The purpose of the Deep Breath Tour is very simple: To stimulate the magic and intimacy already present in the communities being visited while teaching and learning with one another to build a stronger network of resistance to dominant culture — this is a big summer and there is a lot to talk about.

The following dates are either confirmed or pending — still needing help with those! — and, as you can see, many are still open. If you live in any of the pending stops or between any towns listed below and would like to host this, email froseph@crimethinc.com to start collaborating. An intimate house show in a basement, living room, or backyard with other DIY acts from the area and/or traveling through would be ideal. But any park, infoshop, or community center would be great, too. Also, this tour would like to visit as many small towns as possible.

THE ITINERARY:

June 30th - Winona, MN DDBC Bicycle Co-op, 129 Walnut St. 8pm w/ preceding benefit art auction for the Down N’ Dirty Bike Club

July 2nd - Viroqua, WI The Shack, 607 E South St. 8pm

July 3rd - Madison, WI Lothlorien Co-op, 244 LakeLawn 8pm w/Thistle. This will be a benefit show for the GrassRoutes Caravan, a bicycle village of resistance traveling to the RNC protests in St. Paul, MN.

July 5th - Minneapolis, MN TBA

July 6th - St. Cloud, MN TBA

July 7th - Bemidji, MN Gypsy Cabin, 11413 Lumberjack Rd NW 5:45 fancy dinner followed by campfire & music w/ Shannon Murray & friends Call Shannon at (218) 368-8002 for directions

July 8th - Duluth, MN (pending)

July 9th - Appleton, WI (pending)

July 10th - Oshkosh, WI TBA

July 11th - Manitowoc, WI The Treehouse 8pm 806A Buffalo St. w/Saddleshoes

July 15th–20th - Milwaukee, WI CrimethInc. Convergence

July 21st - Chicago, IL (pending)

July 22nd - Fort Wayne, IN (pending)

July 23rd - Kalamazoo, MI (pending)

July 25th - Buffalo, NY w/ From The Depths

July 27th - Pittsburgh, PA (pending)

July 28th - Punxsutawney, PA (pending)

August 1st - Warwick, NJ Stanley Demming Park w/ Shoelacetown Anarchist Black Cross, Passionate Existence Distro, A Longing for Collapse Press, G.U.T.S Distro, and Easy As ABC. Also, a potluck dinner and a game of Manhunt.

August 3rd - New York, NY TBA

August 4th - Easton, PA Riverside Park, Larry Holmes Dr. w/ TBA

August 5th - Philadelphia, PA TBA. Will be here for at least a few days on break.

August 11 - Baltimore, MD (pending)

August 12th - Washington D.C. (pending)

August 13th - Richmond, VA (pending)

August 15th - Athens, OH (pending)

August 17th - Lexington, KY TBA

August 21st - Des Moines, IA w/ The Rice & Bean Underground

Download 2-Up Flyer PDF : Download Poster PDF

The convergence will be several days of self-organized workshops, presentations, performances, and other activities where everyone can be a presenter—so bring your own ideas, not to mention camping gear and whatever resources you can share. This year there will be a focus on coordinating for the demonstrations at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, as well as longer-range anarchist endeavors. Internationals will share experiences from overseas. Participation is free, of course, along with literature, food, child care, and camping space; the convergence will be a sober, consent-based space.

Locals on the ground in Milwaukee, putting in work for this summer’s CrimethInc. Convergence, have announced a public redirect location at Gordon Park (Locust St. & Humboldt Blvd) in Milwaukee, WI.

RSVP to crimethincbooking@yahoo.com

After years of planning, we finally threw our first Really Really Free Market! Organizing and promoting it was a long, arduous task. We live in a small town: Winona has only 27,000 people, and has the largest radical community of any place within 100 miles from us. It has always been tough for us to make things happen here—small town outreach work is always hard. All but one of our anarchist community are originally from Winona, and owing to our slim population, we’re fortunate enough to have a very wide social network. When we started a monthly community newspaper—think of a hybrid of a local indymedia project and Harbinger—we knew it would help us reach people that we had been struggling to connect with for years. We began promoting the ‘Free Market in the first issue, albeit subtly, and by the third issue, we had warmed up to the subject enough to devote an entire two pages inviting people to participate in the event.

-
We invested a lot of energy into connecting with new social circles: we made close friends with the local homeless shelter; we knew the administrators at the food bank well enough to solicit their help distributing fliers; the punks were down to give away free bicycles; even the local food co-op was putting food aside for us. Representatives from all of these different social circles and more met four times before our first ‘Free Market to discuss logistics—we devised promotional schemes and dreamt up ideas and dispersed. When the day came, the first organizer arrived at the park 30 minutes early, to find to his surprise that over two dozen people were already there, waiting for the market to start. An hour into it, that number had grown to 200, and the event was a huge success. It went on that way for four hours: people giving away carloads of clothes, furniture, food, a box of hundreds of toothbrushes! A trash-bag full of condoms, starter plants for a garden, and five kids bikes were given away via a free raffle. We were all really inspired and pleased with the event, knowing that most of the work was out of our hands.

-
We plan to bring the lessons we’ve learned to this year’s CrimethInc. Convergence in Milwaukee, WI. We’ll have plenty of examples of our community newspaper and plan to hold a workshop instructing anyone how to produce an effective, high-quality newspaper to nourish their radical community for under $250 a month. We know how difficult it can be for small midwest towns to get things off the ground—we’ve been struggling to for years. Hopefully, news of our successful ‘Free Market will motivate other small-town anarchist communities to attempt similar feats.

-

The article itself is supportive, having presumably been written by one of Brad’s countless friends, and even mentions Rolling Thunder. Thanks to such shining examples of journalistic integrity as Rolling Stone, it’s possible for revolutionaries outside the United States to get coverage—albeit only a few lines a year and a half late—in the US media. All they have to do is hope some sexy, well-connected US journalist gets killed beside the countless anonymous locals whose lives are ended by US-backed repression.

Let’s keep Brad’s memory alive by supporting all those who still struggle for freedom, in Oaxaca and around the world.

To keep up with current events in Oaxaca, try narconews.com.

Download Text PDF [140k]

Rolling Stone: Issue 1044 Jan. 24, 2008
Anarchist Superstar: The Revolutionary Who Filmed His Own Murder (front cover)

HE WAS AN ANARCHIST, AGITATOR AND JOURNALIST WHO WENT TO MEXICO TO DOCUMENT PEASANT REVOLT — AND HE ENDED UP FILMING HIS OWN DEATH by Jeff Sharlet

The Martyrdom of Brad Will

Even before he was killed by a Mexican policeman’s bullet, Brad Will seemed to those who revered him more like a symbol—a living folk song, or a murder ballad—than like a man. This is what the thirty-six-year-old anarchist-journalist’s friends remember: tall, skinny Brad in a black hoodie with two fists to the sky, Rocky-style, atop an East Village squat as the wrecking ball swings; Brad, his bike hoisted on his shoulder, making a getaway from cops across the rooftops of taxicabs; Brad, locked down at City Hall disguised as a giant sunflower with patched-together glasses to protest the destruction of New York’s guerrilla gardens. Brad (he rarely used his surname, kept it secret in case you were a cop) wore his long brown hair tied up in a knot, but for the right woman—and a lot of women seemed right to Brad—he’d let it sweep down his back almost to his ass. Jessica Lee, one of the few who spurned him, met Brad at an Earth First! action in southwestern Virginia the summer before he was killed. They skipped away from the crowd to a waterfall where Brad stripped naked and invited Lee in her swimsuit to stand with him behind sheets of cascading water. He tried to kiss her, but she turned away. She thought there was something missing inside him. “Like he was incomplete, too lonely,” she says. Maybe he was just tired after a decade and a half on the front lines of a revolution that never quite happened.

He was one of America’s fifty “leading anarchists,” according to Nightline, which in 2004 flashed Brad’s mug shot as a warning against the black-clad nihilists said to be descending on New York for the Republican National Convention. “Leading anarchist”—that was the kind of clueless oxymoron that made Brad laugh. Brad wasn’t a “leader,” a word he disdained; he was a catalyst: the long-limbed climber who trained city punks on city trees for forest defense in the big woods west of the Rockies, the smart guy you wanted in the front row when you gave your public report on the anarchist scene in Greece or Seoul or Cincinnati, even though he was also the dude who would giggle when he fumigated the room with monstrous garlic farts. In the 1990s, he’d helped hand New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani a public defeat, organizing anarchist punks into a media-savvy civil-disobedience corps that shamed the mayor into calling off plans to sell the city’s community gardens. In the new decade, he became a star of Indymedia’s anti-star system, an interconnected anti-corporate press that lets activists communicate—directly instead of waiting to see their causes distorted on Nightline.

Brad seemed to be everywhere: One friend remembers him in Ecuador, plucking his bike from a burning barricade; another remembers him in Quebec City, riding a bike into a cloud of tear gas, his bony frame shaking with happy rebel laughter later while a comrade poured water into his burning eyes.

Now, Brad has become most famous for the final minutes of his last day alive, October 27th, 2006, in the capital of the southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico. He’d gone to document a massive strike blowing up into revolt against the government. His video camera peers through broken glass at a smashed computer; holds steady on a strangely peaceful orange-black plume rising from a burning SUV; crawls under a truck to spy on a group of… well, most people who watch Brad’s video on YouTube don’t know who they are. Cops, probably, though they wear no uniforms. Brad feints and charges toward them along with a small crowd armed with stones and bottle rockets, improbably chasing men toting .38s and AR-15s.

