![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/14/1.jpg\")
Copies of the new issue of Inside Front on a literature table in Budapest. This is like sighting a coelacanth in the wild.
\nOver three decades ago, some of the first people to collaborate on CrimethInc. projects met via the international networks that had developed in the zine underground associated with the hardcore punk scene. One of the first projects they collaborated on was the hardcore zine Inside Front, the archives of which are available here.
\n\n\n\n\nIn those days, without the internet, how did people discover and pass on anarchist ideas and tactics?
\n\nBy embedding these values in rebellious subcultural milieus such as the punk scene—by reading dogeared books about the Yippies, the Situationists, and the Spanish Civil War—and by having adventures.
\n\nThese three elements—subculture, reading, and adventure—came together in the hardcore journal Inside Front.
\n
The last issue of Inside Front came out in 2003.
\n\nIn August 2025, as the hardcore band Catharsis was preparing to play their first shows debuting their album “Hope against Hope,” the team behind Inside Front suddenly came out of retirement and threw together a new issue of the magazine in a week flat.
\n\nAs a consequences of some wrongheaded notions about authenticity and immediatism, the issue never appeared online, though Catharsis distributed them from New York City to Budapest.
\n\nNever, at least, until now.
\n\nWe’ve added this new issue of Inside Front to our online archive, so you can print and distribute your own copies.
\n\nFrom the introduction:
\n\n\n\n\nWe hastily prepared this special limited edition of Inside Front in just a few days, scrambling to finish it in time for the record release shows for the Catharsis LP “Hope against Hope.” Although it has been well over two\ndecades since the previous issue, many people who contributed to previous issues of Inside Front sent new material for this one—not to mention at least one contributor who was not yet born when the first issues of Inside Front appeared.
\n
Copies of the new issue of Inside Front on a literature table in Budapest. This is like sighting a coelacanth in the wild.
\nFrom a review by Martin on the Counterforce site:
\n\n\n\n\nThe cover says “For anarcho-punks and hardcore anarchists” and I could just stop the review right there. This might be the epitome of “perfect zine” for me. The first non-meta content is “Like Weeds – A Dialogue about HIS HERO IS GONE’s Timeless Anthem” in which two thinkers trade increasingly deep and heady observations and anecdotes about the song and it’s context (even more impressive when you realize both parties are almost certainly completely sober).
\n\nThere’s also a relatable story about en EXTREME NOISE TERROR CD triggering scrutiny at the US border, a show review from someone’s first hardcore show ever, top-10 lists, a few reviews, ideas for a Stateless Fair, and a pair of parallel accounts from fighters in the Syrian civil war bonding over a Czechoslovakian hardcore song they all happened to know, and the struggle to finally download and listen to the song in the middle of a war zone.
\n\nIt feels like a special and unique zine, since it draws on energy built up over 20+ years since the last issue. I’m not sure if Inside Front will return in a more permanent way, but I hope this issue gets wider distribution than just the CATHARSIS tour so more of you can enjoy it.
\n
From the introduction to the zine:
\n\nIn the 1990s, in a time of social peace (at least in the United States), the hardcore scene was ahead of the times in that it was hyper-connected, internationally networked, and artistically experimental.
\n\nToday, the hardcore scene is increasingly conservative, artistically speaking (though we challenge you to prove us wrong!). It’s no longer any better networked than any other social milieu. But it is now old-fashioned in a potentially explosive way, because it involves physical collectivity, togetherness that unfolds on a slower time frame than the virtual reality of internet relations.
\n\nPeople have also become more aesthetically literate than they used to be. Whereas both a blast beat and a black bloc were completely foreign and incomprehensible to most people in 1999 (and both models derived both their strength and their limits from that fact), today, a much wider range of people can understand both of them. Yet as these reference points have become more widely shared, a crucial detail of the punk program has been lost: context is everything.
\n\nThe very same song can be meaningless in an expensive club and transformative in a squatted space of resistance. Banksy has demonstrated this in the field of the visual arts. Pussy Riot did the same when they performed “Punk Prayer” at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior in February 2012. Real, living art has to break the frame.
\n\nAs the social peace that used to exist crashes and burns, countless people are grasping for new ways of connecting and fighting. Hardcore and punk still have something to offer people today-perhaps now more than ever.
\n\nThe story goes that a participant in the defense of Weelaunee Forest once said that, proportionate to their numbers, punks were the most impactful participants in that movement. Those from any other walk of life could learn about the situation without necessarily feeling impelled to take action—but punks could not learn about anything without immediately asking how they themselves could take action in relation to it.
\n\nDo it yourself: this is still the key.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/14/2.jpg\")
\nWhat can today’s rebels learn from the Stonewall riots? Why did the uprising have such an impact? To answer these questions, we explore the previously unacknowledged significance of anarchists in the rebellion and the movements that emerged from it. Along the way, we trace a queer genealogy of anarchist organizing methods in North America from the Stonewall Uprising through the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 to today.
\n\nThis is a massive, meticulously researched historical investigation. It’s a deep dive! For a shorter introduction to the subject, see our previous article, “Stonewall Means Riot Right Now.”
\n\nYou can order a zine version of this article here in order to read it in print.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/1.jpg\")
This image designed by the artist Bum Lung appeared in a book collecting the works of the Mary Nardini Gang in 2019. In fact, it repurposes the same Thomas Nast cartoon as a flyer that the anarchist group Up Against the Wall Motherfucker made in the 1960s. This connection gives us a glimpse of a subterranean relationship between queer subversion and criminal anarchism that spans decades.
\n“Be gay, do crime”? Let’s be more ambitious!
\n\nIn 1969, gays and gender rebels were already criminals. At Stonewall, they became revolutionaries.
\n\nAnd if you’ve ever participated in an affinity group at a mass protest, you’ve got them partly to thank.
\n\nHere, we revisit the Stonewall Uprising and its aftermath to trace a queer anarchist history of riots and horizontal organizing. Despite Stonewall being the most famous moment in LGBTQ history in the United States, few have explored the anarchist dimensions of the uprising, nor its influence on subsequent radical organizing and tactics. Until now, queer anarchists who have invoked Stonewall have usually focused on it simply as an anti-police riot, an example of “queer ultraviolence” in which a wide range of sexual and gender rebels including trans people, people of color, and street youth fought back against their oppressors. This is accurate, of course, and were it only that, it would still be worth celebrating. But there is a specifically anarchist legacy at the heart of the rebellion, posing strategic and tactical lessons of interest to contemporary anarchists.
\n\nThe history of queer anarchism has yet to be told. This is one of its riotous chapters.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/2.jpeg\")
Queer anarchists around the world march to commemorate the Stonewall Uprising—let’s actually remember and learn from it.
\nIf you, dear reader, are a queer and/or trans anarchist, we hope you’ll find particular pleasure in this account. But there are no identity-based limits on this legacy. All anarchists and rebels should find useful insights in the story that follows. Looking back through this history, it’s surprising how much of it—the discourse about outside agitators, identity, and local knowledge in riots, the debates about leadership and representation versus spontaneity and affinity, the counterinsurgency methods—resonates directly with our own experiences in more recent rebellions across a wide range of contexts.
\n\nRadical history should go beyond simply cheerleading our ancestors and trancestors; we owe it to them to learn concrete lessons from their successes and failures. The best way to honor the courage of the Stonewall rebels is not by putting their images on our walls or social media feeds, nor by squabbling over the proper version of identity politics to govern our thumbnail accounts of history.
\n\nIt’s by drawing on their experiences to revolt more and better today.
\n\n—some queer anarchists
\n\nWe’ve researched this article using a range of primary materials (documents and accounts from 1969) as well as other historians’ writings about the events, plus interviews years later with folks who witnessed them. Where possible, we’ve included links to online sources that you can read yourself; otherwise, we have included footnotes to materials you can access in libraries. Many of the sources appear in the excellent anthology The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary Reader.
\n\nSome of the accounts directly contradict each other. We’ve done our best to sort through the various sources to pull together a well-supported overall narrative, acknowledging the limits of what we can know.
\n\nObjectivity is impossible. Yet our revolutionary aspirations will not be served by upholding mythologies that are emotionally satisfying but neglect the available evidence. A “usable past,” as we see it, isn’t an uncomplicated and inspiring fable full of hero/in/es to celebrate. It’s an analysis of history that offers lessons we can use to realize our own revolutionary dreams in the present.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/27.jpg\")
Yes honey, we know. But what can it teach us about revolt?
\nStonewall wasn’t simply a night when the cops raided a bar and people fought back. The Stonewall Rebellion spanned three nights of intense rioting throughout Greenwich Village over the course of six days. This is critical to understanding why it made such a difference then and why we still remember it today.
\n\nIt has become common to point out that Stonewall wasn’t the first queer riot. Commonly cited incidents include Cooper Do-nuts in Los Angeles (c. 1959) and Compton’s Cafeteria (1966). We can add to the list the Black Nite Brawl of 1961, also known as “Wisconsin’s Stonewall,” the gay community response to the Black Cat raid in 1967 Los Angeles, and various other pre-1969 rebellions.
\n\nYet our hunger for a usable riotous queer past may exceed what we can actually document. The Cooper Do-nuts incident might have happened, but novelist John Rechy is the only person who claims to remember it (and wasn’t even sure what year it took place). More people claim to remember a tussle at Compton’s, but neither police files, organizational records, media coverage, nor gay nor trans periodicals from the time offer any mention of such an incident. It may have happened, but the details and even the date remain hazy—some time in August 1966 is the best guess. While inspiring to recount as an early example of collective trans and queer resistance, whatever impact such a disturbance may have had at the time was limited.
\n\nOther instances that are better documented, while locally significant, did not spread beyond their immediate geographic or tactical limits. The Black Nite Brawl, while fierce, was essentially a bar fight on a single night. When the Black Cat was raided in 1967, the gay community didn’t riot, though they did organize a nonviolent protest. None of these were widely discussed outside the communities where they took place.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/3.jpg\")
After the Los Angeles Police raided the Black Cat bar in Los Angeles in 1967, the gay community assembled to protest… but didn’t riot.
\nSurely there have been many times when queer and/or trans people fought back against oppression, regardless of whether they were documented in traditional archives or community memory. But before 1969, none of those directly catalyzed a deeper transformation in the queer/trans world beyond the immediate participants.
\n\nStonewall was different. One of the reasons why is that it lasted so much longer. The entire neighborhood around the bar became ungovernable for nearly a week, with multiple escalating clashes that centered gay, trans, and/or gender non-conforming people but grew to include a range of neighbors, street kids, and political radicals. By sustaining the disorder for many days beyond the initial bar raid, the rioters shifted what it meant to be gay in the Village—and eventually, the world.
\n\nHad the 2014 riots in Ferguson died down after one night, they would not have catalyzed the international reckoning with police violence that became known as the Black Lives Matter movement. In the years before a police officer in Ferguson murdered Michael Brown, many one-night riots took place in response to police murders—but none lasted long enough to expand into a generalized rebellion. In Ferguson, locals kept coming back to the streets; this afforded supporters time to arrive, helping to sustain the intensity. The prolonged disorder caught the attention of the public, which eventually caused the protests to spread, making Michael Brown and Ferguson into household names. This is a useful analogy for what happened in the Stonewall riots.
\n\nNowadays, people love to debate who “threw the first brick”1 at Stonewall. Actually, the question of how the rioting continued is at least as important as how it started. While the courage of those who resisted on the first night is admirable, it was the persistence of collective militant defiance in the streets over the following week that transformed it from a disturbance into a revolutionary upheaval.
\n\nOne night, however fierce, could be a fluke. Stonewall was an uprising. Let’s see how it unfolded.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/4.jpg\")
The Stonewall Inn before everything exploded.
\nThe basic story of the first night of rioting at Stonewall is widely known, though certain details about who did what remain contested.
\n\nFriday, June 27 was an ordinary night at the Stonewall, a trashy gay bar on Christopher Street in the West Village run by the Genovese organized crime family. The door was staffed by Ed Murphy, an infamous Mafia tough, pimp, blackmailer, and police snitch who later rebranded himself as a gay activist. A mixture of mostly young gay men and trans/gender-nonconforming folks sipped watered-down drinks from dirty glasses and danced, while outside the bar, more queers (including many too young to get in) congregated in the park and on the streets, laughing and camping and cruising.
\n\nShortly after 1 am, police entered the bar and announced that they were raiding the premises. It was the second raid of the same bar that week, in addition to raids on other gay bars and the destruction of trees in a popular cruising area of a park in nearby Queens. As police sorted patrons for release or arrest, targeting trans people in particular, some begin to protest and physically resist. A crowd gathered outside, grumbling at the police and cheering and camping it up as people exited the bar.
\n\nWord spread through the neighborhood. As the police exited and began loading arrestees into a paddy wagon, tension built. A trans woman smacked an officer with her purse; a butch lesbian, struggling against her captors, yelled at the crowd to do something. From the swelling crowd, people shouted, threw pennies (a pun: “dirty copper!”), beat upon the police vehicles, pulled up cobblestones from the streets, and tussled with the officers. Losing control of the situation as the crowd grew larger and angrier, the officers retreated into the bar.
\n\nThe crowd tossed bottles, stones, trash, garbage cans, and whatever they else they could find. They smashed windows, unarrested some prisoners, and pulled up a parking meter to use as a battering ram. Rioters attempted to set the bar on fire. Cops pulled their guns. More police arrived; as riot cops squared off, the crowd camped it up, chanting and dancing a kick line. For hours, the crowds clashed with police, dispersed and reassembled, set trash cans on fire, chanted, cruised, and milled around discussing their previous experiences with police.2
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/5.jpg\")
Friday night: the police raided and queers fought back.
\nAs Martin Boyce recalled of the morning after:
\n\n\n\n\nMorning came on Christopher, and those broken windows and pieces of cloth inside and diamondlike glass all over. It was a riot, no doubt about it, and there were just exhausted survivors looking dazed. We knew what happened. We all did it… There was a certain beauty to the aftermath of the riot. It was a very extraordinary kind of beauty, something to make art out of later… The beauty of shattered glass and certain kind of fag decorations being blown in the wind, by the window. It was obvious, at least to me, that a lot of people really were gay and, you know, this was our street.3
\n
For all of the ink spilled debating who played what role on the first night, all accounts agree that there were no leaders. No organizations, no formal structures, no representatives: the rebellion was a spontaneous collective outburst of rage and joy. Even attempts to chant slogans such as “gay power” or to sing civil rights anthems like “We Shall Overcome” didn’t take hold in an atmosphere of arch camp irony and fury. While efforts to take control of the riot’s legacy and bend its meaning to serve different political agendas began soon after, the first night expressed an organic, unmediated defiance. An observer writing in the countercultural newspaper Rat remarked on the absence of any effort to exert leadership as the uprising unfolded: “Strangely, no one spoke to the crowd or tried to direct the insurrection. Everyone’s heads were in the same place.”4
\n\nMany of the statements that established activists made early in the rebellion focused on the bars themselves, lamenting the system of mafia control and police payoffs. Craig Rodwell of the Oscar Wilde Bookshop circulated a flyer on behalf of his organization Homophile Youth Movement in Neighborhoods (HYMN) that declared, “The only way this monopoly can be broken is through the action of Homosexual men and women themselves. We obviously cannot rely on the various agencies of government.” Despite this anti-state sentiment, the demands asserted—for gay businessmen to run bars with “competitive pricing,” a boycott of Mafia-controlled establishments, and an investigation by the mayor’s office—suggested a limited imagination.5 While these conditions created frustration and vulnerability for many adult gay people, young queer people—ironically, precisely the constituency that HYMN claimed to speak for—were excluded regardless of who owned them, and trans/gender-nonconforming people of all ages faced additional legal and social harassment both inside and outside of them.6
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/7.jpg\")
Craig Rodwell stands in front of the Oscar Wilde Book Shop in 1969.
\nHad the riots died down after one or two nights, such demands might have remained the thinkable horizon for many participants. However, the unrest persisted across many days despite the efforts of cops, politicians, and community representatives. The prolonged antagonism with police occupying the neighborhood and the ongoing congregation of angry, rebellious queers on the streets defying authority and sharing their experiences expanded the meaning of the uprising. Over the course of the week, what had begun as a grievance related to the bars became a window into a totally different world.
\n\nIn addition to expressing being fed up and determined to resist, participants began to articulate sophisticated political analyses. One young gay rebel explained to a reporter the function of anti-gay oppression: “We strike at the family, and we undermine all the bullshit about virility that keeps most men in line.”7 These insights emerged collectively in real time as the rioters chatted and developed a shared political consciousness. An observer of the first night recalled:
\n\n\n\n\nPeople hung around till after 4 am talking in little groups. People were excited and angry. In talking to a number of kids who had been inside, it was evident most understood at least rudimentarily what was happening to them. What was and should have always been theirs, what should have been the free control of the people was dramatized, shown up for what it really was, an instrument of power and exploitation. It was theatre, totally spontaneous. There was no bullshit.8
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/6.jpg\")
Day one: the raid and the riots left the bar wrecked.
\nIn a 2019 interview, Jim Fouratt, a longtime gay activist and former Yippie who was present for the entire Stonewall Uprising, recalled a detail that hasn’t made it into the published accounts of the riots. In his account, few radical groups participated on the second night of the uprising, but the Motherfuckers were there:
\n\n\n\n\nDo you know about the Motherfuckers? Straight anarchists, black flag kind of group… I did a lot of community organizing with the East Side Yippies and that kind of stuff. And my friend Ren de Antonio called me and she said, “I want you to know that the Motherfuckers are gonna come tonight and they’re gonna try to start a confrontation with the police.” And I said, “How do you know that?” She told me that there was a closeted gay man that she was good friends with in the Motherfuckers named Superdrill… she said Superdrill told me they’re gonna come.9
\n
Did the Motherfuckers participate in the Stonewall Uprising? If so, what impact did they have?10 We may never be able to confirm with certainty what role the Motherfuckers played, but Fouratt’s recollection suggests a throughline connecting the forms of anarchist organizing on the streets of New York City in 1969 with the organizational forms that emerged out of the Stonewall Uprising. In any case, as we shall see below, multiple witnesses confirm that at least one other anarchist group was definitely involved in the riots.
\n\nWho were the Motherfuckers? Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (UAW/MF), also known as the Motherfuckers, emerged in the late 1960s out of organizing involving Dan Georgakas, Ben Morea, and several others. Inspired by Dadaism, Spanish Civil War veterans living in exile in New York City, and the Living Theater, Morea had launched a zine called Black Mask in 1966, turning the radical message of the avant garde against the corporate art world that had defanged it and reduced it to a spectacle. Over the months that followed, he and his companions carried out some of the boldest confrontational direct actions of the late 1960s while modeling a new form of horizontal organization.
\n\nMorea had attended meetings with Murray Bookchin at which they discussed how the Spanish anarchists of the FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica) had organized in grupos de afinidad during the revolution of 1936. Bookchin went on to circulate influential proposals about affinity group organizing through the writings and lectures of the Anarchos Group at spaces like Alternate U, a countercultural free school in Greenwich Village in New York City. At the same time, UAW/MF began to put a similar model into practice, organizing as a “street gang with an analysis,” forming cells that participated in confrontational actions against the art establishment, the police, and the military-industrial complex.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/26.jpg\")
Ben Morea of the Motherfuckers, c. 1968.
\nIn a leaflet titled “The Brown Bag Theory of Affinity Groups,” UAW/MF laid out their philosophy:
\n\n\n\n\nThe affinity group is the seed/ germ/ essence of organization. It is coming together out of mutual Need or Desire. Cohesive historical groups united out of the shared necessities of the struggle for survival, while dreaming of the possibility of love. For man’s nature is not bounded by necessity alone — Desire appears in all its forms & man desires to desire — he seeks to fulfill himself on every level of his complex life. & it is in this psychological sense that the affinity group is a pre-organizational force, it represents the drive out of which organization is formed & in so far as it fulfills men’s desires it becomes the post-revolutionary form, the organization of satisfaction.
\n
It is striking that the Motherfuckers articulated the logic of the affinity group not only as a response to political necessity or as a way to embody anti-authoritarian principles, but an expression of desire and the longing for love. Establishing collective living spaces, working together intensively, and sharing the risks and pleasures of life in revolt, UAW/MF formed a network they called “the family,” which, as Morea recounted, “shared a tribal outlook and lifestyle.” Deconstructing and replacing bourgeois structures of kinship was part of the group’s prefigurative vision. As the radical historian Caitlin Casey explains, “The Motherfuckers saw the nuclear family as a hopelessly outdated concept but their new family as presaging the postrevolutionary society.”
\n\nMorea later recalled, “The fact that we rejected the nuclear family model and lived collectively was never arrived at in a polemical fashion or laid out as a blueprint. We just had a sense that there were other roots to living other than what the West had to offer.” In this rejection of conventional family values in favor of new models driven by desire, love, and a vision of social transformation, the Motherfuckers—despite being a mostly heterosexual formation—promoted an anti-authoritarian vision that paralleled the queer practices that were emerging a few blocks west, where networks of street queens, queer teenagers, cruisers, and gay couples were building alternative worlds.
\n\nWhile these prefigurative models of alternative kinship overlapped with social realities in the Village, UAW/MF’s tactics were a far cry from any means of protest that organized gay groups had undertaken. Pre-Stonewall organizations such as the Mattachine Society of New York employed conventional hierarchical organizing models and limited their tactics to polite advocacy, which was undoubtedly bold for a time when same-sex sex was criminalized and police harassment bedeviled the community. The MSNY’s negotiations with Mayor Lindsay’s administration and the police department had managed to secure a reduction in anti-gay arrests in the years leading up to Stonewall. But while some individual gays and lesbians such as Jim Fouratt participated in more confrontational New Left or anarchist projects, the organized gay movement remained tactically conservative through 1969.
\n\nAt a time when a broad social consensus, particularly among young people and marginalized communities, strongly opposed the Vietnam War and the US military machine, the first gay protest to take place in the city had been a 1964 picket outside the US Army Building advocating for the inclusion of gay men and lesbians in the military. The famous 1966 “sip-in” at Julius’s Bar in the Village involved men in conservative suits identifying themselves as homosexuals and then politely asking to be served in order to challenge State Liquor Authority policies that rendered gay bars vulnerable to closure. While courageous and in some cases effective, the homophile movement showed little tactical innovation. Younger activists’ efforts to propose even minor changes in the scope of actions—such as relaxing the conservative gender-conforming dress code imposed on participants in the “Annual Reminder” picket at the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia—provoked fierce backlash.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/9.jpg\")
The famous “sip-in” at Julius’s Bar in the West Village, 1966. Dick Leitsch, president of the Mattachine Society of New York, is at center, addressing the bartender.
\nBy contrast, on the Lower East Side, the Motherfuckers were pushing the boundaries of protest with near-constant confrontations, property destruction, and street marches. As former Motherfucker Osha Neumann recalled,
\n\n\n\n\nWe would riot, throw rocks through the windows of the bank, and run through the streets chased by beat cops from the precinct reinforced by the Tactical Patrol Force. Those of us they caught got dragged to jail. Those of us who escaped rushed to our new storefront to churn out fliers calling for new demonstrations, which would invariably result in more riots and more arrests.
\n
UAW/MF organized their own protests, but also appeared wherever social tensions presented opportunities for insurrectionary escalation. According to Morea, “We didn’t operate from any plan, we just saw situations and took our chances. We were edge dwellers.” When entering into a conflict, they did not confine themselves within tactical limits: “Our response would include everything from peaceful protests to not peaceful battling depending on the situation. We were extremely volatile and it often depended on how hard we were pushed.” The city presented ample opportunities for escalation, especially as the temperature rose; as a Motherfucker communiqué titled “Liberation in the Streets” declared, “While the rest tremble, we look forward to the heat of summer.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/10.jpg\")
Black Mask, antecedents of Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, c. 1967.
\nYet as summer of 1969 set in, few straight radicals anticipated that the most successful confrontation with the city’s notorious riot squad would come not from seasoned movement “heavies” such as Motherfuckers, Yippies, or SDS militants, but from young gay people in Greenwich Village. Many tough radicals from the New Left viewed the latter with contempt or amused indifference.
\n\nIn fact, all accounts agree that in the Stonewall riots, it was specifically effeminate gays, street queens, and trans/gender-nonconforming people that took the most prominent militant roles. “People are beginning to realize,” one New York Post author quoted the doorman at the Stonewall Inn as saying, “that no matter how ‘Nelly’ or how ‘fem’ a homosexual is, you can only push them so far.” The author continued: “With a battle cry of ‘gay power,’ the Nellies, fems, gay boys, queens—all those who flaunt their homosexuality—have been demonstrating that they have indeed been pushed too far.”11
\n\nDick Leitsch, president of the Mattachine Society of New York, noted, “The ‘butch’ numbers who were around the area and who participated peripherally in the action remained for the most part in the background. It was the ‘queens’ who scored the points and proved that they are not going to tolerate any more harassment or abuse.”12 A graffito on the sidewalk in front of the Stonewall: “BUTCHES, WHERE ARE YOU NOW THAT WE NEED YOU?”13
\n\nAs word spread after the first night of rioting that a rowdy group of street queens and campy young gays with no formal protest experience had successfully squared off against the riot police, militants flocked to the Village to learn from their experience. As gay activist Bob Kohler recounted:
\n\n\n\n\nThe big thing on everybody’s mind, especially the police and movement people, was that these were the only rioters that had gotten the best of the police. So that gave them a special strangeness. I mean, people just [wondered], How could that happen? Because there’d been riots with Yippies and there’d been riots with the SDS and Abbie Hoffman, but nobody had ever gotten the best of the police before. The police were never put on the run, and suddenly they were put on the run by the fairies, so those people were very curious: did this really happen?14
\n
As the day unfolded, radicals and countercultural people of various sexualities and genders converged on the Village, mingling and discussing the events. One lesbian recalled, “Hippies joined the queers & straight places turned gay for the week-end—it was complete madness in NYC.”15
\n\nIn addition to the likely presence of the Motherfuckers, multiple participants confirm the presence of the Crazies, an anarchist cell based in Lower Manhattan that participated in street theater, confrontational protests, and—as came out a few months later—bombings of targets connected to United States militarism.
\n\nAuthor Edmund White reported, “A mad left-wing group of straight kids called the Crazies is trying to organize the kids, pointing out that [Mayor] Lindsay is to blame.” John O’Brien, a Marxist activist with links to various radical groups experienced in street confrontations with police, reached out to the group to ask them to come on Saturday.16 While it is not known which individual Crazies were at Stonewall that night, participants in the group included Robin Palmer and Sharon Krebs, who went on to join the Weather Underground, and Sam “Mad Bomber” Melville. Five months after Stonewall, Melville was arrested en route to a planned bombing due to information passed by George Demmerle, an FBI snitch involved with the Crazies. Melville became a leader in prison organizing at Attica; he died at the hands of police and National Guard troops in the massacre that concluded the Attica Rebellion.
\n\nAs night fell on June 28, the second night of the Stonewall riots, the crowd swelled to include thousands of people. The vibe was at once angry and festively campy. Participants surged into the streets and blocked traffic, chanted, confronted vehicles, and began to throw things. At the nearby Women’s House of Detention, which confined many Black and Latina lesbians and transmasculine folks, detainees cheered and dropped burning pieces of toilet paper out of the windows of the jail to show their support.17 Angry gay and trans people began attacking police cars. Marsha P. Johnson reportedly climbed a streetlamp and dropped something heavy on a squad car, smashing its windshield, while someone else tossed a bag of wet garbage into the face of an officer in another vehicle.
\n\nAfter 2 am, the TPF riot police arrived to reinforce the badly outnumbered officers, advancing in wedge formations in an attempt to clear the streets. Queer demonstrators confronted them with taunts and kick-lines and, when forced out, escaped along side streets to disperse and then reassemble elsewhere. Setting fires in trash cans, attacking police outnumbered by the crowds, and successfully unarresting and freeing some of those snatched by the riot squad, queers continued to flood the streets until after 3:30 am.
\n\nThe success of the crowd in evading police, holding the streets, and sustaining the confrontation for hours likely stemmed from the combination of different demographics that converged on the second night. Gay residents and street queens drew on their intimate knowledge of the local terrain to find escape routes around police blockades, enabling rioters to disperse and reconverge, outflanking police efforts to re-establish control. Anarchists and other militants drew on their experience in street protest to escalate confrontations and defend against police violence and arrests. The gays, Motherfuckers, and Crazies proved a formidable coalition.
\n\nFouratt was thrilled about how the second night went:
\n\n\n\n\nWe learned through the end of it when I, when our little group met again, full of ourselves because it had been more successful than we had expected, many more people came out, it was just wonderful. I remember marching across Waverly Place in the wrong direction, going by Julius’s and shouting, “Come out! Come Out! Come out!” And they’re all raising their drinks, but not coming out! … I don’t claim to be the first person to say, “Come out! Come out!” But on the second night, that was the mantra, the cheer that you heard.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/11.jpg\")
Saturday night: Stonewall belongs to the kids on the streets.
\nOn the third night, Sunday, June 29, large crowds once again turned out, but the fierce confrontations that marked the first two nights did not take place. As David Carter explains, the police had learned
\n\n\n\n\nthat in the aftermath of Friday night’s raid it would take many more police officers than were initially deployed on Saturday to discourage gay men and women and their allies from attempting to seize the area around the Stonewall, which the homosexual citizens saw as their turf; that the police needed to arrive early in large numbers to preempt the gay citizenry from seizing the initiative; and that such a maneuver must be executed in a low-key manner or their mere presence might precipitate the outbreaks they were hoping to end. (At least the police used this approach on Sunday night and it worked.)18
\n
A gay activist writing in the Berkeley Barb also claimed that activists from SDS had promised to lend their support, but failed to show up on Sunday night.19 If the Motherfuckers returned, their presence was not felt. Other factors contributed to muting the rebellion:
\n\n\n\n\nThe second factor working in the police’s favor was that the weekend had passed. Friday and Saturday nights’ events had begun late and lasted until the early morning, something most people could not do on an evening before a workday, especially if they had already done so on the previous night or two. Thirdly, some of the demonstrators felt that they had already made their point and nothing more was to be gained by again repeating what was becoming a predictable scenario. Was it worth risking more injuries and arrests, as well as damage to the neighborhood that gay people were fighting to claim as their own?20
\n
Furthermore, earlier in the day, Mattachine activists had met with representatives of the mayor and police department and attempted to dissuade the gay community from continuing the rebellion. At the Stonewall, MSNY members encouraged people who turned up to go home, posting a sign reading: “WE HOMOSEXUALS PLEAD WITH OUR PEOPLE TO PLEASE HELP MAINTAIN PEACEFUL AND QUIET CONDUCT ON THE STREETS OF THE VILLAGE—MATTACHINE.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/12.jpg\")
An attempt at counterinsurgency. It didn’t work.
\nMSNY’s actions reflect a familiar pattern of co-optation and counterinsurgency, in which the self-appointed representatives of an oppressed group attempt to pacify their constituency in order to maintain their status as intermediaries with the dominant power structure. This model is familiar from Ferguson to Standing Rock to Minneapolis; it represents one of the most serious threats to the revolutionary potential of social movements.
\n\nHowever, at Stonewall in 1969, the elation at the possibilities opened up by the riots, the limited influence that the Mattachine Society had upon the street youth who comprised the front line of the rebellion, and the hatred that the vast majority of the community felt towards the police combined to limit the effectiveness of this strategy. The crowds remained large, if less rebellious than the night before, and an array of defiant actions took place. As Carter recounts,
\n\n\n\n\nSeveral gay youths took daring advantage of the heavy police presence in the Christopher Street area to make a guerrilla raid on the Sixth Precinct’s headquarters. They went to the police station and slapped Day-Glo blue and fuchsia bumper stickers reading “Equality for Homosexuals” on the police cars, a patrol wagon, and the personal cars of cops who had left their vehicles parked while on duty.21
\n
While the crowds did not march and clash with police as on the first two nights, the attitude remained militant and defiant. One furious young queen tore into a well-meaning straight ally who attempted to defuse the crowd’s anger:
\n\n\n\n\nThe hell you say! You don’t impress me. You are straight and you are my enemy! Don’t give me that phoney liberal bull. You made the laws. Nixon’s silent army. Now we are gonna get you! I was in Vietnam, man, how does that grab you? Huh? Huh? And, man, I’ll screw your daughter. But I’ll screw your son first! 22
\n
While some non-gay radicals did join the rebellious crowds, queer participants remained skeptical of dogmatic leftists whose humorless attempts to impose their analysis on the situation attracted little sympathy. Several sources have remarked on a joke in circulation among the gay youth participants in the uprising: “I’ve become a left deviationist.” 23 The quip picks up on a common authoritarian leftist epithet that Stalinists and Maoists used to condemn a variety of positions, particularly those that promoted more freedom than the party apparatus trusted people with, as well as the Cold War term “sex deviate,” used to denote homosexuals. This rather niche pun indicates the extent to which leftist lingo had saturated youth subcultures and how an anti-authoritarian gay sensibility used humor to mock the pretensions of both homophobes and rigid leftists—groups that overlapped considerably in 1969 New York City.
