as engaged in a two-sided struggle between the common people and the institutions of power. Today, as the future of neoliberalism becomes uncertain and uprisings break out from France to Hong Kong, we are increasingly finding ourselves in three-way fights that pit us against both the reigning authorities and far-right nationalists driven by their own vision of civil war.

How do we strategize for conflicts that involve three or more sides, so that one adversary does not benefit from our victories against another side? This has been a problem for anarchists at least since the Russian Revolution.

In this presentation, we will introduce the concept of non-binary conflict, consider case studies of contemporary three-sided conflicts around the world, and discuss how this can inform our struggles against fascists, the Trump administration, and the centrists of the Democratic Party.

Catching the Wave: A Panel Discussion Reflecting on History in Progress

Tamarack, Oakland, December 7

Throughout its first three-quarters, 2019 has been a moment of gathering momentum for emancipatory movements around the world, even as populist, nativist, revanchist, and fascist projects likewise swell around the world. Following on the heights of the gilets jaunes experiment last fall and winter, populations in revolt topped leaders in Sudan and Puerto Rico. Haiti teetered on civil war. Hong Kong began its descent into open insurrection, and now, in a feedback loop, popular revolt spills across Ecuador, Chile, and Bolivia, across Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon, while Hong Kong continues to burn and conflicts in the multi-power war zones of Palestine and Syria intensify.

What are the possibilities for this wave to strengthen and amplify or, alternately, to be annulled by an entirely different dynamic, inimical to emancipation? Can we identify a consistency to or internal character of these revolts, distinct from those of the last global wave circa 2011? How do we understand the anti-political character of these revolts, their refusal of the typical insignia of left and right—and what dangers and potentials does this raise? What role might a global recession, long overdue, play in the unfolding of these events? What local variants might eventually emerge in the US—and how should we be preparing?

Remembering Xelîl : How Our Paths Crossed in the Search for Freedom

2019-09-07T17:01:00Z

Reminiscences of Xelîl, a friend we lost last year.

In October 2012, we organized a lecture tour through Germany on the occasion of the publication of the book Message in a Bottle, a collection of CrimethInc. texts in German. The planning escalated quickly; it became a total of 45 events throughout Northern Europe within less than 2 months.

I was on the road for two weeks of the tour. We did 13 events on 13 days—mostly in Germany, but also in Holland and Belgium. Before the tour, I only knew the other two presenters via mail.

It was an intense tour, full of adventures and meaningful discussions that produced new friendships and connections between communities. Everywhere we went, the venues were full and the conversations went on until late at night. Between events, we visited historic sites, took city tours, climbed onto rooftops, danced at wild parties, and finally hurried to the next event just in time.

On one of those evenings, when we were discussing the basic questions—”What do we mean when we say that we are anarchists? What is our overarching strategy against capitalism?”—I got to know Xelîl, who was going by another name in those days. It was one of the many meaningful encounters on that tour, one of the moments that remained in our memories.

After the discussion, we ended up in an activist collective in which private property was limited to small boxes and which was otherwise based on shared self-organization. We felt at home there immediately.

We sat half the night at the kitchen table. I was drinking wine; I don’t remember if Xelîl drank too. I was impressed by his knowledge of texts from Adorno to Foucault to current CrimethInc. texts and how eagerly and tirelessly he tried to combine the approaches, to find similarities. Reading his obituary in Lower Class Magazine, in which Peter Schaber writes, “He belonged to those people who are constantly driven by the very big questions,” I immediately recalled that encounter.

Xelîl offered to work directly on future translations - and so he became part of the crew that also translated Work. We owe the first 30 pages of the German translation to him.

The introduction describes much of what we discussed that night in 2012:

“At any time, we could all stop paying rent, mortgages, taxes, utilities; they would be powerless against us if we all quit at once. At any time, we could all stop going to work or school—or go to them and refuse to obey orders or leave the premises, instead turning them into community centers. At any time, we could tear up our IDs, take the license plates off our cars, cut down security cameras, burn money, throw away our wallets, and assemble cooperative associations to produce and distribute everything we need.

“Whenever my shift drags, I find myself thinking about this stuff. Am I really the only person who’s ever had this idea? I can imagine all the usual objections, but you can bet if it took off in some part of the world everybody else would get in on it quick. Think of the unspeakable ways we’re all wasting our lives instead. What would it take to get that chain reaction started? Where do I go to meet people who don’t just hate their jobs, but are ready to be done with work once and for all?”