With two minutes left, Brad inches toward the door behind which he knows men with guns may be hiding. “Si ves a un gringo con cámara, mátalo!” government supporters ranted on local radio around the time Brad arrived in Oaxaca. “If you see a gringo with a camera, kill him!” Then there are the last words heard on Brad’s video before he films a puff of smoke—muzzle flash beneath a gray sun—and his own knees rising up towards the lens as he falls, the cobblestones rushing toward him: “No esten tomando fotos!” (“Stop taking pictures!”) Brad didn’t hear.

He was scheduled to fly back to Brooklyn the next day.

-

During the three weeks he spent in Mexico before he was killed, Brad would make fun of his half-assed Spanish by introducing himself as “Qeubrado” (”Broken”). He didn’t look it. Six feet two, with a frame broad as his father’s – a veteran of Yale’s 1960 undefeated football team— he was vegan-lean but ropy with muscle, “a little stinky and a lot gorgeous,” remembers his friend Kate Crane. Back during his twenties, when he’d bring a slingshot to demonstrations instead of a camera, he thought of himself as half-warrior, half-poet, a former student of Allen Ginsberg’s now specializing in crazy-beautiful Beat gestures recast in a militant mode— “sweet escalation,” he called it, protest not as a means to an end but as a glimpse of a world yet to be made.

By the time he got to Oaxaca, in the fall of 2006, he was calling himself a journalist. “His camera was his weapon,” says Miguel, a Brazilian filmmaker who has produced a tribute called Brad: One More Night at the Barricades. “If you survive me,” Brad told a friend after he’d battled cops at a protest in Prague, “tell them this: I never gave up. That’s a quote, all right?” In the end there was just a picture, his last shot, the puff of smoke of the bullet speeding toward him.

“Yo d,” he wrote to Dyan neary, an ex-girlfriend, three days before he died, “jumping around like a reporter and working my ass off—been pretty intense and sometimes sketchy.” The governor of Oaxaca had sent in roving death squads, pickup trucks of paramilitaries firing on the barricades. The bodies were piling up. Brad was getting scared. “I went back to the morgue—it is a sick and sad place—I have this feeling like I will go back there again with a crowd of reporters all pushing to get the money shot— the body all sewed up and naked— you see it in the papers every day—I am entering a new territory here and don’t know if I am ready.”

Ready for what? Revolution? Blood? Brad had seen both before, in Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil. Oaxaca was bigger, more exciting, more frightening. What had started as a strike by the state’s 70,000 teachers had exploded after the governor attacked the teachers with tear gas and helicopters. The federal government feared a domino effect, other states following Oaxaca’s example. In Oaxaca, every kind of leftist organization—indigenous groups, unions, students, farmers, anarcho-punks—came together in an unprecedented coalition and took over the city. The national government declared the entire state of Oaxaca “ungovernable.”

Brad knew what to do: Film it all. He’d send the tapes home, screen them in squats and at anarchist bookstores. Revolution is real, he’d say, here’s the proof. Burning tires, masked rebels stuffing rags into bottles full of gasoline, farmers with machetes; free kitchens, free medical clinics, free buses, commandeered by farmers and fishermen. At a street funeral, old women sing a radical anthem with their fists raised in the air; in a red tent at night a father pounds the silver box that holds his son. “La muerte as gobierno malo!” shout the mourners. (”Death to the government!”) “Viva Alejandro!” Alejandro García Hernández, forty-one years old, shot twice in the head by a group of soldiers who tried to crash through a barricade opened to let an ambulance pass. Brad wrote home, “And now Alejandro waits in the zocalo“—the city plaza—”he’s waiting for an impasse, a change, an exit, a way forward, a way out, a solution—waiting for the earth to shift and open—waiting for november when he can sit with his loved ones on the day of the dead and share food and drink and a song…one more martyr in a dirty war…one more bullet cracks the night.”

-

Kenilworth, Illinois, isn’t a town that raises radicals. A mile wide, tucked away close to the beach on the North Shore of Chicago, Kenilworth is the kind of place in which the wrong side of the suburb means houses cost only a couple of million dollars. There were four African Americans in the most recent census, and if there were any Democrats around when Brad was growing up, says Stephanie Rogers, a family friend, they kept quiet. “If Kenilworth wasn’t the absolute height of preppiness,” she says, “it was only because we were Midwestern. Kids would study that East Coast model, towns like Greenwich, Connecticut. That’s what Kenilworth wanted to be.”

Not the Wills. They didn’t follow anyone. “The Wills were achievers, and leaders,” says Rogers. For Brad’s three older siblings, that meant good grades, sports and student government, Brad was different. “We were all active kids, curious, athletic, and we would roughhouse and play ball,” says his sister Christy, a graphic designer who lives in San Diego. “Brad was less interested in those kinds of things.” He preferred science fiction and fantasy, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. And Star Wars, one of the few passions he shared with his all-American dad: Hardy, an engineer who owned a small factory, liked to imagine how other worlds might work. Brad liked to build them. He’d arrange miniature societies with his action figures, write modules for role-playing games. It wasn’t the monsters that enthralled him, it was the struggles between good and evil.

One of his favorite movies was It’s a Wonderful Life; lanky, amiable Jimmy Stewart provided a model for the way Brad would move through the world as he grew older, a Teen Beat-gorgeous geek–a dungeon master!—who was friends with jocks, preps, even Kenilworth’s tiny clique of stoners. With his feathered hair, his rugby-shirt collar standing proud and a broad smile sprawling beneath dreamy eyes, Brad looked like an extra in a John Hughes movie.

But he was slowly splintering away from the high-school-college-back-to-the-burbs loop that was the natural order of things in Kenilworth. “It was a struggle to open my life,” Brad would tell a Venezuelan newspaper years later. “I didn’t know much about the truth of the world, but little by little, I forced my eyes open, without the help of anyone.”

The Will children were expected to be athletes (Brad was a runner) and stick with an instrument. But one day Brad announced he was quitting trumpet to play guitar. Instead of joining clubs, he worked after school, as a flower-delivery boy, a library shelver, selling newspaper subscriptions. “Brad was perplexing,” says his mother, Kathy. “But he wasn’t a loaf.”

The one unbendable rule for Will children was college. His sister Wendy went to Stanford, Craig followed their father to Yale, and Christy went to Scripps College. Brad’s grades hovered between B and C, but after he aced his entrance exams he squeaked into Allegheny, a small school in western Pennsylvania. There he joined a frat, majored in the Dead and studied On the Road. Mostly he liked getting high, passing a pipe back and forth with his friend Matt Felix, an outdoorsman from New Hampshire who introduced Brad to the radical environmentalism of Earth First! That ethos of direct action and theatrical gestures drew Brad west when he graduated in 1992. He followed the hippie highway to Boulder, Colorado, where he began attending classes taught by Allen Ginsberg at the Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

Even more influential than Ginsberg was Peter Lamborn Wilson, who under the pseudonym Hakim Bey was known for a manifesto called The Temporary Autonomous Zone, or T.A.Z., a study in “ontological anarchy” and “poetic terrorism,” and a guidebook to the life of Brad was beginning to lead. “What happened was this,” Wilson writes, “they lied to you, sold you ideas of good & evil, gave you distrust of your body & shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization & all its usurious emotions.”

Wilson wasn’t offering an indictment so much as a prescription: “Avatars of chaos act as spies, saboteurs, criminals of amour fou“—crazy love—”neither selfless not selfish, accessible as children, mannered as barbarians, chafed with obsessions, unemployed, sensually deranged, wolfangels…” Brad was becoming one of Wilson’s wolfangels. “Very high-energy, extremely bright, not so well-controlled,” Wilson remembers of the student who talked his way into class because he hadn’t bothered to pay tuition. “Loose at the edges, reckless, you might call it courage. Manic sometimes, charming everybody.”

“Brad liked being in a hotbed of ideas,” says his mother, happy, at least, that her son had a job. She didn’t know that he stopped paying rent. “My crazy poet roomies fled the scene,” he later wrote of his accidental introduction to squatting. “I stayed and didn’t even have the phone number of the landlord.” that suited Brad—cash, he was beginning to believe, was a kind of conspiracy, a form of control he was leaving behind. He wanted to write poems, but even more he wanted to become one, a messy, ecstatic, angry, sprawling embodiment of Wilson’s manifesto.

His first attempt came one summer when 50,000 members of a Christian fundamentalist men’s movement called the Promise Keepers descended on Boulder, distributing a pamphlet called “The Iron Spear: Reaching Out to the Homosexual.” Brad wasn’t gay, but he decided to reach back. The Naropa Institute’s lawn abutted the Promise Keepers’rally ground, so Brad put on a show: He married a man. He recruited Wilson to perform the ceremony and a poet named Anne Waldman to play his mother. Another student was the bride, in a white satin gown complete with a train, and Brad scrounged a suit and tie. “I actually am a minister in the Universal Life church,” says Wilson. “I married them in full view of the Promise Keepers.” Then Brad kissed the bride, a long smooch that provoked one Promise Keeper to hop the fence to find out whether he was really seeing two men making out. Brad declared the stunt a victory when the fundamentalist decided to stick around, apparently convinced that poets throw better parties than Promise Keepers.

That was Brad’s idea of politics and poetry at the same time: a party and performance. But Brad didn’t care for stages. He wanted the show to run 24/7. From Boulder he moved to West Lima, Wisconsin, a half-abandoned town that had become an “intentional community”—a commune—called Dreamtime Village. Dreamtime was like a surreal version of the town Brad had grown up in: There was a post office, a school building, little Midwestern houses and almost no rules. Then, in the summer of 1995, Brad became interested in the stories he heard from a group of New York squatters on a road trip. When they headed back east, Brad hitched a ride.