\n\nWhile full-scale riots did not break out the following two nights, tensions remained high and continued building as riot police stalked the neighborhood, taunting gay residents with homophobic slurs. An observer recounted:
\n\n\n\n\n“Start something, faggot, just start something,” one cop kept telling people. “I’d like to break your ass wide open.” After saying that to several dozen people, one man turned and said, “What a Freudian comment, officer!” The cop started swinging and hauled the guy off to a waiting wagon.24
\n
One officer fell victim to the trolling of “a wildly ‘fem’ queen,” who “sneaked up behind him, lit a firecracker and dropped it between his feet.” The cop squealed and flailed at the crowd with his nightstick; in the succeeding mêlée, a gay rioter made off with his badge. Leitsch recalled:
\n\n\n\n\nThe next day, the badge turned up hanging on a tree in Washington Square Park, stuck into a string of pickled pigs’ feet. When the cops found the badge-stuck pigs’ feet, they didn’t take them down from the tree—they beat the pigs’ feet to the ground, then picked up the badge.25
\n
This mutual taunting reflected the war between gays and police that was generalizing throughout the neighborhood and beyond. The tension ratcheted up further on Wednesday when an offensive article penned by Lucian Truscott appeared in The Village Voice, mocking the protests and the gay community. As night fell on the Village and the crowds swelled, the tension once again reached a boiling point.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/13.jpg\")
Despite the lull, queers remained in the streets—and another explosion was soon to come.
\nWhile the early nights of the rebellion and the days of lull had involved anger leavened with wit and cheerful banter, the mood had turned ugly by Wednesday night. Days of homophobic police occupation, injuries and arrests, mocking news coverage, and efforts by respectability-oriented activists to defuse anger engendered a cold fury among the crowds that assembled on the night of July 2. Likewise, the police were even more brutal: one observer noted, “The cops, who had been caught off-guard and were on the defensive before, had taken the offensive and massive retaliation was their goal.”26
\n\nBy 10 pm, between 500 and 1000 people were seething in the streets. The arrival of a police motorcade to Christopher Street prompted a wave of shoving and bottle throwing. Shortly after, gay and trans/gender-nonconforming participants began to light fires in the street. The crowd discussed burning down the building housing The Village Voice in retaliation for its offensive coverage. Throughout the neighborhood, riot police attempted to snatch members of the crowd, who fought back fiercely, looting shops and smashing windows. A handful of people were arrested; a large number of people were injured, including some officers.27 Although the clash lasted a short time compared to earlier nights—the fiercest fighting lasted around an hour—its ferocity struck all onlookers. One participant concluded, “The word is out. Christopher Street shall be liberated. The fags have had it with oppression.”28
\n\nWhat makes a riot queer? One dimension involves the rupture of gendered expectations about who participates and how. Rioter Ronnie Di Brienza summed this up in a local paper a week later with an elegant audio metaphor: “Revolution is being heard on Christopher Street, only instead of guttural MC-5 voices, we hear it coming from sopranos, and altos.”29
\n\nThe MC5 were a Detroit-based rock band popular among militant New Left activists and Yippies; their manager John Sinclair had founded the White Panther Party and worked with the anarchist newspaper Fifth Estate. On tour the previous year, the Motherfuckers had started a riot at an MC5 show at the Fillmore East, leading to the band’s being banned from a range of venues. By invoking the gruff swaggering masculinity of the MC5 and the street militants associated with them and contrasting it to the effeminacy of the frontline rioters at Stonewall, Di Brienza showed how the uprising not only asserted gay and trans grievances, but deconstructed the entire notion of who could be a revolutionary.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/14.jpg\")
“Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees Are Stinging Mad”—despite the mockery of local media, the effeminacy of the rioters stunned police and butch revolutionaries alike.
\nIn the US today, many leftist commentators presume that people who are disproportionately vulnerable to state violence need to be sheltered from it in militant protest. This can lead to contradictory conclusions. Some assert that those insulated by some degree of privilege should take the front lines and actively participate in militant resistance in order to absorb the brunt of confrontations; others claim that those who have more privilege should refrain from participating in escalatory activity because its effects will disproportionately impact those who have less privilege. Critics of the latter approach respond that only by taking collective risks to defy state power can we do away with the conditions that render targeted communities vulnerable to state violence in the first place. Even well-meaning efforts to police the scope of militant tactics are generally premised on the patronizing assumption that targeted communities have no agency to resist on their own behalf. Ultimately, this framing supports the state monopoly on power.
\n\nThese issues were the subject of strident debate surrounding the Stonewall Uprising, focusing most acutely on the night of July 2. Commentary on the final day of conflict focused on the demographics of the participants, and specifically the relationship between (presumably or predominantly) straight rioters from crews based outside the Village, such as the Motherfuckers and the Crazies, and the gay/trans/gender-nonconforming rebels in the streets. As Dick Leitsch from the Mattachine Society of New York observed shortly after,
\n\n\n\n\nThe composition of the street action had changed. It was no longer gay frustration being vented upon unsuspecting cops by queens who were partly violent but mostly campy. The queens were almost outnumbered by Black Panthers, Yippies, Crazies and young toughs from street gangs all over the city and some from New Jersey. The exploiters had moved in and were using the gay power movement for their own ends. A lot of them were looking for a fight, and had the police not come, they probably would have started the old game of street gangs everywhere, “beating up a queer.” The blacks and students who want a revolution, any kind of revolution, were there to exploit. They swelled the crowd and tried to recruit, but “graciously” let the queens take all the bruises and suffer all the arrests. (If they have no more courage than they displayed on Christopher Street, their revolution is a long way off.)30
\n
This narrative bears uncanny similarities to the accusations lobbed at (and within) many 21st-century North American social movements. An array of presumed outsiders—if white, coded as political radicals, and if Black, coded as apolitical criminals—are portrayed as a threat to whatever demographic is presumed to bear authentic political grievances and entitlement to local terrain. Note the invocation first of the Black Panthers and then of “young toughs” from “New Jersey.” It is almost certain that Leitsch did not interrupt rioters to ask them where they lived and that New Jersey residents were not visually identifiable as such. On the heels of the Black-led Newark riots of 1967, invoking “New Jersey” in contrast to the residents of the almost entirely white Greenwich Village neighborhood served as a racial code for white gay readers.
\n\nIn an effort to prevent people from interpreting diverse participation in the rebellion as an expression of solidarity, Leitsch even concocts a fantasy of gay-bashing gang members so intoxicated by violence that they temporarily forget to attack gay/trans/gender-nonconforming people and instead attack the police alongside them. While anti-queer street violence was a reality in New York City at this time, Leitsch rejects the far more plausible explanation that a wide range of young people, including Black and brown kids, political radicals, and others, had suffered at the hands of the police and came together to fight back against them on account of shared interests and desires.
\n\nObservers who were more connected to the city’s marginalized communities and social movements, while noting the less visibly queer composition of the streets that night, arrived at different conclusions. Bob Kohler, a white gay radical and active supporter of the civil rights movement and the Black Panther Party, agreed that the crowd was different, but framed this in a broader context:
\n\n\n\n\nYes, there was a difference in the makeup [of the crowd on July 2]. There were more people rioting that could not be easily categorized, and a lot of that had to do with people that came over from other areas. The straight movement moved in heavily that night as a support. I’m assuming it was as a support. They were, of course, using it for their own ends, too… You had, for lack of a better word, provocateurs who were seeing an incident that could be used for the good of their movement or a different movement or a coalition of movements. This was one more. It was the last. There was nobody else left to riot, so people with some foresight, more foresight than I [had] at the time, could see that this could again strengthen the radical movement, that people they hadn’t really thought about were now up there in the front. 31
\n
Although referring to presumably non-gay rioters as “provocateurs” (while questioning his own use of the word), Kohler recognizes the broader participation in the night’s events as a form of solidarity oriented towards building a broader radical coalition that could resist the forms of oppression that multiple targeted communities experienced.
\n\nNeither activist specified how they knew that the rioters on July 2 were not “queens” or members of the gay community. For Leitsch, race certainly played a role, as well as gender presentation; to his credit, although not a “queen” himself, he insistently named and praised the role of effeminate gay/trans/gender-nonconforming people on the front lines of the uprising. Kohler was more familiar with the landscape of multiracial activism in the city; he may have recognized people from elsewhere. But both appear to have relied on a narrowly gendered, and to some extent racialized, interpretation of identity in reading the crowds.
\n\nAt a time when gay identity was still publicly associated with effeminacy and functioned for many as a specific subculture with distinctive cultural styles, many homosexually active men did not register to other gay people as “gay” in a cultural sense. John O’Brien, a white gay left-wing activist who was present from the first night of the uprising, remarked that his more masculine presentation aroused suspicion that he might be a provocateur or police informant when he participated in gay demonstrations.
\n\nAs one commenter on more recent queer riots has argued, one of the radical possibilities of street rebellion lies in how it can open up new ways of being in the world, weaponizing otherwise static identity categories as tools for revolt. We will never know exactly who comprised the crowd around Stonewall on July 2. Rather than asking who they had been, it might be more interesting to ask what they were becoming. Leitsch crafts a narrative in which the most marginalized members of a rebellious mass disproportionately bore the brunt of physical violence and legal consequences due to the combination of escalatory provocation and cowardice on the part of outsiders or more privileged participants. But there is another way to tell the story.
\n\nWith the benefit of historical hindsight, it is clear that the participation of non-gay radical rioters in the Stonewall Uprising constituted a vital act of solidarity. By adding important tactical knowledge, swelling the crowds, helping to free arrestees, escalating and sustaining confrontational energy, and spreading word of the uprising beyond the confines of the Village, they helped to transform the events from a fleeting expression of long-suppressed rage to a rebellion with world-historical significance. Had the Motherfuckers, the Crazies, and other anarchists and rebels subordinated themselves to the prescriptions of contemporary identity politics and stayed home, the riots might have petered out sooner and with less impact. The Stonewall Uprising illustrates the meaning of the slogan solidarity means attack.
\n\nSetting aside the question of whether observers such as Leitsch and Kohler could infallibly read the sexual and gender identities of the rioters, we must ask—were those identities fixed and static? Should those identities have been primary in determining the rioters’ relation to the rebellion? Even in Leitsch’s paranoid fantasy of otherwise homophobic “toughs” temporarily turning to fighting homophobic police in order to slake their thirst for destruction—wouldn’t that be a good thing? Instead of “be gay, do crime,” the Stonewall rioters inverted the script: by doing crime together, regardless of what previous desires they felt or sexual subcultures they frequented, people across a wide range of identities made it easier to be gay. We might even say that they invented a new way to be gay together. What affinities, erotic and otherwise, might previously unconnected people have discovered in the streets? What new possibilities might the ostensibly heterosexual participants in the riots unlocked within themselves?
\n\nThis destabilization of identity through revolutionary struggle became a hallmark of the emerging gay liberation movement, if only briefly. The earlier homophile movement’s major conceptual innovation lay in seeking civil rights for a “minority” by means of interest group politics. In that framework, a more-or-less fixed number of homosexuals existed alongside “other” minorities with their own distinctive issues (rarely, in those pre-intersectional times, did the implicit whiteness of this framework trouble white gay or lesbian activists). However, as one Gay Liberation Front activist explained in 1970 at a gathering of radical movements, gay people were coming to understand gay liberation not “as an oppressed minority fighting for rights but more the process of [creating] a society in which people can come out and be all that it’s possible to be” while rejecting “the false categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality.”32
\n\nAt Stonewall, rioters put this into practice: rejecting the false categories that divided them, they fought side by side against the police who oppressed them, and in the process changed history.
\n\nWith the Fourth of July weekend pending, both gay residents and police anticipated that crowds would be massive and the riots would intensify. Riot police continued to assemble in the Village, redirecting their attention from the Motherfuckers’ usual rebellious turf, as a local left-wing newspaper observed:
\n\n\n\n\nThe calling in of the TPF had the incidental benefit of taking the heat off the Second Avenue and St. Marks Place area of the Lower East Side, the TPF’s usual stomping grounds, allowing street people there an unusually relaxed July 4.33
\n
However, although large numbers of people assembled in the streets of the village and sporadically confronted police, major clashes did not break out. As Leitsch described the following days:
\n\n\n\n\nSporadic efforts were made to start trouble—by people who can best be described as “outside agitators,” by gay people, and too often by uptight cops who tried to start trouble to give them an excuse to start bashing heads again. Despite those efforts, no major outbreak erupted. It was almost as if everyone had decided that the point had been made and any further action would only bring on a backlash.34
\n
It is not surprising that Leitsch, as a white moderate, adopted the “outside agitator” language first deployed by white supremacists in the South against civil rights and labor organizers and later generalized to target all forms of protest. During the civil rights struggles of the early 1960s, this language was so widespread that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spent much of his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” addressing it.
\n\nFollowing another half century of seeing this language weaponized to divide and discredit radical social movements, it is easy to recognize such rhetoric as purely reactionary. We should understand that Leitsch’s subsequent accounts of the uprising were shaped by his experience of being marginalized by the younger and more radical participants. Rejecting his attempts to position his own organization, the Mattachine Society of New York, as the head of the gay movement in the uprising’s aftermath, radicals went on to found the Gay Liberation Front, which continued to pursue a confrontational approach and worked to form alliances with precisely the radical groups Leitsch had condemned as “outside agitators.”
\n\nBearing this in mind, let’s consider Leitsch’s description of the looting that unfolded on the night of July 2:
\n\n\n\n\nObviously, little of it was done by people who live in and frequent Christopher Street and environs, because all the most unlikely places were looted. The first shop to get hit was the “Gingerbread House,” a toy shop run by a delightful little lady who is a friend of everyone on Christopher. The other shops broken into were also run, for the most part, by nice people, sympathetic to the gay cause and the plight of the street queen. The really likely places, the “fag shops” that overprice their wares and bleed the gay market for exorbitant prices, were left alone. Shops whose managers complain the loudest about the cruising and swishing in the neighborhood were also, surprisingly, left alone. Observers in the know doubt if the looting was done by gay people.35
\n
Leitsch did not condemn property destruction or looting out of hand; rather, he criticized the looters for the specific targets they chose. His response includes a critique of the economic exploitation of the gay community and the petty bourgeois norms of respectability preached by business owners. While stopping short of validating property destruction as a tactic in service of these critiques, he cites the pattern of which businesses were attacked as evidence that looters lacked intimate knowledge of the neighborhood’s gay geography and the grievances that might prompt radical action.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/15.jpg\")
Queer rioters’ intimate knowledge of the West Village helped to sustain the revolt.
\nLeitsch’s critique anticipates the debates over property destruction and “diversity of tactics” that have saturated the anarchist movement over the past three decades—particularly during the mobilizations of the so-called anti-globalization era, from Seattle to Miami to Adams Morgan. On occasion, anarchists who have become exasperated with these debates have dismissed valuable good-faith critiques of confrontational actions. Perhaps, had the Motherfuckers and other rebels who converged on Stonewall taken the time to confer with local gay residents, they might have been able to pick their targets more thoughtfully, thereby achieving an even more seductive riot.
\n\nBut was Leitsch’s representation of the looting of July 2 accurate? Lacking other sources that comment directly on which businesses were attacked and how, it is difficult to say. His rhetoric reflects a common pattern in moderate critiques of property destruction during times of widespread unrest. Knowing that the rebellion was widely popular and reflected deeply felt anger, Leitsch identified the righteous fury that queer residents felt at their economic exploitation, at the scorn targeting femme and gender-nonconforming people, and at the repression of cruising and public sex—but he attempted to redirect some of this fury against imagined “outsiders.”
\n\nPerhaps, then, we should not uncritically read the looting as poorly targeted militant action, but as an expression of outrage so popular that it forced even committed opponents of militant action to frame their critiques as a matter of targets, not tactics. Today, we need not look far to find pundits eager to defuse and recuperate popular anger by praising “our right to resist” in the abstract while criticizing every concrete action as the wrong place, the wrong time, the wrong target.
\n\nLeitsch himself and other homophile groups had been organizing for years without qualitatively shifting the sense of possibility in the Village or beyond. Without downplaying their accomplishments, which included a significant decrease in police harassment and entrapment from 1966 forward, we can see that it took a dramatic break with existing forms of activism and the norms governing queer people’s relationship to public space to make the quantum leap into the era of gay liberation. Only by defying the demands of city officials, police, and established gay activists—by remaining in the streets and fighting back over an entire week while refusing to accept the tactical limits that leaders attempted to impose—did young queer people and their comrades render a deeper shift possible.
\n\nWhatever so-called “outsiders” participated in the rebellion, it is clear that the gay, trans, and other assorted members of the community around the Stonewall were ready to embrace more militant tactics. As Ronnie di Brienza, a self-described freak who participated in the first night’s riot, put it:
\n\n\n\n\nI have had a lot of shit thrown my way, but until Friday night, June 27, I was basically a pacifist. However, pacifism is fast going out the window. How many times can one turn the other cheek. There is a limit, and Friday night was it… Poof, it starts. The fags have gone revolutionary… The fags, like the true revolutionaries, have become resigned to fighting for their cause, if necessary by force and with heavier weapons.36
\n
Members of the established homophile groups reacted with ambivalence to the militancy of the riots, which many younger gays saw as a harbinger of their irrelevance. The Insider, the newsletter of the Mattachine Society of Washington, exemplified this discomfort in their coverage of the riots:
\n\n\n\n\nThe Insider does not see this exhibition of militancy as a fluke. Militant open defiance has become the most characteristic mark of the sixties’ protest movements. First used by the blacks in irrational riots, and later used more systematically by hippies and campus protestors who shut down their own universities, militancy has never been characteristic of the homophile movement. Militant protestors rationalize their destructive methods by pointing out that knocking on doors is useful only to a point. When it becomes clear that the doors are never going to open and that door knocking is only a pacifier for the masses, then it is time to knock the doors down. In these terms, the homophile movement is behind the times. It is quite possible that the homosexuals in the streets may well make obsolete much of what the present homophile is doing. For better or worse, militancy is here.37
\n
The conventional racist characterization of Black revolt as “irrational” and anxiety about the “destructive” methods of militants reflected the racial, class, and generational positioning of many homophile activists. Self-described “gung-ho right-winger” homophile activist Foster Gunnison, Jr. lamented, “It is common knowledge that the Commie-pink-anarchist fringe tries to take over any minority cause it can latch on to, and for us it had to come sooner or later.”38
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/16.jpg\")
Conservative homophile activist Foster Gunnison, Jr. condemned the “Commie-pink-anarchist fringe.”
\nWhile less reactionary, Don Jackson of the Los Angeles Advocate scolded the rebels and urged activists to rein them in:
\n\n\n\n\nHomosexuals simply cannot afford rioting and violence. Such incidents solidify straight opinion against them and will surely bring a reaction… It is essential that rational leaders appear who will redirect the anger into more peaceful and successful methods. Otherwise, history and sociology indicate, gay riots on a vast scale with needless loss of life and property damage may occur. This is not the road to equality. Such disturbances will increase the irrational hatred the straights feel toward homosexuals. Every educated reasonable member of the gay community must aid in redirecting the anger and frustrations of the more violent and emotional members.39
\n
In historical hindsight, Jackson could not possibly have been more wrong. In fact, the rioting and violence at Stonewall catalyzed an international militant movement that helped transform the lives of millions of queer and trans people, and remains better known and more widely praised than any other act of protest or resistance in United States LGBTQ history. Yet today, self-proclaimed leaders across a wide range of communities persist in saying the exact same thing.
\n\nOthers, however, broke free from the constraints of homophile timidity and enthusiastically embraced the riots. Jack Nichols and Lige Clarke, a prominent gay activist couple who had participated in Mattachine organizing since the mid-1960s, penned a column in Screw that offered a full-throated endorsement of militant gay resistance to police:
\n\n\n\n\nThe revolution is taking to the streets, and it is high time that it did… We were thrilled by the violent uprising in Sheridan Square in which homosexuals put police on notice that they’d no longer accept abuse. For many decades gay people have been afraid to stand up for themselves and have allowed policemen to run over one of their most basic civil rights: the right to assemble in public. Today, however, a new generation is angered by raids and harassment of gay bars, and last week’s riots in Greenwich Village have set standards for the rest of the nation’s homosexuals to follow.40
\n
Over the years that followed, Nichols and Clarke continued to radicalize, while remaining critical of authoritarian leftists who they described as “just as unbalanced on the gay issue as is the far right. Gays get it from both ends, so to speak.”41 By the 1990s, Nichols would be authoring a column titled “The Homosexual Anarchist.” Through the crucible of Stonewall and gay liberation, some homophile activists developed a far more radical critique of the existing world.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/28.jpg\")
Jack Nichols: from polite homophile… to “homosexual anarchist.”
\nThe energy unleashed by the Stonewall Uprising produced a wave of organizing that quickly rendered the existing gay activist infrastructure irrelevant. Under pressure from fired-up radicals, Dick Leitsch agreed to form a Mattachine Action Committee, and flyers circulated for a meeting on July 9, one week after the last night of rioting. Around a hundred people, mostly younger gay and lesbian radicals, turned up and made plans to organize a march against police harassment.
\n\nAt the next meeting, a week later, the young radicals made a definitive break with the old guard. When Leitsch attempted to lecture the angry crowd about the importance of pursuing progress slowly via accommodation with the straight establishment, Jim Fouratt denounced him:
\n\n\n\n\n“We have got to radicalize, man! Be proud of what you are, man! And if it takes riots or even guns to show them what we are, well, that’s the only language that the pigs understand! All the oppressed have got to unite! The system keeps us all weak by keeping us separate.”42
\n
His speech received wild applause. Leitsch’s attempts to regain control of the meeting failed. The radicals agreed to form a new organization that would sustain the energy of the Stonewall Rebellion. This became the Gay Liberation Front (GLF).
\n\nOver the years since, the GLF has often been described as “anarchic” or “anarchistic,” but little attention has been paid to the role that anarchists and anarchist ideas in its founding. The founders who assembled in late July 1969 at Alternate U were radicals from across the left-wing spectrum. As Karla Jay recalled, the crowd of around forty at the first meeting included “drag queens, bar dykes, street people, feminists, radical students, leftists, socialists, Marxists, Maoists, anarchists, libertarians, hippies, and former Yippies.”43 As gay liberation organizing blossomed across the city over the following years, regardless of whether its participants used the language of anarchism to describe themselves, the movement relied on anarchist infrastructures, engaged with anarchist concepts and tactics, and adopted a distinctly anti-authoritarian ethos.
\n\nThe location of the GLF meetings is revealing. Alternate U was a radical educational project that hosted a wide range of workshops and teach-ins, classes on a variety of radical topics, social and cultural events, and activist meetings. Located on the second floor of a warehouse at West 14th Street and 6th Avenue, it sat on the northern edge of the West Village, a short walk from Stonewall and the core of the gayborhood where the riots had occurred.
\n\nFounded in 1965 as the Free University of New York, as the Interference Archive explains, it had been launched as “a free university, with no exams or degrees, where they could learn about social struggles and everyday life,” whose participants “strove for a revolutionary experience in education.” By 1969, it had changed its name to Alternate U and was attracting participants from a wide range of movements, from radical psychologists to media collectives to women’s theater groups. The project was coordinated by a collective of radicals that included anarchists and Marxists; the space hosted the Anarchos Group and featured talks by Murray Bookchin and other anarchist thinkers.
\n\nStonewall rioter John O’Brien—a Marxist who had been expelled from the Socialist Worker’s Party’s Young Socialist Alliance for his homosexuality—served on the project’s board; this provided the initial connection that helped enable the GLF meetings to find a home there. After the GLF’s founding meetings in the space in July 1969, Alternate U continued to host many of the group’s activities, including their gay dances, the most popular and widely attended GLF project. The weekly gatherings offered the first public alternative to Mafia-controlled bars at which same-sex couples and trans/gender-nonconforming people could dance freely; this, in turn, provided a critical source of revenue for the fledgling group. Holding meetings and dances at Alternate U brought a wide cross-section of activists and the gay population at large into contact with anarchist and radical ideas.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/33.jpg\")
GLF members prepare for a gay dance at Alternate U, 1970. A poster from the May 1968 uprising on the wall behind them reads “Borders = Repression.” A message for all movements based around identity.
\nPolitical differences emerged within the GLF from the beginning, but a loose anti-authoritarian consensus determined the organization’s structure and culture. A political scientist who interviewed many of the group’s members and offered the closest early reading of the group’s politics characterized the GLF as dominated by “radicals” who “championed anarchy.” These participants coexisted with doctrinaire “revolutionaries” who “looked forward to socialism,” with whom the radicals sometimes collaborated and sometimes found themselves at odds.44
\n\nThese values were reflected in the group’s decision-making practices. According to an observer of the early meetings, “When a decision had to be made, voting was unpopular. After sufficient discussion, a “consensus” was arrived at—the membership, undivided, coming to an agreement. Time-consuming often, but solidarity-building.”45 There were no officers and no formal leaders, though informal hierarchies did solidify around those who were popular, perceived to have revolutionary cred, or sometimes, as critics noted, simply spoke loudly. While the exhilaration of being together exploring radical ideas carried the participants through the early meetings, as more political differences surfaced, clarifying the group’s structure and priorities became urgent.
\n\nMost of the participants in the GLF were gay men, but a few lesbians played prominent roles. One of them was Lois Hart. In her thirties, Hart was older than most members; she had left her life as a nun to explore lesbian identity, radical politics, and alternative spirituality. In the months before Stonewall, she had participated in courses on feminism and anarchism at Alternate U, where Murray Bookchin had spoken about anarchist organizing and affinity groups.46
\n\nIn the fall of 1969, Hart proposed that the GLF adopt a decentralized structure in which the GLF weekly meetings would serve as spaces for autonomous groups to report on their activities and coordinate efforts, while individual cells retained the freedom to work on projects independently.47 The group agreed to adopt this anti-authoritarian structure; separate clusters formed to organize the weekly dances, publish the newspaper Come Out!, study gay oppression through a Marxist lens, and pursue other goals.
\n\nJohn Lauritsen, who brought a dogmatically Marxist approach to gay organizing, dismissed the cellular structure as “some Murray Bookchin inspired notion.”48 Indeed, Bookchin had been a direct influence on Hart through Alternate U. As a gadfly critical of the authoritarian turn of SDS and the New Left, Bookchin represented an anarchist alternative that appealed to many in the feminist and gay liberation movements who were critical of traditional organizing models.49
\n\nOver the following year, fifteen cells developed under the auspices of the GLF. Some eventually broke away to become fully autonomous groups, including Third World Gay Revolution, Gay Youth, and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries.50 Some of these groups outlived the GLF itself, which ceased to function by early 1972. While the GLF proved short-lived, its influence rippled out across time and space, as the model of horizontal autonomous organizing based in cells and affinity groups generated new collectives and spread around the country.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/32.jpg\")
Murray Bookchin, who helped translate the concept of affinity group organizing from anarchists in the Spanish Revolution to the GLF’s cell structure.
\nGLF participants reflected critically on the model as it unfolded, arriving at different conclusions about its efficacy. In January 1970, Hart explained in the GLF newspaper Come Out! that “the many mentalities, dispositions, and persuasions of GLF activists and dissenters are finding expression in small groups structured after the needs, goals and philosophies of the participants.” The cell structure, she explained, reflected a commitment to direct action and active participation that necessarily required breaking with the conditioning into passivity that hampered radical movements: “In the knowledge that growth and change occur within individuals and that individuals develop only through active involvement in projects and goals of their own choosing, GLFers chose the rocky road of fluid cellular organization rather than perpetuate older, oppressive structures of Follow the Leader and passive participation by voting.”51
\n\nAs the group grew, attracting a wider range of participants beyond its initial radical core, some who were accustomed to more centralized forms of organizing became frustrated when they could not dictate the activities of the entire group according to their own ideological or tactical preferences. This became particularly pronounced with the arrival of more “well-meaning establishment types who could not conceive of something democratic that did not involve everyone being controlled by the consensus of a voting membership.” As Hart explained, “For them GLF was the Sunday Night Meeting, not groups of activists for homosexual liberation. They did not realize that we are a movement, not a static organization.”52
\n\nThose of us who participated in the Occupy movement may smile with rueful recognition here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/31.jpg\")
Lois Hart (second from right) prepares to participate in a “Lavender Menace” action at the Second Congress to Unite Women with her fellow Radicalesbians, May Day 1970.
\nNot all participants agreed that the flexibility and autonomy of the cell structure served to build the movement for gay liberation—indeed, not even all of the anarchist participants did. One such critic, Arthur Evans, became famous in the late 1970s for his book Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, which called for a gay anarchist revolution in which decentralized affinity groups would use witchcraft and direct action against patriarchy and the military industrial state. In 1970, however, his frustration with the group’s chaotic structure and dispersed focus led him to join with others seceding from the GLF to form the Gay Activists Alliance, a resolutely single-issue organization with a more traditional structure.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/29.jpg\")
Arthur Evans lets the straight world know exactly what he thinks.
\nRalph Hall, an artist who was to author a series of gay anarchist zines in the following years including Faggots and Faggotry and Revolutionary Limpwristed Faggot, wrote in late 1969 that the GLF’s “structureless structure” granted too much power and influence to unscrupulous authoritarians. Criticizing the members of the 28th of June cell, which took over the publishing of Come Out!, as “a flighty crop of revolutionary dogmatists,” he took them to task for glorifying authoritarian communist regimes (“What does the sexual revolution in Cuba have to do with homosexual oppression in Amerika?”) and for taking advantage of the loose consensus process to “shrewdly manipulate and brainwash the membership.”
\n\n“I thought,” Hall lamented, “we had no leaders or followers, but all participants.”53
\n\nDespite the challenges of the cell structure and participants’ internal critiques, the model spread to other cities. Dozens of GLF chapters appeared across the country over the following months; while not all of them modeled their internal structure on the New York group, many did. As NYC GLF participant Bill Weaver recalled, “There was a real struggle to establish cells. New York went through this ‘cellular’ struggle, and now, when Washington GLF or Walla Walla GLF has it, they assume at the very beginning that they’re going to have cells.”54
\n\nThe Washington, DC GLF’s adoption of the cell structure proved influential far beyond its members—indeed, beyond the entire gay liberation movement—because of the role its participants played in what was to be the largest mass mobilization in US history up to that time, the 1971 May Day protests.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/17.jpg\")
A Gay Liberation Front meeting at Alternate U in 1970.
\nThe centrality of gay organizing within the 1971 May Day anti-war mobilization did not come out of nowhere. From its inception, the nascent gay liberation movement had overlapped with the movement to end the US war in Vietnam. The pre-Stonewall homophile movement had largely remained silent on the war, while advocating for an end to the US military’s ban on homosexual service members. By contrast, gay liberationists donned T-shirts reading “Suck Cock to Beat the Draft,” joined anti-war marches, and, according to an account from the notorious queer performance troupe The Cockettes, hung out outside of military induction centers offering blowjobs to draftees in order to help them secure deferrals.
\n\nAfter Stonewall, members of the newly formed GLF took an active role in the anti-war movement. The first non-gay-organized action that members participated in with the GLF banner was an anti-war, anti-draft protest late in the summer of 1969 at Central Park. Television cameras circulated images of the group’s members and materials nationwide.55
\n\n“Through a lot of 1970,” recalled Perry Brass, a member of the GLF cell that produced the newspaper Come Out!, “I must have gone to at least six different antiwar marches where we [gay people] were all joining hands and marching up Fifth Avenue or marching in the park.”56 In the months following Stonewall, gay liberationists in California circulated a flyer riffing off of a famous quote from Muhammad Ali, titled, “No Vietnamese Ever Called Me a Queer.” The flyer advertised a performance by the Berkeley-based Gay Liberation Theatre, putting both the US military and the homophobic anti-war movement on notice:
\n\n\n\n\nSo we’re not going to fight in an army that discriminates against us, fucks us over, sends us to the front lines or jails us and throws us out dishonorably when we are ourselves and love our brothers. Nor are we going to fight for a country that will not hire us and fires us when we are ourselves and loving our brothers, that puts us out of and puts us down in every phase of its every institution. Nor are we going to fight in a revolution that puts us down.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/34.jpg\")
“No Vietnamese Ever Called Me a Queer.”