Xelîl on the trail of the revolution in Latin America.

Xelîl’s first band, Unknown Artists.

We stayed in loose contact after working on Work together. Xelîl was one of the first to explain the “new paradigm” of the Kurdish movement to me, inviting me to reconsider my previous concerns about the Kurdish movement and to engage with Abdullah Öcalan’s idea. I remained skeptical, but if I had not been talking with Xelîl and other friends we would not have been able to send Öcalan’s writings and material expressing solidarity with the Kurdish movement to our local bookstore so early. “In a few years, he managed to connect many people and movements with the liberation movement and to build bridges,” proclaims the eulogy published by Internationalist Commune. I can only agree with that.

In 2015, we met again at an information event about the struggle in Kurdistan at which Xelîl reported on his trip to Bakur. After the event, we sat together once again in the living room, talking until early in the morning. There were many things we didn’t agree on, but we were united by the determination to combine struggles and theories, to create something new, to break the mold and depart from the old paths that had led to dead ends. It was an enriching conversation, an example of the sort of respective and productive debating culture that many people wish was more common. When Xelîl polemicized against Western individualism, citing Öcalan, I confronted him with the ideas of Max Stirner; we got into a debate about autonomy, the individual, and the importance of revolutionary politics. Shortly afterwards, we lost contact, but even today, the memory of that night remains clear in my mind.

Xelîl traveling in Mexico.

Xelîl visiting Oaxaca, Mexico.

Xelîl in Kurdistan.

Today, I read his text about “revolutionary leadership.” It contains so much that I would like to argue about with him and also some things I would have liked to ask about. “The seeds that Heval Bager has sown on his many travels have begun to germinate and sprout everywhere,” reads the aforementioned eulogy. Hopefully, the seeds he sowed will not only open up in his theory, but also in creating the conditions for discussion and productive struggle.

CrimethInc. published the interview “From Germany to Bakur” in 2015. Xelîl took part in composing the answers. In response to a question about the Kurdish form of struggle, he wrote:

“Let me share a story that a friend once told me. He took part in the Qandil war in 2011. At that time, there was a pragmatic alliance between Turkey and Iran: both had a problem with the Kurdish movement, and were afraid of the military opportunities the guerrillas had. Qandil forms the southern end of the Mediya Defense Territories, the guerrilla-controlled mountains in the border regions of Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. He told me about a situation when one and a half thousand pasdaran, the Iran infantry regiments, tried to storm the hill where the guerrillas were hiding. There were only about thirty comrades defending their mountain. He explained that what the Iranian army tried to use against them were just their bullets, and their fear of punishment from their leaders. They ran blindly upwards, and were defeated. They had no conviction, no energy, no friendship between them. On the other hand, when his comrades defended their position, they didn’t just use their weapons, he told me. They were fighting for their looted villages, for their split families, with their fallen friends in mind, with the consciousness that the attacking army would burn the mountains and forests behind them and destroy the nature in their lands. They fought for those who were too weak to stand alone, for all the parts of society who stood behind them and had their back. Maybe it’s hard to understand if you didn’t feel it yourself. But their energy was backed by a long line of friends, historically experienced oppression, mutual protection—a love for life and a belief in themselves.

“All these things come first, he said, when you’re sitting next to your friends in your guard position and raising your arms in defense: your trust in your comrades, your gratitude for those who believe in a free society living in the valleys, for the ones who cultivate the gardens feeding you, your sadness about the horrors the state did to your friends and families. And in the end, there’s the bullet you shoot at the ones stumbling in your direction. How could they possibly win, he asked, smiling.”

In these lines, we see his admiration and appreciation for the guerrillas in the Mediya defense areas where Xelîl was murdered by the Turkish Air Force in December 2018. He was serving in the ranks of the HPG (Hêzên Parastina Gel, People’s Defense Forces).

In the Kurdish movement, it is said, Şehîd namirin—the dead are immortal. It’s true, martyrs are immortal—but this is true not only of those who died in battle, but also of all who act in search of their full potential, who are seekers on the trail of life, looking for escape routes for all of us out of the global catastrophe that is unfolding today. Xelîl has left behind traces that have made him and his thoughts unforgettable.