“I moved to the big shitty as Giuliani-time kicked in,” he wrote in an essay for an anarchist anthology, We Are Everywhere. In New York, at least, anarchists were concentrated in a few dozen squats, buildings abandoned at the nadir of the city’s grim Eighties and rehabbed by whoever wanted to live rent-free. It was illegal, of course, which was part of the attraction for Brad—just living in a squat was a form of direct action, defiance of all the rules about property and propriety. Brad found himself an empty room in a squat on East 5th Street, home to around sixty “activists and destructionists,” in the words of Pastrami, a yoga teacher who befriended Brad. They hauled water up from fire hydrants and wired an electricity from a streetlight. Next door they cleared the trash out of an abandoned lot and turned it into a garden with a pear tree. They shared it with their Puerto Rican neighbors, eventually winning over even the nuns of the nearby Cabrini seniors home—their response to the squats went from one of horror to prayers for the wild but lovely young creatures who ate the trash and the toxic soil of the city. This was the life Brad had been looking for.

-

Anarchist isn’t so much a singular ideology as a set of overlapping philosophies, and Brad wanted to explore them all. He’d haunt the anarchist store Blackout Books, in New York’s Alphabet City neighborhood, and then he’d disappear for days into volumes he had bought, borrowed or even dumpster-dived, his long, bony hands cracking the spines of old lefty tomes and the quickie compilations of the writings of Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of the Zapatista revolt in Mexico who was fast becoming the new model for anarchist panache. he read Kropotkin, the early-twentieth-century Russian biologist who gave to anarchism its core idea of “mutual aid,” the simple but radical premise that cooperation, not competition, is the natural condition of humanity, and he worked with movements like the Ruckus Society, Earth First! and Reclaim the Streets, leaderless networks of activists who put anarchist ideas into action through confrontational tactics—Brad was expert in the construction of “sleeping dragons” and “bear claws,” both methods of locking yourself down in front of a bulldozer or in the middle of a city street. The point wasn’t a set of demands but the act of disruption itself. In Brad’s world, action—direct, local, unfiltered—mattered more than ideology. In theory, anyway. In practice, the anarchist factions often succumb to purist notions, refusing even to speak to comrades they consider co-opted. Not Brad. he was tight with anarcho-primitivists, who view language itself as oppressive, and social anarchists, who write books and build schools. “He was the least sectarian person I ever met,” says Dyan Neary. “That’s what made it easy for him to introduce people to ideas. He was just sort of user-friendly.”

He had a sharp side, too. “Brad did his fair share of alienating people,” says Sascha DuBrul, who like Brad had migrated from Dreamtime to the Lower East Side. “He was so loud and outspoken, and he wasn’t always a big listener.” At the 5th Street Squat, he’d “talk really loud” about his building skills, but then, friends say, he wired his room incorrectly, resulting in a small fire. The fire didn’t threaten the building, but it gave Giuliani an excuse to tear it down. “When they came for our building,” Brad wrote, “there weren’t any eviction papers, and they came with a wrecking crane. I snuck inside, felt the rumble when the ball pierced the wall. I was alone. From the roof I watched them dump a chunk of my home on my garden…When it was all over: a rubble heap.”

“I almost feel like he wanted to die up there, he felt so guilty,” a friend told The Village Voice. Afterward, Brad undertook a freight-train tour of America, riding in boxcars from city to city, speaking to activist groups about Giuliani’s crackdown. “Brad got incredibly fucking riled up,” remembers DuBrul. “He was on fire, his hands were shaking.”

“He had a certain innocence,” says Stephan Said, a squatter and folk singer Brad admired. “What led him to his death was at the same time what made him so endearing.”

In 1998, Brad went out west to join Earth First! activists for a “forest defense,” which for Brad would consist of spending the summer on a platform built high up around the trunk of an old-growth Douglas fir in Oregon, an anarchist retreat from the laws down below. “I called it the Y plane ‘cause you’re up, up, up off the rules of the X plane,” says Priya Reddy, who’d become one of Brad’s best friends that summer. “The only rule you really have is gravity. It’s homelessness in the best sense.”

A city girl, Reddy–in Oregon she took the name Warcry, a not-so-subtle response to “hippie-ish” tree-sitters like Julia Butterfly—didn’t know how to climb, so at first she provided ground support, hiking from tree to tree in the murky green light, taking orders for supplies. Brad had a different concern. “I dropped a piece of paper,” he called down on her first day. “Could you find it for me?”

Warcry looked into the branches. The voice’s source, 200 feet up, was invisible. So was his piece of paper, fallen amid the thick ferns of the forest floor. When she found it, a folded-up scrap, she took a peek. A battle plan? No; a love poem.

The woods were noisy with the music of the tree-sitters. CDs and tapes of Sonic Youth, Crass and Conflict blasted full volume. The most popular song seemed to be “White Rabbit.” After Warcry heard it for what seemed like the hundredth time, she took a stand. “Why are you people playing White Rabbit over and over again?” she demanded. “You don’t know?” came the answer. “It’s a warning.” White Rabbit meant the cops, spotted by Brad or another tree-sitter from their perches far above, were on their way.

Soon Warcry worked up the courage to join Brad in the trees, spending three weeks on a neighboring platform. She brought a video camera. One day loggers brought down a giant within fifty yards of Brad’s and Warcry’s video, but you can hear his raw scream: “Fuuuck!” The tree settles, and Brad shouts at the loggers below. “How old do you think that tree was? How old are you?” It was a question he might have been asking himself—up in his treehouse, there were times he felt like a child, powerless to respond.

-

What set Brad apart from so many radical activists was that throughout it all, he remained close to his family, the buttoned-down Republican Wills of Kenilworth. When he was jailed for nearly a week at the WTO Seattle protests in 1999, one of his chief worries was getting out in time for his mother’s sixtieth birthday, which the Wills planned to celebrate in Hawaii. When he made it there, he didn’t tell them what had really gone down. “He didn’t want to burden us,” says his mother.

That’s how Brad kept his truce with where he came from. In 2002, when he and Dyan Neary were hopping freight trains from the Northwest to New York, he insisted they take a detour so that Neary—who goes by Glass—could meet his mother. Glass tried to talk politics, telling the Wills about South America coca farmers blasted into extreme poverty by U.S.-funded crop-spraying. Brad’s mom looked confused: “But, dear, how do you think we should deal with the cocaine question?” It wasn’t meant as a question.

“Later, I was like, Oh shit, they don’t really know what you’re doing, do they?” Brad giggled, proud of his ability to move between worlds.

The two had met shortly after 9/11, their first date a six-hour walk around Ground Zero. Brad was thirty-one; Glass was twenty, tall and skinny with big curves and big eyes and a smile like Brad’s, wide and knowing. But she was stunned by New York’s transformation from go-go to grief to warmongering. “What the fuck happened to my city?” she thought. They decided it was time to get out of town.
There were two complications. The first was monogamy. Brad didn’t believe in it. All right, Glass said, no sex. Brad suddenly discovered an untapped well of fidelity. The other problem was thornier: Brad was about to become a father. The mother was a French woman with whom he’d had a brief relationship while she was visiting New York. A month later, she called to tell him she was pregnant. Brad loved kids, but he’d sworn he’d never bring one of his own into a world he considered too damaged. Brad flew over to visit.
“Why don’t you stay?” she asked. “We can raise the child together.”

“I’ll help you out with money,” he said—a major commitment, given that he lived on food he found in dumpsters—“but I’m not moving to France.”

When the woman had the baby, her new boyfriend adopted him. That seemed to Brad like an ideal solution—he loved the family he already had, but he wasn’t looking to start one.

“He wanted to experience revolution,” says Glass. “He wanted to live that every day.” They spent much of the next two years in South America, returning to New York to raise funds by taking temp jobs–Brad was a lighting grip—and throwing all-night benefit parties. In Brazil, they worked with the Movimiento Sin Terra, landless poor people who’ve squatted and won rights to more than 20 million acres of farmland. In Buenos Aires, they joined up with a movement of workers who’d reclaimed factories shuttered by Argentina’s economic meltdown. In Bolivia, they met a radical coca farmer named Evo Morales who would soon become the country’s first indigenous president. This wasn’t the East Village, Brad realized, or a tree platform in Oregon. There was real power at stake.

Now he had a mission. He wanted to show American activists how to join the fight wherever they could find it, or start it. Video, he determined, was his best medium. In 2004, he scraped together $300 for a used Canon ZR 40 and headed back south, this time on his own. He was ready to start telling stories, ready to become a reporter.

In 2005, in a central-Brazilian squatters’ town of 12,000 landless peasants called Sonho Real (”Real Dream”), Brad filmed a police attack that resulted in two dead and twenty “missing.” Brad was the only reporter on hand. He hid in a shack, filming, and waited for the worst. The cops found him, dragged him out by his hair and beat him to a pulp. Then they smashed his camera and arrested him. “The U.S. Embassy refused to do anything,” says Brad’s friend Miguel. “They said, Yes, we know, but he is not an important person to us.” But his American passport still carried weight with the Brazilian police. They let him go. He’d managed to keep his tape hidden; soon, it would be broadcast throughout Brazil, a perfect example of Indymedia in action.