\nAs the gay liberation movement blossomed in 1970, activists in the anti-war movement were beginning to question their model of holding mass marches in Washington, which attracted large numbers of participants and ample media attention but appeared to have little impact on the war machine. In fall of 1970, a range of anti-war groups assembled under the umbrella of the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice began coordinating plans for actions in the nation’s capital the following spring. While members of the PCPJ timed a lobbying week for the end of April to plead with politicians to end the war, more radical participants assembled in an informal coalition dubbed the May Day Tribe, including a range of Yippies, anarchists, and other radical protesters determined to shut the city down. The May Day Tribe adopted the slogan, “If the government won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government.”
\n\nAs the mobilization approached, a small core of DC-based activists who staffed the office and worked on coordinating logistics for the demonstration began calling themselves the Gay Mayday Tribe. Participant John Scagliotti recalled, “There were about five of us who were gay, and we sort of ran the office. We immediately became very close and out of that was Gay Mayday.”
\n\nThe group functioned partly as a political collective, partly as an underground cell undertaking a range of illegal activity, and partly as a polycule—with participants organizing, partying, and sleeping with each other. At a time of rampant FBI infiltration of radical groups, the Gay Mayday crew remained impervious to snitches because of its emphasis on queer sexual as well as political affinity. As Scagliotti explained, “They couldn’t infiltrate it, because we were all sleeping with each other. And we were doing a tremendous amount of illegal things, that they could have gotten us all for.”
\n\nBe gay, do crime indeed!
\n\nLike the Stonewall rioter who analyzed the roots of homophobia in the threat that gay men posed to a social structure based in rigid masculinity and the nuclear family, the DC organizers framed gay opposition to the war not in a paradigm of identity politics, but in a broader analysis of how patriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism form a single interlocking system. As L.A. Kaufman explains:
\n\n\n\n\nThe Gay Mayday Tribe viewed its participation in the 1971 antiwar action as more than just a matter of mobilizing gays as a constituency or contingent, along the lines of “schoolteachers against the war” or “physicians for peace.” Instead, it sought to draw connections between militarism and social constructions of gender. One Gay Mayday leaflet called the Vietnam War “a straight man’s game,” created by “men who need to gain their masculine identity through the killing of women, children, and their own brothers.” A call to participation elaborated, “We know that the men running the country are very deeply sexist—they relate to each other and to situations in an uptight straight male way. These men make decisions in order to satisfy their male egos and their needs for competition with other men.” The Gay Mayday Tribe offered up an expansive radical vision, in which gay liberation could not only transform laws or lifestyles, but also undermine the very foundations of war. For, they promised, “an army of lovers would not fight.”
\n
The loose collective included members of the Washington GLF, which had adopted the New York group’s horizontal cellular structure. Kaufman attributes the GLF’s structure to the influence of the women’s liberation movement: “The radical feminist influence was also felt in the GLF’s ‘structureless’ organizational form, comprised of decentralized collectives (called, in this case, ‘cells’) with no formal decision-making process, membership requirements, or bylaws.” While Lois Hart, whose proposal had played a significant role in shaping the GLF’s structure, was certainly a feminist and active in the women’s movement, Hart also named anarchist ideas, in particular the notion of affinity groups emerging from the Spanish anarchist movement conveyed via Murray Bookchin, as central in shaping her approach to revolutionary organizing.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/30.jpg\")
Members of the Washington, DC Gay Liberation Front, 1971.
\nThe GLF’s approach represented one of the two major influences on the affinity group structure adopted in May 1971. The other had reached the New Left via the Motherfuckers. Kauffman connects the dots:
\n\n\n\n\nMorea and the Motherfuckers soon introduced the idea of affinity groups as teams for street combat to Weatherman, the faction of SDS that aspired to be a revolutionary fighting force and to “bring the war home” to the United States. It was during the October 1969 “Days of Rage,” perhaps Weatherman’s most notorious action, that affinity groups made their true American debut.
\n
The Days of Rage had turned out disastrously, owing in part to the centralization and authoritarianism of the Weatherman leadership. Yet activists who rejected vanguardist militarism but remained intrigued by the possibilities of decentralized and mobile formations at mass demonstrations revisited the approach in the 1971 organizing. As Kauffman summarizes:
\n\n\n\n\nBy the time the Mayday Tribe put out its call to protest, the concept of affinity groups had begun to blend with the other small-group forms that were rapidly growing in countercultural popularity: collectives, communes, cooperatives, consciousness-raising groups. “Affinity groups at Mayday,” recalls John Froines, another Chicago 7 defendant centrally involved in the action, “were both a tactical approach in terms of the street and also something more, connected to people’s linkages to one another.”
\n
In an effort to prevent the demonstrations from completely paralyzing Washington, DC, police and National Guard troops mass-arrested 12,000 people across three days of disorder—the largest mass arrest in US history. In addition to partially shutting down the city and damaging the Nixon administration’s standing, the format of decentralized affinity groups acting autonomously in coordination with each other proved enormously influential. Afterwards, it remained the preferred means of organizing mass direct action from the anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s to the queer-led civil disobedience of ACT-UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in the 1980s to the global justice movement that exploded onto the world stage with the protests that shut down the Seattle summit of the World Trade Organization in 1999.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/18.jpg\")
An affinity group blocks traffic near the Washington Monument, the week of May Day 1971.
\nThe fact that anarchist ideas and models rapidly proliferated in the movements that emerged from the Stonewall uprising lends weight to the hypothesis that anarchists played a meaningful role in the uprising itself.
\n\nThe GLF and the Motherfuckers both drew on the affinity group organizing model that they had absorbed from the Spanish exiles and Murray Bookchin, but each employed it in their own way. Setting out to create a new way of life on the chaotic Lower East Side, the Motherfuckers devised insurrectionary approaches to social conflict while seeking to prefigure a revolutionary society by exploring new conceptions of the family. Gay liberationists, operating in a criminalized sexual subculture involving people linked by desire rather than shared politics, also developed alternative modes of kinship, networks of mutual aid, and flexible organizational formats that facilitated horizontal collaboration across lines of difference.
\n\nOver the course of a week in the hot summer of 1969, they collided with each other as they fought the police side by side. While the Motherfuckers dissolved shortly thereafter, gay liberation exploded and spread around the country. At the 1971 May Day protests, the two threads that converged at the Stonewall Uprising—gay liberation and anarchist direct action—came back together to transmit the affinity group model to posterity, setting the template for affinity group-based mass mobilizations for decades to come.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/25.jpg\")
A march in 1970. Marsha Johnson is holding the trans sign at the left.
\nEvery June, queers around the world celebrate Pride—the co-opted consumerist shell that remains of the celebrations in memory of the Stonewall Uprising of 1969.
\n\nThe first “Pride” was the Christopher Street Liberation Day March, launched in 1970 by radical gay and lesbian activists intent on breaking with the moderate homophile movement of the 1960s. Thousands of marchers convened in Greenwich Village and marched north through the city, chanting “Gay power! Gay power!”—”Gay, gay, all the way!”—”Out of the closets, into the streets!” The march was non-commercial, open to everyone, trans-inclusive, and radical, concluding in a massive “Gay-in” in Central Park. As lesbian historian Lillian Faderman summed up the day, “Never in history had so many gay and lesbian people come together in one place and for a common endeavor.”’
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/19.jpg\")
Christopher Street Liberation Day March, 1970—the first “Pride.” Yes, there was a black flag there!
\nToday, looking out over the landscape of contemporary Pride, we could say that rarely have so many LGBTQ people come together in one place while managing to accomplish so little. Depending on where you live, you may be charged admission for the privilege of wandering around and spending more money in a sea of commercial vendors, corporate sponsors, and tables of polite community groups. Despite the waves of resistance to racism and police violence in the late 2010s and early 2020s, you’re likely to see cops marching in the parade. In some states, organizers’ pre-emptive compliance with drag bans has gutted even the playful apolitical entertainment that we used to have.
\n\nOf course, the anti-LGBTQ and specifically anti-trans backlash of the past decade has caused many corporations that opportunistically sought out gay consumers via Pride sponsorships to dial back their efforts. Should we be nostalgic for the days when we had the luxury of complaining about being a target market rather than a target for bigotry, scapegoating, and violence?
\n\nThe history we have explored here offers a different perspective on the legacy of Stonewall, pointing to a long-running cross-pollination between anarchist organizing and queer culture and sexuality. Consulting this, we see that queer anarchism is not just an intersection of discrete identities, but a transformative force that has played a central role in half a century of direct action and revolutionary ferment. Looking at Stonewall through this lens, we see how the queer riots of 1969 offer lessons that are directly applicable to today’s movements for liberation.
\n\nThis account of the Stonewall Uprising leaves no room for consumerism, cops, or hierarchical leaders. According to this version of the story, we celebrate the rebels of June and July 1969
\n\n\n\n\nWhen we help to push riots beyond a single night of disturbances into an ongoing rebellion against the ruling order;
\n\nWhen we resist the efforts of community representatives to defuse our anger and send us home;
\n\nWhen we mingle in the streets against the instructions of riot cops, politicians, and official activists, communicating and finding common cause;
\n\nWhen we evaluate our strategies and tactics to find ways to revolt more effectively and joyously;
\n\nWhen we organize horizontally, rejecting representation and leaders, making space to collaborate while insisting on autonomy;
\n\nWhen we form affinity groups to undertake our creative and destructive projects;
\n\nWhen we prefigure the horizontal worlds we desire beyond the workplace, the party, and the nuclear family in the ways we organize, riot, party, and fuck.
\n
When we do these things, we are truly honoring the legacy of Stonewall.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/20.jpg\")
The spirit of Stonewall: gays smash City Hall during the White Night Riots in 1979.
\nFor oral histories with Stonewall participants and GLF members, see The Gay Liberation Front Foundation and the LGBTQ History Project. Some elders are still living—reach out and talk to them!
\n\nYou can find digital uploads of the GLF’s newspaper Come Out here.
\n\nAdam Nagourney Dudley Cleninden, Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America—This is largely anti-radical and obnoxiously transphobic, but includes some useful material.
\n\nHugh Ryan, The Women’s House of Detention: The Queer History of a Forgotten Prison—A queer abolitionist history of the jail a few blocks from the Stonewall.
\n\nFor more about the Motherfuckers, see:
\n\nFor more about the Crazies, see Leslie James Pickering’s Mad Bomber Melville.
\n\nOur analysis of the 1971 May Day actions draws considerably from the brilliant research of L.A. Kauffman in the article “Ending a war, inventing a movement: Mayday 1971”.
\n\nFor a narrative account of May Day 1971, see Lawrence Roberts, Mayday 1971: A White House at War, a Revolt in the Streets, and the Untold History of America’s Biggest Mass Arrest. You can also consult the 1971 May Day protests tactical manual.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/22.jpg\")
Gay Liberation Front Marches on Times Square, New York City, 1969.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/23.jpg\")
Marsha P. Johnson Hands Out Flyers in Support of Gay Students at New York University, 1970.
\nAs Jim Fouratt, a young gay radical who participated in the riots, later pointed out, the question itself betrays a lack of awareness about the material conditions of the bar and its surroundings: “And who threw the first brick? Where would you find a brick on Christopher Street, unless you brought it in your purse, you know?” Danny Garvin, another participant in the riots, recalled finding a construction site on Seventh Avenue South where retreating rioters found a stack of bricks; in any case, brick throwing was not among the first acts that catalyzed the rebellion. See Carter, Stonewall, 155. ↩
\nThis summary derives from a range of accounts, including Carter, Stonewall, Duberman, Stonewall, and several primary sources. ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 181. ↩
\n“Queen Power: Fags against Pigs in Stonewall Bust,” Rat, 9 July 1969, 6; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nHomophile Youth Movement, “Get the Mafia and the Cops Out of Gay Bars,” ca. 29 June 1969, Craig Rodwell Papers, Box 5, New York Public Library; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nAccording to Jefferson Fuck Poland of the Sexual Freedom League, NYC police claimed that when they raid bars, “they are not picking on homosexuals,” but focused on bar employees and on trans/gender-nonconforming patrons: “generally men dressed as men, even if wearing extensive makeup, are always released; men dressed as women are sometimes arrested; and ‘men’ fully dressed as women, but who upon inspection by a policewoman prove to have undergone the sex-change operation, are always let go.” Poland called for direct action against cross-dressing laws through a “Switch In,” in which “a large group of males and females, of all sexual orientations, should appear in clothing unmistakably of the opposite sex. Daring the cops to bust.” Jefferson Fuck Poland, “Lady Inspectors,” Berkeley Barb, 16 July 1969, 17; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nJohn Gabree, “Homosexuals Harassed in New York,” National Guardian, 12 July 1969, 14; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\n“Queen Power: Fags against Pigs in Stonewall Bust,” Rat, 9 July 1969, 6; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nInterview with Hugh Ryan, 2019. ↩
\nIn discussion with the authors in June 2026, Osha Neumann, one of the few living New York Motherfuckers, wasn’t sure: “I have no recollection of any MF being involved with Stonewall. That doesn’t mean some folks didn’t go there, but I somehow doubt it. By June 1969, I believe the core of the MFs were already heading to New Mexico.” But digging a bit deeper, it’s clear that the question is still open. In 2006, Motherfucker Ben Morea explained that the Motherfuckers were not a membership organization, but a network of affinity groups that acted independently and a label that any of them could employ: “We never called ourselves Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, although we signed our posters and leaflets UAW/MF, which anyone in the group could produce, with that name… It was essentially a loose confederation of affinity groups.” In fact, a wide range of people, from Mark Rudd and Spain Rodriguez to the Jefferson Airplane, dallied with both the organization and its tag line; there appear to have been autonomous chapters of Up Against the Wall Motherfucker as far away as Austin, Texas. Some people outside Motherfucker circles likely used the term to describe a wider range of people than Osha Neumann did. All of this is squarely within the anarchist tradition of informal organization. Regardless of whether members of the affinity groups specifically associated with Morea or Neumann directly took part in the Stonewall Uprising, it is certain that anarchists took part, and probable that some of them overlapped with the crews that identified—or were identified—as Motherfuckers. ↩
\nJay Levin, “The Gay Anger behind the Riots,” New York Post, 8 July 1969, 36; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nD. L. [Dick Leitsch], “Gay Riots in the Village,” Mattachine Society of New York Newsletter, Aug. 1969, 1–2, 4; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nBob Kohler, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” Come Out! 1, No. 2, (January 10, 1970). ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 202. ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 183. ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 302, note 21. ↩
\nHugh Ryan, The Women’s House of Detention: The Queer History of a Forgotten Prison. ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 196. ↩
\nLeo E. Laurence, “Gays Hit NY Cops,” Berkeley Barb, 4 July 1969, 5; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 196. ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 197. ↩
\nTom Burke, “The New Homosexuality,” Esquire, December 1969, pp. 178, 304–18. ↩
\nLucian Truscott IV, “Gay Power Comes to Sheridan Square,” Village Voice, 3 July 1969, 18; John Gabree, “Homosexuals Harassed in New York,” National Guardian, 12 July 1969, 14; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History ↩
\nD. L. [Dick Leitsch], “Gay Riots in the Village,” Mattachine Society of New York Newsletter, Aug. 1969, 1–2, 4; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nLeitsch, “Gay Riots in the Village.” ↩
\nLeitsch, “Gay Riots in the Village.” ↩
\n“Cop Injured 5 Seized in Village,” New York Post, July 3, 1969. ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 205. ↩
\nRonnie Di Brienza, “Stonewall Incident,” East Village Other, 9 July 1969, 2; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nLeitsch, “Gay Riots in the Village.” ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 201-205. ↩
\nKiyoshi Kuromiya quoted in Marc Stein, City of Brotherly and Sisterly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945–72, 334. ↩
\nJohn Gabree, “Homosexuals Harassed in New York,” National Guardian, 12 July 1969, 14; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nLeitsch, “Gay Riots in the Village.” ↩
\nLeitsch, “Gay Riots in the Village.” ↩
\nDi Brienza, “Stonewall Incident.” ↩
\n“Gay Power Explodes,” The Insider: Newsletter of the Mattachine Society of Washington, Aug. 1969, 1–3; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nDonn Teal, The Gay Militants, 95. ↩
\nDon Jackson, “Reflections on the N.Y. Riots” The Los Angeles Advocate, Oct. 1969, 11, 33; in The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. ↩
\nLige [Elijah Hadyn Clarke] and Jack [John Richard Nichols], “Pampered Perverts,” Screw, 25 July 1969, 16. ↩
\nClarke and Nichols, I Have More Fun With You Than Anyone, 147. ↩
\nCarter, Stonewall, 216. ↩
\nKarla Jay, The Lavender Menace: A Memoir of Liberation, 77. ↩
\nToby Marotta, The Politics of Homosexuality, 90. ↩
\nDonn Teal, The Gay Militants, 101. ↩
\nMarotta, The Politics of Homosexuality, 87. ↩
\nDudley Cleninden and Adam Nagourney, Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America, 43. ↩
\nTerence Kissack, “Freaking Fag Revolutionaries: New York’s Gay Liberation Front, 1969-1971,” 116. ↩
\nLate in life, immediately before renouncing anarchism, Murray Bookchin published a screed excoriating what he described as “lifestyle anarchism,” even sneering, in passing, at “gay faery circles.” Ironically, the queer liberation movement did more than any institution to spread what is useful in Bookchin’s contributions to anarchist practice. ↩
\nDavid Eisenbach, Gay Power: An American Revolution, 127. ↩
\nLois Hart, “GLF News,” Come Out 1, no. 2 (January 10, 1970), 16. ↩
\nHart, “GLF News.” ↩
\nRalph Hall, “Gay Liberation News,” Gay Power 1, no. 9 (1969), 8. ↩
\nDonn Teal, The Gay Militants, 101. ↩
\nDonn Teal, The Gay Militants, 52. ↩
\nL.A. Kaufmann, “Ending a War, Inventing a Movement: May Day 1971.” ↩
\nBen Morea has passed away. Known for his participation in Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, the self-styled “street gang with an analysis” active in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the late 1960s, he withdrew from the city and pursued a path into revolutionary animism. In the following eulogy, Tasos Sagris of Void Network recounts Ben’s subsequent visit to Exarchia, the Athenian neighborhood famed as a hotbed of anarchism.
\n\nToday, the Exarchia that Tasos describes has also changed. To mourn a person is to mourn an entire vanished world. Yet, as Tasos explores, there is a silver thread that connects Ben’s life and the legacy of Exarchia to our own present and possible future.
\n\nBen Morea is dead, motherfuckers.
\n\nTo many of us in Void Network, Ben was not simply an old revolutionary from another era, nor a nostalgic remnant of the American counterculture. He was one of those rare human beings who attempted to transform rebellion into a total form of life—to erase the borders between self and other, poetry and insurrection, art and survival, to bring global social revolution to the streets of the metropolis.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/1.jpg\")
Ben Morea.
\nWe met him in April 2016, when my sister, Georgia Sagri, invited him for a series of talks and meetings at Ύλη[matter]HYLE, a space in the center of Athens bringing together art, politics, and the sciences. He was a beloved friend of hers from her years in New York. She enthusiastically introduced him to many different people—not only anarchists but also artists and other creative people from the Athens underground scene.
\n\nI enjoyed a long day and night walking around Exarchia with Ben. It was during a high point of the anarchist solidarity movement with refugees and migrants, when more than ten occupied buildings across the neighborhood housed over a thousand displaced people fleeing the wars and wreckage of the global order to seek a better future in Europe. Exarchia was no longer simply the legendary neighborhood of anarchists, punks, radical students, and street riots; it had become a fragile liberated territory where the uprooted of the Earth attempted to survive collectively in the face of the violence of borders, police raids, fascists, poverty, and abandonment.
\n\nWe walked endlessly through the narrow streets. We passed the occupied refugee squats where children played on the rooftops under torn flags, living in buildings powered by improvised, illegal electricity connections. We passed assemblies in smoky rooms filled with comrades speaking ten different languages. We walked through old cafés where anarchists argued all night about revolution, defeat, and desire while armored riot police waited at the entrances of the neighborhood like an occupying army.
\n\nI brought him to the Free Social Center Nosotros, which Void Network participated in for fifteen years, and to the self-organized political spaces scattered across Exarchia. I translated for him the slogans painted on the walls and the posters announcing demonstrations, solidarity kitchens, anti-fascist patrols, underground concerts, assemblies for imprisoned comrades, open discussions on gender, social collapse, and insurrection. He looked carefully at everything—not with the cold curiosity of an intellectual tourist, but with the trembling attention of someone recognizing fragments of a long unfinished dream.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/13.jpg\")
The Free Social Center Nosotros.
\nPerhaps what moved him most was not the militancy itself, but the atmosphere of collective survival. The defiant beauty of people who possessed almost nothing yet continued building common spaces in the ruins of austerity and social collapse. Young anarchists sharing food and ideas with refugees from Syria, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, Nigeria, Congo, illegal kitchens feeding hundreds every day, people from many different countries dwelling together. Abandoned buildings transformed into living organisms of solidarity as artists, dropouts, migrants, junkies, fugitives, students, and political outcasts attempted to create another form of life.
\n\nFor Ben, this was not activism as moral duty. It was the continuation of a war against alienation that had begun decades earlier in the streets of the Lower East Side.
\n\nThat night, as we were walking through Exarchia, he stopped and looked at me with an expression I will never forget and said:
\n\n“Tasos, I feel so happy that now I can die.”
\n\nI asked him what he meant.
\n\n“Everything we did so many years ago, so far away, has taken root here. Exarchia is what we were fighting for with the Motherfuckers!” Since the early 1960s, from the days of Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, he explained, he had dedicated his life to creating liberated social zones in New York and across the United States. Spaces where people could escape the prison of normality to invent new forms of collective existence. Free territories where art was no longer separated from life and revolution was no longer separated from everyday experience.
\n\nNow, decades later, on the other side of the planet, he had encountered another generation continuing the same struggle in different historical conditions. Not the white American dropouts of the psychedelic era, but refugees, migrants, precarious youth, and anarchists surviving the catastrophe of neoliberal Europe.
\n\n“Now I can die happy,” he told me. “We are winning.”
\n\nWe continued walking through the streets of Athens, surrounded by the graffiti, the helicopters, the police sirens, and the burning memory of all unfinished revolutions.
\n\nThat same night, in the center of the city, Ben Morea gave what was for many of us an unforgettable historical speech. For hours, he answered questions from anarchists, freaks, radical artists, and young rebels who gathered around him with the hunger of people seeking lived experience. He spoke about the birth of the counterculture as if describing an underground war. He told stories about riots, communes, outlaw survival, collective madness, criminality, revolutionary theater, the attempt to assassinate Andy Warhol as a strategy to block the spread of heroin in freak communities, sabotage, psychedelics, fugitives, and impossible dreams with a mixture of tenderness and levity.
\n\nMost of those stories would be impossible to summarize here. Perhaps they can only survive the way all insurgent knowledge survives: passed from mouth to ear to mouth, from generation to generation, like a secret fire moving through the darkness of this world.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/16.jpg\")
\nBen Morea belonged to a generation that understood something that has almost been erased from the collective political imagination today. They grasped that revolution was not merely a program for the future but a transformation of everyday life in the present. Not an ideology to be consumed, not an identity to perform, but a dangerous reorganization of existence itself.
\n\nBefore the museums, universities, and fashion industries domesticated the aesthetics of revolt, before rebellion became a commodity circulating through social media and cultural branding, Morea and the comrades around Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker attempted to dissolve the separation between art and life completely.
\n\nThey did not want radical art, but radical existence.
\n\nFor them, art could not remain imprisoned inside galleries, theaters, literary circles, or intellectual prestige. A painting that did not attack the conditions of everyday alienation was merely decoration for the ruling class. A poem that did not open breaches inside consciousness was simply another dead object circulating in the market of culture. Even revolution itself risked becoming another form of bureaucracy if it lost contact with desire, ecstasy, madness, and collective imagination.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/7.jpg\")
\nThis was one of the deepest contributions of Ben Morea and the Motherfuckers: they understood that capitalism does not survive only through economic exploitation or police violence, but through the colonization of perception itself. Through the production of obedient identities. Through the management of desire. Through the reduction of life to work, consumption, and passive spectatorship.
\n\nLong before the language of contemporary critical theory existed, they were already attacking the society of separation with their bodies, their actions, and their forms of collective living.
\n\nThey stole food and distributed it freely.
\n\nThey occupied spaces and defended houses with open doors where anybody could be free at any time.
\n\nThey organized street theater as social attack.
\n\nThey disrupted cultural institutions.
\n\nThey transformed everyday gestures into acts of refusal.
\n\nThey attempted to create temporary liberated zones in the heart of the metropolis where people could experience forms of relations outside commodity logic.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/2.jpg\")
\nIn this sense, Ben Morea was not only an anarchist militant. He was a poet of social space creating poetry inscribed directly upon the nervous system of the city.
\n\nDuring those years, the streets of the Lower East Side became laboratories of anti-capitalist imagination. Runaway teenagers, junkies, artists, political fugitives, radical musicians, criminals, undocumented people, trans and queer outcasts, psychedelic heads, and street gangs all collided in an unstable ecosystem where counterculture and insurrection became inseparable. It was dirty, chaotic, often self-destructive, and filled with contradictions, but it carried an intensity almost impossible to imagine today within the managed sterility of contemporary urban life.
\n\nWhat terrified American society was not simply the riots or the political extremism. It was the appearance of human beings who no longer desired to be integrated into the existing order.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/8.jpg\")
\nThe Motherfuckers represented a direct attack upon the American dream because they rejected the entire psychological architecture of normality: career, patriotism, private property, productivity, family discipline, social obedience. They transformed dropping out into a collective weapon.
\n\nThis is why they remain important today.
\n\nNot as a romantic relic of the sixties, but because the central conflict of our era remains exactly the same: will human life be completely reduced to economic functionality or can new forms of collective existence emerge against the machinery of control?
\n\nAnd perhaps this is why Ben recognized something familiar in Exarchia.
\n\nBecause despite all the historical differences, he once again entered a territory where people were attempting—however imperfectly—to reclaim life from the structures managing it, refusing ideological purity and political branding and living together in political and social antagonism against the establishment.
\n\nCommunal kitchens / Occupied buildings / Illegal assemblies / Underground art / Collective risk.
\n\nFriendships formed inside repression / People discovering each other again through struggle instead of competition.
\n\nThis was always the real battlefield.
\n\n\n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/6.jpg\") \n | \n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/5.jpg\") \n | \n
The dominant culture constantly tries to convince us that capitalism is natural—to accomplish this, it destroys every social experience that could generate another perception of reality. Isolation becomes normality. Competition becomes common sense. Fear becomes social organization. Human beings cease to imagine freedom because they cease to experience collective power.
\n\nThe Motherfuckers and other anarchist and autonomous movements across the world have sought to explore the opposite possibility: that people can become ungovernable when they rediscover themselves and each other outside institutional mediation.
\n\nFor this reason, the system always attempts to neutralize rebellious movements in two ways simultaneously: through repression and through cultural absorption.
\n\nPolice attack bodies. The spectacle attacks memory.
\n\nEvery radical gesture is eventually transformed into style, merchandise, or harmless mythology. The revolutionary becomes an icon. The outlaw becomes an aesthetic reference. The living experience of revolt is emptied of danger and returned safely to society as entertainment.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/10.jpg\")
The Free Social Center Nosotros.
\nBen Morea refused this domestication until the end of his life. He disappeared. This disappearance was itself a political gesture. Unlike so many public revolutionaries who slowly transformed themselves into celebrities, academics, or nostalgic commentators of their own past, Morea withdrew from visibility almost completely. Hunted by the state and exhausted by the implosions that destroyed much of the revolutionary energy of the sixties, he turned away from the machinery of political spectacle.
\n\nBut he did not surrender to normality. He did not “grow up.” He did not reconcile with the world. He did not moderate his politics or his passions. Instead, he moved toward another frontier of existence.
\n\nFar from the metropolitan centers of visibility, consumerism, and ideological production, Ben Morea spent years living close to Indigenous communities and spiritual traditions across North America. Not as an act of exotic escapism, but as part of a search for forms of knowledge and relation that industrial civilization has almost annihilated.
\n\nBen Morea speaks at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University on April 23, 2024, describing why he and his comrades had occupied the same university almost six decades earlier: “It wasn’t just to stop the war, it was to replace the ideology that created the war. The idea of occupation, a colonialist mentality. Not only did we want to stop the war, we wanted to end the mental state that would allow the war to become a reality.”
\nMany Western revolutionaries speak endlessly about liberation while remaining trapped within the same colonial mentality they claim to oppose: domination over nature, domination over time, domination over imagination, domination over the body, domination over meaning itself. Morea began searching elsewhere. In Indigenous cosmologies, communal memory, ritual practices, and non-Western understandings of land, he encountered another dimension of resistance—one far older than the modern revolutionary tradition. A resistance not centered solely on seizing power, but on preserving relationships with the Earth, the ancestors, the spirits, and collective forms of life against the expanding desert of industrial capitalism.
\n\nThis journey lends an almost mythic quality to his later life. He never became a new age guru or a “spiritual leader”—he probably hated such descriptions. For us, he embodied a rare continuity between revolt and transformation of the self. He remained, until the end, a human being searching for freedom beyond the categories offered by the dominant civilization.
\n\nAnd perhaps this is why his presence affected so many younger anarchists decades later. Because beneath the stories, the legends and the historical aura, people sensed something increasingly rare in contemporary political culture: he had truly risked his life for another world, and he had never psychologically returned from that journey.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/12.jpg\")
\nToday, in an era where even dissent is rapidly transformed into consumable identity, the legacy of Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers becomes important again not as historical nostalgia but as a living provocation. Because the catastrophe they fought against did not disappear. It expanded across the entire planet.
\n\nThe Metropolis they saw emerging in the 1960s—the society of alienation, surveillance, spectacle, and emotional paralysis—has now become almost total. Capitalism no longer simply exploits labor. It occupies attention, emotion, sexuality, language, memory, and imagination itself. Human beings are increasingly transformed into isolated economic units permanently connected to systems of consumption and digital control while simultaneously disconnected from collective experience, from nature, from physical community, and from any deeper sense of meaning.
\n\nThe result is a civilization filled with information but emptied of presence, a society of communication without encounter, visibility without intimacy, opinion without lived experience, a planetary loneliness managed by algorithms and pharmaceutical industries.
\n\nInside this landscape, the radicalism of the Motherfuckers acquires new force precisely because it was always more than merely ideological. They were fighting against a model of existence. The battlefield they fought on remains the central battlefield today.
\n\nA contemporary revolutionary cannot simply imitate the aesthetics of the sixties. The costumes, slogans, and mythology of past revolts are useless when they are disconnected from the historical necessity that produced them. What matters is the impulse beneath their actions: the refusal to allow capitalism to define the limits of reality and human possibility.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/15.jpg\")
\nTo live “against the wall” today means refusing psychological integration into the machinery of fear and passivity.
\n\nIt means defending spaces where people can still encounter each other directly outside commodified relations. It means rebuilding forms of solidarity in societies designed to fragment every collective bond. It means fighting against the war, the apartheid, the genocide, the environmental and psychological destruction, protecting zones of human unpredictability inside a civilization obsessed with management and control.
\n\nThe liberated territory is not only the occupied building or the street confrontation. It is also the communal kitchen / the underground art space / the collective garden / the occupied university and the collective house / the public assembly and the secret meeting / the barricades, the fires on the streets, the smell of benzine on my hands, and to hold you in the mist of the tear gas / the pirate radio station / the neighborhood organization of mutual aid / the friendship that survives a political defeat / the refusal of narcissism and permanent digital mediation / the defense of the imagination against the dictatorship of cynicism.
\n\nBecause cynicism has become one of the primary weapons of Power.
\n\nThe system no longer asks people to believe in a beautiful future. It merely asks them to stop believing that anything other than a dystopian future is possible. This emotional exhaustion produces populations that continue obeying not because they are convinced, but because they feel existentially defeated.
\n\nThis is why every authentic community of resistance becomes dangerous. Because it immediately threatens state power militarily and existentially, and because it reawakens suppressed human capacities: trust, collective joy, solidarity, courage, eroticism, care, spiritual intensity, and the experience of shared risk.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/18.jpg\")
Spirou Trikoupi, a squat in Exarcheia that housed nearly a hundred migrants from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iran, Kurdistan, and elsewhere. The squat was run by a regular weekly assembly and featured a bar, a library, and classrooms for children. Police brutally evicted it in August 2019, kidnapping the migrants at gunpoint and taking them to detention centers and concentration camps.
\nThe Motherfuckers understood that revolution without the transformation of everyday life becomes just another authoritarian structure. But they also understood the opposite danger: that counterculture without social struggle degenerates into narcissistic lifestyles and harmless bohemian consumption.
\n\nThis conundrum remains unresolved today. On one side, we see political movements emptied of poetry, desire, and imagination, reproducing the same emotional misery as the system they oppose. On the other side, we see cultural scenes obsessed with personal expression while completely detached from material struggle and collective responsibility.