But it didn’t seem like a victory to Brad. “I feel like I am haunted,” he wrote to his friend Kate Crane. “I keep seeing a thin woman’s body curled up at the bottom of a well, her body in a strange position—I can’t escape it.”

-

The Mexico to which Brad traveled in early October 2006 seemed like a nation on the verge. Of what, nobody could say. But something was about to break. It was an election year, and a new force in Mexican politics, the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), appeared certain to win the presidency. Vicente Fox, the Bush clone who had deposed the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 2000, was constitutionally forbidden from running again. His anointed successor was Felipe Calderón, an angry bully obsessed with oil and secrecy, the Dick Cheney of Mexico. On July 2nd, Mexican television declared the race between Calderón and moderate Andrés Manuel López Obrador too close to call, and the next morning Mexico’s electoral authority made Calderón the winner. Only they hadn’t counted all the votes. Two million Mexicans poured into the streets to protest. Calderón’s only hope was to seduce the PRI, his right-wing party’s traditional enemy, into a coalition against the leftist PRD. In exchange for the PRI’s support, he promised that his party would bail out the PRI’s cash cow: Oaxaca.

Oaxaca is one of the poorest states in a poor nation. In 2004, the PRI installed as governor a rising star with a reputation for electoral fraud named Ulises Ruiz Ortiz. Ruiz was a cash machine, skilled at milking the state to kick funds up to the national party organization. What he wasn’t so good at, it turned out, was keeping a lid on the discontent that has been rippling across Mexico since the Zapatistas marched out of the jungle in 2004.

“If they want to kill our teachers,” Oaxaqueños declared after Ruiz’s police killed several striking teachers on June 14th, 2006, “they should kill us all now.” From that day on, Oaxaca City was in open revolt. “Con Ulises’pelotas, yo haré los huevos fritos,” women chanted in the streets. (”With Ulises’ balls, I’m going to make fried eggs!”). It was as if Louisiana’s poor converged on New Orleans, shoved aside the political hacks and ran the city themselves for months, even as National Guardsmen drove around shooting into houses.

And yet the American press ignored Oaxaca. That made it a perfect story for Brad. Friends tried to talk him out of it. “The APPO”—the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, in effect its revolutionary government—”doesn’t trust anyone it hasn’t known for years,” Al Giordano, the publisher of a report on Latin American politics called Narco News, told him. “They keep telling me not to send newcomers, because the situation is so fucking tense.”

“I think I will go,” Brad wrote back. When he showed up at an Indymedia headquarters in Mexico City en route to Oaxaca, they told him his white skin would make him and anyone standing near him a target.

“You’re treating me like my mom,” Brad said. “What are you made of? This is what it’s about. This is the uprising.”

John Gibler, a radical print journalist with deeper roots in Mexico, remembers Brad showing up in Oaxaca City’s central square, a tall hipster American with a fancy camera—Brad had sunk his life savings into it—that made him look like a professional. “The media painted a picture of a gung-ho idealist who didn’t know which way was which, but the guy was not clueless,” says Gibler. “That first day I said, Hey, Brad, you wanna come along to the barricades tonight?” He looked at me, and he said, “I can’t wait to get out there, but people are getting killed. I need to get a feel of the place. Walking around at night without that is not a smart move.”

He found a place to sleep (the floor of the headquarters of an indigenous-rights group) and a place to stash his videotape—he’d learned from Brazil that a hiding place was a requirement for an Indymedia journalist lacking the protections of a big news agency. He ate with the APPOs, as the protesters were called, marched with them, slept on the ground beside them on hot evenings. He told them about his politics before he asked about theirs. He laughed a lot, his ridiculous guffaw. Slowly, the APPOs began to trust him. Brad was on the inside of what Rolling Thunder, an anarchist rag back in the States, would call “the closest our generation has come to seeing an anarchist revolution.” Mexican authorities evidently agreed—they were preparing to make an example out of Oaxaca.

-

Brad’s footage on October 27th begins on a suburban street, strewn with rocks and sandbags, a pillar of black smoke rising in the background. Minutes before, there’d been a battle, paramilitaries with automatic weapons versus protesters with Molotov cocktails. Brad zooms in on a silver van consumed by flames. Then he cuts back to the crowd, old men in straw hats, teenagers in ski masks, big mamas with frying pans. They begin to shout. “the people, united!” Bullets pop from a side street, and the fight careens onto a narrow lane of one-story buildings. “Cover yourselves, comrades!” someone shouts. The protesters advance car by car, lobbing Molotovs that bloom from the blacktop. The sky darkens, bruised blue over green trees. A dark-skinned boy in a black tank top kneels and aims his bottle-rocket bazooka. Bullets are cracking. Brad remembers a war photographer’s maxim: “Don’t get greedy.” That’s when you get killed. He turns of his camera.

When he starts shooting again, the protesters are crouching outside a white building in which they believe a comrade is being held prisoner. They batter the door, darting out into the open to deliver drop kicks. “Mire!” Brad shouts. (”Look!”) From down the street, more gunfire. Brad runs. Next to him someone is hit. “Shit!” Brad shouts. “Are you OK, comrade?” someone asks. Brad zooms in on an old woman fingering her prayer beads.

Then the final footage played around the globe half a million times: a red dump truck used as a barricade and a battering ram, a wounded man led away, gunfire answered by bottle rockets. “Diganle a este pinche wey que no este tomando fotos!” somebody shouts. (”Somebody tell this fucking guy to stop taking photos!”) Brad keeps shooting. He steps up onto the sidewalk, his camera aimed dead ahead. The compañeros are crouching; Brad rises, a pale white gringo above the crowd.

“I watch this, and I say, Brad, stop! Don’t do this!” says Miguel, the Brazilian filmmaker. “I ask myself if he really knows where he is. I ask myself if he knows he can die.”

Bang–a bullet hits Brad dead center, just below his heart, exploding his aorta.

“Ayúdeme!” he screams. (“Help me!”)

“Tranquilo, tranquilo,” someone says. (“Take it easy, take it easy.”) A photographer gives Brad mouth-to-mouth, and he gasps and opens his eyes. There are last words, but nobody knows what they are; the men who rush him to the hospital don’t understand English, and Quebrado has forgotten how to speak his mind.

-

His old girlfriend Glass was in Hawaii when she heard. She’d been e-mailing Brad a lot. She missed him, and it seemed like he missed her too. She’d been in New York right before he’d left for Oaxaca, and they’d gone on a pub crawl. He’d had a girlfriend with him, but in the pictures from that night it’s Glass on Brad’s arm. The day he died, she was sitting in a park, singing songs she learned from Brad. She sang the anarchist anthems, then Woody Guthrie’s “Hobo Lullaby.” Most of all she wanted to sing his favorite, “Angel from Montgomery.” She tried to hear Brad’s voice. He’d be John Prine, she’d be Bonnie Raitt.

Just give me one thing that I can hold on to/To believe in this living is a hard way to go.

“I have to e-mail Brad,” she thought. “This is so great!” Then her phone rang. “This is Dyan, right?” a stranger’s voice said. “Can you call Brad Will’s mom? He’s hurt.”

“What? How?” The stranger wouldn’t answer. “I’m not calling his mother until I know what happened,” Glass said. The stranger gave Glass another number. She dialed. “I was told to call this number about Brad?” she asked.

“Yeah, it’s been confirmed,” said the voice on the other end, another stranger.

“What’s been confirmed?”

“Oh, he’s dead.”

All Glass remembers after that is screaming.

-

In Oaxaca, the APPOs combed Brad’s long hair and dressed his body in white. They draped a gold cross around his neck and laid him in a coffin. There were no fiery speeches, just weeping. Then-president Fox used the death of the gringo as an excuse to invade Oaxaca with 4,000 federal police. The U.S. ambassador, a Bush crony from Texas, blamed the violence on schoolteachers and said that Brad’s death “underscores the need for a return to law and order.” In the coming months, the APPO would be crushed; Calderón would slam through a Mexican version of the Patriot Act, allowing police to tap phones and make arrests without warrants or charges; and, this past fall, the Bush administration proposed a $1.4 billion military aid package for Calderón’s regime, ostensibly to fight drugs and “terrorism.”

And Brad’s killers? It seemed like an open-and-shut case—a Mexican news photographer had even taken a picture of the men who appeared to be the shooters, a group of beefy thugs in plain clothes charging toward Brad and the APPOs with pistols and AR-15s. The Oaxaca state prosecutor, a Ruiz loyalist, grudgingly issued warrants for two of them, police Commander Orlando Manuel Aguilar and Abel Santiago Zárate, known as “El Chino.” But at a press conference two weeks later, the prosecutor announced a new theory: Brad’s murder had been a “deceitful confabulation” planned by the APPO. In this version of events, Brad was only grazed on the street. The fatal bullet was fired point-blank by an APPO on the way to the hospital—a physical impossibility, according to the coroner. No matter. At the end of November, a judge set the suspects free.

Last March, Brad’s parents traveled to Mexico to request that the investigation be turned over to federal authorities. They won that fight, only to be fed the same story with a half dozen variations. Believability wasn’t the point. “In political crimes in Mexico,” notes Gibler, who came to act as the family’s translator, “there’s an impeccably neat history of immediate obfuscation and destruction of evidence. The authorities immediately flood all discussion with conspiracy theory. There’s a tradition of exquisite incompetence, so that later only speculation is possible.”

The Wills are not, by nature, speculative people. At age sixty-eight, Hardy is a solid, fit man with white hair worn in a boyish curl. He still drives more than an hour each way every day to his factory in Rockford, Illinois. Kathy Will bounces like a loose electron around the Wisconsin lake house in which they now live. Designed and built by Brad’s great-grandfather, the home is a mansion of broad, dark cypress beams, spotless, disturbed only by neat stacks of documents, arranged at the great oak dining table, like settings for a seminar on Brad’s achievements as a boy, Mexican politics and ballistics.

It’s on this last matter that the case still turns. If the Wills are ever to be able to say, “This is what happened, this is how Brad died, this is the man who killed him,” they must determine what sort of bullet killed him and where, exactly, it came from. The initial coroner’s report said the bullets were 9mm, which would rule out the .38s carried by the cops Brad filmed. But a re-examination of the evidence has revealed that the bullets were .38s after all. Hardy shows me a photograph of them, two squat slugs hardly dented. “They only passed through soft tissue,” he says. But from how far away? The government says Brad was shot nearly point-blank. The Wills are certain he was shot by the policemen at the end of the street. Proving that, they believe, may start the wheels of justice turning. I’ve come bearing what passes for good news to the Wills these days: a frame-by-frame analysis of Brad’s last minute made by his friend Warcry, who has entrusted me to act as her courier.

“This is what we’ve been waiting for,” says Hardy. We gather in a TV room. “That’s it!” Hardy exclaims. There, on the left side of the screen, above the hood of the red dump truck, in the green of the trees, a tiny white starburst appears, expands, drifts like smoke, visible for a fraction of a second, blown up into giant, pale pizels—very possible the bullet that’s about to hit Brad.

“Should we watch it again?” Hardy asks. Kathy’s head drops, and she backs out of the room. Rewind, pause; Brad falls down, over and over. “Yes,” says Hardy quietly, “this is what we need.”

He’s excited, his face flushed. It’s 11:30 at night. I call Warcry; she’s up, waiting for the Wills’ response. Hardy wants to see a still she’s isolated of a man who appears to be holding a sniper rifle, more potential evidence for a long-distance kill shot. “This could really change everything!” Hardy says. We gather around his computer in his study, a dark room filled with hunting trophies and memorabilia from Hardy’s Yale football days. I pull up the image, a man in a yellow shirt at a distance, a long gun barrel rising above his left shoulder. Hardy sighs. He walks over to a well-stocked gun cabinet, removes a rifle and turns around, posing perfectly as the man Warcry believes is his son’s killer.

“It’s not a sniper rifle,” he says, looking at the gun in his hand. “It’s a carbine.”

The puff of white smoke is the best piece of evidence they’ve seen in the year since Brad died, but they still can’t explain how he was shot twice at long range by such a clumsy old weapon. Hardy slumps into a seat in the corner, thinking of one more theory—one more chance at certainty—dashed.

Kathy brings us tea. Like Brad, she has soft, sleepy eyes and a broad smile. “I like talking to people,” she says. “I’ll talk to anyone. I guess that’s where Brad got it from.” Hardy is exhausted, but Kathy sits up, watching Brad’s old videos—Brad fleeing tear gas in Miami, bullets in Brazil. Hardy was always the skeptical one, shielding his wife from the ways of the world, but now it’s Kathy who’s gaining a worldly wisdom, grasping the roots of her son’s political discontent. She still doesn’t get the politics, tsk-tsks when she sees Brad sitting in front of an upside-down American flag—a crisp Stars and Stripes snaps on a pole outside the house, and there are three bands of red, white, and blue stones on her finger. It’s not anything that Brad said that has changed her point of view. It’s what the Mexican government says, the lies they told her to her face.

“It’d be laughable if they weren’t serious,” she says. “What they’re really telling me is that Brad was there for a very good reason. Believe me, I didn’t want him there. But he was absolutely right. He was right about all the injustices. I didn’t know it then. I really didn’t know. I know it now. In spades.”

One of the most common clichés about radicalism in America is the myth that it’s all about the parents, activists rebelling against or proving themselves to Mom and Dad before they settle down and become Mom or Dad. That wasn’t what Brad Will was doing. Had he come through that fire-fight on October 27th, 2006, he probably wouldn’t have mentioned it to his mother. Instead, he’d tell her about the great Mexican food he’d had, and she’d say that the lake was flattening in the cold, that soon it would be frozen, that maybe when he came home for Christmas he could go ice-skating. His footage likely would not have been seen outside activist circles in the United States, the echo chamber of the already persuaded. Yet the bullet that killed him ended up broadcasting what he had learned far beyond his usual channels, all the way back to where he’d begun. With Brad’s death, knowledge came to Kathy Will. It was the most awful kind of knowing: a new understanding of the world as it is, almost blinding her to the glimpse she had caught, maybe for the first time, of the world as Brad had imagined it could be.

“The last possible deed is that which defines perception itself,” writes Hakim Bey in the long and wild poem that turned Brad Will on to those possibilities, “an invisible golden cord that connects us.”

After the presidential inauguration of 2005, nationwide mass mobilizations died down in the United States. Everyone from anarchists to liberals had rightly given up the idea that the Iraq war could be stopped by symbolic mass actions—smashing windows is no less symbolic than a candlelight vigil, unless you come back to smash them again the following week—and without the anti-globalization movement or the election circus to focus on, there wasn’t much left to mobilize people on a national scale besides the standard fare of ecological crises, labor struggles, disaster relief, and defendant support. Activists had to make good on all the rhetoric that had been thrown around about the shortcomings of summit-hopping by finally taking the time to focus on their local communities. In some areas, this has resulted in a lot of great community-based organizing—the recent proliferation of Really Really Free Markets brings to mind the spread of Food Not Bombs over a decade ago. While the relative quiet on the national scale gives the impression that anarchism is going through a minor recession, we won’t find out whether or not this is true until the next wave of mass actions—which we predict for 2008—shows what anarchists have been brewing in their communities.

This emphasis on local activity isn’t limited to the organizers of social programs like the aforementioned ’Free Markets—it also extends to insurrectionists such as the publishers of this ’zine. Of course, they never call themselves “insurrectionists” here—we can only infer that perspective from their focus on autonomous acts of anonymous revolt against property and authority. The local emphasis comes through in that the ’zine focuses on activity of a wide range of cultural stripes in one small area, rather than activity of one cultural persuasion across a wide geographical area. The misery referenced in the title doubles as the state, Missouri, from which this publication hails; it is both an emotional space and a physical place—and, as the Dylan quote on the cover of the first issue proclaims, “there must be some kinda way outta here.”

The content is made up of reprints from police reports of vandalism, anti-corporate robbery, and similar criminal activity, supplemented by more thoroughly fleshed out stories of strikes and arsons. This format is an exciting innovation in that it offers an equation for a ’zine that basically writes itself: all the editors have to do is watch the police blotter, copy out everything they like, and add their own commentary. The second issue also includes reports of workplace accidents and a guide to obtaining food stamps as thorough as anything in Recipes for Disaster.

This format is interesting in the way it implies the editors’ political perspectives and sense of who their allies are without these ever having to be stated explicitly. This enables them to avoid subcultural jargon while still emphasizing radical solutions, and with any luck that will make this ’zine intelligible to a wider circle of readers than your average anarchist publication is.

Of course, finding common cause with others of unknown political commitments insofar as they take subversive action is always a tightrope act. On the one hand, it starts from something concrete that spans the superficial differences of language; on the other hand, it risks being unable to move from that starting place towards any more concrete forms of cooperation or solidarity. Your average would-be revolutionary editorial collective seeks to impose an action plan on others on the basis of assumed ideological similarities; this editorial collective instead risks projecting ideological similarities on others on the basis of their actions.

The Situationists used the Watts riots to argue that their ideas were “already in everyone’s heads”; that was a stretch at best, and at worst a way to claim the right to speak for those who could only speak on their own behalf through action. The leap of faith here is that by simply covering actions and literally re-presenting them to the communities that generated them, the editors hope not only to encourage more of them but also help to hone the strategy behind them.

Looking over these two issues, I don’t think they’re publishing this just for the radical cachet; it appears they sincerely aspire to promote insurrection. Given that, I can’t help but question whether this is the most effective format for the broad readership they presumably desire. Photocopied ’zines are common currency in some subcultural circles, but entirely invisible in others. I wonder if this would be more effective in certain communities as a pirate radio show, or set to music on spools of free CDRs outside gas stations.

All these concerns aside, War on Misery is an inspiring, entertaining read. At the very least, it can serve to keep self-identifying anti-authoritarians abreast of manifestations of unrest among the general public, the better to motivate and coordinate their own efforts. When one is trying to build up the morale to act, it always helps to know others are out there throwing down and often getting away with it.

The real payoff of focusing on local projects is that this can produce instantly reproducible models ready to be applied everywhere else. Inspired by War on Misery, we are, in fact, starting our own local publication to cover acts of social resistance in our own fair state. If every medium-sized town can have its own Really Really Free Market—a potential that is far from realized, but which is almost within reach and would do a lot for the anarchist movement—then every state could get its own War on. All that remains is to come up with forty-nine more puns for capitalist oppression.

Diction Quibble: At one point the editors use “fight-back” as a noun, the sort of mutilation of the language I associate with authoritarian socialists. Please, please don’t let this catch on. “Fight back” is much better as a verb, as something we do.

_{war_on_misery@hotmail.com}

The purpose of this tour is to stimulate the magic and intimacy already present in the communities we plan on visiting.