\n\nBen Morea and his friends, among them Osha Neumann and many others, represented a rare attempt to hold these two dimensions together: insurrection and beauty, fury and tenderness, collective discipline and ecstatic freedom. Perhaps this is why his words in Exarchia carried such emotional force for me. He recognized that despite all defeats, despite repression, cooptation, and exhaustion, fragments of that old dream still survive wherever people attempt to create living communities of resistance in the ruins of capitalism. Not perfect communities, not ideological utopias, but temporary breaches in the social machinery. Places where people can breathe differently.
\n\nAnd perhaps this is the deepest lesson that his life can offer younger generations of anarchists, artists, and revolutionaries today: that resistance is not only the struggle against oppression. It is also the defense of human intensity against the civilization of emotional death.
\n\nTo remain capable of wonder in a world organized around despair.
\nTo remain capable of love in a culture built on contention.
\nTo remain capable of collective imagination inside systems designed to isolate consciousness.
\nTo continue creating free spaces even as history appears to collapse around us.
This was the invisible thread connecting the streets of the Lower East Side to Exarchia decades later.
\n\nNot a political model or an ideology frozen in time, but the persistence of a dangerous human desire: to live differently / to feel differently / to relate differently / and through this transformation of everyday existence, to open cracks in the apparent inevitability of this world.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/11.jpg\")
\nPerhaps this is what Ben Morea understood better than most of the revolutionaries of his generation: that the struggle for liberation is not only about changing institutions. It is about protecting the possibility of another kind of human being from extinction.
\n\nBen Morea’s life leaves behind no doctrine, no party line, no strategic blueprint that future generations could mechanically reproduce. Perhaps this is precisely why his presence continues to resonate so deeply today. He reminds us that the most powerful revolutionary experiences escape institutionalization and refuse to solidify into ideology. He belonged to a generation that believed that history could suddenly open upon new horizons. That everyday life could be reinvented. That human beings could escape psychologically, existentially, and materially from the systems shaping them.
\n\nMany of those dreams were defeated. Others were absorbed by capitalism and transformed into style, fashion, or harmless cultural memory. Entire fragments of the counterculture were commodified and sold back to society as entertainment while the economic and technological machinery of domination expanded to a planetary scale.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/14.jpg\")
\nAnd yet something survived. Not the mythology of the sixties, the romantic image of rebellion, the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, but a certain irreducible human force. A refusal.
\n\nA refusal to accept alienation as destiny.
\nA refusal to reduce existence to work and consumption.
\nA refusal to abandon collective life even in periods of historical darkness.
\nA refusal to surrender imagination to the administrators of reality.
This refusal passed through many forms across the decades: through communes, occupations, pirate radios, underground newspapers, autonomous social centers, Indigenous struggles, anti-fascist networks, street riots, collective kitchens, night attacks, artistic experiments, migrant solidarities, and invisible friendships formed in the margins of defeated movements.
\n\nBen Morea carried this force through his entire existence. Even his disappearances were meaningful. In a civilization obsessed with visibility, self-promotion, and political branding, he chose opacity, distance from fame; he chose to protect the living intensity of revolt from becoming another spectacle to be consumed. This choice gave his life a rare integrity. He remained dangerous because he never fully allowed himself to become socially legible. And perhaps this points toward one of the deepest lessons emerging from his trajectory: that revolution is not an identity.
\n\nIt is not a subculture, a career, a scene, or a posture of moral superiority. Revolution, at its deepest level, is a transformation of relations—with others, with the body, with desire, with fear, with nature, with the self and with time itself. This is why the most meaningful revolutionary moments are often experienced not as political obligation but as sudden expansions of life.
\n\nA collective meal inside an occupied building.
\nA forbidden conversation lasting until dawn.
\nThe preparation of explosives in the living room.
\nA street filled with people refusing fear together.
\nA neighborhood defending migrant residents from fascists and police.
\nA city without government.
\nA temporary experience where the loneliness imposed by capitalism suddenly cracks open and another form of existence becomes thinkable.
These moments are fragile. Often temporary. Sometimes tragic. But they leave irreversible marks inside personal and collective consciousness. Once someone has experienced this intensity, normality itself becomes unbearable.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/9.jpg\")
The Free Social Center Nosotros.
\nPerhaps this is why so many people who met Ben Morea across generations felt affected not simply by his ideas but by his presence. He carried within him traces of another relationship to reality—one shaped by collective risk, existential commitment, and lived rebellion rather than intellectual abstraction. He belonged to that increasingly rare category of revolutionaries who understood that freedom is not a future paradise guaranteed by historical progress.
\n\nFreedom exists only when people create it together in the present. Even if briefly. Even if imperfectly. Even when the entire world appears to move in the opposite direction.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/17.jpg\")
\nToday, as authoritarianism rises globally, as surveillance penetrates everyday life and war industries reorganize the killing machine, as genocide in Palestine and ecological collapse accelerate, as social existence becomes increasingly mediated by automatic behaviors and algorithms, the temptation to despair has become enormous. Many people retreat into cynicism, private survival, digital paralysis. Others seek refuge in ideological certainties that cannot address the spiritual and emotional devastation that contemporary capitalism is inflicting.
\n\nAgainst this landscape, Ben Morea’s life stubbornly demonstrates that human beings remain capable of creating liberated social spaces even within catastrophe. Small territories of intensity, lovers of Total Freedom, moments of collective beauty, communities of resistance, experiments in chaos.
\n\nThis is how I choose to understand the meaning of the phrase he whispered to me while we were walking through Exarchia: “We are winning.”
\n\nThe state had not collapsed. Capitalism had not been defeated. History had not fulfilled the dreams of the sixties. But somewhere, on another side of the planet, amid crisis, migration, repression, and social devastation, new generations were still attempting to continue the unfinished work of liberation. The fire had not been extinguished. It had simply changed languages and places.
\n\nWe fight to defend the human capacity for insurrectionary imagination, to preserve tenderness against brutality, collectivity against isolation, poetry against the administration of existence, living memory against the spectacle, and freedom against all the visible and invisible walls surrounding human life.
\n\nBen Morea is dead.
\n\nBut somewhere tonight, in occupied demolished buildings, underground gatherings, spontaneous conversations, illegal raves, and secret psychedelic ceremonies, in hidden bars and collective kitchens, in street riots, acts of solidarity, existential poetry, abstract paintings, in impossible dreams, fragments of his spirit continue moving silently through the darkness of this world.
\n\n—Tasos Sagris / Void Network
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/3.jpg\")
\nA Life in Rebellion—Ariel Uesseler
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/13/4.jpg\")
\n For many years, we have joined others around the world in observing April 15 as worldwide Steal Something from Work Day. Last year, we prophesied that the arrival of a new cast of kleptocrats at the head of the federal government of the United States would only intensify the factors that give rise to workplace theft. In fact, the first fifteen months of the second Trump administration have seen workers around the country rapidly radicalizing and escalating their efforts to counter the ongoing plunder of our society. In 2026, when Large Language Models are pillaging the intellectual heritage of humanity in order to steal everyone’s jobs while underpaid workers are burning down warehouses and carrying out direct attacks on employers, Steal Something from Work Day is the moderate option.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/15/1.jpg\")
Jason Scott of Internet Archive speaking at the 2015 Game Developers Conference. “Steal from work,” he advised a crowd of game industry professionals. “Workplace theft is the future of game history.”
\nThis year, we present two accounts from nurses who steal for the common good. In honor of the fight that people in the Twin Cities have put up against the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement occupation of their communities, we share testimony from a nurse in Minnesota who reappropriates medical supplies from the workplace to equip those who are confronting ICE in the street.
\n\nTo learn more about other ways that nurses have helped to rescue people from the clutches of ICE, you could read this.
\n\nEveryone assumes that nurses are “good.” We get treated like God’s little soldiers. Nurses often feel a sense of moral high ground. People who aren’t nurses adopt this tone when they are talking about us, too.
\n\nThis shouldn’t be the point. Often, people who see themselves as “good” do a great deal of harm in the world, while people who are behaving badly actually help people. No one should be so focused on proving that they are “good” that they miss a chance to help someone.
\n\nThere are four general categories of workplace theft at the hospital:
\n\nIf you’re a patient in a hospital and a nurse is caring for you, chances are, some element of the care they are providing you is reaching you in defiance of the system that exists to exploit both nurses and patients. When it comes to being good, don’t be afraid to be bad.
\n\nWhen Metro Surge came to Minneapolis, it felt like a hammer falling—a hammer that had been hanging over us since election day. As January got underway, we could feel the pressure rising in the administration’s increasingly violent rhetoric—while the temperature continued to drop, setting the stage for one of the coldest and snowiest winters in recent memory. Still, none of us anticipated what was to come just a few days after the new year.
\n\nIn response to the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who was also a nurse, so many of us felt compelled to do something. This is one of the stories about what people did.
\n\nIf you were to ask me why I became I nurse, I would say because I want to help people. I know what it’s like to be in pain, to feel that nobody is around to help you, that all of your time and resources are going to something you cannot control, all while watching the oligarchic government and hospital CEOs slowly chip away at your life savings.
\n\nOn average, big hospital chain systems pay their CEOs between one and seven million dollars a year—while nurses are doing the real work at the bedside, risking our lives for a barely living wage. (Don’t get me started on the insurance CEOs who make between $20-30 million a year.) Manufacturing a one-liter bag of normal saline costs two dollars on average. Yet hospitals on occupied Turtle Island sell the bags at upwards of $700. Individuals who need to stay in the hospital incur costs for the room, with nursing staff and doctors adding another $2600 to $3000 a day to this cost.
\n\nAs of 2023, some 80% of the nursing workforce reported workplace violence impacting their ability to do their job. Does nobody see the correlation between this violence, the widening wealth gap, our patients’ inability to afford the care they need to survive, and the ever-growing greed of the few who want everything all to themselves? There are no beds to spare at the hospital and patients sleep in the hallways and ambulance bay, yet both rural and inner-city hospitals continue to close for lack of resources.
\n\nIn 2020, the city of Saint Paul closed St. Joes, the oldest hospital in the state of Minnesota. The community lost 253 beds at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the worst pandemic in modern history. In 2023, Fairview filed to sell the medical complex system that sits on both sides of the Mississippi to Stanford Health, seeking to merge the healthcare companies; if Fairview didn’t get someone to pay them out, they would have to file for bankruptcy. The CEO of Fairview, James Hereford, makes $4.3 million a year, which makes him one of the highest-earning healthcare CEOs in the Midwest. Yet the people who rely on the medical and Medicare system are the ones who are blamed.
\n\nThe “trickle-down system” is bleeding backwards, against gravity, up the pyramid to the top where the wealthy few are positioned. How can you claim to be a nonprofit company while the people at the top of the pyramid are making several millions of dollars in a year—and then nonetheless claim that the company is unable to stay afloat without a buyout?
\n\nRemember, nobody questions a nurse that looks busy.
\n\nSupply liberation and time exploitation should never come before bedside patient care. Ensure that your efforts to hold both identities as a nurse and a comrade don’t conflict with the ethical reasons you chose both sides of this work. Your goal is to decrease harm and pain: you are exploiting an unfair healthcare system while working directly with people who are in pain, many of whom understand that the system is exploiting them, too.
\n\nI liberate out of love, I expropriate in the name of harm reduction, I “steal” in the name of all of the people killed by the state of so-called Minnesota. I take in hope that these medical items can help to save or ease the lives of community members, so we don’t have to experience once again the trauma we experienced when we lost Alex, Nicole, Amir Locke, Winston Boogie Smith, Philando Castile, George Floyd, and too many others. Death at the hands of the state is so pervasive and the price of medical supplies is just too damn high.
\n\nTime theft is complicated when you’re a nurse. You work for the healthcare company, but you care for the patients; if you forget that and no longer see those you care for as human, you become part of the problem. The healthcare system is not human, and in any case, you will hurt your workplace very little by stealing things. But if you engage in time theft carelessly, you can strain the care that someone else is dependent on you for.
\n\nYou can take a longer break than your allotted time IF
\n\nYou can clock out a little late so that you can take the time to care for yourself between caring for patients and not have to rush your charting.
\n\nIf the hospital pays for your continuing education credits, you can use these to learn things that you can pass on to others in a community setting, such as diabetes education, CPR, and wound care. Rephrase the education you receive as a nurse when you present it as public-health community education: you’re not giving medical advice, but simply explaining how a body process or disease works.
\n\nOn March 1, 2026, at the conclusion of a week of action against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement occupation of the Twin Cities, protesters converged on the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Fort Snelling, Minnesota. At least four hundred people marched on the southeast side of the building to demand that ICE withdraw from Minnesota and that the land Fort Snelling occupies be given back to the Dakota people. Many Native people participated in the march, including members of the Dakota, Ojibwe, and Chippewa tribes. On the opposite end of the building, a group of fifty protesters blockaded Minnehaha Avenue with shields, reinforced banners, homemade tank traps, and improvised barricades.
\n\nHennepin County Sheriffs and Minnesota State Troopers attacked both protests almost immediately. They tackled and dragged dozens of people out of the march on the southeast side. At the blockade on the northwest side, they beat protesters, sprayed them with bear mace, and slammed a person’s head against the pavement. One person bled from their eyes and suffered corneal damage from taking so much mace.
\n\nThe sheriffs arrested forty people in total. Ten of these arrests occurred at the blockade and thirty at the march. The first attacks on the march did not occur until after the barricades on the other side of the building were cleared away. Presumably, the blockade functioned keep pressure off the march by drawing police attention elsewhere.
\n\nFrom Chicago to the Twin Cities, local and state police who answer to Democratic officials have played an essential role in enabling ICE to terrorize communities. Without the continuous assistance and support of local authorities, federal agencies would have been outmaneuvered by protest movements long ago. Every time cops and sheriffs participate in brutalizing those who oppose the ways that ICE is abducting and murdering people, this shows the complicity of Democratic officials in the rise of fascism.
\n\nDespite the hardships that the participants endured, this brave action shows that the resistance to the ICE occupation of the Twin Cities is not over. In replacing so-called “Commander at Large” Greg Bovino with “Border Czar” Tom Homan, Donald Trump is trying to rebrand the agency responsible for the high-profile murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. (Homan himself accepted a bag of $50,000 in return for promising to distribute government contracts in an FBI sting operation in 2024, aptly illustrating how the persecution of immigrants functions as a cover for government corruption and the military-industrial complex.) Yet even after the withdrawal of thousands of ICE agents from the Twin Cities, more than 400 remain—an unprecedented number before the surge of federal mercenaries into the city two months ago. Thankfully, people are not finished fighting ICE.
\n\nHere, an anarchist in Minneapolis who participated in the blockade action describes what happened.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/4.jpg\")
Photograph by @slunttttt.
\nIt was a cold, bright morning when I got to the north lot outside Whipple. About forty people were already there. I was nervous. Our numbers were dangerously small. We knew going in this would be a smaller action, but I felt exposed. The wind buffeted us in the shadow of the seven-story concrete detention center. Were we about to get slaughtered?
\n\nWe waited a few minutes. People hugged each other and huddled in their affinity groups whispering pep talks. Eleven more comrades trickled in. I counted every one of us, then counted again. Two Hennepin County Sheriff cars were watching from the other side of the parking lot. We had scarcely more than fifty people.
\n\nA van swerved into the north lot and screeched to a halt. The first deployment team leaped out, already in gas masks, and started throwing hastily-painted plastic shields out of the back of the van. Everyone scrambled to empty the van, fastening respirators and goggles to their faces and grabbing shields. The sheriffs got out of their cars; they were yelling into their radios calling for backup. A cop car heading south towards Whipple made a sharp U-turn and plowed over the curb of the median strip to cut us off.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/10.jpg\")
Photograph by @slunttttt.
\nWe had barely left the parking lot when a stout, mustachioed sheriff pepper-sprayed the person to my left. The person flinched and fell backwards, but did not cry out. Medics started flushing their eyes. We kept pushing forward.
\n\nA line of sheriffs blocked our path before we reached our intended blockade point. Some of them were in normal uniforms; others were in full kit tactical gear, looking almost exactly like the federal agents who guarded this area in the recent past. One of them menaced us with a can of bear spray. I fiddled with my goggles, frantically trying to stop the damn things from fogging up in the cold.
\n\n“IF YOU HAVE A SHIELD, PUT IT ON THE GROUND NOW!” a sheriff bellowed at us. He bellowed the same phrase again, and then a third time.
\n\n“Not today, asshole,” somebody to my right shouted back. “Is your family proud of you, you fucking pig?”
\n\nThe cops ran at us. They maced somebody. They started grabbing shields and wrenching them out of people’s hands. I was standing in the front. A sheriff put both his hands on the top of somebody’s shield and they wrestled back and forth over it. The person let go of the shield, and the sheriff toppled backwards and fell on his back.
\n\nSomebody started shouting instructions to fall back. Most of us did. The sheriffs tackled two brave people who were slower to retreat. Three or four officers dogpiled onto each of them. One person’s helmet flew off and they struggled to stand up. A sheriff threw himself on top of them, smashing their head onto the sidewalk with an audible crack.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/1.jpg\")
\nSomeone with a bullhorn walked out into the street, attempting to take the road a second time. She started a chant: “Whose streets? Our streets!” The cops immediately tackled her, as well. The rest of us followed, trying to get back into the street to form a shield wall. Two sheriffs flanked the person in front of me and tried to pull them forward. People on our side grabbed the person by the backpack and tried to pull them back. The sheriffs hit us with another jet of bear mace and we lost the person. Someone else in the front was holding the line as best they could, shoving back and forth with their shield. A sheriff tried to grab them by the arms, but a comrade behind them crouched and hugged them around the waist, wrenching them backwards. That person got away.
\n\nWhen the melee concluded, they had arrested ten of us. There were only forty of us left in the street. The number of cops confronting us had dropped, too, as many of them had their hands full detaining our arrested comrades and putting them into a van. We fell back again and put up a shield wall, now with a severely diminished number of shields. Somebody grabbed a pallet and a broken stop sign from the side of the road and threw them into the street in front of us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/5.jpg\")
\nOnly after the arrests did the sheriffs issue a dispersal order.
\n\nThe next ten minutes felt like hours. The sheriffs kept their distance now. I think they were calling for reinforcements. Four vehicles blocked the road in front of us, and two blocked the intersection of Minnehaha and Hiawatha behind us. I was afraid we were going to get kettled. We huddled together in the freezing wind, crouching behind our few remaining shields. A middle-aged woman pulled up her car behind us. For a moment, I thought she could be ICE. Then she yelled out her drivers’ side window: “You guys are all so hot and brave!!!”
\n\nOur morale was low by this point, but she helped boost it.
\n\nThen, finally, the cavalry arrived. A second deploy team pulled up in a flatbed truck. People swarmed around the back of the truck, ripped away a green tarp, and pulled out buckets of hinges, nails, and scrap metal. We dumped them onto the barricade. We also pulled out three “tankbuster” traps—four-foot-high welded jacks that looked like barricades from the beaches at Normandy, and positioned them to block the road. Piled beneath all this stuff, we pulled out two 8’ x 4’ reinforced banners made of corrugated steel. I wish we’d had this shit 20 minutes ago, I grumbled to myself.
\n\nWe held the road for another half hour. The sheriffs did not approach us again. Taken aback by the barricade, they were constantly talking into their radios. At 10:24 am, I received a text on my burner phone that the march on the other side of Whipple was no longer holding the street. This meant ICE had an egress point at Gate 3 and were no longer trapped inside. That was our cue to leave. We called our exfil team.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/6.jpg\")
\nIronically, the smoothness of our exit seemed to disorient the sheriffs more than anything we’d done at the blockade. Eight cars pulled up behind us and we piled in, abandoning the barricade and peeling off toward Hiawatha.
\n\nOne car got followed by an ICE SUV on the way out. The driver led them on a chase through South Minneapolis until they reached Powderhorn Park, where they used a local rapid response chat to call for reinforcements. Dozens of neighbors came out to the park, filming with their phones. The ICE vehicle turned around and withdrew.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/8.jpg\")
Photograph by @slunttttt.
\nI was frightened and stressed out during most of the action on March 1, but I did it anyway. Many things went wrong during the planning and execution. We took 20% arrests, and some of the arrestees caught misdemeanor charges. We never had the numbers to properly accomplish our task—yet somehow, we managed to block the road for 52 minutes. Of every organized protest at the Whipple building in the last three months, this one was by far the smallest. It was also the first and only occasion on which we succeeded in fully blocking ICE into their headquarters for any length of time.
\n\nWhat happened on March 1 represents a new phase of the struggle against ICE in the Twin Cities. We are decidedly on the other side of the crest of movement activity that peaked in January. The so-called “drawdown”—which still leaves 407 ICE agents on our streets—was intended to demobilize our movement, and in this respect it has partly succeeded. The thousands who fought them in the streets in January are exhausted.
\n\nYet fight them we must.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/11.jpg\")
\n\n\n\n“We are not many, perhaps more than you dream of, though we are all determined to fight to the last.”
\n\n—Plain Words, 1919
\n
At the opening of Donald Trump’s second term, many people were paralyzed by the idea that resistance would only play into his hands. He and his supporters appeared to be an unstoppable force, something out of a nightmare. In that context, we published an article titled “It’s Safer in the Front,” arguing that avoiding confrontation is not the most effective strategy for surviving the rise of fascism.
\n\nA year later, the spell has been broken. The Trump administration has caused tremendous harm, but they have not succeeded in pacifying the population. If anything, people are losing their fear, becoming more capable of fighting back—and learning, in the process, that our passivity and isolation are essential to the administration’s control.
\n\nNo politician, party, or petition is going to protect us from the kidnappers and murderers who hold power today. Our only hope is our own collective courage. If we do not find it, the ones who control the institutions will have no reason to grant any of our demands; if we find it, we can defend each other, we can topple autocrats, we can change the world as we see fit.
\n\nIn the following account, a participant in a demonstration in Portland describes the experience of collectively crossing the line into revolt and discovering that, when everyone does this together, our oppressors’ power evaporates.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/29/2.jpg\")
“Fuck these fascists.”
\nOn Saturday, January 24, Border Patrol agents opened fire in Minneapolis, publicly executing Alex Pretti as he tried to defend a woman from federal agents who were shoving her to the ground and pepper-spraying her. They fired ten rounds at him, shooting him in the back.
\n\nThat same night, people rallied outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland, Oregon. As dusk fell, the crowd’s righteous anger was unmistakable. The energy felt different from previous nights.
\n\nLast summer, as protests unfolded at the facility, federal agents had painted a thin blue line across the driveway entrance, a clear warning that no one was allowed to cross. Since then, small groups and even lone protesters had stepped over that line, often resulting in officers carrying out targeted arrests or snatching people in the moment.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/29/1.jpg\")
The thin blue line.
\nSaturday was different. There was no room left in the driveway. It filled completely, with people spilling out into the street. Within minutes, the crowd began making space for dumpsters and other objects that were rolled into place to barricade the main gate. Shortly after, another door that the feds sometimes use to exit the building was barricaded as well.
\n\nNotably, in sharp contrast to recent months, there was no peace policing, no hand-wringing over tactics. People cheered in response to the barricading. The crowd was unified and unafraid to show it.
\n\nAfter some time, federal agents, unable to exit through their usual gate to carry out their routine violence, began firing munitions through and over the barricade. Once they had forced a bit of distance between themselves and the crowd, they pushed out, dragged the barricades inside the driveway, and retreated behind the gate, which closed behind them.
\n\nPeople were gassed but not discouraged. The energy remained high.
\n\nIt’s common for agents to storm out and brutalize protesters to clear space for government vehicles entering or leaving. But that night, they were using a rear driveway for vehicles. When they exited the front of the building, their sole purpose was to hurt people.
\n\nThe officers came out for the sole purpose of hurting people…
\nThey came out again—and this time, the assault escalated. They assaulted people with flash-bang grenades and pepper balls, filling the area with more tear gas than before. After this barrage of munitions, they retreated again.
\n\nA lull followed. The crowd regrouped. Medics rinsed people’s eyes. Folks caught their breath, many still standing their ground directly in front of the building.
\n\nThen the feds came out a final time.
\n\nThey unleashed more tear gas and munitions than in the previous two pushes combined. It was relentless.
\n\n…and were forced to retreat again and again.
\nIn the middle of the chaos, someone yelled, “It’s safer in the front!” The crowd surged forward together, larger and more unified than at any previous point that night.
\n\nAs another wave of gas filled the air, including Hexachloroethane (HC) smoke canisters, everyone moved as a unit. Nearly every canister the agents fired into the crowd was thrown right back. Other demonstrators, armed with nothing but protest signs, ran through the smoke, fanning the gas away from those who were choking.
\n\nThe feds wanted fear. They wanted the crowd to disperse in disarray. They wanted people isolated, choking, scrambling for safety.
\n\nInstead, they got solidarity.
\n\nThey got a crowd that refused to retreat. They got strangers locking arms in clouds of gas. They got medics running toward the smoke instead of away from it. They got people with nothing but cardboard signs and soaked bandanas standing their ground against armored agents armed with weapons of war.
\n\nEvery time they fired, the crowd regrouped. Every time they pushed forward, people came back together. The message was unmistakable: repression would not restore their control, and violence would not make the community disappear.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/29/4.jpg\")
\nWhat happened that night was not disorder. It was collective refusal. It was people deciding, in real time, that they would not quietly accept state terror in their city. It was grief turning into action. It was rage turning into protection. It was the understanding that when the government murders someone for defending others, the only moral response is to stand up. Together.
\n\nAs a consequence of that kind of solidarity, not one single person was snatched by the feds for crossing their blue line.
\n\nThe barricades can be dragged away. The gas canisters can be fired. The gates can slam shut.
\n\nBut the line the feds drew in blue paint last summer is gone now. The fear it was meant to create didn’t hold. People crossed it. They erased it. And they’re not going back.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/29/3.jpg\")
\nOn January 23, thousands of people went on strike in the Twin Cities to oppose the ongoing campaign of kidnapping and murder that federal mercenaries have perpetrated over the past two months in service to Donald Trump’s program of ethnic cleansing. Over 1000 businesses shut down—some enthusiastically, others involuntarily. At the same time, a smaller number of demonstrators set out to prevent federal mercenaries associated with Immigration and Customs Enforcement from carrying out the abductions they had planned for the day.
\n\nEarly on the morning of January 23, in sub-zero conditions, roughly 75 demonstrators with shields and reinforced banners blocked the intersection of Minnehaha and Federal Drive, immediately adjacent to the Bishop Henry Whipple building, which ICE has been using as their base of operations in the Twin Cities. At the same time, someone left an RV trailer blocking Airport Service Road near the north end of Federal Drive (see map). This completely blocked two of the three means of ingress and egress to and from the Whipple building. Presumably, the blockade was intended to box ICE in at the north end of Federal Drive, blocking off every point of egress, but as it played out, they still had access to one exit.
\n\nThe RV trailer blocking Airport Service Road remained in place for about half an hour. The demonstrators blocked the intersection of Minnehaha and Federal Drive for two and a half hours.
\n\nThere was no sign of ICE or BorTac (the Border Patrol Tactical Unit, members of which have beaten and tear gassed protesters at prior actions by the Whipple building) during the entire two and a half hours. The ICE motor pool appeared almost totally full during the action, suggesting that they weren’t staging from any secondary location. It is possible that this action effectively trapped a large number of ICE agents at their headquarters.
\n\nEventually, after the trailer had been removed, Hennepin sheriffs threatened to attack the demonstrators with chemical weapons. The participants in the blockade dispersed five minutes later, before chemical weapons were deployed. Two arrests were reported in the area, apparently not in connection with the blockade at the intersection of Minnehaha and Federal Drive.
\n\nThe role of the sheriffs is noteworthy. From Chicago to the Twin Cities, local and state police that supposedly answer to Democrat politicians have played a fundamental role in violently suppressing protests in order to enable ICE to continue kidnapping and brutalizing people. Any movement against ICE will have to contend with this bipartisanship.
\n\nTwo weeks ago, on January 8, protesters blocked the gates of the Whipple building for one hour in response to the murder of Renee Nicole Good by federal agent Jonathan Ross. Today’s attempt raises the bar. It is inspiring that thousands of people participated in today’s general strike. The blockade at the Whipple building shows that some are prepared to go further, taking bold and creative action to directly impact what ICE can and cannot do.
\n\nIn the following anonymously submitted account, participants describe what they witnessed during the blockade and offer some context for their experiences resisting the ICE occupation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/24/1.jpg\")
Location 1: demonstrators blocked the intersection of Minnehaha and Federal Drive. Location 2: an abandoned RV trailer blocked Airport Service Road.
\n“It’s been the longest year of my life.” You can hear this refrain throughout the Twin Cities—and it’s only January. More than fifty days of occupation by federal forces has weighed upon the resolve and well-being of resisters and occupiers alike.
\n\nThe federal site at Fort Snelling, where the Whipple Building is located, is known for having served as a concentration camp imprisoning the Dakota people in the 1860s. This legacy continues today with the use of the site as the home base for thousands of masked kidnappers. The 3000 federal agents involved in this operation outnumber the ten largest police forces in the Twin Cities combined.
\n\nThe first abductions began as a trickle and built to a stream, then a flood like the mighty Mississippi. The most henious and evil acts are burned into our brains, reminiscent of the sort of attacks the Israeli army has carried out in the West Bank: ambushes on schools and hospitals, masked invaders using terrified children as hostages, shootings, even a public execution. The piercing tones of 3D-printed whistles are scorched onto our eardrums like tinnitus. Yet the violence of ICE has fueled a shared rage that many people never knew they were capable of. Many new resisters are waking up to this reality for the first time. Others have experienced wave after wave of struggle in the Twin Cities, which have prepared many of us for this moment.
\n\nFascism is not on the way. It is here.
\n\nIn response, people prepared to go on the offensive on the day of the general strike. This offensive involved three different struggles, none any less important than the others.
\n\nLike many on the global stage, we find ourselves in unfamiliar waters. The old rules have been thrown out the window. In the streets, ICE acts more like Nazis than like cops. This is especially apparent to those of us with experience in anti-fascist organizing. Their terroristic tactics combine a mixture of brutality and cowardice; their unpredictable nature has strained even seasoned veterans.
\n\nThis is the first form of conflict we must deal with: struggle against self.
\n\nUncertainty breeds fear. We have use threat modeling to identify what the risks are and which ones we are prepared to run. Movement tactics like positioning sharpshooters on roofs, using security checkpoints, and sending security teams to escort people through dangerous areas have become common once again, as they were in the height of the 2020 uprisings. This is the case even for large meetings now. We study and practice these skills over and over, doing our best to address our fears while seeking to assuage anguish over those who have already been disappeared.
\n\nCare must be taken when deliberating too, as frustration can easily flare up over minor or inconsequential issues. Recognizing and regulating our own emotional states is key to avoiding the tendency to act on fear. Group visualization techniques present an opportunity to imagine possible outcomes and prepare our responses in advance.
\n\nThe crime against humanity that we call genocide doesn’t just affect those who are abducted or killed. Those who remain must carry its weight. In the week leading up to the general strike, we wrestled with all of these things. Nonetheless, we pressed on.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/24/2.jpg\")
Demonstrators with shields and reinforced banners blocking the intersection of Minnehaha and Federal Drive.
\nThere is a difference between ordinary cold and bitter cold. It’s difficult to describe if you haven’t experienced it. In the bitter cold, there is almost a serene stillness to the air, a seeming tranquility daring you to underestimate its lethality. Literal arctic chills can spread through our state. A week ahead of the general strike, it became clear that it was going to be a very cold day.
\n\nThis second form of conflict is just as dangerous as any human violence: struggle against nature.
\n\nI’ve seen one exposure death before. The glassy black skin on their body isn’t a vision I will ever forget. ICE have recently been taking a page out of the Saskatoon Police force’s “Starlight Tours” and dropping off arrestees in the middle of the night in remote areas, intentionally using weather exposure as a weapon of torture. On the morning of the general strike, temperature adjusted for wind chill was about -30 degrees Fahrenheit (-35 Celsius). This can cause uncovered skin to develop frostbite within twenty minutes, a challenge that requires careful planning and specialized clothing to address.
\n\nIn the modern surveillance state, one must also take care to avoid being identified by one’s specialized winter clothing. Despite organized warming stations, several volunteers from out of town underestimated the risks and were injured from exposure alone. There surely would have been two or three times as many participants in the blockade were it not so bitter outside.
\n\nAs in the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline, there were concerns that state or federal forces might use water as a weapon. At one point, a scout identifed and radioed out what appeared to be preparations to employ a water cannon. In this weather, with no nearby facilities to warm up in, such a weapon could inflict permanent harm. Similarly, water to flush chemical weapons can pose a risk in these temperatures.
\n\nTensions were high, but with extra jackets and handwarmers, we were able to hold the line.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/24/3.jpg\")
The RV trailor abandoned in the middle of Airport Service Road.