Froseph, the newest addition to the CrimethInc. music library, will play a set of songs, including many off “Deep Breath,” his forthcoming album. This project was painstakingly recorded and mixed in a hidden Salem dungeon by Froseph himself, harmonizing obscure vocal stylings with a hearty assortment of instrumental tactics. Having a reputation of screechy politically charged novelty songs, Froseph takes a different, more serious approach with the songs on “Deep Breath,” dealing mostly with sexual abuse, lonliness, civilization, and the denial of those repressions.

Aside from a Froseph set, and in an effort to eliminate the predictable and all too comfortable performer/audience dynamic, this tour will try to encourage participation on many levels: exciting and intimate community-building exercises and games exchanging awkwardness for empowerment and a variety of workshops—including a workshop on transforming vehicles into running on vegetable oil—to be hosted by our troupe of craftsfolk and any locals brave enough to come out of the woodwork to share skills they have. The usual CrimethInc. literature will be available accompanied by harder-to-find arts-and-crafts projects, cds, shirts, patches and zines.

Although a tour name has not been decided on, a tentative itinerary has been pulled together and it looks like we’ll be in these areas around these dates:

Nothing is confirmed, as of this post. If you or anyone in your community is interested in helping throw this event in your town, please email me [froseph@crimethinc.com] and we’ll work out the details. We’re pretty portable and low maintenance. We need a venue (lodge/park/infoshop/basement/etc) and promotional help. Also, if you live around these areas and would like us to come to your town, let us know.

To see what Froseph is all about, visit www.myspace.com/twinklepig

We really hope you’re as excited about this as we are. Together we can work magic.

In Danger,
the CrimethInc. Board of Insurrectors

From September 1st through 4th, 2008, the Republican National Convention will be held in St. Paul, MN.

As residents of the Twin Cities, as anti-authoritarians and anarchists, we, the RNC Welcoming Committee invite folks from all around the globe to show up and make something happen. Pull this movement out of its rut, or start something new. Let the up-tops know that we could give a shit about their suits, their speeches, their money. Bring your (A)-game, cause 2008 is ours.

We’re calling for:

1. Whatever skills you’ve got: medical, food-prep, legal, soapboxing, circus tricks. You name it, we wanna see it.

2. Intelligence gathering. Seriously.

3. Big numbers: your presence makes a difference, even if you aren’t doing anything but sending good vibes our way and bad vibes to the RNC.

4. Decentralized actions: both coordinated and independent; these cities are a playground, and you wouldn’t want to miss all the fun.

5. Surprises: Republicans, cops, starry-eyed youth—everyone likes a surprise.

These are the rules:

1. Know the area. Come early, come often. Or if you can’t do that, study up from home.

2. Respect local communities, develop your knowledge of local background, and remember that, good or bad, the effects of your actions will endure long after you’ve left.

3. Strategize: Be smart. Be creative. Get a sense of what other organizing is going on.

4. Take initiative.

5. Keep your privilege in check. Recognize socialized systems of domination, and work to undermine them.

6. Respect. Respect. Respect. Where it’s due. But no capitulation, and do what you have to do.

7. Keep the bullshit to a minimum. Elitism is not security culture. No vanguardism, no unnecessary infighting, no loose lips.

Questions? Want to participate? Want to sign on to this call? Contact the RNC Welcoming Committee: rnc08.at.riseup.net

There are plenty of projects to keep everyone busy this season—if you haven’t already, now would be a good time to begin laying plans for this summer!

Midwest Anarchist Networking Convergence

March 29th – April 1st, 2007
Winona, MN

This spring, we’d like to invite you into our community for a networking event. If all goes well, our networks will allow us to be ready for anything; tours, prisoner support, actions, collaboration on projects and much more.

This event has its’ eyes on 2008, the year a well-known and widely despised event will occur in our state. The idea behind the convergence is primarily to meet face-to-face and exchange ideas and information. Besides networking, workshops relevant to the issues at stake will be presented.

As stated, we are welcoming you into our community. We hope that you would treat it as such. We hope you will give our community the same respect you’d give your own. You should expect us to respect you as well. We have a few requests to those who will be coming to our town.

Requests

The organizers of this convergence have some requests to make of everyone who participates. Sure, it’s not “democratic” to make up a bunch of rules before most people arrive—but laying basic guidelines for how people take advantage of locals’ organizing is a necessary condition of that organizing. Please respect the wishes of those who have worked to make this event happen. If you don’t like these policies, make use of this time to find others with whom to organize your own convergence according to your own desires.

Consent — any interaction you have with others here, whether sexual or otherwise, should be consensual. Silence and passivity do not count as consent. If someone says no to something or is unsure and you badger them until they say yes, that’s not consent; if someone is intoxicated they may not be in a position to give you consent. If someone says you violated their wishes, that counts as breach of consent, whatever a court of law would say. By the same token, don’t define others’ experiences for them: the person who has an experience gets to decide whether or not their wishes were respected in it, and also what, if anything, the community should do about it.

Security — Security is a consent issue just as much as sex is. Don’t say or do anything that puts others at risk without their express permission: don’t speak about their involvement in illegal activity, don’t endanger them by your own actions. Be aware that you may be under observation by your enemies at all times. Don’t alienate others by speculating about whether they are informants or ostracizing them based on suspicions; at the same time, don’t put yourself at risk by trusting people just because they’re here.

Drinking and Drugs — there is a strict policy of no alcohol or drug use on the campsite. This is for several reasons, but the most important are to comply with the express wishes of our host and to avoid giving the authorities a pretext for harassing us. If you do wish to drink or use intoxicants, please do so elsewhere, perhaps in a home to which you’ve been invited. There is no judgment or morality attached to this policy; the last thing we want is an obvious division between people who drink and people who don’t.

Photographs — don’t photograph anyone or anything without permission. This should be common courtesy, but some people have picked up bad habits from the corporate media.

Exclusion — because we need this convergence to be a safe space for everyone, people who violate these policies may be asked to leave. In cases of breach of consent, both sexual and security, we will 1) trust the survivor and 2) abide by the survivor’s wishes. For example, if you gave information to the police about someone without their permission and they doesn’t want you in this space, we will ask you to leave; likewise, if you have sexually assaulted someone and they are comfortable with you being here as long as you participate in a mediated discussion about their boundaries during this event, we will ask you to do so, or else to leave. This is not a matter of permanently excluding “undesirables” from the anarchist movement, but simply of making things work in a limited space for a limited time. People can be asked to leave the campsite without being exiled from our communities. If anything, this simply provides an incentive for individuals and communities to work out their conflicts in advance of events like this, so we won’t all have to deal with unresolved conflicts here.

To state the obvious, known informants, snitches, and law enforcement officials will not be welcome.

We want this event to be all inclusive. Whether you are young or old, trans-bodied or non-trans bodied, queer or straight, parent or child (we will provide childcare); however you identify you are welcome in our community!

We are in need of people willing to do workshops and skill shares themed around RNC 2008 issues (i.e.: First Aid, Prisoner Support, Direct Action, etc.). Do you have something you’d like to share? Contact us.

Be prepared for the possibility of camping in Minnesota during the spring. This means varied weather; one day it could be 72 degrees and sunny, the next 23 degrees and rainy. We are working on housing, but please be prepared for this possibility. Also, if you could bring food for yourself and to share, we would appreciate the help. We are also working on food issues, but could use some help.

A redirect point has been established at the junction of Highway 61 and Huff Street (Winona Visitors Center). We will meet you there with open arms, as well as information about this event and our town. Hope to see ya soon!

Please RSVP with organizers via email.

Follow along with planning and developments of both the Midwest Anarchist Networking Convergence, and the Great Lakes Anarchist Gathering at Midwest Action Network.

On short notice after a last minute discovery of a special Minuteman Project meeting organizers were able to pull together a crowd of about 30 people to make Gilchrist, Minuteman Project founder, and his foolish legions feel unwelcome. The mixed faces of anti-racist activists, community leaders, anarchists, media, and families from the surrounding neighborhood took to the sidewalk in front of the restaurant holding signs and rallying support from the passing traffic.

An inside source tipped the activists off as to the exact time that Jim Gilchrist was going to be delivering his speech. A spontaneous plan was put in to effect that began with the activists pretending to leave. The sly crowd then hopped a small wall and entered a park that allowed them to be just a few feet away from the Minuteman Project meeting. Managing to elude 30 or so Sheriff’s deputies (and helicopter) and catch the room full of Minutemen completely off guard they announced their presence by chanting, “Hey Gilchrist you’re a clown, racist Minutemen get out of our town!” According to our inside sources our timing was perfect sending the entire room into chaos right as Gilchrist was at a highlight in his foolish speech!

The group then reassembled in front of the restaurant and offered the Minutemen the kind of send off that racist assholes deserve. Gilchrist was forced to sneak out through the kitchen and, as discomfort showed on the faces of the rest of the Minutemen, the crowd was quick to point out the fact that the police were there to protect them because they, indeed, needed protection.

Upon being sure that all of the Minutemen were gone the activists disbanded and headed home to warm frozen fingers and toes knowing that they had taken a brave stand against racism.

We are getting better at confronting these assholes but we need your help. Keep an eye out because more action against the Minuteman Project is coming soon.

Join us next time!

Here follows a selection from the afterword, which briefly addresses the successes and failures of the “Seattle model” of struggle and the extent to which it remains relevant today.

WTO Protests Retrospective: Seven Years Later…

…From this vantage point, it is possible to interpret the WTO protests according to any number of frameworks. They were a watershed in the development of the contemporary anticapitalist movement, at which thousands of disparate groups discovered each other and the power they could wield together. They were the point at which, a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the old “democracy versus communism” opposition, the fundamental dichotomy of global politics was recast as corporate capitalism versus the common people. They were, as the researchers of the RAND corporation self-servingly discovered, the substantiation of theories about how new communications technologies would shape social conflict. They were simultaneously the beginning and the high point of a “movement of movements” which ended when terrorists hijacked the global stage on September 11th, or when communist splinter groups hijacked the anti-war movement a year and a half later, or which continues so long as certain anthropology professors require a subject for inquiry.

The only thing that matters for us anarchists, of course, is what we can learn from the past to act effectively in the present. Does it make sense to pursue “another Seattle,” or is that just a will-o’-the-wisp? Could any of the tactics that succeeded in Seattle be as effective today, or are they subject to a law of diminishing returns?

What Happened in Seattle

Immediately following the Seattle WTO protests, some reformists moaned that the confrontational tactics and far-reaching goals of militant participants alienated people and ruined any chance of concretely affecting national policy. Yet by reformist standards, the so-called anti-globalization movement [1] associated with the Seattle protests achieved practically unprecedented triumphs, and the credit for this must go at least in part to the militants. The next WTO meeting had to be held in Qatar, cementing the image of the WTO as an anti-democratic, oppressive elite. Many of the proposals that had most outraged activists were immediately dropped; likewise, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) agreement is now essentially dead in the water. Some analysts have concluded that the mobilization against corporate globalization peaked early because its goals were not ambitious enough.

In addition to giving the WTO a public image makeover and successfully forcing concessions from it, the militancy of the demonstrators in Seattle pushed its supposed critics to adopt a more uncompromising stance. Organized labor and segments of the Democratic Party have to present the illusion of being oppositional in order to justify their existence. As was frankly acknowledged in the RAND report, they hoped to maintain this illusion and simultaneously absorb and neutralize any radical tendencies by putting in an appearance at the Seattle WTO protests. Once they found themselves caught up in a huge, obviously popular demonstration against the WTO, they had to feign at least some sympathy or else reveal their “opposition” to be a mere pretense. Thus we can see that direct action is the most effective means both for putting pressure on adversaries and for exerting leverage on supposed allies. Even if you don’t want to overthrow the government, forget about voting and petitioning—the only hope for change is in the streets.

Finally, the successes in Seattle brought US anarchists worldwide visibility, along with a needed morale boost, and provided a format for future actions. The “summit-hopping” model made a virtue of the transience that has been such a stumbling block for anticapitalist organizing in North America; like it or not, a movement must make the best of its weaknesses, and if many anarchists couldn’t be counted on to stay in one place long enough to do effective local organizing at least that mobility enabled them to come together occasionally at capitalist summits.

The breakthroughs in Seattle that affected the anarchist community turned out in the long run to be dangerous gifts: as soon as the media attention, the thrill of victory, and the effectiveness of the new model were taken away, many anarchists felt they were back at square one.

A Complex Legacy

In reflecting on the mobilization in Seattle, people often overlook the years of failure that had preceded it. What happened in Seattle was possible precisely because it had been years, if not decades, since so many people joined in disruptive action against a capitalist institution in the US. As noted in the RAND analysis, police expected symbolic arrests à la the anti-nuclear demonstrations of the 1980s, not the coordinated obstruction and rioting they got. Subsequent mass actions were much more difficult to pull off, as the authorities mobilized every resource to ensure that what happened in Seattle would not happen again.

Despite this, Seattle was followed by a series of demonstrations unlike anything in the preceding decade: Washington, D.C. was shut down the following April by protests against the International Monetary Fund, and a year later the FTAA ministerial in Quebec City occasioned the most intense street fighting since the Los Angeles riots of 1992. All the teargas in the country was no match for the enthusiasm of the anticapitalist movement once people had a model to work from and a structure to plug into. It was not until after September 11, 2001 that the tide finally began to recede, and this occurred primarily as a result of the widespread self-fulfilling prophecy that the high point of anticapitalist mass actions was over. The momentum that followed Seattle was not destroyed by the government response, it was abandoned by those who had maintained it: the most significant question presented by the post-Seattle phase of struggle is not how to handle repression, but how to sustain morale.

After anticapitalists lost the initiative, it was inevitable that the partisans of willful impotence would regain it. Proportionate to the number of participants, the antiwar movement of 2002 to 2003 was incredibly ineffectual, largely due to the machinations of liberals and communists who did their best to prevent anyone from taking effective action. And once the legend of Seattle ceased to be the origin myth of an existing, vibrant movement, it became a burden upon everyone who tried to apply the mass action model. Even though many anarchist demonstrations between 2002 and 2005 put everything that happened in the mid-1990s to shame, they seemed stunted and disappointing compared with the Battle of Seattle. Past accomplishments always cast a shadow over the present, and shadows loom bigger the further the object casting them recedes.

The FTAA ministerial in Miami four years after the Seattle WTO protests showed how much ground anticapitalists had lost and how much their adversaries—both those in uniform and those carrying protest signs—had learned. While there were probably almost as many committed anarchists in Miami as there were in Seattle, far fewer other protesters showed up—partly because Miami is so far from the rest of the US, partly because it has the most reactionary Latino population of any US city, and partly because the ability of anticapitalist networks to bring out protesters had been sapped by demoralization and competition with antiwar organizing. The AFL-CIO duplicitously coordinated with the police while asking demonstrators not to carry out direct action during their march, and the demonstrators—insanely—agreed to this request. This enabled the police to concentrate on beating and pepper-spraying people before the union march, controlling the streets during it, and then viciously brutalizing and arresting everyone who remained in town after it. The police tactics in Miami, which were significantly more aggressive than those of the police in Seattle, showed that the fluke in Seattle was not that the police were so aggressive but that the corporate media were caught off guard and accidentally reported on their violence [2]. Finally, the strategy of the demonstrators in Miami, which consisted of a largely symbolic assault on the fence surrounding the meetings, had no hope of actually interfering with them. The protests in Miami only succeeded in disrupting business as usual and giving the FTAA a bad name because the authorities, still transfixed by the specter of Seattle, went to such lengths to repress them.

As of this writing, the Miami FTAA ministerial is itself three years behind us, and there have been no major mass actions in the US since Bush’s second inauguration almost two years ago. Paradoxically, the good news is that enough time may now have elapsed since the WTO protests that a mass mobilization with a clever strategy could catch the powers that be by surprise again—but the bad news is that anarchists, demoralized from so many years of trying to “repeat Seattle,” may not yet be ready to stake everything on another attempt.

What Next?

The presidential campaign of 2008 will be the next backdrop against which major mass actions can be expected to take place. Whatever misgivings some of us currently have about them, for anarchists not to have a powerful presence in mass actions in 2008 would be tantamount to our disappearance from the national arena of social struggle.

The essential challenge of the mass action model is that its greatest strengths and weaknesses are identical. Working from the physics equation tension=force/area, this model brings together a great number of people in a small space so their coordinated actions can have exponential effects—but with sufficient warning, the state can also concentrate its forces to neutralize their efforts. Consequently, successful mass actions must either come as a surprise themselves or employ an unexpected strategy. At the G8 protests in Scotland in 2005, for example, participants outwitted the authorities by dispersing into the countryside to block roads outside the areas where police forces were concentrated.

Effective mass action necessitates that people from a broad range of perspectives work together without limiting each other. In that regard, mass actions are good practice for building the symbiotic relationships fundamental to an anarchist society. The mobilizations that succeeded in Seattle, Quebec City, and elsewhere succeeded because a great number of people simultaneously engaged in a diverse array of complementary tactics. Regardless of the success of a particular action, the ability to do this itself constitutes a victory over the segregation, isolation, and conflict promoted by the capitalist system. In that regard, the Seattle WTO protests were not an unrepeatable miracle, but rather an example of how powerful we can be whenever we find ways to work together.

Suggested Reading

We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism—Through testimony, photos, tactics, and history, this book provides an excellent context for anticapitalist organizing in the years up to and immediately following the WTO protests.

“Five Years After WTO Protests” by Chuck Munson—In this article, one of the administrators of www.infoshop.org refutes corporate media reports that the movement behind the WTO protests had come to an end by 2004.

“N30 Black Bloc Communiqué” by the Acme Collective—Some of the participants in the Black Bloc in Seattle released this excellent and nuanced defense of anarchist property destruction at the WTO demonstrations immediately afterwards.

“Demonstrating Resistance,” the feature article in the first issue of Rolling Thunder—This extensive analysis follows the anarchist experimentation with mass action and autonomous action models that occurred between 2000 and 2005, drawing conclusions about what factors must be present for each approach to succeed.

1—Ironically, the “anti-globalization movement” was perhaps the most globally interconnected movement in the history of protest movements. The corporate media christened it with that misnomer because identifying it for what it was—a movement opposing capitalist globalization—would acknowledge the existence of capitalism, and thus the possibility of other social and economic systems.

2—Likewise, as the dramatically militarized police force in Miami consisted of at least six times as many officers as protected the WTO in Seattle, and they faced off against crowds perhaps a fifth the size of those that had gathered in 1999, they could not fall back on the excuse of being “overwhelmed” and forced into violence. If anything, the police in Miami were more violent than those in Seattle, thoughtlessly attacking demonstrators, retired union members, and corporate media reporters alike.

These events and more have been documented in photographs here. Read more about it here.

DON’T TALK TO POLICE OR THE FBI
Though directed at activists at risk for being harassed by the morons in suits, this poster is a useful reminder for anyone who may at some point be questioned or threatened by the bullies in blue. Our fates and those of our comrades are in our hands, not the hands of our enemies.