\nBeing across the highway from the rest of the city, the Whipple Building is difficult to reach on foot and well-protected from pedestrians. Two days before the action, our adversaries added additional layers of fencing to create chokepoints and opportunites to trap demonstrators. They put up jersey barriers and fences on either side of Federal Drive, all the way down, separating the street from the sidewalk, blocking off every driveway—creating a sort of tunnel. Understood solely as a defensive tactic, this made sense in a mindset obsessed with violence. Though it also made it easier to blockade the route, as their fortifications left them only three exit points.
\n\nFour different groups prepared to take action to blockade those points. This is the final form of conflict we must confront: struggle against the occupiers.
\n\nOne group walked in from the city and train station, carrying shields, steel banners, and other items. Their goal was to block the primary access point, diverting traffic. Arriving early, I saw items being distributed as people huddled for warmth in the exposed parking lot. At first, the numbers looked concerningly small. The group pressed forward to the chokepoint, occupying the area before the tunnel. The demonstrators could not get in, but the mercenaries would not get out.
\n\nPerhaps the latter had not prepared for this mutual achievement of goals. In any case, the only forces that these demonstrators encountered were three squad cars from the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department. The federal forces remained holed up in the building, apparently afraid to step into the cold. The demonstrators chanted and taunted them to draw their ire; still, federal agents did not show themselves. They took no offensive action of any kind.
\n\nPerhaps the federal agents, too, are exhausted from their long campaign of contemptible violence. Perhaps they were stretched thin from preparing to deal with the general strike. Perhaps they were more afraid of nature than the demonstrators were. Or perhaps they were obeying strict orders from their commanding officers not to engage, for reasons we can only speculate about.
\n\nIn any case, it was unusual that they did not attack the blockade. The participants successfully retained all the equipment and supplies they had brought out to the action, which is unusual for such confrontations.
\n\nWhile that group held the city entrance, other groups took coordinated action elsewhere. One group towed blockading material into the highway entrance. The first convoy in this group apparently deployed an RV trailer and exited the area. A second convoy in the group left the area without deploying any sort of barricade, as sheriffs swarmed the trailer at the last second. The single RV trailer that remained nonetheless obstructed egress for nearly half an hour.
\n\nFinally, two other groups provided support and a human blockade on a side road. Unfortunately, sheriffs carried out two arrests there during an agressive push towards the fortified “tunnel.” Reportedly, snowballs were thrown at federal vehicles, shattering one window. Ice versus ICE.
\n\nAfter tear gas was deployed, many of the people in this area began coming over to the primary blockade, reinforcing the numbers at the intersection of Minnehaha and Federal Drive.
\n\nAs the hard barricades were cleared and others poured in, the demonstrators took a moment to consider the situation. They had already achieved their objectives for the day, coordinating between several groups and seizing the opportunity of the general strike as a whole to grind things to a halt at the Whipple building. Given the opportunity to leave without sustaining losses, they chose to take it, leaving before weapons were deployed. They marched back as a single unit in a tactical retreat, still protected by shields and steel banners, chanting “Minnesota’s got the ICE melt!”
\n\nFor two and a half hours, demonstrators had blocked all but one of the routes in and out of the Whipple building.
\n\nToday’s action only strengthens our resolve. Now we have more experience coordinating with one another and more knowledge of the terrain. The fact that federal forces did not show themselves reinforces the notion that they are not prepared to defend themselves in large confrontations—or at least, that they consider it preferable to avoid doing so. Their continued reliance on state police and sheriffs poses complicated strategic questions for us, but it could also create complications for them in the future.
\n\nAs local comrades recently stated in regards to Donald Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act:
\n\n\n\n\n“We must continue to organize communities, patrol our streets and build rapid response teams, push for workplace stoppages, and grind them down every step of the way. We must exact a price for every footprint they leave in our snow. When we have the opportunity, we will drive them from our streets and tear down their concentration camp. ICE will melt when the heat turns up.”
\n
Forever yours in struggle.
\n\nCongratulations on surviving 2025 and welcome to our year in review report! What did we accomplish this year? Let’s review!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/8.jpg\")
\nIn the United States, the year 2025 arrived like a nightmare. Danger. Terror. Hatred. All of the worst elements of humanity had taken power and were preparing to use the institutions of the state to inflict tremendous harm. War was already raging in Ukraine, genocides underway from Palestine to Sudan. How much worse could it get?
\n\nWe, at least, were not taken by surprise. Four years ago, looking back on the debacle of January 6, 2021, we anticipated Trump’s return; when Elon Musk bought Twitter, we pointed out that his purchase resolved the fundamental conflict within the capitalist class, between Silicon Valley and Trump’s authoritarian nationalism; by summer 2024, we sensed what was coming:
\n\n\n\n\nDonald Trump will win the election. Then all the institutions that centrists have counted on to protect them—electoral politics, the court system, the police, ordinary citizens’ inclination to obey the law and respect the authorities—will become weapons in the hands of their enemies. Of course, many of us already experience these institutions as our adversaries. Biden’s supporters will have to ask themselves whether they are willing to work alongside us against them, or if, in fact, they prefer fascism to freedom.
\n
Despite these warnings, the opening months of Trump’s second administration shocked many people who had foolishly expected a rerun of Trump’s first presidency, not the sudden arrival of a much more destructive and cynical strategy of governance. Others remain in denial to this day, assuring themselves that however bad things have gotten, they cannot possibly continue to get worse at such a pace.
\n\nOn the contrary, we remain convinced that only grassroots action can change the trajectory we are on.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/6.jpg\")
First, they came for the immigrants. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement mercenaries.
\nNot everyone had the good fortune to survive 2025. Police officers murdered well over 1200 people in the United States in 2025. Dozens more perished in ICE custody. Hundreds of thousands of people have been brutally snatched from their communities, held in abominable conditions, and deported. The cuts that Elon Musk and his flunkies made to aid programs have reportedly already inflicted many hundreds of thousands of deaths. Countless more will follow as the autocrats continue to “streamline” the state to play a purely repressive function.
\n\nNonetheless, as we have documented, the assault has reached a plateau, if not yet an impasse. It is time to get our bearings, identify the vulnerabilities that our oppressors have opened up by demolishing the concessions that their predecessors made, and launch a counterattack that could propel us into an entirely different future.
\n\nFor a full accounting of the struggle in the United States throughout 2025, consult our retrospective, “At the Turning of the Tide.” For more background, revisit the events of 2024.
\n\nWe began 2025 with two foundational texts proposing how to come to grips with the rise of autocracy.
\n\n“It’s Safer in the Front: Taking the Offensive against Tyranny” makes the case that, facing ascendant fascism, it is more dangerous to try to avoid confrontation than it is to go on the offensive. Bringing together a series of anecdotes from the front lines of a quarter of a century of anarchist mobilizations, this text also offers a brief overview of the ways that repression has ramped up since the 20th century.
\n\nThe second text, “Become an Anarchist or Forever Hold Your Peace,” argues that, rather than powerlessly accusing Donald Trump and his cronies of lawlessness, our best hope is to organize concrete acts of resistance on a horizontal and participatory basis. In other words, to become anarchists.
\n\nIn June, we followed these with a third text, “Mutual Aid, the Commons, and the Revolutionary Abolition of Capitalism,” revisiting the distinction between charity and mutual aid in hopes of unlocking the revolutionary potential concealed within the latter.
\n\nWe concluded the year with the aforementioned analysis, “At the Turning of the Tide.”
\n\nIf you only have time to read a few things we’ve published this year, start with these four.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/06/05/2.jpg\")
From “Mutual Aid, the Commons, and the Revolutionary Abolition of Capitalism.” Click on the image to read the essay.
\nEarly in 2025, we published a report on the student walkouts in Los Angeles, one of the first signs of life from what became a powerful movement.
\n\nOver the following weeks, we published a text from a bus driver facing austerity measures, titled “The Only Immigrant Trying to Steal My Job Is Elon Musk,” followed by a reflection on the federal kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil.
\n\nWhen a wave of resistance to ICE gathered momentum in June, we published reports from participants in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Austin, Texas, Chicago, and Seattle. In fall 2025, when ICE concentrated their violence on Chicago, we published a report from the blockades at the Broadview holding facility, followed eventually by reflections on the efforts to target that facility.
\n\nWhen ICE agents returned to the Twin Cities, people confronted them once more.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/3.jpg\")
By the end of the year, the student walkouts had spread from Los Angeles to Charlotte, North Carolina.
\nIn March, we published the final installment in our series chronicling the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, Georgia. In July, as Stop Cop City defendant Ayla King prepared to go to trial, we published an overview of the absurdly tenuous case against Ayla and the other RICO defendants. Almost all of the charges have since been dropped, though the threat of future state persecution still hangs over the heads of the accused.
\n\nFollowing up last year’s campus occupations in solidarity with Gaza, we covered a daring Palestine solidarity occupation at the University of Washington in May. In October, we published a statement from a participant in the Thousand Madleens to Gaza flotilla, followed by an account of the direct action campaign that shut down Elbit Systems—Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer—in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
\n\nFinally, as we do every year, we observed Steal Something from Work Day—this time, by celebrating employees who shared company goods with the general public during a time of need.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/01/20/header.jpg\")
The weekend of the Festivals of Resistance was the anniversary of the brutal police murder of Tortuguita, a participant in the movement to Stop Cop City. Mourners courageously redecorated this billboard in the middle of New York City in Tortuguita’s memory.
\nAt the end of December 2024, we called for people to organize “Festivals of Resistance” the weekend immediately before Trump was to take office, in order to share skills and prepare for the onslaught. Over two dozen cities hosted events in response to this call. Afterwards, we published reportbacks from some of them.
\n\nWe published a call to take action on May Day, as well, and a call for anti-authoritarian blocs at the October 18 “No Kings” demonstrations around the country. Afterwards, we reached out to participants in a dozen cities and towns to learn how their efforts went and published a collection of their reflections.
\n\nFinally, we published a reportback from the Florida Abolitionist Gathering.
\n\nAnarchists at one No Kings rally led the entire crowd off the sidewalk and on a spirited march throughout the city.
\nEarly in 2025, we published a short guide titled “Eight Things You Can Do to Stop ICE.” Copies of the trifold version appeared everywhere—for example, during the disruption of a US Customs and Border Protection recruiting event in Chicago.
\n\nTen months later, drawing on the experiences of Chicago organizers, we followed up with “Standing Up to ICE,” a guide spelling out the steps a community can take to stand in the way of ICE kidnappings on a large scale.
\n\nIn between, we published “A Demonstrator’s Guide to Operational Security: Fighting Back, Staying Free,” a comprehensive guide to maintaining your anonymity while engaging in street actions, as well as “A Demonstrator’s Guide to Reinforced Banners” and “A Demonstrator’s Guide to Lockdowns and Blockades.”
\n\nIn addition, in response to Donald Trump’s cartoonish announcement that his administration would be designating “Antifa” [sic] a “major [?!] terrorist organization,” we circulated\n“Safeguarding Our Movements against Repression,” spelling out steps that organizations, activists, and others who oppose fascism can take to be ready to endure an authoritarian crackdown. If such a crackdown has not yet taken place, we owe that chiefly to the resistance that has tied down federal mercenaries on other fronts, as we argued at the end of the year:
\n\n\n\n\nIf federal agencies have yet to move with full force against a target other than immigrants, it is only because people have fought so hard to obstruct ICE. This drives home the true meaning of solidarity: the best way to protect ourselves tomorrow is to protect each other today.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/1.jpg\")
Demonstrators outside the Broadview holding facility. They’re in there for us, we’re out here for them.
\nBetween May and July, we published a series of texts from the Mideast, including a reflection on what the Rajaee Port disaster in Iran revealed about the systematic racism that Baluch ethnic minorities face; a statement from Iranian, Kurdish, and Afghani feminists arguing against reductive positions in regards to the conflict between Israel and Iran; and an analysis of what the decision of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK) to lay down their arms means for the whole region.
\n\nIn August, a wave of protest against austerity spread across Indonesia, then escalated dramatically in response to the police murder of Affan Kurniawan, a 21-year-old delivery worker. While the Indonesian government managed to reestablish control, a few days later, a similar eruption toppled the government of Nepal, setting a template for what became known as the “Gen Z uprisings,” a series of revolts from Madagascar to Peru.
\n\nWe published an interview with anarchists in Nepal who participated in the revolution, followed by an article by another Nepali about the new horizons it opened up. The following month, we published an interview with participants in the subsequent uprising in Morocco, as well.
\n\nWhile conditions in the United States and Europe have been grim, these distant fires suggest that the age of uprisings is not over. The plumes of smoke rising from the horizon today hint at events that could break out much closer to home tomorrow. It is urgent to think through what lasting gains movements can achieve during such surges of activity in an era when the apparatus of the state has proven incapable of reform.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/2.jpg\")
Indonesia.
\nOur most ambitious historical project of the year was “Anarchists in the Movement against Police and White Supremacy,” tracing anarchist contributions to uprisings against white supremacist policing from the Los Angeles riots of 1992 to the George Floyd Uprising of 2020.
\n\nWe also published a collection of reflections from participants in the Seattle Solidarity Network on their seventeen years of organizing to support laborers and renters in their struggles with bosses and landlords.
\n\nSeeking to equip people for the urgent struggles of 2025, we published a text about the General Strike of May Day 2006, one of the high-water marks in the fight against the oppression of immigrants in the United States, and two articles about how people organized to shut down the machinery of deportation in France in the 1990s. Both of the articles were adapted from the newly published book Another War Was Possible, a firsthand account of anarchist street action at the turn of the century, to which we contributed the preface.
\n\nFinally, we shared a eulogy for Karl Garside, a lifelong participant in the animal liberation movement.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/05/28/header.jpg\")
A scene from the uprising of 2020.
\nThis year, via our Ex-Worker podcast, we released audio versions of a handful of our articles, including “It’s Safer in the Front,” “Become an Anarchist or Forever Hold Your Peace,” “Mutual Aid, the Commons, and the Revolutionary Abolition of Capitalism,” “Safeguarding Our Movements against Repression,” and our coverage of the origins of the wave of resistance to ICE in Minneapolis to Los Angeles.
\n\nWe also collaborated with subMedia and the Coordinadora Anarquista Tejiendo Libertad on a video and poster campaign to counter ICE recruitment.
\n\nMERCENARIES: A Video and Poster Campaign to Counter ICE Recruitment
\nWe published a work of speculative fiction, “Survival: A Story about Anarchists Enduring Mass Raids.” We also designed a poster in homage to Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, the “street gang with an analysis” that introduced the concept of the affinity group to English-speaking anarchists in the 1960s.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/9.jpg\")
\nIn 2025, we released our first record in over a decade—the album “Hope against Hope” by Catharsis, long known as one of the world’s most extreme and uncompromising underground hardcore bands. The first pressing of the LP sold out immediately, but we will have a second pressing available soon. You can read an array of reviews of the record here, or read Kim Kelly’s interview with members of the band.
\n\nCatharsis supported the album with tours on the East Coast of the United States and in Europe, and has further tours scheduled in 2026. The vast majority of the other music we have released over the past thirty years is available here, all of it free of charge.
\n\nCatharsis: “Hope against Hope.”
\nWe also published a text written by the surviving members of the Russian hardcore band Sandinista! in memory of their bandmate, Timur Kacharava, on the twenty-year anniversary of his murder at the hands of fascists.
\n\nFinally, we reprinted our Contradictionary, alongside other print projects.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/7.jpg\")
\nHere follows a more or less comprehensive list of the zines, posters, and articles we published in 2025 in different languages, organized from most recent to oldest.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/at-the-turning-of-the-tide/at-the-turning-of-the-tide_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/make-ready-safeguarding-our-movements-against-repression/make-ready-safeguarding-our-movements-against-repression_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/chicago-against-ice-la-migra-la-policia-la-misma-porqueria/chicago-against-ice-la-migra-la-policia-la-misma-porqueria_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/resistance-reader/resistance-reader_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/minneapolis-to-feds-get-the-fuck-out-how-people-in-the-twin-cities-responded-to-a-federal-raid/minneapolis-to-feds-get-the-fuck-out-how-people-in-the-twin-cities-responded-to-a-federal-raid_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/seven-steps-to-stop-ice/seven-steps-to-stop-ice_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. (Español) \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/it-is-fascism-start-acting-like-it/it-is-fascism-start-acting-like-it_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. (Español) \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/melt-ice-be-water/melt-ice-be-water_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/los-angeles-stands-up-to-ice-a-firsthand-report-on-the-clashes-of-june-6/los-angeles-stands-up-to-ice-a-firsthand-report-on-the-clashes-of-june-6_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/mutual-aid-the-commons-and-the-revolutionary-abolition-of-capitalism/mutual-aid-the-commons-and-the-revolutionary-abolition-of-capitalism_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/cop-city-is-everywhere/cop-city-is-everywhere_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/survival/survival_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/remember-2020-we-can-win/remember-2020-we-can-win_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/become-an-anarchist-or-forever-hold-your-peace/become-an-anarchist-or-forever-hold-your-peace_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/8-things-you-can-do-to-stop-ice/8-things-you-can-do-to-stop-ice_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. (Español) \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/its-safer-in-the-front/its-safer-in-the-front_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/mercenaries-2025.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the poster. (Português Brasileiro, Español, Español) \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/we-are-all-anti-fascist.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the poster. \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/for-spirits.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the poster. \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/security-culture.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the poster. \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/the-whole-world-hates-the-police.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the poster. \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/fantastic-demands.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the poster. (Español) \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/may-day-means-resistance.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the poster. (Italiano) \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/its-double-or-nothing-for-everyone-now.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the poster. \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/fell-in-love-with-fire.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the poster. \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/depose-trump-depose-musk.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the poster. \n | \n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/4.jpg\")
\nFamine has become one of the central weapons with which the Israeli government seeks to exterminate the population of Gaza. On October 1, the Israeli military attacked the Sumud flotilla, a fleet of ships attempting to break the siege around Gaza in order to deliver much-needed humanitarian aid. People around the world protested in response—notably, in Italy, where millions of people flooded the streets across four consecutive days of demonstrations. But another flotilla, Thousand Madleens to Gaza, is right behind Sumud. Here, we present a statement from one of the participants.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/10/05/1.jpg\")
\nI’m writing you 300 miles from Gazan shores. I’m a sailor aboard the Soul of My Soul, a boat funded and supported by Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, an anarchist disaster response organization in North America. We are part of the Thousand Madleens flotilla. Our mission is to break the siege of Gaza—to challenge Israel’s stranglehold by barging in with a few scrappy sailboats full of infant formula and medication.
\n\nI’m not a zealot. I know how small our chances are of powering through the blockade imposed by the Israel Occupation Forces. If we are bound to be water cannoned, boarded, arrested, and kidnapped, like our comrades in the Global Sumud Flotilla were a few days ago, then it is clear that the power lies not with us but with you. I want you to know about us, about me, and I want you to take action of your own.
\n\nI’m a sailor. Some take to vans, some to small cabins in the woods, but sailboats have always been my thing. I never imagined that my penchant for sailing around vintage plastic sailboats from the 1970s would ever be relevant to any political struggle, very less one so center-stage. I ended up here when a call went out looking for comrade with some sea time. I jumped at the chance. As a lifestyle, do-it-yourself yachting is about as marginal to political struggle as you can imagine, but here I am.
\n\nDon’t let anyone tell you your passions are too fringe to be part of our greater fight for freedom. I’m not a veteran activist or even a marine professional. If I ended up here, you can too.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/10/05/3.jpg\")
\nOur boat illustrates how anarchists can plug into these wider highly visible political campaigns while staying true to our convictions. I know that many of us shy from activism like this—big orgs with a back office and actions that center themselves in the media’s eyes. Our boat was self-organized, sourced and purchased by comrades. We assembled our own equipment, legal support, and crew, then plugged into the bigger org at the end, once we were fully fledged. Maybe our boat is a bit like an affinity group. This has preserved us some degree of autonomy and decision-making power, and we can still sail with our comrades as a fleet.
\n\nI’m often asked what the goal of our flotilla movement is. Is this a largely symbolic act? Is there any chance we’ll get through?
\n\nMy own feelings have changed many times. There is historical precedent for boats getting through. A few of them did before the lethal attack on the Mavi Marmara in 2010. It’s not like Israel’s political ideology and animosity for the Palestinian people was much different then.
\n\nBut I’ve been watching the news out here at sea, and we see the enormous waves of protest against the genocide erupting across the world in response to the attack on the Sumud flotilla. This has enabled me to understand our purpose here. We’re just a rallying point. The world is sick of Israel’s murderous bombardment and brutal siege of Gaza, and we are offering an occasion to fill the streets of the world once again—this time to end it.
\n\nIf there is any chance of the Thousand Madleens flotilla arriving on Gazan shores, it will be because all of you demand it. If you rise up in defense of Palestine worldwide, the political waters might part before us. Maybe we will be the first trickle of a people’s sea corridor.
\n\nPlease, act however you can, as loudly or as decisively as you can. You take the streets, and we will take the sea.
\n\nFree Palestine.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/10/05/2.jpg\")
\nIt has been a long time now since our last music release—but desperate times call for desperate measures. Taking up arms against a wave of authoritarianism and despair, North Carolina’s premier hardcore band, Catharsis, has recorded a new full-length album, “Hope Against Hope.” You can now download it from us here or pre-order the LP on vinyl from us here. It’s also available on the usual streaming platforms.
\n\nThis record picks up where the band’s last material left off, continuing to push the envelope in terms of what hardcore can do. They don’t retread the ground they broke on their previous albums, but press forward into ever more abrasive and dynamic territory. Politically, they remain uncompromisingly radical in their lives as well as lyrics. Hardcore draws its dramatic power from the connection between word and deed; this is not a band that has slowed down, toned down, or mellowed out.
\n\nYou can read an interview Kim Kelly conducted with the band here. An array of reviews are excerpted below.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/08/01/2.jpg\")
\nTrue to their roots in the do-it-yourself underground, Catharsis are releasing the album through CrimethInc. in the United States, Refuse Records in Europe, and No Gods No Masters in South America. The band recorded the drums with Benny Grotto at Mad Oak Studios and tracked the rest themselves. For the backing vocals, Catharsis tapped the vocalists of some of their favorite hardcore bands: Gosia (of Poland’s Mind Pollution, Next Victim, and Sorrow), Brazil’s Point of No Return, and North Carolina’s own Scarecrow and Vittna. Mixed by Kurt Ballou at God City Studio and mastered by Scott Crouse, “Hope Against Hope” is as explosive as our times.
\n\nTwenty-four years have passed since Catharsis released their last record, the split LP featuring “Arsonist’s Prayer,” though they did complete another song from that session for their discography in 2012. But they have been playing regularly together since 2013, adding Jimmy Chang (of Undying and Sect), who left the band in 1995, to the lineup that recorded the “Passion” LP. It was high time to record another album, making the most of material that has come together across two decades. In fact, Catharsis has never sounded better.
\n\n“Hope Against Hope” is an assault on a self-destructing society and a beacon of inspiration for all who are determined to survive.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/08/01/3.jpg\")
\nIn the words of the musicians themselves:
\n\n\n\n\nWe have recorded a new album, Hope Against Hope.
\n\nThis is our first full-length release in 26 years. We’ve been working on these songs for a long time—if you saw us on tour in fall 2000, you witnessed an early version of the oldest one.
\n\nWe’re still the same band, the four of us who recorded the Passion LP and Jimmy, who left the band almost thirty years ago and had to wait until we got back together in 2012 to resume playing with us. We’re still the same people, just a few years older, a few years angrier, more heartbroken, more haunted by the brutality of our society, more convinced of the urgency of our mission. We are still doing what we have always done, metabolizing our grief into fury, our despair into determination, reaching out to you across the gulfs that divide us, seeking to give hope to fellow rebel hearts.
\n\nIt is still true that, if the world we deserve to live in does not exist, then our clumsy efforts to bring it into being are the closest thing to it that we will ever experience, and the best way to mourn our distance from it, the best way to honor it and what is noblest within us. Hope Against Hope is our humble contribution.
\n\nFor us, hardcore is not a style of dance music or a marketing strategy. Hardcore is still a secret society at war with the world, a way of living in struggle against everything around us that is petty and servile, a way of fighting to defend the beauty of the world.
\n\nFor all, against all.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/08/01/6.jpg\")
You can download the lyric sheet at catharsis.band.
\nMore information about the band is available here, including updates about their upcoming shows.
\n\n\n\n\nA record that feels less like a comeback and more like a statement carved out of three decades in the trenches.
\n\nThe songs circle around collapse, memory, and resistance — from the bleak opening of “Nocturne” to the anthemic weight of “We Live” and “Last Words.”
\n\nHope Against Hope is exactly that: a reminder that even in despair, there’s still ground to stand on, and still reasons to push forward.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nThe passion, the sheer musical force, and the stubborn drive are more than enough to make it stand out not only as one of the releases of the year, but as one of its defining events.
\n\n \n
\n\n\n“Hope Against Hope” is not an attempt to update or chase after imitators—if anything, it calls them to order. […]
\n\n“Gone to Croatan” and “Power” hover between unease and ritual, evoking not so much post-hardcore/metal as we understand it today, but rather an idea of hardcore that has come to terms with the end of illusions. “Eremocene,” in terms of structure, inspiration, and intensity, is perhaps the pinnacle of the album: a song that transforms geological anxiety and the awareness of collapse into something lyrical and relentless, as if Catharsis had found a way to sing about extinction without resigning themselves to it. […]
\n\nIn an era in which the political urgency of hardcore is often digested and spat out as aesthetics or formal code, Catharsis rejects rhetoric and reappropriates a stance that has always rejected shortcuts: that of commitment as a long-term choice, of art as a form of responsibility.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nOne of the original innovators of metallic hardcore return with one of the most ferocious and relentless albums of the decade. Catharsis is everything hardcore aspires to be—crushing, sharp, and matched by an outspoken political acknowledgement of the world we inhabit, not empty bravado. Hope Against Hope grapples with a paralytic melancholy that is ultimately overcome through fury.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nLet’s start with a question. Do we deserve a new Catharsis album?
\n\n \n
\n\n\nCatharsis needs no introduction.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nHope against Hope is a triumph of art coinciding with life.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nSuch was the clarity of Catharsis’s musical vision and political conviction, it was hard for me to imagine them coming back as anything other than the Catharsis that so indelibly helped to shape my understanding of what hardcore can achieve.
\n\nMy confidence was not misplaced. Hope Against Hope succeeds both in dramatically progressing the band’s musical expression and also conveying a sense that they have never been away—this is simply the organic next step. Bleakly menacing, structurally ambitious, crust-tinged metallic hardcore continues to form the searing crucible that enables the band to ferment a barrage of unwavering, visceral intensity. It is clearly crafted with intent and a characteristically arresting inventiveness.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nWe could say that it’s difficult to come back hoping to make as much of an impression as with the Passion LP, but after listening to this, we understand that it happens naturally.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nThis might be an even stronger and more cohesive album than its two predecessors. It would have sent shockwaves through the hardcore scene in any era. In 2025 it proves that music this vital and incendiary does not age. The fact that the band members are now middle-aged has not dulled their edge. If anything, they can express their anger and anguish with more depth than before. Every riff here is coiled in sinewous tension, every beat is a mini-explosion played with energetic excess, every growl is an exhalation of relief. The production is amazing; raw and intense with power and clarity. There is little fuzz on the guitar distortion and the drums are played fast and loose, presumably without triggers and samples.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nThe band continues on the path established with their latest releases, but deepens their aggressiveness and expands their sound.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nCatharsis tap into the primordial essence of the hardcore scene.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nCatharsis did not return to remind us of the music that they once created; rather, they came to show us what they can do today—and that everything is possible.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nThey are an inspiration to us and a great example of what we stand for and what we’d like antifascist metal to become: anticapitalist, in opposition to the commercial structures of the music business, free, horizontally organized, unbound, unleashed.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nI didn’t get to think too much about what Catharsis 2025 could be or create any expectations other than that sudden rush of excitement, but it’s safe to say that they handled any kind of weight that a two and a half decade-long absence of an iconic band could have created with their typical effortless class. They did it by just being themselves, just like they’ve always been.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nMy album of the year could be none other than the magnificent comeback of this collective from North Carolina… Hope Against Hope is their most honest, coherent, and meaningful album. A monument to those who still believe that art and community can change the world.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nProbably the most intense, focused, ferocious, melancholic yet hopeful record to come out this year… Musically complex, richly layered, providing a soundscape reflective of the lyrical content it reeks of near perfection. Deeply considered, providing a dissection of power in the face of all our hopes and the vision of a better world, paired against the fear to actually take the first step. I once quipped that CATHARSIS is a band which perfects the musical vision of AMEBIX, TRAGEDY, and INTEGRITY layered over the lyrical focus of CRASS and this latest LP really drives that home.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nThis record practically came out of nowhere, took no prisoners and sounded fresh as hell for such a seasoned band. I was particularly blown away by its epic moments and “Power” may be the song of the year.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nWho better than Catharsis to rise from the dead in an age of obscurantism and deliver a powerful, passionate, and rebellious blow? (…)
\n\nHoping even when you know it’s hopeless. All Catharsis in a single title. To die with weapons in hand. The anger remains intact. So does the lucidity.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nI was immediately blown away.
\n\n \n
\n\n\nFuck is it good, man—it’s really, really good.
\n\n-Myke C-Town, two and a half months later.
\n
\n\n\nI gotta say, it’s really good.
\n\n \n
Catharsis will be performing in the United States and Europe over the next three months.
\n\nOctober 13 - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Bonks
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/08/01/4.jpg\")
\n You can read a review of the show in Zagreb here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/08/01/1.jpg\")
\n“Hope against Hope” also topped that author’s top ten list for 2025. ↩
\nBy revisiting the struggles that took place at the turn of the century from the vantage point of our current dystopia, we can grasp how much is at stake in today’s struggles.
\n\nThis text appears as the introduction to the book Another War Is Possible, just published by PM Press, which documents the experiences of one anarchist fighting against capitalism and the state across three continents in the course of the so-called anti-globalization movement. You can read more about it in the appendix.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/01/6.jpg\")
\nIt was the end of the 20th century and capitalism had triumphed.
\n\n“Really existing socialism” had collapsed. Elections were taking place everywhere, bringing new politicians to power to sign neoliberal trade agreements. In place of dictatorships, the free market reigned victorious.
\n\nFrancis Fukuyama declared it “the end of history,” proclaiming
\n\n\n\n\nthe end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
\n
For politicians, advertising agents, and corporate executives, it was a time of jubilation.
\n\nThe social ferment of the 1960s had ebbed. In the United States, radical politics largely subsisted in subcultural milieux—environmental movements, radical bookstores, the hip hop and punk scenes. Europe also had the rave scene, the squatting movement with its network of social centers, and the vestiges of the powerful movements of the mid-20th century. On the opposing side, there were fascists, but they, too, were largely confined to subcultural milieux. Outside those enclaves, social peace prevailed, as everyone scrambled to get their piece of the pie or waited for their ship to come in.
\n\nIt was a fools’ paradise. Globalized capitalism was moving wealth around faster and further than ever before, but in the process, it was concentrating it into fewer and fewer hands, slowly immiserating the vast majority. Anarchists knew that the apparent unanimity around the new world order would not last forever. Eventually, there would be another round of conflicts and history would continue moving forward. The real question was how the lines would be drawn.
\n\nWe met at hardcore punk shows. We were reading about the Panthers, the Yippies, the Ranters, the Diggers, Up Against the Wall Motherfucker. When we heard that someone had spray-painted “NEVER WORK” on the wall of the Boulevard de Port-Royal during the May 1968 uprising, we took it literally, embarking on a life of crime.
\n\nOthers took a different approach, drawing on a different toolset. We quit our jobs; they unionized their workplaces. We squatted buildings; they did tenant organizing. We rejected formal organization; they created federations. We hitchhiked to events; they showed up with vans full of gear.
\n\nEventually, we began to run into each other at conferences and demonstrations. Everything that rises must converge.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/01/5.jpg\")
An anarchist sails across the heads of the police into the embrace of comrades during demonstrations against the presidential inauguration on January 20, 2001.
\nFortunately, anarchists were not the only ones who had a bone to pick with the reigning order. On the first day of 1994, just as the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation rose up against the Mexican government in Chiapas, setting a powerful example of grassroots struggle against neoliberalism. Inspired by the EZLN and other anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movements, people around the world began to organize protests, networks, occupations, global days of action.
\n\nTo most people in the United States, taking on the authorities seemed absurd, if not downright quaint. Corporate media journalists refused to even say the word capitalism aloud, substituting “anti-globalization” as if we were part of a worldwide movement for parochialism. The bitterest conflicts were over “violence”—to be precise, over whether it was acceptable to respond in kind to the perpetual top-down violence of the state. But the most difficult challenge was to enable people to imagine that the capitalist world order was not inevitable, that another world was possible.