WASH YOUR OWN DISHES
Long in the coming, this poster fits neatly over the sink to remind housemates and guests of the anarchic virtue of cleaning up after oneself. To illustrate this point, it offers a hilarious review of how the dishes get washed under every political/economic system from Libertarianism to Anarcho-Primitivism. The illustration is taken from the highly recommended pamphlet Abolish Restaurants, available from prole.info.

THE ART OF POLITICS
Just in time for the election, this pamphlet version of an article from Rolling Thunder #1 lays out all the ways that politics-as-we-know-it excludes, segregates, co-opts, distracts, controls, represses, and oppresses those who submit to it. Take stacks of these to liberal rallies, community events, and polling stations–perhaps the best reason to vote is to leave propaganda or graffiti in the voting booth. Cutting edge design makes this at once readable and visually stimulating.

Anyone who does not have access to a printer and copy scam, or is simply too lazy to seek it, can email crimethincbooking@yahoo.com to ask for a paper copy of any of the above. Please copy and distribute these projects as widely as you’re able!

To make it worse, Mexican President Vincente Fox is using Brad’s death as an excuse to invade the region with federal forces and crush the rebellion. A national call to action has been made to take action at Mexican Consulates this Monday to demand a halt to this violent invasion, in remembrance of the values our friend and compañero died for.

For more information on Brad and Oaxaca: infoshop.org : indymedia.org

For a listing of all the Mexican consulates in North America, click here.

Some of you may know Brad from the CrimethInc. convergence in Minnesota last summer, at which he presented a workshop on resistance in Latin America. Please accept our condolences. We share your sadness.

Call to Action Across the US Against Mexican Consulates
This is a call to action to remember Brad, show solidarity with the teachers and protesters of Oaxaca, and attempt to interrupt the invasion of Oaxaca that Fox is beginning.

Yesterday, as many who are reading this probably already know, an amazing companero, journalist, anarchist, freedom fighter, earth firster, musician, and human being was shot down and killed in cold blood, along with three other companeros, by officials employed by the Mexican Government. His name was Bradley Will, and he was shot at the barricades of Santa Lucia, in Oaxaca, Mexico, as an indymedia reporter telling the story of the amazing resistance of people of Oaxaca. For over five months residents have occupied the streets in an attempt to oust the corrupt, brutal governor Ruiz, and achieve the dignity, freedom, and autonomy initially sought after by the teacher’s strike which was so brutally repressed by that same governor.

While it is not yet clear which segment of the Mexican government is responsible, it is clear from the many photos taken during the shooting that the chief of police, another policeman, and important members of PRI party which supports Ruiz were involved.

To add insult to injury, President Fox is now using the tragedy of these deaths as an excuse to bring in federal forces, to restore “lawfulness.” We can only assume, given the student massacre of ‘68, the history of repression of the Zapatistas by Fox’s military, his recent threats to invade Oaxaca, and the fact that his own government is instigated in the murders, that Fox means to repress the rebellion.

Days before we US residents may have been watching Oaxaca, waiting to “see what happens.” No longer shall we wait. We are now a part of this unfolding history. If the Mexican Army invades Oaxaca, it will be with the financial and military support of the US government. We can not let this happen.

On Monday morning, October 30th, Mexican consulates around the US will attempt to open their doors, to continue business as usual. But they will not succeed in doing so, because we will be there to stop them. At every embassy, at every consulate, we will be there, to remember Brad, to support the teacher’s strike, to fight alongside Oaxacans in their struggle for self-determination and autonomy from the corrupt Mexican government. This call to action against consulates is in line with what companer@s from the APPO have already called for earlier this week before this shooting.

We already know of many groups who are planning for Monday, and every day following if necessary. Please spread this call to action as wide as possible. Spread the word: to activists, teachers, students, earth firsters, latino social services centers, places where day laborers gather, anti-racist action groups, food not bombs chapters, peace and justice organizations, Zapatista solidarity groups, anarchist people of color chapters, people you work with, your neighbors. Copy and paste this the whole world wide, and do so quickly. And please translate a version of this to Spanish as well, and spread it around!

Here is a directory of all the locations of all the Mexican consulates in the US and Canada.

In memory of my friend, who I know will be with us in spirit,
signed,
a friend and companero of Brad, who is sad, angry, and organizing.

“See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”
—George W. Bush

How To Select Effective Literature
The absolute most important part of a literature table is, of course, what’s on it. The effectiveness of the style and voice of the literature you choose to distribute depends on the atmosphere you present it in. The literature available at an event should appear to complement it seamlessly and push it to the next logical step—e.g., an introduction to street art at a gallery opening or a collection of DIY guides at an alternative music club—be relevant, and up-to-date. Don’t waste people’s time with barely readable 8th generation photocopies; if the content is essential, take an afternoon to renovate it with some fresh images and illustrations and correct margins. Speaking of waste, don’t waste paper either: informative literature is like poetry, say as much as you can with as little words as possible.

In that same fashion, 2 or 3 amazing pamphlets with copies available for everyone interested is a far more valuable approach than 25 different titles with only a handful of each. Don’t bore people with obscure philosophy—unless you’re tabling in the lobby of a philosophy lecture, in that case make the literature unbearably obscure and esoteric. In review: literature should be relevant to the event, contain up-to-date information and contact information, be easy to read (and reproduce!), short, sweet, readily available for everyone and satisfying to read. If you can’t say all of those things about the zine you’re thinking about distributing, retire it to your zine library or rewrite it.

“Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.”
—A. J. Liebling, a journalist who had the misfortune of death before KINKOS.

Freeproducing Your Literature
Pardon the wordplay, but it’s true—there is no reason to pay for photocopies. If you look hard enough—and you better!—you will find an unattended photocopier or laser printer. Check out a local university—sometimes you can find a public printing kiosk, but if you can’t track down a student ID to access lab computers. You can plug laptops directly into network printers and bypass security. Corporate copy-centers usually provide convenient “one of us in every town” access, but you’ll have to find the right way to ask. Regardless of the method, you’ll find a way, and when you do, proceed to the next step.

GLOSSARY
Firstly, it would help to become familiar with a few terms.
PDF—or, portable document format—is a file format developed by Adobe Systems that renders documents to appear uniformly on any computer system. If you have digital media to print, this is the format it should be in. Chances are an available scanner can output a PDF directly, otherwise Adobe InDesign is the recommended program for laying out PDFs from scratch. There are other ways to create a PDF file including using a Mac to print a document. [ File > Print > PDF > Save As PDF ]
IMPOSE—This is the process of arranging pages onto spreads so that they will read in the correct order after printing and folding. If a digital file is described as “Print Ready” or “Imposed”, you can assume that it has already gone through this process. For some, this process can be a headache to manage on most software; if you are one of these people, you might find doing it manually with individually printed pages to be easier.
DUPLEXING—In simple terms, this means to print on both sides of a piece of paper, something you’ll find decent laser printers and almost all photocopiers can do. Never settle for hand-fed double-sided copies, unless you are backed into a corner.
SADDLE-STITCH—Is a book-binding technique where the binder folds the pages in half and staples them together on the center fold. You will find this is the most effective way to keep your literature from falling apart.

Out Of The Frying Pan . . .
Now that we’re speaking the same language, let’s figure out how you’ll get these things onto paper and into your backpack. For your own sake, you’ll want to avoid inkjet printers at all costs—in addition to being terribly old-fashioned and unreasonable, they often leave hideous misprinted streaks in the finished product. On laser printers, you’ll find the duplexing option somewhere in the Print dialogue, likely in the layout tab. On photocopiers you’ll probably find a one-sided to two-sided option, you can use this to scan in individual pages to make an imposed master copy. The two-sided to two-sided copy option is what you’ll use if you already have a master flat of the zine you’re trying to reproduce, this instructs the machine to feed your zine through and make copies of both sides of each page. You’ll probably find the tray at the top of the copy machine, where you’ll simply drop the stack of flats into and select the amount of copies you’d like to make and let the machine do the rest!

Into The Fire . . .
Now you have a stack of hundreds of leafs of paper. Hopefully, you’ve kept them in some discernible order. When you’re assembling them, you might find your hands get exhausted by folding zine after zine, this is you’re body telling you what any seasoned zine binder knows already—your hands won’t do the trick! In order to get a crisp fold without damaging the paper, use a mason jar or butter knife or something else with a solid and smooth edge—Bone Folders are preferred by most binders and work amazingly! Get your hands on a long-armed stapler, if you like to pay for things like that, you prepare for as much as $30, otherwise they are widely available for free at the nearest corporate office supply. You’ll find your way through this process sooner or later and develop a solid rhythm. Once you’re done assembling all of your zines, wrap them up with rubber bands so they stay together and remain easily identifiable.

DOWNLOADS AVAILABLE
Browse our own selection for print-ready downloads. Including our new re-edition of an out-of-print Inside Front account: The White Shark Tales chronicles the adventures of several CrimethInc. operatives throughout their harrowing endeavors. Revisit demonstrations in DC, a Reclaim The Streets in North Carolina, an Earth First! Rendezvous, a mutual aid assignment to the mountains of southern Mexico, and much more.

Quiver Distro has quite an extensive list of PDFs available for immediate reproduction. Show your appreciation for their hard work with a donation or a gift of a selection from their wishlist.

Prole.Info has just released an informative coloring book decrying the restaurant industry, and made it available for download. If you can navigate through the site you’ll find more interesting and provocative PDFs.