\n\nNonetheless, for a few years—let’s say, from 1999 to 2001—the chief conflict playing out on the global stage was between neoliberal capitalism and the grassroots movements that opposed it. On June 18, 1999, thousands of people converged on London for a day of action heralded as the Carnival against Capitalism, during which some of them almost succeeded in destroying the London Stock Exchange. The following November, demonstrators successfully blockaded and shut down the summit of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. Over the next two years, almost every major international trade summit occasioned fierce street conflict.
\n\n“Should we try to get across?” I shouted, but we were already running, it was a split-second decision, we were already on the bridge by the time she answered “Let’s do it—we’re doing it” and we were sprinting for the other side. Behind us, I could hear the POP, POP as the cops fired tear gas and rubber bullets; around us, I could hear the impact of the bullets, the clatter as the canisters landed, the hiss as their noxious contents filled the air; ahead, I couldn’t see anything, the gas blotted out the sky, there was only the unknown—and beyond that, if we were lucky enough to reach it, a city to destroy, a world to create.
\n\nThe stakes were higher than we knew. If all of the people who were on the losing end of cutthroat capitalism failed to grasp that it was the source of their misfortunes, they would be susceptible to nationalism, racism, xenophobia, and demagoguery when they realized that the market was not fulfilling their hopes. But if we could make our case that capitalism was the chief cause of their misery, they might join us in our efforts to build a new society. There was a short window of time in which it seemed possible that we might succeed.
\n\nThis was the war in which the author of this book participated—a war fought to forestall all the senseless wars that came afterwards. We were fighting for a world in which all human beings could encounter each other as equals, in which the profit imperative would not trump the needs of human beings or the threat of climate change.
\n\nWe set out from the campus at noon. Hundreds of people were there, ready, suited up—hoods, helmets, shoulder pads, the works. One group was pushing a full-size catapult. I was walking behind some people who were pulling a giant puppet representing the World Bank. Sledgehammers kept falling out onto the asphalt from inside the papier mâché.
\n\nAmong the crowd, I recognized his crew from the inauguration the previous January. You develop an instinct for such things, even when everyone is masked. In idle social conversations and online forums, we were rivals. But in a situation like that, you want everyone there.
\n\nAt some point, the police drove a water cannon right at the crowd. A certain masked anarchist ran right up to it and smashed out the window before it could get a clear shot at us. The driver pulled away in a hurry.
\n\nWell, that’s fucking crazy, I thought. Wow.
\n\nPerhaps if everyone had been able to see what was coming, more people would have fought as hard as the author of this book. Few understood how dire things could get.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/01/4.jpg\")
\nUnfortunately, we were not the only force contending to determine how the lines of conflict would be drawn in the 21st century. Provoked by centuries of colonial violence, Salafi jihadists attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Neoconservatives in the Bush administration snatched the opportunity to invade Afghanistan and then Iraq, precipitating the so-called “clash of civilizations” they had been fantasizing about. The new century opened with a series of bloodbaths.
\n\nThis declaration of war served to obscure the possibility of any other war, any other stakes for which people might fight. The authorities in the United States and their symmetrical adversaries in al-Qaeda aimed to assert their rivalry as the central conflict in history, sidelining the rebels in Chiapas and the demonstrators who had shut down the Seattle WTO summit.
\n\nIn the United States, authoritarian socialist parties took advantage of the situation to seize the initiative from anarchists and other horizontally organized projects, gaining control of the anti-war movement through front groups (Not in Our Name for the Revolutionary Communist Party, ANSWER for the Workers World Party). The transformative grassroots models of the visionary anti-capitalist movement gave way to reactive protests addressing uncaring politicians.
\n\nThe US government passed the Patriot Act. The FBI stepped up operations targeting Muslims in particular, but also environmentalists and animal liberation activists. Politicians expanded and militarized the police. On November 30, 1999, the government of Seattle had fielded just 400 police to defend the summit of the World Trade Organization; in 2017, 28,000 security personnel defended Donald Trump’s inauguration.
\n\nOverseas, the brutal US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan cost nearly a million lives, driving more people into the ranks of the jihadists. The rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria a decade later showed that the invasions had only strengthened the forces that the neoconservatives purported to be attacking. In 2010, when a wave of revolutions began in Tunisia and spread across the Mideast, it hit a wall in Syria in part because of the Islamic State and its supporters. We’ll never know what the uprisings of the so-called Arab Spring and other social movements in the region could have accomplished if not for the harm wrought by the so-called “War on Terror.” When the Taliban recaptured Afghanistan in 2021, that only underscored how pointless as well as destructive the US invasions had been.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/01/1.jpg\")
Bashar al-Assad had hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered to maintain his grip on Syria, yet lost in the end nonetheless. The United States did the same in Afghanistan. These pointless and horrific tragedies are only a glimpse of what awaits if we continue down this road.
\nThe violence and poverty that resulted from all of these wars, occupations, and insurgencies drove refugees towards Europe from Africa and the Mideast by the million. Something similar was taking place south of the US border, as the havoc wreaked by the North American Free Trade Agreement and the militarization of police and paramilitaries plunged whole regions into bloodshed. Nativists on both sides of the Atlantic took advantage of the refugees’ desperation to drum up racism and fear.
\n\nMeanwhile, in the former Eastern Bloc, capitalist profiteering left many people worse off economically than they had been before the fall of the Berlin Wall. This generated waves of nationalism, enabling autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán to consolidate control. Emulating their model, politicians like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Giorgia Meloni came to power in the Americas and Western Europe. They channeled the rage of the eroding middle class towards openly fascist politics, encouraging their supporters to blame refugees, queer and trans people, Jewish people, and “communists” for the ways that the free market had failed them.
\n\nDriven by rampant industrialism, climate change hammered coastlines and incinerated forests. The COVID-19 pandemic—the spread of conspiracy theories and disinformation—the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few billionaires—the genocide in Gaza: all this will be familiar to you unless it has been eclipsed by even worse by the time you read this. The Russian invasion of Ukraine will not be the last of the wars to come if we continue down this road—wars made possible by the consolidation of autocratic power and inevitable by economic and ecological crises. Looking at the weaponization of refugees on the border between Belarus and Poland and the use of prisoners as cannon fodder in Ukraine, we can see that—unless we change course—life is going to be increasingly cheap in the 21st century.
\n\nOn June 18, 2023, exactly 24 years after the Carnival against Capitalism in London, the top article in the New York Times acknowledged what we had been saying for a quarter of a century: capitalist globalization creates catastrophic wealth inequalities, wrecking the biosphere and generating extreme-right nationalism. The article recited all the talking points of the average anti-capitalist protester of 1999, right down to the criticisms of the International Monetary Fund. Even the capitalists themselves now wish that we had won.
\n\nAll of these tragedies had yet to occur when the struggles described in this book took place. Who knows—if more of us had fought harder, we might have averted some of them.
\n\nBut we can’t fault the author of this book. He was always in the front lines.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/01/3.jpg\")
The anarchist black bloc marches out to confront the police during the riots in Québec City protesting the proposed (and ultimately defeated) “Free Trade Area of the Americas” in April 2001.
\nWe ran into each other at a book fair some years after the events described in these pages. I recognized him from the streets, but we had never had a proper conversation.
\n\nUnexpectedly, we hit it off immediately. In person, it didn’t matter that I was an adventurist dropout and he was a boring platformist.
\n\nHe wanted to know if we were going to release a sequel to a certain controversial memoir we had published about a delinquent living on the run. “Politically, it’s trash,” he said. “But as a story, it’s so exciting.”
\n\nI didn’t share his high opinion of it. I thought the humor compensated for the lack of character development, but speaking as a career criminal, the subject matter was positively banal. We had printed it as a strategy to undermine the materialism and timidity of kids from the suburbs, not to appeal to seasoned anarchists like himself.
\n\nHe persisted. “Come on, you have to do a sequel!”
\n\nI told him that he should write a memoir of his own, recounting his adventures in the streets. That would be worth publishing, I said.
\n\nIt only took him two decades.
\n\nWorld history is a vast stage. On the scale of all humanity, each of us is only one out of billions. But it is up to us how we approach our role in the drama. We can see ourselves as spectators and passively accept our fate—or we can understand ourselves as protagonists and set out to discover how much influence we can exert on the course of events.
\n\nThe author of this book took the latter approach. As a result, he participated in a surprising number of the historic events of the turn of the century. The litany of his adventures attests to how much a single person can accomplish with a bit of determination, whether in a time of social peace or of pitched conflict. Fortunately, he survived and, with a little encouragement, managed to write down some of what he experienced.
\n\nThe result is the valuable historical document that you are holding in your hands. Not everyone who lives through epoch-making street-fighting on three continents has the opportunity to write such a memoir. Buenaventura Durruti didn’t.
\n\nLike Peter Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist or Emma Goldman’s Living My Life, this book offers a firsthand record of a pivotal time period. You can learn a more about what things were really like from such a text than from any secondhand summary.
\n\nBut this is not simply historical reference material. None of the struggles described in this book have reached a conclusion. All of them continue on a much larger scale and with even higher stakes: the struggle against fascism, against the violence of borders, against the subordination of ecosystems and communities to the demands of capitalism, against the violence of the police and the military, against autocratic power.
\n\nAnother war was possible—and it still is today. If the consequences of our failure to abolish capitalism at the turn of the century were two decades of butchery, economic crisis, ecological disaster, and fascist reaction, think what will ensue if we fail to rise to the challenge this time. History didn’t have to turn out the way it did in 2001—and it doesn’t have to continue down that road now. This book remains timely because it tells part of a story that you have to finish.
\n\nThere are many ways to participate in these struggles. Physically fighting fascists and police officers is only one of a wide range of tactics, and it is hardly the most important. From the author of this book, you can learn what some of those who came before you tried and what you might be able to do yourself. We—the survivors of the previous round—will be fighting alongside you.
\n\nIf we don’t speed it on its way, capitalism will take another century or more to collapse. It will sweep us into wars like nothing we have seen before. The resulting catastrophe will bury all of us in the wreckage.
\n\nLet’s fight together for a better future. Another war is possible.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/01/2.jpg\")
“Across centuries of darkness, we can already see from here—the sun on the horizon of a new dawn.”
\nThe following is our description of the book Another War Is Possible, which appears on its back cover.
\n\nAt the turn of the century, the movement against capitalist globalization exploded onto the world stage with mass mobilizations in Québec City, Washington, Genoa, and other cities. Anarchists faced off against heads of state, captains of industry, and riot police by the thousands. While the authorities sought to bend all living things to the profit imperative, anarchists set out to demonstrate a way of fighting that could open the road to a future beyond capitalism. The twenty-first century was up for grabs. And every time, Tomas Rothaus was there, fighting on the front line.
\n\nIn Another War Is Possible, we follow Tomas from his days as a young militant to his tenure editing the publication Barricada. In vivid prose, he recounts the lessons he learned from veterans of the Spanish CNT—his first experience trading blows with police in the streets of Paris—his adventures slipping across borders to participate in epoch-making riots. With Tomas, we breathe tear gas, we tear down fences, we tour the squats and battlefields of three continents.
\n\nAlong the way, Tomas shows that the tragedies of the twenty-first century were not inevitable—that another war was possible. His testimony is proof that another world remains possible today.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2025/04/18/the-vanguard-of-fantasy-a-poster-in-homage-to-up-against-the-wall-motherfucker", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2025/04/18/the-vanguard-of-fantasy-a-poster-in-homage-to-up-against-the-wall-motherfucker", "title": "The Vanguard of Fantasy : A Poster in Homage to Up Against the Wall Motherfucker", "summary": "We've prepared a poster in homage to Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, the self-styled “street gang with an analysis” active in the 1960s.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/18/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/18/header.jpg", "date_published": "2025-04-18T22:58:25Z", "date_modified": "2025-06-13T17:55:42Z", "tags": [ "columbia university" ], "content_html": "We’ve prepared a poster in homage to Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, the self-styled “street gang with an analysis” active in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the late 1960s. Up Against the Wall Motherfucker gained notoriety participating in the occupation of Columbia University in 1968; they were instrumental in introducing anarchist politics into the hippie counterculture and resistance to the Vietnam War, emphasizing the importance of affinity groups and direct action. The text is taken directly from an Up Against the Wall Motherfucker broadside.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/18/fantastic-demands_front.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the poster.
\nOur utopia is an environment that works so well we can run wild in it.
\n\nUntil our most fantastic demands are met, fantasy will be at war with society. Society attempts to suppress fantasy, but fantasy springs up again and again, infecting the youth, waging urban guerrilla warfare, sabotaging the smooth functioning of bureaucracies, waylaying the typist on her way to the water-cooler, kidnapping the executive between office and home, creeping into the bedrooms of respectable families, hiding in the chambers of high office, gradually tightening its control, eventually emerging into the streets, waging pitched battles and winning (its victory is inevitable).
\n\nWe are the vanguard of fantasy.
\n\nWhere we live is liberated territory in which fantasy moves about freely at all hours of the day, from which it mounts its attacks on occupied territory.
\n\nEach day bring new areas under our control.
\n\nEach day a new victory is reported.
\n\nEach day fantasy discovers new forms of organization.
\n\nEach day it further consolidates its control, has less to fear, can afford to spend more time in self-discovery.
\n\nEven in the midst of battles, it plans the cities of the future.
\n\nWe are full of optimism.
\n\nWe are the future.
\n\nIn a time of escalating repression and desperation, it is bracing to revisit the avowed optimism of our revolutionary forebears. This optimism concerns not just whether it is possible to win, but what would constitute victory and who stands to benefit.
\n\nFantasy—the imaginative excess that escapes the confines of prevailing reality—is common to all human beings. The most repressed and conservative individual could ruthlessly suppress his tendency to daydream while awake, but nonetheless, every night, when he closes his eyes to sleep, he will dream uncontrollably.
\n\nTo side with fantasy is to side with the suppressed creativity within every human being against everything that is constraining about our institutions, everything that is suffocating about our rituals and routines. It means fighting on behalf of all against everything we do to limit ourselves and each other.
\n\nFantasy represents sensitivity to possibility itself. Anarchists aspire to create conditions in which all creatures are able can fulfill their potential on their own terms. This entails abolishing the boundaries between the excluded and the included, the subordination of what is called “wild” to what is called “civilized,” the subordination of the physical to the mental and the body to the mind.
\n\nIf fascists have gained the upper hand in our society for now, it is precisely because they have been so successful in subjugating fantasy, channeling it towards their narrow-minded pursuit of coercive power rather than letting it run wild and free. Fantasy can serve oppressors when it is caged and yoked to machinery of domination—but fantasy, liberated, liberates all in turn.
\n\nThe original version of this text appears in two different forms. The collection Black Mask & Up Against the Wall Motherfucker: the incomplete works of Ron Hahne, Ben Morea, and the Black Mask Group presents it with two frames of an image of a primate, whereas page 46 of this collection includes three frames and an additional phrase:
\n\nTo put thought underground… so that wildness can come above ground.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/18/1.jpg\")
\nThe more complete version bears the letters “ESSO” in the lower left, with a hand-drawn circle around them, standing for the East Side Service Organization. Sometimes known as the East Side Survival Organization, this was the business front that UAW/MF established to receive donations with which to support the hippie runaways and others who were living precariously on the streets of lower Manhattan in the mid-1960s.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/18/2.jpg\")
\nThose who want to learn more about Up Against the Wall Motherfucker can read Full Circle: A Life in Rebellion, a memoir by prominent participant Ben Morea, just released by Detritus Books this spring.
\n\nYou can consult Ben’s Instagram page to see some of his artwork. His now-defunct blog is archived here.
\n\nEvery year, like many other people, we observe April 15 as Steal Something from Work Day. This year, April 15 finds a new cast of authoritarians in control of the United States government, recklessly overhauling it to spread terror and fill their pockets. But this will not put an end to workplace theft. On the contrary, it only intensifies the factors that give rise to it.
\n\nConsequently, this year, in hopes of promoting good behavior, we celebrate “Robin Hood employees”—those who steal from their workplaces in order to share with others.
\n\nEvery year, employers rip off their employees to the tune of $50 billion in wage theft—and then the government swoops in to collect taxes, which are disproportionately put towards purposes that tend to benefit employers more than employees.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/14/3.jpg\")
Through the eyes of loss prevention, we are all just obstacles to profit.
\nAll this was true before Donald Trump returned to the White House determined to loot everything in sight. Now, as Elon Musk guts every government program that doesn’t benefit him personally while setting his sights on lucrative state contracts, it is laughable to pretend that capitalism is anything other than highway robbery. Forget insider trading—at this point, the entire United States government and the economy it presides over are the equivalent of a Trump-owned casino in which the house always wins.
\n\nMeanwhile, Silicon Valley has been hard at work coming up with new ways to rip off ordinary human beings. Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence, for example, functions by plagiarizing human creative activity—with the intent of making human authors superfluous. This is just the latest innovation in the longstanding field of profiting on others’ labor.
\n\nMind you, it has always been true that—like the Large Language Models—every individual human being benefits immeasurably from the effort and innovations of the countless human beings who preceded them. As Peter Kropotkin wrote in The Conquest of Bread,
\n\n\n\n\nThere is not even a thought, or an invention, which is not common property, born of the past and the present. Thousands of inventors, known and unknown, who have died in poverty, have co-operated in the invention of each of these machines… every new invention is a synthesis, the resultant of innumerable inventions which have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry.
\n\nScience and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle—all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present.
\n\nBy what right then can anyone whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say—This is mine, not yours?
\n
The solution is not to figure out a system via which every single person who has ever done something that someone else later benefitted from can be paid precisely in proportion to their labor. Most of those people are long dead, and any system for appraising and compensating them for the value of their contributions would be hopelessly arbitrary. The point is that the system of attribution and intellectual property itself has always existed in order to serve a small number of beneficiaries at everyone else’s expense. Rather than quixotically trying to make the system fair, it would be easier to abolish the various forms of gatekeeping that impose artificial scarcity in the first place.
\n\nIf that’s not something we can do on the scale of society as a whole yet, we can take immediate, concrete steps to redistribute wealth in our workplaces whenever our oppressors are not watching.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/14/1.jpg\")
Steal Something from Work Day: Discouraging retail security consultants from hiring employees since at least 2012.
\nA few months into the COVID-19 pandemic, a Home Depot employee was arrested after allegedly admitting that she had been permitting customers to take commodities from the store without paying. Because she had not accepted money for the goods herself, there was no way to ascertain the value of the items that had reached people thanks to her.
\n\nLet’s put this in context. It was a time of tremendous financial uncertainty; the first stimulus checks had gone out, but $1200 per taxpayer (or just $500 per child) is hardly enough to sustain anyone through months of unemployment. It was a time of tremendous danger; the first vaccines against COVID-19 were more than six months away, and by the time they were available, hundreds of thousands of people had died. From the safety of their homes, middle-class people were hypocritically celebrating “essential workers” at precisely the moment that those workers were being treated as expendable. Rather than the working class, one could speak simply of the endangered class.
\n\nIn these conditions, it’s no exaggeration to say that the Home Depot employee was risking her life as well as her freedom to ensure that people got access to the resources they needed regardless of whether they could afford to pay for them.
\n\nThe news report about this courageous employee appeared on May 29, 2020, a day after protesters burned down the Third Precinct in Minneapolis in retaliation for the gruesome and senseless murder of George Floyd. If the mass resignations of the pandemic era can be read as an expression of anti-work sentiment, we should also understand this lone employee’s risk-tolerant generosity as a part of the George Floyd revolt.
\n\nThe band Godspeed You! Black Emperor once described this as “slow rioting”: repudiating the premises of capitalism, even in the heart of conquered territory. When an employee does this on the job by refusing to charge for essentials, we might call it retailiation.
\n\nIn an article about the upstanding Home Depot employee for Loss Prevention Magazine, the publication of choice for security guards, the author acknowledged that most human beings are more inclined to foster equality than to abide by rules that arbitrarily benefit some people over others:
\n\n\n\n\nJames Fowler, a political scientist at University of California at San Diego, tested if there were such a thing as a “Robin Hood Impulse.” He tested 120 participants to determine if they were inclined to take from the rich to give to the poor, finding that humans’ “taste for equality” is a driving reason why we cooperate with one another. In his money experiment, he discovered that over 70% of participants at some point would take from the richest players and donate to the poorest players, in an attempt to equalize the income among all participants. Fowler’s team said that even players whose own money had been lost in previous rounds of play were willing to redistribute the money in an egalitarian manner.
\n
For most human beings, this is something to be proud of—evidence that our species has a deep-seated capacity for empathy and solidarity. For security guards and other mercenaries, however, it is a problem to be solved.
\n\nThe author asserts that so-called “Robin Hood” employees are often among the best workers at an establishment:
\n\n\n\n\nIn today’s world, we’re seeing everyday “Robin Hoods” in the actions of trusted retail employees. The same people who work overtime, through the snow and rain, and during a global pandemic to serve retail customers are becoming “social bandits” like Robin Hood. We are seeing signs that many of these essential and dedicated employees are taking sides in situations they feel are more moral than practical.
\n
The Loss Prevention article goes on to point out that Robin Hood employees can inflict losses on a corporation much more efficiently than ordinary shoplifters or employees who only steal for their own benefit. In other words, when it comes to redistributing wealth, the most effective approach is not to take things for yourself, but to share them with everyone.
\n\nYou, too, can be a Robin Hood at work.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/14/2.jpg\")
A diagram in Loss Prevention Magazine alleging that “in one hour, a Robin Hood employee can generate a massive amount of shrinkage vs. more traditional forms of theft/fraud.”
\nIn a society founded on violence and theft, in which violence and theft are becoming more and more pervasive, we need a new ethical framework to evaluate them.
\n\nIn the case of violence, when violence is everywhere and being “non-violent” is often little more than an alibi for doing nothing to interrupt the violence that is already taking place, it is of little use to appraise the value of a given action according to whether it is violent or not. We might do better to ask a more interesting and instructive question: does the action in question reinforce existing power disparities, or counteract them?
\n\nLikewise, in a world in which laws are profoundly biased in favor of the owning class, the judiciary is increasingly subservient to autocrats, and top-down theft is par for the course, it is absurd to fixate on the question of whether a given action constitutes theft as if that were sufficient to reveal its ethical value. We might ask, instead—how does a given theft distribute power? Does it reinforce existing power disparities, or counteract them?
\n\nWorkplace Theft in the Age of “Essential” and “Remote” Labor
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/14/4.jpg\")
\n This account picks up where our previous article about the Anti-Deportation Collective left off, chronicling scenes from the movement against deportations in Paris in the late 1990s.
\n\nAs Donald Trump attempts to put $45 billion towards expanding the gulag system of immigrant detention in the United States, it is crucial to learn how people in other countries have resisted state violence against undocumented people in the recent past.
\n\nThis true story is adapted from the forthcoming memoir Another War Is Possible, a narrative from within the global movement against fascism and capitalism at the turn of the century. You can follow the author here.
\n\n\n\n\nThe Collectif Anti-Expulsions (Anti-Deportation Collective) was explicit that our support for the sans-papiers was intrinsically linked to our anarchist principles. We emphasized that our interests were linked to theirs in our desire for the abolition of states and borders, for the end of capitalist labor exploitation, for the freedom and autonomy of human beings. At the same time, we worked hand in hand with the collectives of sans-papiers that were largely autonomous of party or NGO structures and who were most welcoming of solidarity in the form of direct action.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/09/3.jpg\")
\nThe Ibis hotel at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport is about what you would expect of a two- or three-star airport satellite hotel. Drab exterior and unspectacular office-style architecture on the outside, sullen-looking businessmen and stereotypical stressed-out families with 2.3 children running around the lobby on the inside. The lobby is the one and only particularity. It’s a ground-floor-only structure with a flat roof that connects the significantly taller buildings where the hotel rooms are located.
\n\nWhat makes this particular hotel unique is inside one of those towers. And what is inside it is the reason why two hundred people are about to storm through the main doors, access one of the towers (with the assistance of a comrade who has entered incognito to hold open a strategically important access door), rush up a flight of stairs, smash a window, and take control of the rooftop over the lobby.
\n\nWhat makes this particular hotel unique is a testament to the mundane and banal nature of oppression in consumer capitalist society. In this hotel, side by side with the hustle and bustle of the businessmen and the joy of the vacationing white European families, is the despair of other human beings who are being held here against their will.
\n\nAn entire wing of this Ibis hotel is a prison, where people without documents (sans-papiers) are held before their definitive deportation on an Air Afrique or Air France plane. It is a prison made possible by the collaboration of the Accor hotel group with the French state’s deportation machinery.
\n\nAs we pour out onto the first-floor rooftop through the busted-out window, a few comrades unfurl a large banner reading “Stop Deportations!” and hang it over the front of the building, covering the Ibis logo, to the loud cheers of the few dozen supporters who remain outside the building. Sophie and I manage to clamber out onto the roof—and there, we make an important discovery. The prison, or “temporary detention center” as the supposedly human-rights-conscious socialist government prefers to refer to it, is apparently on the same floor, just opposite from where we entered onto the roof! We can make out shadows through the windows of people throwing peace signs. We can see them banging on the windows.
\n\nOur reaction is visceral and instinctive. Fifteen or twenty of us break into a run toward the other side. We’ve barely reached the windows—the first kicks and elbows are flying against them—when we hear people yelling, “Stop! Stop!” They are from the action group that planned this action. “I know what you’re thinking, but it probably won’t work, and most importantly, the immigrants themselves asked us not to do it.” What we are thinking is, obviously… prison break! There are still no cops here to speak of, so what would it take to pull the plug on the largely symbolic action and flee here while giving cover to whoever wanted to use the chance to escape? If they were to succeed, then the action would be an all-around success anyway. Accor publicly shamed, the detention center breached, some individuals given another concrete chance at freedom.
\n\nThe action group from our collective, the Collectif Anti-Expulsions, has been in touch with a collective that is in contact with these detainees. “We explained to them that the chances of a successful escape are low,” they explain. Sadly, this is objectively true, since we are outside the city and at an airport of all places. There is only one train in, as well as a few buses and a highway, which makes it almost impossible to escape as a mob. “They know that if they try to escape and fail, they’ll be subjected to penalties; it will allow for a legal extension of their detention time, and it’ll possibly earn them a ban from the French territory. They said they’d rather take their chances with the passengers on the plane.”
\n\nI take an uncharacteristically deep breath and quietly process my feelings of anger, frustration, and sadness. The point isn’t lost on me, and there’s a good chance they’re not wrong. My comrade is referring to the strategy of appealing to passenger solidarity in order to get deportees taken off the planes, a tool we have often used successfully to prevent deportations and run out the clock on a person’s detainment.1 But that doesn’t make it feel any less frustrating.
\n\nOther comrades, though, are less introverted than I am, and a shouting match breaks out. “What the fuck is this shit? This isn’t supposed to be a lobby group! We’re standing in front of the windows of a fucking unguarded prison and you’re telling me I shouldn’t touch them because some people I don’t know and who I’ve never spoken to are against it? What kind of process is that? You think this is autonomy? If I wanted to be told what to do without being asked my opinion about it, I would have joined a party or become a cop.”
\n\nThe comrade speaking, Alice, is one of the classic totos among us. Toto is the either loving or derogatory francophone shorthand for anarchist autonomes. To put it mildly, she and the affinity group around her are not fans of delegation or of tempering messaging or tactics to account for optics or appease others.
\n\n“If they don’t want to escape through the open windows, nobody is going to force them, but I don’t see what that has to do with me breaking them or not,” she spits out, before turning furiously and walking away. The tension between collective members subsides for the rest of the day, but it’s indicative of a growing strategic rift inside the group.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/09/1.jpg\")
Graffiti in Paris outside an Ibis Hotel, reading “Accor collaborates to deport the undocumented. Let’s attack Ibis, Mercure…” It is signed CAE for Collectif Anti-Expulsions (Anti-Deportation Collective).
\nThe middle-aged man leaning through the shattered window and trying to interact with us is a walking, living stereotype of a French detective. Flannel shirt over a notable beer belly, light-brown suede jacket, balding, and a prominent mustache. He is missing the obligatory aviator glasses that would complete the look, but I guess sunglasses might be a bit much since it is past 4 pm on a cloudy and rainy afternoon in the dead of Parisian winter—in other words, basically night.
\n\nAnd indeed, regardless of his unconvincing promises that there will be no arrests if we leave soon and peacefully, we’re about ready to make our exit. We’ve been on this roof for a few hours now, and since the initial excitement of being out here (and yelling at each other) wore off, we’ve spent the last few hours milling around and chatting in the freezing cold. The monotony was only broken when some comrades arrived with drinks and sandwiches, which they tossed up to us. There is no further practical or symbolic objective to be attained by our continued presence in the rain on this windswept roof.
\n\nThe only way off the roof is through the same broken window we used to get onto it in the first place. It’s barely wide enough to fit one person at a time, so any kind of concerted mass attempt to get out of here is completely off the table. Worryingly, as we peer our heads through the window to look down the hotel corridor, we see that quite the welcoming committee is waiting for us. The hall is packed on both sides with a veritable gauntlet of riot cops. We confer among ourselves, determined not to let them split us up, intending to protect each other against targeted arrests. We quickly agree that we’ll all enter the corridor through the window and begin massing there, in order to then head down the corridor and stairs as a compact group.
\n\nAs the first brave souls climb through the window and into the cop-filled hallway, it becomes clear that the cops have something else in mind. They begin to push and shove people, trying to muscle them down the hallway and toward the stairs. Preferring to stick to the original plan, our comrades meet the baton swings with kicks and blows. Those of us who remain on the roof hesitate, unsure whether it’s best to use the threat of our continued presence here as leverage—to this day, I have no idea how they would have evacuated us from there if we had decided to stay indefinitely—or if we should hurry to get as many people into the hallway as possible to defend our comrades.
\n\nSomebody yells at the mustached detective cop that if he doesn’t get the other cops to back off and allow everybody into the hallway, we’ll all stay on the roof. Incredibly, the move works and the cops retreat partially, allowing all of us to get into the hallway, together and untouched. We begin heading down the stairway, once more flanked by riot cops. As most of us reach the ground floor and begin exiting the building, I hear shouting and immediately feel a football-stadium-like avalanche of people pushing from behind. We pour out into the street in a disorganized blob.
\n\n“They started hitting us with batons from behind and arresting people in the middle of the stairs.” It’s Sophie, who was one of the last people off the roof.
\n\nIn the middle of nowhere, with cops everywhere, it’s clear there is nothing more to be done here. As we hastily head to the train station, somebody proposes the usual idea, “We should go to the police station until they release them.” A woman speaks up. It’s Alice, the toto from the argument at the beginning of the occupation. “Yes, we could go to the police station and beg for their release. Or we could pay a visit to some of the other Ibises in the city until they beg us to stop, as a way to force the police to release our comrades.”
\n\nWith that, the remaining hundred of us head into the city under cover of night, minutes later erupting into the first of the evening’s three Ibis hotels, where a masked crew of ten corners a frightened-looking concierge.
\n\n“Get on the fucking phone and call your boss. Now. Tell him this isn’t going to stop until our comrades are freed without charges.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/09/2.jpg\")
\nWe’re in the heat of battle in the midst of the annual NATO summit. A black bloc of about a thousand people, mainly from Germany and France, has fought intense battles with the police all day. The bloc has just fought the cops back off of a railway overpass, and we now have an endless arsenal of rocks from the tracks at our disposal. The clearly overwhelmed cops retreat under the ferocity of the attack. Fifteen thousand robocops have been assigned to protect this summit, with the goal of rendering militant resistance impossible. For the second day in a row, they are failing spectacularly.
\n\nAs we advance into the Port du Rhin neighborhood, revolutionaries join local residents in looting a pharmacy, then set it aflame. The day before, local immigrant youths guided black bloc activists around the neighborhood as they erected barricades, fought running battles with the riot cops, and attacked a military jeep. In turn, black bloc’ers aided local youths in prying open the gates of a police storage space where seized scooters were stored, returning them to the community.
\n\nWe have now arrived at the border; only a river stands between us and Germany. German riot cops line the other end of the bridge, and the bloc is content with building barricades to prevent them from crossing while lobbing the occasional stone in their direction. I walk back from the front line for a well-deserved break and take in the scene behind us.
\n\nThe first thing I notice is the now-abandoned border police station, completely ablaze. Schengen has rendered this border obsolete—at least for a time—but the symbolic value of a burning border crossing is enormous.
\n\nNot far behind the border crossing, flames are starting to emerge from a five-story building. Just a few minutes earlier, a hundred black-clad militants ransacked the lobby and turned the furniture into flaming barricades in the street. It’s a sign that our movement does not easily forget and a reminder that collaboration does not pay. Strasbourg’s Ibis hotel is engulfed in flames.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/09/6.jpg\")
The burnt husk of Strasbourg’s Ibis hotel—a consequence of the corporation profiting on the kidnapping and deportation of immigrants.
\n\n\n\nIf the Ibis hotel had to burn, it was not as an act of senseless destruction, but a concrete protest against the Accor brand (which owns, among others, the Ibis chain) and its complicity in the deportation of “illegal” immigrants through the rental of its rooms to the State as a last “housing” location for immigrants before their deportation.
\n
\n\n\n-Antifascist Left International, “Riots, Destruction, and Senseless Violence,” Göttingen, Germany, April 2009
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/09/5.jpg\")
The cover of the Antifascistische Link International’s text “Riots, Destruction, and Senseless Violence,” with the inscription “Offensive. Militant. Successful.”
\nAt that time, the French state could only hold undocumented immigrants for a period of ten days, at the end of which, if they had not yet been deported, they had to be released again until their eventual date of deportation. ↩
\nThis May Day, gather in defiance of tyranny and oppression. Gather to create communities based in solidarity and mutual aid. Gather with everyone who wants a better life. Gather to honor those who fought before us. Gather to show that another world is possible.
\n\nAs May Day 2025 approaches, we face an increasingly grim situation. Donald Trump and his lackeys are restructuring the state, redirecting even more resources towards repression and filling their pockets along the way. They are already deporting students on the basis of their political views and they have made it clear that they intend to escalate to deporting US citizens as well. All the while, the ecological damage, climate disasters, wars, and genocides that were already in progress are only intensifying.
\n\nWhile some are laying low, hoping that the tide will turn, that is a terrible mistake. How far this nightmare can go will be determined by what people do now to build movements of resistance. The more time passes, the firmer Trump’s grip on the institutions will be, and the better positioned he will be to expand and intensify repression. Even if Trump’s ill-thought-out policies alone suffice to turn the majority of the population against him, that will not answer the question of how to push him out of power—he has already shown that he will not leave office willingly. It also will not ensure that what comes after will be any better. Remember, we ended up in this situation because of the catastrophic reign of the Biden administration.
\n\nThere’s no way around it: we have to build powerful grassroots movements through which to defend each other and popularize a radical analysis of what we are up against.
\n\nMay Day offers a perfect occasion for this. For nearly a century and a half, anarchists and other revolutionaries have observed it as a day of celebration and resistance. Tapping into this longstanding tradition offers many reference points for what we can do right now.
\n\nWherever you are, you can do something for May Day. Better yet, organize a week of events, including education, mutual aid, arts and entertainment, and a march or demonstration.
\n\nWe’ve prepared a poster design to support you in organizing and promoting events in your community.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/04/08/4.gif\")
Click on the image to download the poster.
\nMost of the suggestions that follow here are things you can do with two dozen people. Organizing doesn’t have to involve massive numbers to be worthwhile. Even in movements that do involve massive numbers, the best way to ensure that they will be resilient and effective is to make sure that people are in the habit of talking, making decisions, and taking action in small groups so as to maximize the agency of the participants.
\n\nIn Washington, DC, an ad-hoc group is calling for an occupation of the National Mall:
\n\n\n\n\nOur strategy is to establish a 24/7, legal, non-violent demonstration on the National Mall, calling on Congress to take the only logical step in this crisis: impeach and remove Donald Trump.
\n
You can follow their announcements here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/04/08/2.jpg\")
\nElsewhere around the country from Seattle and Eugene to Minneapolis, Bloomington, and Providence, longstanding groups are planning events. People in Aberdeen, Washington are planning a whole day of activities the preceding weekend just to get things started.
\n\nBut don’t leave everything to them. If anything really exciting is going to happen, it’s up to you.
\n\nSpring is in the air; it’s a good time to make new connections. Even if you are already organizing in a tight-knit community of anarchists, this is a chance to reach out to people you don’t know yet. Invite them to events! Talk to them about their concerns! Propose ideas for what you could do together!
\n\nEven if you are completely isolated and cannot organize events with other humans, you can order stickers from Municipal Adhesives—and, sure, from us as well—and bring the bus stops and electrical boxes of your neighborhood to life. Pocket a paint marker and add “ICE” to every stop sign in your county. Cut a stencil design into the bottom of a thick paper shopping bag and walk around your neighborhood with a can of spray paint in the bag, leaving a little trail of messages everywhere you go. If you are not a gifted artist, Municipal Adhesives mails out stencils, too. Download and print posters, make wheatpaste or obtain wallpaper paste, and go out putting postering. You could do all of these things even if you are the only sentient life form within a hundred miles.
\n\nOn the other hand, if you are not the only sentient life form within a hundred miles, you could also print or order some zines and set up a literature table at a punk show, a campus, a farmer’s market, or, failing all else, at that bus stop where you put up your first sticker.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/04/08/1.jpg\")
\nFor May Day, you could organize a reading group around a text engaging with the history of May Day. You could host a presentation on anarchism, or on the history of resistance in your local community. You could call for a discussion connecting one of those themes to the various attacks that the Trump administration is currently carrying out, with an eye to strategizing a response.
\n\nYou could also announce a gathering in a public location at which people read aloud the final statements of the Haymarket martyrs—the ones whose sacrifice for the labor movement gave rise to May Day as we know it today. Likewise, you could read one of the speeches of lifelong anarchist organizer Lucy Parsons, whose husband was among the murdered.
\n\nAs the Trump administration smashes and loots the infrastructure of state-sponsored education, it is important to be building up our own educational models in their place.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/04/04/08/3.jpg\")
\nYou could call for an assembly bringing together different people affected by or working on an issue such as ICE deportations or environmental damage, at which to coordinate resistance.
\n\nEven if the administration has not targeted your local community yet, you should do this now, in order to be prepared. For example, you could come up with a plan and get all the resources in place to respond as soon as they take a given action.
\n\nThe May Day parade is a time-honored tradition, especially in places like Minneapolis. If there is already something like that happening near you, great—all you have to do is organize a contingent for it. But if there is not a May Day parade in your area, that is also great—it means that you can organize one according to your own preferences.
\n\nDon’t neglect to prepare banners, giant puppets, or other artistic elements. In 2017, anarchists in Portland made giant spiders for their May Day parade.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/05/03/header.jpg\")
The spiders of mutual aid, solidarity, and direct action: May Day in Portland, 2017.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/05/03/10.jpg\")
How to make spiders of your own!
\nFor later in the evening—or over the weekend—you could book a benefit show featuring local bands. For extra credit, you could host a show in a subversive location, such as under an overpass or in an abandoned warehouse.
\n\nEnd the night with a dance party!
\n\nFor the occasion, you could host a Really Really Free Market, a potluck, or a work day at a community garden or social center.
\n\nAll of this will be of little use if we can’t also go on the attack. Limiting ourselves to attempting to manage the details of our survival in a non-hierarchical way while the state inflicts brutal violence on more and more people means accepting defeat in advance. We should respond to their offensives, but it is crucial that we pick the time and place of our own.
\n\nThus far, the one solid example of this is the Tesla protests, which have opened up a new front of conflict, distracting the attention of Elon Musk and Donald Trump and laying bare their vulnerabilities. But there are many other ways to take the fight to our oppressors—recall the ICE occupations of 2018.
\n\nIdentify a target and call for a protest or some other form of action there. If there is no obvious target available, you could still organize a public demonstration for the purposes of getting people used to moving together and engaging in collective expression, however symbolic. A smaller group of people preserving the element of surprise could also take action, sending up a signal flare to let others know that they are not alone in their rage.
\n\nRemember, at any demonstration that could be subject to repression, leave your phone at home and dress to preserve your anonymity.
\n\nYou can find more resources about taking action here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/weare/weare2_b.jpg\")
\n Massive liberal organizations are promoting protests around the country here. The following events have a more grassroots character; the majority of them are organized by anarchists or involve anarchist contingents.
\n\nYou can consult a list of May Day events around Brazil here and fully forty-four events around Germany here.
\n\nIn the following account, the author recounts scenes from the movement against deportations in Paris in the late 1990s. As Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their lackeys scapegoat the undocumented and kidnap immigrants who oppose genocide even when they hold green cards, it is a good time to study how people have resisted the violence of the state in other times and places.
\n\nThis is adapted from the forthcoming memoir Another War Is Possible, narrating experiences from the global movement against fascism and capitalism at the turn of the century.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/26/1.jpg\")
\nIt’s early evening and Sophie and I are sitting in the long-distance-train waiting area of Paris’s Gare de Lyon, one of Europe’s busiest train stations. All around us are travelers scurrying to and fro. Stressed-out tourist families, a camera still flung around Dad’s neck, rushing their kids through the station mix with tired-looking businessmen waiting to get back home.
\n\n“You did a great job with your outfit,” she says to me as she looks me over from head to toe. I met Sophie at an action (or demonstration, or concert, or something of the sort) about a year ago, and we have been inseparable at political events since. She is my age, a student at Paris’s Lycée Autogéré (Self-Managed High School),1 and if I didn’t know very well the context in which she’s making this comment, I might think she’s flirting with me.
\n\n“You’re looking pretty good yourself,” I respond in kind.
\n\nShe has managed to transform herself into the spitting image of your perfectly forgettable average French teenage girl. Basically, she looks like a younger Sporty Spice in her Adidas tracksuit and sneakers. I, on the other hand, have gone with a significantly preppier look: khaki pants, polo shirt, nondescript jacket, and moccasins. She looks at me again, pauses, and slightly withdraws her compliment: “It’s not the most functional wardrobe, though. The khakis stand out and the moccasins probably aren’t great for running.”
\n\nI shrug. “I did what I could. I was mainly concerned with getting this far.”
\n\nWhile we are sitting among the tourists and businessmen, doing our best to look like a somewhat mismatched young teenage couple waiting for a train back to their city, we are in fact not travelers, and the correct term for our attire is not outfit but disguise. We are not here to take a train, but to stop one. A train that transports imprisoned human beings against their will every single night. The 21:03 to Marseille, otherwise known to us as the deportation train.
\n\nOur objective is to stop the Paris-to-Marseille overnight train, which the French National Railway Company, better known for its French initials SNCF, permits the French government to use to transport North African immigrants, usually of Algerian or Moroccan origin, by rail to Marseille. Once in the port city, they are expelled from French territory by boat. The attempt to block this train is an idea born of the Collectif Anti-Expulsions (Anti-Deportation Collective), and it was decided that if we were to have any chance of success, we should disguise ourselves as best as possible and infiltrate the station in small groups, since trying to march in there as a demonstration probably wouldn’t get us very far.
\n\nThe CAE, officially formed only a few weeks earlier in early April 1998, was an autonomous collective born in the heat of the movement of the sans-papiers of the mid-’90s, a French term meaning “without papers” that refers to the movement against the deportation of undocumented immigrants and in favor of their “legalization.” The collective’s broadly accepted guiding principles2 were as simple as they were clearly steeped in anarchist modes of organization, thought, and action:
\n\nThe plight of the sans-papiers had exploded into the public consciousness following a series of highly publicized church occupations in 1996 by undocumented immigrants themselves. This culminated on August 23, 1996 in a raid in which nearly two thousand police officers stormed the Saint-Bernard church, resulting in the detention of 210 undocumented immigrants.
\n\nAfter that, solidarity demonstrations with the sans-papiers in Paris regularly numbered in the tens of thousands, with the participants—and their demands and methods of action—representing the broad spectrum of the French center left and radical left. This included the Communist Party and the CGT union, but likewise the sizable anarchist blocs of the CNT, Anarchist Federation, Alternative Libertaire, SCALP, and everything in between. Importantly, the sans-papiers themselves were organized into several collectives and structures; they were active and leading participants in their own struggles. As with all communities, they were not a monolith. Within the sans-papiers organizations, one could find a similarly broad spectrum of ideas and strategies in regards to demands, objectives, and methods of action.
\n\nWhile the sans-papiers organizations, regardless of their politics, were limited in their methodology by the logical constraints of their situation—the fact that an arrest or identity control could quickly lead to a possible deportation with devastating, even deadly, potential consequences—the reformist organizations were unsurprisingly bound by the constraints of their respect for legality and their acceptance of the basic premises of states and borders and the idea that a human being should in some way or another be bound by the possession of a particular piece of paper, or lack thereof, based on their place of birth.
\n\nOr, even more absurdly, as is the case in France, their bloodline.
\n\nWe anarchists, on the other hand, had no such constraints. Our solidarity with what were clearly some of the most oppressed and marginalized groups in society—workers, people of color, many of them women, escaping from what were some of the most horrendous conflicts in the world at that time—was immediate and instinctive. But through our position of unconditional solidarity with the sans-papiers and the assertion that in the world we are fighting for, no human will ever be illegal and freedom of movement will be for people and not just for commodities, we articulated a position of necessary rupture with the concepts of states and borders. If our demands could not be granted by the state and our objective could not be realized within the framework of its existence, then it naturally followed that we would not look to the state to grant those things.
\n\nConsequently, we were embarking on a concrete struggle to prevent deportations and make it possible for people to live where they chose and how they chose. The same stance toward the state applied in this struggle as in our abstract analysis: the state was our enemy, and we were determined to wage war against it within the appropriate context of the time and situation we found ourselves in, in hopes of preventing it from carrying out its objectives. The greater our success, hand in hand with those sans-papiers who were open to our solidarity and methods, the greater our collective power would grow as a movement and the greater the degree of agency, autonomy, and freedom we would be able to realize.
\n\nWe were not making demands, but seeking to force concessions and create realities. Concretely, that meant that deportations are for stopping. To do so, we would attack the state’s machinery of deportation, its infrastructure, and the enterprises that collaborated with it and benefited economically from assisting with the hunting, caging, and expelling of human beings.
\n\nWe did so out of solidarity, out of conviction, but also with the explicit understanding that despite our privileges and different realities, our struggle was the same as theirs. In fighting alongside the sans-papiers, as accomplices rather than allies, we were also fighting for ourselves:
\n\n\n\n\n“Their situation makes us all more precarious in labor relations, the repression and control developed against them will affect us eventually as well, the hardening of borders is also a barrier to our freedom of movement, because we are also foreigners to this world and we will be pushed further and further into clandestinity (by choice but also by necessity if we are to live our desires) by the constant evolution of the law and the states.”3
\n
So there we are, sitting under the elegant industrial-era steel and glass roof so typical of venerable European train stations—a fittingly dramatic setting for the impending confrontation. We are waiting anxiously for the moment when an unknown number of cops will appear, escorting what I expect will be a handcuffed individual through the hall, at which point we are to spring into action and form a human chain to prevent them from loading him onto the train. Failing that, we are to do everything we can to prevent the train from departing. We are not pacifists, and while there is a general consensus that our side will avoid unnecessary escalations, there is an equally clear agreement that the priority is not optics, but accomplishing a concrete and tangible objective.
\n\nNonetheless, I’m anxious about our chances of success. “Do you see any familiar-looking faces?” I ask worriedly. I’m scanning the hall as best I can and I don’t like what I see.
\n\n“No, I can’t even see Alan or Mary. I wonder if they made it in.” Mary is another Lycée Autogéré student and Sophie’s best friend, while Alan is slightly older and the token cliché-looking punk—complete with mohawk and faux leather jacket—in our little youth affinity group.
\n\nNot one of us is old enough to be a legal adult, yet the four of us already have a fair amount of experience getting into trouble with the state. We met at a Comité d’Action Lycéen (CAL, or “High School Action Committee”) meeting, a place that can only be described as a breeding ground for high-school-age anarchists.
\n\nWe’re young, fanatical, and unencumbered by wage slavery enough to enjoy ample free time, which we use to be regulars at every demonstration, action, occupation, political squat, concert, debate, and confrontation within the greater Paris area. When we’re not doing that, we’re spending our nights together drinking, getting stoned, and listening to Ska-P’s “El vals del obrero” in the catacombs under the streets of Paris. Or at least the others are—myself, I’ve discovered Sergei Nechayev’s Catechism of the Revolutionist and concluded that my mind and body are weapons for revolutionary struggle, so I should keep them free of drugs and alcohol. This makes me lots of fun at parties.
\n\nStill, no matter how combative we may be, no matter how sharp I keep my proverbial weapons, if there are only twenty of us when the cops show up, this is probably not going to go well. “Fucking unions,” Sophie mutters under her breath. “What are they good for if they can’t even bring out fifty people for something like this?” Her complaint is directed at SUD, short for Solidaire, Unitaire, Démocratique (“In Solidarity, United, Democratic”), a small leftist union born in the aftermath of the 1995 general strike, whose railway branch had promised to mobilize for this action.
\n\nI shrug. “Who knows, it’s not like we know what they look like. Maybe it’ll work out.”
\n\nI’m trying to be positive, because this is the route we have chosen; if we’re at the ball, we might as well dance. It doesn’t seem like there are many alternatives available, anyway. A couple of weeks earlier, we were able to occupy the tracks, successfully delaying the train for a few hours. The cops eventually cleared the tracks via a liberal use of batons and CS gas, and when we returned a few days later, we found an army of police guarding the tracks.
\n\n“Look, look, right there!” Sophie points to one of the entrances to the hall, her voice trembling with a mix of excitement and anger. I’m just spotting what she is pointing at, a young man probably in his twenties being led by an escort of seven or eight cops, when immediately my concerns about our numbers today are erased. From every corner of the hall comes a loud burst of disapproving whistling, followed immediately by what seems like the entire crowded hall erupting in thunderous chants of “Non, non, non… aux expulsions!” amplified and rendered even more urgent by the echoes generated by the closed space in which we find ourselves.
\n\nThe first few people rise from their seats, sprint over to where the line of CRS riot police are guarding access to the platform and the train, and link arms. A few more join them. Then dozens more. Friends and comrades appear from everywhere among the crowd. The chants declaring that no human being is illegal ring loud and constant as we too join the human chain. There are hundreds of us! There are so many of us that we form two lines across the opening to the platform—one facing the cops who were already stationed there to prevent us from attempting to get access to the tracks, and another facing back toward the hall, preventing the cops who are escorting a captive from reaching the train. Sophie and I find ourselves in the first of those two lines.
\n\nThe next few minutes pass in an adrenaline-fueled blur. The sight of the person we are trying to protect from deportation right in front of us illustrates poignantly what is at stake, and the disconcerted looks of his police escort only embolden us. Clearly, they aren’t sure whether to push through or abort.
\n\nThe police are familiar with resistance to deportations. We regularly show up at airports, informing passengers as well as airline workers about what is happening on their flights and what their employers are making them unwilling accomplices to, urging passengers to refuse to fly on flights that are simultaneously prisoner transports. We have had varying degrees of success. We’ve tried to disrupt and prevent deportations too, as we did a few weeks earlier at this same spot.
\n\nBut we’ve never done this.
\n\nAt least, never by the hundreds, never with the palpable feeling that we might actually succeed. I think the cops sense that, too.
\n\nThe next scene is of an extreme and almost intimate violence. Clearly, the order has been given to clear access to the train. CS gas and batons fly all around us. We are not armed. We have no flagpoles, no helmets, not even the cloth of a banner to protect ourselves with. Masks cover our faces while linked arms keep us together, but this leaves us practically defenseless against the baton blows. With neither word nor warning, the riot cop directly to my right pulls out a metal retractable baton from the inside pocket of his jacket, and in one swift motion he extends it and brings it down with a thud against the head of a comrade next to me. I hear the crack and immediately see blood gushing from the wound at the top of his forehead. His arms go limp, and the best I can do is kind of release my arm, which I have linked around his, and push him backward as he slumps, so that he falls toward the line of comrades facing the station and not at the feet of these unhinged cops.
\n\nBefore I can assess the wisdom of this course of action, I am already instinctively launching a kick at the stomach of the cop who has injured my neighbor. This cop has been sneering at us since we stood up, waiting for his moment to injure a “gauchiste de merde,” the French for “piece-of-shit leftist,” which is exactly what nationalists and fascists like to call us in Argentina, as well. Sophie yells for me to get back, but her voice barely registers on my radar. Comrades break the line to carry away the injured friend just as I broke ranks with my kick. Still others, blinded or unable to breathe due to the CS gas, also break ranks and retreat.
\n\nThe young Algerian is forced onto the train. The following week’s edition of Le Monde Libertaire, the weekly newspaper of the francophone Anarchist Federation, later reported4 that the train
\n\n\n\n\n“departed with a delay of thirty minutes. […] The train would stop several kilometers farther, in Melun, waiting for another train transporting approximately half of its original passengers.”
\n
The missing passengers had been unable to board due to the clashes between demonstrators and police.
\n\n\n\n\n“The train was again stopped at the Lyon-Perrache station around 2:30 am by activists there, but not before having made an unscheduled stop at L’Estaque station to disembark the prisoners and place them in the detention center at Arenc, as the cops were concerned about the possible actions of further demonstrators in Marseille.”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/26/3.jpg\")
\nThere are still two clearly defined fronts inside the waiting area. We are standing on one side, now about twenty meters or so away from the trains.
\n\nA small group of people start to leave—about twenty people, all wearing high-visibility vests. They are the SUD railway trade unionists, who had shown up to the action after all, but decided that with the departure of the train, their participation was over.
\n\nThe rest of us still number solidly in the hundreds. In the grand scheme of things, that’s nothing. It’s poor attendance even at a third-division football match, barely enough people to fill a subway car. Even a strictly anarchist demonstration in Paris could number into the thousands. But in my eyes at that moment, these people are the whole world. Who cares about numbers, optics, or the opinion of sheep? I feel at home among these two hundred who have put their bodies behind the conviction that no human being is illegal, who have shown with their actions that the state and its agents are to be confronted head-on.
\n\nRather two hundred ultra-leftists, adventurists, extremists, or whatever else they may call us than two thousand who will stand idly by because party or union discipline says now is not the moment and this is not the way—or twenty thousand who will march down the street with us proclaiming that no human being is illegal, only to placidly continue with their day while others are dragged, often drugged and bound, to prisoner transports. I’m grateful for the participation of the sympathizer, the unionist, the party member, the reformist. I understand we need them to exert political pressure. But I feel now that my place is with the militants and the fighters, no matter the numbers.
\n\nIn front of us is a wall of riot cops, now too far to reach us with their gas and truncheons. The idea of police as the armed guards that enforce the dictatorship of capital through the state-sanctioned monopoly of violence gave way to a much more urgent feeling—a burning hatred of those who hurt my friends in order to perpetrate injustice. Whoever wears that uniform is the immediate means of our oppression and therefore my enemy.
\n\nSomebody has come back from another track with a backpack full of stones. As the chants against deportation continue to roar, a few dozen of us attack the cops. There’s sadness and frustration still, because we failed, but there is also joy. There is a feeling of collective refusal and liberation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/26/2.jpg\")
\nAs we finally make our retreat from the station, smashing security cameras, advertisement panels, and automated ticket counters along the way, I am already thinking about the young Algerian whose deportation we were trying to stop. Tonight wasn’t about making an abstract political statement against deportations. It wasn’t a militant yet still symbolic action against the machinery of expulsion and the barbarism that categorizes human beings based on where they happen to have been born. The objective was to stop the kidnapping of a specific human being. And while there is still some distant hope that comrades farther down the line, in Lyon or in Marseille, might still succeed, we, at least, have failed, and my mind is already focused on how I, or we collectively, can do more.
\n\nDespite my concerns that we didn’t do enough, the very next day, I am confronted with the press and the good citizens of Paris howling that we did too much. I pick up a newspaper on the way to school and find articles pontificating about the extremists at the train station, outraged at the disorder, condemning the supposed outbreak of violence. Too much disorder, too much violence—words coming from exasperated good citizens of Paris as they walk past me at the very same train station and see the smashed ticket-vending machines. The constant hand-wringing about “the extreme left, emboldened, becoming increasingly aggressive, violent, and dangerous” has only intensified since the election of the socialist and communist center-left government coalition.
\n\nWhat was damaged? As I make my way through the station, I take note of the “damage.” The only damage to the station is to the machines that hinder our freedom of movement and convert the need to get from one place to another into an economic consideration. To the advertising panels that pollute public space and turn any place where the human eye might rest its gaze into propaganda for the constant consumption of goods we don’t need. And finally, to the increasingly ubiquitous security cameras, ensuring that anyone who rejects this system of consumption and control can be more efficiently surveilled and criminalized.
\n\nWhat precious order did we disrupt? If the order they are referring to is this superficial peace and tranquility that has nothing to do with justice, then the problem is not that we were violent or disorderly but that we effectively disrupted the orderly procedures of oppression. The order of those who prefer the continuation of oppression as long as they can turn a blind eye to it—or worse, celebrate it in the name of nationalism or racism—to the turbulence of the struggle to end it.
\n\nViolence? We threw some stones, probably injured nobody. The injured were on our side, those who faced the armed forces of the state with not much more than our bodies and the occasional flying object. What is a few smashed ticketing machines and advertisements compared to the violence we witnessed? The violence that takes place constantly, unceasingly, in every immigrant neighborhood swept by kidnappers working for the state—during every ticket control in the subway that triggers a domino effect that ends in deportation—on flights leaving constantly with prisoners, often drugged and handcuffed, transported as human cargo against their will.
\n\nIn regards to the life of this man, I don’t intend to shock or traumatize with speculations about what his fate might be, what his circumstances were, whether he was torn from a family, a partner, a project, his dreams. It doesn’t matter. I assert his freedom to live as he chooses and where he chooses because my anarchism demands this as a minimum condition of human dignity and a rejection of the system of states and borders that I seek to destroy. This violence, this war on individuals in the name of states and nations, is the only relevant violence here, the violence that is carried out in the defense of oppression.
\n\nIt is a machine of violence built to protect and perpetuate the system of exploitation and human suffering that pits human against human in a needless struggle for survival. A machine that has colonized the minds of people to such an extent that they can only recognize violence at the point of impact—the fist striking a face, the rock striking the policeman’s shield—and only when it interrupts the order that ordinarily inflicts it.
\n\nThis renders invisible the ceaseless unspeakable violence that flows from the system of nations, capital, and class society: death due to lack of access to health care, famine and hunger created by artificial scarcity, workplace accidents and deaths caused by the drive to skimp on safety measures in order to maximize profits, endless religious and nationalist wars. Immigrants drown in the seas around Fortress Europe or die of dehydration in the heat of the Arizona desert in desperate attempts to escape poverty and improve their lives. This systemic violence, the violence of oppression, barely even registers to most as such.
\n\nI make my way through the city, still lost in my thoughts as I exit the subway into the largely immigrant neighborhood where the CNT offices are. Two cops are parked outside the subway, nonchalantly checking people’s identification at random. “Papers, please.” The normality of everyday violence.
\n\nFaced with this reality, who cares about legality? Who cares about popular opinion? When there were few of us and we occupied the tracks, our action was completely peaceful. Yet the mercenaries of the state came and beat us without hesitation in order to achieve its objectives. Although they were able to accomplish this in a relatively “orderly” manner, due to our small numbers and tactical avoidance of violence, was that not the victory of an immeasurably greater violence? Would a greater violence on our end, for the purposes of liberation, not be justified? In what thought process does it follow that nonviolence represents the moral high ground, when adherence to nonviolence makes the perpetuation of human suffering and oppression possible?
\n\nThere is a moment that I will never forget from the day we were beaten off the tracks a few weeks prior to the story I have recounted.
\n\nI can barely see him through the glass, his complexion and the reflection of the station lights against the train’s windows making it difficult to distinguish his features and facial expressions. Two cops are moving him through the train, one holding each arm behind him, his hands cuffed together in front. Suddenly, as they pass an open window we can clearly see as he turns to us. He lifts his hands and displays a victory sign with each, as he mouths “thank you” to us. There is sadness, dignity, and gratitude in his face. I don’t know anything about him, who he is, where he is from, what brought him here, what he is being sent back to. But I know that violence—life-changing and potentially fatal violence—is not taking place in the delaying of the train. Violence is what is being done to him inside it.
\n\nIt’s not that we are too violent, but exactly the opposite. If we don’t employ the full arsenal of our capacity for collective revolutionary action, to be a force against the system of control that oppresses all of us, are we not as complicit as those who see it but choose to turn away?
\n\nWhat we are doing is not too much.
\n\nIt’s not nearly enough.
\n\nParis’s Lycée Autogéré (Self-Managed High School) is an experimental public school founded in 1982 that “places students in a condition of autonomy, encouraging them to resolve challenges themselves, in a collective manner if they so choose.” Academically, the school rejects grades, while structurally, its day-to-day operations are decided on collectively by teachers, students, and staff in a directly democratic fashion, principally through working groups and assemblies. Unsurprisingly, the school has steadily provided new and young blood into the anarchist and antiauthoritarian movement, and just as unsurprisingly, it was a target of a fascist attack in 2018. The high school’s website (in French) can be found here. ↩
\n“Lutter auprès des sans-papiers: Histoire du CAE Paris,” Courant Alternatif, February 1, 2006, http://oclibertaire.free.fr/spip.php?article115; translation by the author. ↩
\n“Un bilan critique du Collectif Anti-Expulsions d’Ile-de-France,” Cette Semaine, no. 85 (August–September 2002), https://cettesemaine.info/cs85/cs85cae.html; translation by the author. ↩
\nJacques, “Étrangers expulsés, étrangers assasssinés!,” Le Monde Libertaire, no. 1123 (May 14–20, 1998), available at https://ml.ficedl.info/spip.php?article3761; translation by the author. ↩
\nFaced with intensifying repression and state violence, there is an understandable inclination to seek safety by avoiding confrontation. But this is not always the most effective strategy.
\n\n\n\n\n“Counterintuitive though it is, in a confusing situation, often the best, if not safest, place to be is the front lines, so you can get a clear visual grasp of what is going on around you.”
\n\n-“What I Do for a Living,” an account from the demonstrations against the 2003 European Union summit in Thessaloniki, published in Rolling Thunder #1.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/01/28/8.jpg\")
\nMy friend’s grandfather grew up in Germany in the 1920s. Being Jewish, he got involved in radical organizations and sometimes engaged in physical altercations with Nazis. In a memoir that he recorded for his family decades later, he describes the situation when the Nazis took power:
\n\n\n\n\n“In January 1933, Hitler became chancellor. I thought we would now start a revolution, but actually nothing happened. The communists defected—often en masse—to the Nazis and the social democrats held out a little longer but ultimately dissolved their organizations.”
\n
In May 1933, when he was twenty years old, he learned that he was about to be prosecuted for having broken a Nazi’s nose in a street brawl. Rather than face trial in a judicial system controlled by Nazis, he immediately obtained a passport and boarded a train for Holland that same night at 8 pm.
\n\nSome years later, the rest of his family died in the concentration camp in Auschwitz.
\n\nThis story succinctly illustrates a surprisingly common phenomenon. Had my friend’s grandfather not participated in open confrontations with Nazis from the very beginning, had he kept his head down and avoided trouble, he probably would have remained in Berlin and met the same fate as his relatives. By taking the offensive, he put himself in harm’s way—but paradoxically, in the long run, that worked out better than playing it safe.
\n\nLikewise, participants in the guerrilla underground of the Jewish resistance were among the only ones to survive the Nazis’ annihilation of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. In organizing to meet the Nazi threat head on, they developed a robust relationship to their agency, and this served them well when the only way out was to organize a daring escape from the besieged and burning ghetto through the sewer system.
\n\nFor members of targeted groups, the initial impulse is often to withdraw, to go into hiding. Yet when it comes to both individual and collective self-preservation, it can be wiser to act assertively at the beginning, while it is still possible to influence the course of events. Even if this goes badly, it can be better to bring the conflict to a head immediately, before one’s adversary becomes more powerful. If nothing else, this strategy has the virtue of making it impossible to lull oneself into a false sense of security while the threat increases.
\n\nIt doesn’t always work out this way, but sometimes, it’s safer in the front.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/01/28/9.jpg\")
“There’s no reason to sleep curled up and bent. It’s not comfortable, it’s not good for you, and it doesn’t protect you from danger. If you’re worried about an attack, you should stay awake or sleep lightly with limbs unfurled for action.” Artwork by Jenny Holzer.
\nIt was noon on April 20, 2001. My comrades and I had assembled alongside hundreds of other anarchists and anti-capitalists at Laval University in Québec City to march on a transcontinental summit intended to establish a “Free Trade Area of the Americas.” In the center of town, behind miles of protective fencing and thousands of riot police, George W. Bush and his fellow heads of state were plotting to override labor laws and environmental protections to enrich their patrons at our expense.
\n\nThe sun was shining. More and more people were arriving at the departure point. One group even rolled up a catapult. The police were nowhere to be seen.
\n\nStill, I was anxious. Most of my experience of violence was subcultural—fighting skinheads, hardcore shows. I’d never taken on an army of police before. At a meeting the preceding evening, a local organizer had told us that it would be impossible to reach the fence around the summit—there were just too many cops with too much armor and weaponry.
\n\nAs the crowd began to make its way out of the university towards the street, I consulted with a more experienced comrade. “Should we hang back and see what happens?” I asked.
\n\n“If we want to be able to see what’s happening, we’ll have to be in the front,” he answered, matter-of-factly.
\n\nWe marched directly to the fence surrounding the summit and tore it down. The police could not stop us. The “Free Trade Area of the Americas” was never ratified.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/01/28/1.jpg\")
Anarchists marching on the so-called “Summit of the Americas” in Québec City, April 2001.
\nMy friend’s advice served me well four years later, on the day that George W. Bush began his second term. That night, following the daytime march against the inaugural ceremonies, a second march surged through the neighborhood of Adams Morgan, smashing banks and corporate businesses and attacking a police substation. Some participants dropped an enormous banner across a building façade reading “From DC to Iraq—with occupation comes resistance.” We were attempting to compel the Bush regime to end the occupation of Iraq, which inflicted countless civilian casualties and later contributed to the catastrophic rise of the Islamic State.
\n\nAs the march dispersed, a comrade and I found ourselves among a number of people walking through an alley. Ahead of us, police officers appeared at the exit.
\n\nWe could have turned around and run the other direction. But then we would have been at the back of the crowd, unable to see what we were running towards. “Run, run forward,” I said to my companion. We were already running.
\n\nWe dashed past the cops just as they closed their line across the mouth of the alley. “Don’t let any more of them out,” I heard one bark to another.
\n\nWe were the last ones to escape. The police had blocked the alley from the other side, as well. They forced the people behind us to kneel in the snow for hours. Years later, the detainees won a settlement from the city, but it was better to get away.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/01/28/2.jpg\")
Washington, DC, January 20, 2005.
\nOn August 25, 2008, in Denver, during the demonstrations against the Democratic National Convention, a couple hundred people gathered for a march that had been announced but never organized. We were still protesting against the ongoing occupation of Iraq and against capitalism in general.
\n\nArmored police were positioned in groups of a dozen each all around the park and the surrounding streets, outnumbering the young people sitting around with black sweatshirts in their laps. A vehicle was supposed to deliver banners, but a rumor reached us that police had detained the driver. Yet just when it seemed certain that nothing was going to happen, a few young folks pulled up their hoods and began chanting.
\n\nWho are these people? I recall wondering. What are they thinking, masking up and linking arms with hundreds of riot police surrounding them and undercovers at their elbows? What can they hope to accomplish?
\n\nNonetheless, the other people who had gathered for the march regrouped with them and they began marching out of the park. They only made it as far as the road, where the nearest squadron of police formed a line blocking their path and showered them with pepper spray. No protest had occurred yet, I had heard no dispersal order, and already the police were using chemical weapons.
\n\nA comrade and I watched all this with dismay. There were still about two hundred of us, but the police were closing in from all sides and the crowd was disoriented and uncoordinated. It was a recipe for disaster.
\n\nWe were at the back of the crowd. But the back can become the front—it’s just a question of initiative. My comrade began shouting out a countdown. Others joined in, instinctively. Counting together concentrated our attention, our expectations, our sense of ourselves as a collective force capable of concerted action. And then thirty of us were sprinting over the grass away from the police line.
\n\nSeeing this, the rest of the crowd fell in behind. In a few seconds, hundreds of people were running across the park to the intersection at the far side of the lawn, where police had not gathered yet.
\n\nNow the energy in the air was electric, in contrast to the malaise and uncertainty of a moment earlier. We passed through the intersection, into which some enterprising young people pulled a municipal sign reading “Road Closed”—and suddenly, we were approaching the business district.
\n\nThe same principle served us well later in the evening when we saw a line of riot police fanning out across an intersection a block ahead. Without pausing to confer, my comrade and I bolted towards them. We reached the line of police and dodged between them before they could block our path. They had orders to create a barrier, not to chase us. We were safe.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/01/28/3.jpg\")
Denver, August 25, 2008.
\nOn the morning of January 20, 2017, another comrade and I joined the march in downtown Washington, DC opposing the inauguration of Donald Trump. In the decades that had passed since Bush’s second inauguration, police all around the country had militarized, receiving bigger and bigger budgets even as politicians claimed there was no money available for anything else. This time, the streets were crowded with 28,000 law enforcement personnel.
\n\nThere was open conflict with the police as soon as the march got underway. The wail of police sirens, the deafening explosions of flash-bang grenades at close quarters, the acrid scent of pepper spray, the roar of police motorcycles, the sizzle of adrenaline—it was a terrifying situation, but the demonstrators around us were giving as good as they were getting. The idea was to set a template for resistance on the first day of the Trump administration, sending the message to everyone that no one should passively accept the intensification of tyranny.
\n\nThe longer we were in the streets, the more dangerous it got. When we passed Franklin Square again, doubling back on our tracks, it was clear that it was only a matter of time before we were surrounded.
\n\nIn downtown DC, between the intersections, the streets are like long stretches of canyon between the cliff faces of the buildings. I knew the police wanted to box us in and kettle us. Every time we passed through an intersection, I glanced at the intersections a block away on either side to see if police were shadowing us on the parallel streets, preparing to cut off our exit routes. Every time we moved out of an intersection into another stretch of canyon, I watched the intersections ahead and behind for police. Whenever we were moving between intersections, we were vulnerable.
\n\nAs we approached 13th Street, police on motorcycles passed us on the sidewalk on our left, attempting to overtake us and seize the intersection ahead. We were still hundreds of feet from it. I urged my companion to run ahead with me, and we sprinted past front of the march, past the bike cops and motorcycle cops, who began ramming their vehicles into the people immediately behind us. When the cops saw that a few of us were already at their backs, they gave up trying to form a line and once again focused on racing ahead of us. Police hate to be outflanked—they can’t risk being surrounded themselves.
\n\nThe clash at the intersection showed that the march was no longer in control of the territory around it. It was time to make our exit. We ran down an alley on our right shortly before the next intersection. A hundred others did the same. Those who continued forward were blocked by a line of police at the next intersection, and turned around only to discover a much stronger police line blocking them from behind.
\n\nFor two long minutes, the crowd paused in confusion and dismay. Some people towards the back of the march had already taken off their gear and were hoping to pass as civilians in order to make their way out of the area, not realizing that they were already trapped from all sides.
\n\nThe participants at the front of the march kept their gear on and linked arms. Someone called out “We’re going to do a countdown!” They counted down quickly from ten to one and charged directly at the police line ahead of them. The person at the very front of the charge held open a flimsy umbrella as they all ran blindly forward. Somehow, the umbrella protected them from the answering stream of pepper spray.
\n\nFifty of them broke through the police line and escaped. The ones who lingered, waiting to see whether the charge would break through before joining it, remained trapped in the kettle.
\n\nSomeone later posted a humorous comment on social media to the effect that the cheat code for the J20 Protest Simulator was to be always running at the cops holding a hammer. But there was something to it. Afterwards, watching police footage released to defendants in the subsequent court case, we saw that even after the police and National Guardsmen had tightened up their line, one enterprising individual had escaped simply by sprinting as fast as possible directly at them and ducking between two of them.
\n\nEveryone who was detained was charged with eight felonies apiece—up to eighty years in prison—for the crime of being mass-arrested in the vicinity of a rowdy march. A few took plea deals, but everyone else stuck together, establishing a collective defense plan and confronting the legal system head on. In the end, after two trials at which all the defendants were declared not guilty, all of the remaining defendants saw their charges dropped. Years later, all of them received payouts from the state to settle the resulting lawsuits.
\n\nIt sounds like a metaphor, but I mean it literally as well as figuratively. Whether it’s a march or a court case, sometimes it’s safer in the front.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/01/28/6.jpg\")
Washington, DC, January 20, 2017.
\nSeveral years later, I was in Atlanta for the Block Cop City mobilization. Protesters had been trying to stop the construction of a multi-million-dollar facility to further militarize the police. In retaliation, the police had murdered one person and arrested a large number of people at random, charging them with terrorism and indicting sixty-one of them on trumped-up racketeering charges.
\n\nBefore the action proper, there were two days of deliberations at a local Quaker community center. Everyone was on edge. The goal was to try to march into the forest and occupy the construction site. Would we all be arrested? Would we, too, be charged with terrorism and racketeering? The discussions went in circles as people fruitlessly attempted to predict what would happen and negotiated their own risk tolerance.
\n\nIt was decided that there would be three self-organized blocs within the march: essentially, the front, the middle, and the back. Officially, this distinction was not based on anticipated risk, because the organizers could make no promises about what the police would do. But no one was able to consider which bloc to join without panning back to larger questions. How much do I fear the violence of the police and the judicial system? What am I prepared to sacrifice for this movement?
\n\nOnly the bold few who had made peace with their fears and committed to taking the front of the march seemed at ease. Even within the “middle” bloc, there was a lot of agonizing and bargaining going on. “I’ll be in the middle, but not at the front of the middle…”
\n\nThat night, I explained to my family what to do if I didn’t come home from the demonstration. Both of my romantic partners, independently of each other, asked me whether it was really that important for me to participate in this particular march. Couldn’t I just leave it to the younger activists?
\n\nIt’s safer in the front. I remembered this saying from earlier mobilizations—but thinking it over, I wasn’t so sure. How could it be safer to charge directly into police lines? The slogan distilled lessons drawn on my own experience, but heading into yet another dangerous situation, I was dubious.
\n\nOn the morning of the mobilization, we assembled at the park. Despite a few festive flourishes, the atmosphere was somber: a few hundred people risking injury, arrest, and prison time for the honor of an embattled movement. Many people had decided to stay home at the last minute. We marched out of the park in a column, everyone assiduously sticking to their particular position in the risk tolerance spectrum. As long as we were marching down the narrow pedestrian walkway, this made sense, but it made less sense when we emerged onto the main road and advanced towards the construction site. We should have fanned out to present a broad front as we approached the lines of police and armored vehicles blocking the road, but no, the crowd stretched out into what was almost single-file line, like lambs lining up for slaughter.
\n\nNonetheless, the ones at the front picked up speed, forming a V-shaped wedge with their reinforced banners and pointing their umbrellas forward to block the cops’ view as they charged directly into the shields of the skirmish line. The rest of us dragged along behind, holding the positions we had committed to holding—no less, and no more.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/01/28/7.jpg\")
People assembling to begin the Block Cop City march, November 13, 2023.
\nThe people with the reinforced banners pushed the first line of cops back until it was reinforced by a second line. Even then, they didn’t relent; they kept on pushing forward against the police. The cops lashed out with their batons, but went on losing ground. The bloc at the front of the march stuck together, protecting each other, acting deliberately. Maybe they were afraid, but it wasn’t fear that was determining their actions.
\n\nLooking on from behind them, I was terrified. I was grateful I wasn’t in the front, having to make decisions. Police batons are scary, jail time is scary, felony charges are scary, but the truly frightening thing is responsibility. People will accept a lot of negative consequences in their lives just to avoid responsibility. And unfortunately, it’s impossible: try as we might, there is no avoiding the fact that as long as we are able to make decisions and take action, we are responsible for ourselves. That is true whether you position yourself at the front or at the back, or even if you don’t show up at all.
\n\nI watched the front-liners ahead of me push both lines of police back until they reached a third line comprised of futuristic stormtroopers. No sign of the stormtroopers’ humanity was discernible beneath their military gear; not even their eyes were visible. They had withdrawn themselves from the human community completely.
\n\nThe stormtroopers pulled out tear gas canisters. I watched in disbelief as they tossed the canisters one after another over the heads of the ones at the front into the middle of the march—into the midst of those of us who had hoped that others would run risks on our behalf, who had intended simply to be an appendage of others’ agency. Perhaps it would have been safer in the front, after all?
\n\nThen everything vanished in a poisonous white haze.
\n\nWe staggered blindly back in disarray, choking and coughing. But the stormtroopers had gassed the rest of the cops, as well, and the other cops were not wearing gas masks. They, too, had retreated. Against all odds, the battle concluded in a draw.
\n\nIn the end, the only person who was arrested that entire day was someone who had opted to play a support role far from the site of the action. They were detained in a vehicle near the park from which we had set out. No one was charged with terrorism or racketeering.
\n\nIn all our anxiety, we had forgotten the greatest risk of all: that we might do nothing, that we would let ourselves be cowed into abandoning the streets. With so many people already facing outlandish charges, marching on the construction site was a risky proposition—but permitting the state to crush the movement would have set a precedent that would threaten other movements, emboldening the authorities to use the same tactics elsewhere against many others like us.
\n\nSometimes you can only find out what the risks are by taking a chance. This time, we had gotten lucky. But in a way, we had also passed a test.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/01/28/5.jpg\")
Anarchists at the May Day demonstration in Bandung, 2019. Photograph by Frans Ari Prasetyo.
\nIt’s not really safer in the front. Staying home is safer—at least, it’s safer until the long-term consequences of abandoning the streets set in. Then nowhere is safe, and it turns out it would have been better to take some smaller risks earlier on.
\n\nThe anti-fascists who went to Charlottesville in August 2017 to confront the “Unite the Right” rally were putting themselves in harm’s way. One of them was killed; several of them were severely injured. But if they had stayed home, if they had permitted fascists to establish control of the streets, the whole world would have become more dangerous. The likelihood that we may be forced to fight that same battle all over again today does not diminish the fact that they won us eight precious years of relative safety.
\n\nEven when all really is hopelessly lost, it is generally better to act boldly, sending a signal flare of hope across the generations, the way the Communards and the Kronstadt rebels did. In so doing, you at least preserve the possibility that others will be inspired to continue attempting to build the world you desire, so that one day, your dream might be realized—even if without you, at least due in part to your efforts.
\n\nBut that’s not where we are today. We face powerful adversaries, but the majority of people, including many of their supporters, have good reason to oppose them alongside us. If we bring people together, if we demonstrate effective ways to fight back, putting our own risk tolerance at the disposal of larger struggles, many more people will eventually join us. There’s no reason to hasten into glorifying martyrdom or accepting defeat when the future is unwritten.
\n\nNot everyone can be in the front all the time, of course. It can be exhausting. But the front isn’t a spatial location. Understood properly, it doesn’t necessarily require a particular kind of physical ability or skillset. It’s a way of engaging with events, of remaining focused on our agency, taking the initiative wherever we can rather than just reacting to our opponents’ initiatives. Everyone can open up a new front of struggle by identifying a vulnerability in the ruling order and going on the offensive. The more fronts there are, the safer we all will be.
\n\nFacing the second administration of Donald Trump, many anarchists and anti-fascists don’t know where to begin. During the previous Trump administration, we fought hard against an adversary that was much more powerful than us, and won—only to find victory snatched from our hands by cowardly Democrats, who eagerly took over where the Republicans left off, disappointing so many people that Trump was able to return to power. But that is no reason to give up, this time around—it just shows that all along, we were right about the nature of power, and we owe it to the world to demonstrate a real alternative.
\n\nIn countries ruled by fascism or other forms of despotism, the majority of people do not necessarily support the authorities; they have simply become dispirited, accustomed to passivity. Much more so than liberals, anarchists are used to being outnumbered and outgunned, to fighting against incredible odds. While Democrats make excuses for the fascists or even embrace their agenda, we should demonstrate that it is possible to take ambitious, principled action to resist.
\n\nIf you feel despair, if you feel defeated, if you catch yourself dissociating or focusing on what our oppressors are doing rather than on what you can do yourself—that is territory that the enemy has claimed within you.
\n\nGive them nothing without a fight. Stay focused on your agency. Every hour, every day, wherever you are positioned, there is always something you can do. Take care of yourself and those around you. Keep your eyes out for opportunities and seize them. We are in a fight—but it is a fight that we can win. It’s safer in the front.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/01/28/4.jpg\")
The umbrella charge on January 20, 2017.
\nFive years in the making, this hour-long film documents the uprising that swept Chile from October 2019 to March 2020, showing how everyday people sustained six months of rebellion by creating extensive networks of self-determination and mutual aid.
\n\nThis is an inspiring portrayal of the tactics that gave demonstrators control of the streets, the organizing strategies that enabled the movement to act effectively while remaining leaderless, and the importance of time and space in revolt. It is also a cautionary tale about how the government used the promise of a new constitutional process to recover enough legitimacy to regain control. It chronicles a high point of action in a struggle that continues today.
\n\nOctober 2019 in Santiago, Chile. The president has called in the armed forces against the people for the first time since the country transitioned from dictatorship to democracy.
\n\n“Wait, I don’t get it. The advertisements are untouched. There’s not even graffiti. Not a single window is broken.”
\n\n“Yes. And?”
\n\n“I mean, the shelves are all empty. Did they just evacuate all the merchandise, or was it actually looted?”
\n\n“Haha what? Of course it was looted, the whole neighborhood looted it. Well, women and children first.”
\n\n“And no one destroyed anything?”
\n\n“Look, the idea isn’t to give them a bigger insurance check. Besides, if things keep going the way they are, that building may soon be ours.”
\n\n“That would be a serious step. I can’t imagine things ever reaching this point where I come from. Good luck with your struggle.”
\n\n“No! No, no, no, brother—our struggle. You’re here. You’re in this. Tell people.”
\n\n“I don’t even know how I’d explain this to anyone back home.”
\n\n“Explain it like this: neoliberalism was born in Chile, and here it will die.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/5.jpg\")
The basic argument of Fell in Love With Fire on a flier: “Hop the gate of the anti-life of paying to live, living to pay.”
\nOn October 17, 2019, Chile’s student movement was on its heels, facing new legislation that put police in schools for the very first time. With the students’ normal organizing environment swept out of their control, the movement launched a campaign against a routine increase in public transit fare. With a right-wing billionaire in the presidency, the prospects for resistance looked dim.
\n\nEverything changed in a single day. On October 18, a small rush-hour protest at a metro transfer station triggered a stoppage of Santiago’s entire public transit system. As commuters were stuck in hot traffic, images of police beating students began to circulate on their phones.
\n\nSantiago exploded. In one weekend, over a hundred metro stations were attacked, with ten completely destroyed. A quarter of the Wal-Marts (the largest grocery chain) in Chile were looted or burned. The government declared martial law in response to civil disturbance for the first time since the 1973-1990 Pinochet military dictatorship—but the people would not back down.
\n\nChile graffiti reel, 2019-2020.
\nWe decided to take a break from our country after I finally beat criminal charges resulting from participating in combative political activity. We had just crossed the border out of Ecuador when we heard reports about an uprising there. Peasants were marching on the capitol, choking off the highways to force the president to reverse proposed austerity measures.
\n\nYou said, “We should go back.”
\n\nI said, “If it were Chile…”
\n\nJust two weeks later, it was.
\n\nI’m not from Chile, but I lived there for years.
\n\nWe arrived in Santiago a week before everything exploded, and almost immediately encountered an evasión [a collective fare-dodging action] that students were staging. It was your first time in Chile, and I was excited for you to get a small taste of student rebellion. And, hey, getting where we were going quicker without having to pay the second highest transit fare in Latin America?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/9.jpg\")
Evasion, 2019.
\nOK. But the best part was how fun it was. It was so fun that the following day, when we heard the shriek of students rushing down the escalators towards the turnstiles, that we ditched our free bus ride and rushed into the station. As if we had just scored the winning goal, the teenage rebels thrilled, chanting “If you don’t jump, you’re a cop!” as we hopped through the turnstiles they had liberated. We kept evading whenever we encountered fare-dodging actions that week, even if we didn’t really need a metro ride.
\n\nOn October 18, I was supposed to give a talk at some friends’ anarchist ateneo [social center]. You were out on the town while I was back at my old apartment preparing. You WhatsApp’d me some videos of kids wilding out in the metro station. Was it really Los Heroes [a metro station]?1 You were at the center of history? God damn. I just YeahYeahYeah’d you because I had seen Chilean riots before. “Oh I’m glad you got to see that. We have to get ready to leave though.”
\n\nYou—somehow—got back to my old apartment where we were staying. Knowing what I know now, I don’t even understand how you got there in time. But you were always good at finding me in the streets over the coming months, even when things got chaotic. What should have been a 45-minute commute to the ateneo took two and a half hours. Time can be elastic in Chile, sure, but it really shouldn’t take that long.
\n\nSomehow, we got there. No one else did, though. Over the months that followed, the coolest people I met flattered me with, “Oh, I was going to come to your talk that day! But then, well…”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/8.jpg\")
The CrimethInc. presentation in Villa Francia on October 18, 2019.
\nAs we waited for an audience, I saw two ten-year-olds walking down the middle of the street with a children’s couch the size of a playpen.
\n\n“There’s no way they’re gonna do what I think they’re gonna do to that couch, right?”
\n\nThey did. Right onto the fire at the end of the block. We started to piece it together: what you had seen, no one at the event, the heavy traffic, this flaming barricade. Santiago was going off.
\n\nWe crossed downtown to our friend’s apartment, closer to the action, but it turned out the action was everywhere. The husk of a bus. Smoldering buildings. At one point, our cab driver wasn’t sure what to do because the intersection had cops on one side and fighting encapuchados [masked heroes] on the other.
\n\nI was still YeahYeahYeah-ing your wide eyes when I left the following day, despite all my friends’ insistence that this was something special. When I got to the anarchist book fair in Buenos Aires—to give my talk again—the whole book fair was cancelled. They managed to get through a couple of the time slots, but everyone was talking about Chile. Looking at their phones. Cheering for our team whenever we struck a blow and expressing outrage every time there was news about repression. It didn’t take long for the organizers to pack it all in and just open up the social center so the whole book fair could simply watch the news from Chile.
\n\nMy friend, one of the organizers, walked over to me while I was wide-eyeing the events on the television. He whispered to me, “Dude, why the fuck did you leave?”
\n\nThe third time I tried to give my ill-fated talk, it was in the middle of the revolt, both temporally and territorially. Some anarchists had opened up a squat in one of the looted and abandoned businesses right by the main protest plaza. Enough people said they still wanted to see my talk—even though I didn’t understand why they would be interested in anything other than what was going on around us—that I decided to organize a presentation at the squat. Plus, I loved the space and wanted to keep it active. During talks there, one would regularly hear the uproar of revolt just outside the door, although we occasionally had to tuck our heads into our knees and wait out the wafting clouds of teargas.
\n\nNobody came. The host had been optimistic, but after waiting a couple of hours, he informed me that the legendary 1970s Basque punk band, La Polla Records, was playing in a stadium that day.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/10.jpg\")
Fifty years of punk rock in the middle of an insurrection: “No rest, no peace!”
\n“I don’t really like punk rock, so I didn’t mind opening up the space for you. But I guess everyone’s there.”
\n\nBut I do like punk rock. So I grabbed my loosies and hopped on my bike.
\n\nAlmost ten years ago now, five punks died in Santiago when bouncers violently beat back a rush of poor punks who were trying to get into a show where the British crust band Doom was playing. Wanting to avoid a similar situation—or simply intimidated by the uncontrollable, pay for nothing, fight for everything spirit that was consuming Chile—the security at the stadium would simply allow you to walk in without a ticket. I even took my bicycle in.
\n\nInside the stadium, 15,000 punks were letting their hair down. Out in the plaza, every sector of the oppressed was present, and while we gave the cops our worst, we tried to be on our best behavior with each other because survival depended on our collective bonds. For example, a fragile truce existed during those months between the different soccer hooligan barras bravas so that they could fight the police together. On the rare occasions that fights did break out between demonstrators, everyone would chant “If you fight, you’re a cop! If you fight, you’re a cop!” Wild anarchist idealists went to the plaza with their most polished pitches to promote the values we believed would deepen the revolt.
\n\nInside that stadium, however, the pressure was off. The plaza always had an element of carnival, but the La Polla Records show felt much more like a celebration of how far the anarchy had gone. If you know, you know, and everyone there got it—all punks—and we could just be bad because being bad together was so good. We didn’t need justifications or explanations, we could just enjoy the environment of collective, chaotic rebellion. While we had to mind our interactions on the frontline (“If you recognize me behind my mask, no you didn’t”), lest buchón sapo [Argentine, then Chilean, for “snitch”] plainclothes track our social connections, here in the stadium, those of us who had maintained a professional candor with each other in the streets could embrace and see the whole of each other’s faces erupting in radiant laughter.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/7.jpg\")
Demonstrators snap a photo of the declaration of intra-hooligan, anti-police unity. It reads, “We lost too much time fighting among ourselves,” with each word atop the colors of a different team.
\nEveryone was sharing alcohol and weed and whatever else they had. A skinhead hooligan had hacked the stadium’s sprinkler system and was spraying mist over his section of the crowd under the hot summer sun. People climbed onto the sound tower and the roof of the stadium to hang banners in solidarity with the prisoners of the revolt and the Mapuche struggle or to dance silhouetted against the setting sun.
\n\nHere, the audience was in control—except the audience was totally out of control. Just a few songs into La Polla Records’ set, they had to stop in the middle of a song because too many enthusiastic hooligans had gotten on the stage and one had fallen into the drumset. They weren’t trying to stop the show, really. They were just excited.
\n\nA few more songs of the same, and one fateful fight between a bouncer who tried to suggest to a fan that he shouldn’t grab the singer’s neck in order to sing along, and the whole thing fell apart. Altogether, La Polla Records played something like five songs before abandoning the stage. As dusk came on, the atmosphere shifted from enthusiasm to anger.
\n\n15,000 punks rule! La Polla Records in Chile, February 2020.
\n15,000 grumbling punks and anarchists and hooligans and skinheads filed out of the stadium. Honestly, the amount of inward-facing frustration was so high that the most strategic choice the police could have made that evening would have been to allow the infighting to take its natural course. However, when there are thousands of punks occupying the road outside the stadium drinking and destroying traffic infrastructure, the pigs just can’t help themselves.
\n\nAnd neither could we. The most beautiful, glorious street battle of those six months unfolded before my eyes. We could see the police descending from up in the hills, so their arrival was anticipated. There was an air of “Here we go…”
\n\nBrightly colored mohawks bounced in and out of visibility amid clouds of tear gas. The most wildly dressed peacock punks engaged in feral smashing of beer bottles against police, while boom boxes provided a fast-paced tupa-tupa-tupa soundtrack to the riot. We didn’t see the best practices of gas masks, goggles, and gloves that the frontline used in the plaza. This was pure fuck you energy.
\n\nI had made a friend earlier that night while standing around selling cigarettes—but our befriending quickly accelerated when we realized we needed to rely on each other to get out of there safely. Even though they had, let’s say, much more reason to avoid capture by the police, on our first attempt to extract ourselves, they grabbed my arm and said, “Can we just watch it though?”
\n\nYeah… except no! They were shooting shit at us! Dozens of punks rushed past us and, behind them, mechanical faceless stormtroopers advanced out of the gas clouds, arms drawn. We turned and ran.
\n\nIn those six months, I mastered a whole audio taxonomy of booms—deep ones for the spent spray paint cans thrown into street fires, three different mid-level frequencies for different police projectiles, and the most piercing booms, fireworks. With the cops at our heels, we heard—BOOM—and instinctively I told my friend, “Jump!” No shit, a smoking canister hurtled under our feet. BOOM BOOM! Instinctively, again, “Duck!” This time, they went right over our heads.
\n\n“We absolutely have to get out of here.” We turned down a side street and wandered to the home of a friendly but ribbing communist who was excited to share his plan to subvert either the anarchist circle-A, or the constitutional process—I couldn’t tell which—by making a circle-A logo for the “Apruebo” (Approve) campaign for the constitution.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/12.jpg\")
“Stop prohibiting so many things, I can’t keep up with disobeying them all.”
\nOver the last five years, I’ve had the honor and privilege of sharing the material from this documentary in live presentations. In the days that this film depicts, every time I organized a talk, it was interrupted by the fiercest street confrontations in decades, or a people’s insurrection just across the border, or an uncontrollable wave of rioting punks. I wish that was still happening today. It’s better to do than to watch.
\n\nSince those days, I’ve presented the live version of Fell In Love With Fire within autonomous territory held in defiance of state power—in Weelaunee Forest, at a Los Panchos community in Mexico City, in People’s Park, where the audience sat on a trashed excavator left from the last riots to retake the park in 2022. It is my hope that this videozine, this documentalgo, can serve as tool to bring those kinds of spaces onto the map of other projects of rebellious self-determination across the globe and across time.
\n\nPlease, don’t limit your use of this video to isolated viewing, nor to sterile, polite, seated events to raise funds. Use it to raise hell.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/3.jpg\")
Their side.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/4.jpg\")
Our side.
\nYou can download the English .srt subtitles file here to translate the subtitles into another language for us.
\n\nLos Héroes is not far from La Moneda, the metro stetion where kids dropped a televisión onto the tracks—shutting down the metro and setting off the chain reaction of revolt. ↩
\nTo celebrate June 18, the anniversary of the historic Carnival against Capitalism that kicked off the movement against capitalist globalization some twenty-five years ago, we revisit Reclaim the Streets, a viral model for the joyous transformation of urban space.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/06/19/5.jpg\")
\n\n\n\n“I will dance!” I declared; “I will dance myself to death!” My flesh felt hot, my heart beat violently… To dance to death—what more glorious end!
\n\n-Emma Goldman, Living My Life
\n
“Mom, can I go to a protest?”
\n\n“No… I’m sorry, but no.”
\n\nShe was worried. A month earlier, a plane had slammed into the side of a pentagon-shaped building just down the road from our house.
\n\n“OK. Uh, can I go to the homecoming game?”
\n\n“Well, sure!”
\n\n“But like, I’m new at school so… can I just go by myself? So I can make friends?”
\n\n“Of course, honey.”
\n\nI couldn’t believe it worked. My high school was right next to a metro station—I was obviously just going to hop on the train and go to the protest.
\n\n“I hope we win.”
\n\n“Me too! I’ll pick you up at 8.”
\n\nWhen I got off at the Dupont Circle stop, my punk rock role model older-sister-figure who always tempted me to skip school for cool shit was already waiting for me.
\n\n“So…what are we protesting? Bush? The World Bank? The war?” I asked, not caring too much as long as we got to fuck shit up.
\n\n“Cars.”
\n\n“Cars?”
\n\n“Yeah, we’re taking over a street.”
\n\n“What do you mean ‘taking over’?”
\n\n“Like, with couches and DJs and stuff.”
\n\n“DJs?!”
\n\nThat did not clarify things for me, especially because people in the march that scooped us up were carrying placards decrying all the evil institutions and people I had mentioned. But once we hit 21st and P, a black-masked affinity group, moving with purpose and apparent planning, ran out of the crowd to a nearby alleyway and pulled out orange cones stenciled with an image of bellbottomed dancers inside a diamond-shaped traffic symbol. They lined up the orange cones on either end of the block. Unlike other marches I had been on—in which the point was to keep moving so that an affinity group could break out, quickly destroy the windows of a bank or Starbucks, then disappear among the mass again—the point of this demo seemed to be just to be here.
\n\nSomeone handed out flyers with the same bellbottomed dancers traffic symbol, saying something about streets not belonging exclusively to cars, about reinventing public space as a wonderland of joyous community instead of an artery for capital.
\n\nAnother affinity group quickly established good relations with the workers at a local café, who let us use the bathroom and get water throughout the afternoon. This happened so quickly that there must have been some prior, behind-the-scenes organizing with the workers. A bunch of them did have piercings and funny hair.
\n\nAs I stared at the café, marveling at all the moving parts in this troublemakers’ Rube Goldberg machine, a cheer erupted behind me, drawing my attention back to the crowd. A junker car—presumably acquired especially for the occasion—was rolled out of its parking spot, tagged up with “Reclaim the Streets!” and a circle A, and flipped over. Some genius found a pole to lay inside its wheel well and people pulled couches all around it so that anyone could chill and watch the skaters grind the spectacle of destruction.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/06/19/4.jpg\")
The Reclaim the Streets action in Washington, DC in October 2001. A photograph by the author, aged 14 at the time, digitally restored for this publication. Note the white van to the right.
\nThat’s when the final party favor opened its doors: in the middle of the block, a white work van in an alley became a DJ booth playing techno. BOOM BOOM. And loud! Vibing my body down to its core. I live chasing that feeling: the loss of control, the impossibility of remaining unmoved, the need to get down. I had a Fatboy Slim CD at home, but I had never heard techno this loud, or around this many other people. I scanned the crowd once more—it wasn’t just bigger now, it was transformed. The protestors with their placards and the anarchists with their black masks were still there, but out of nowhere there were way more party freaks: JNCOs, goggles, candy necklaces, frost-tipped hair.
\n\nI overheard a couple of the ravers talking.
\n\n“Yo, I’ve never been to something like this.”
\n\n“I know bro. I’ve heard of outlaw parties before, but this is wild.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/06/19/1.jpg\")
Another archival photograph from the Washington, DC Reclaim the Streets action of October 2001.
\nJust as this departure from traditional protest tenor mesmerized me, it was also a captivating deviation from the routine techno party. The alchemy of underground scenes kept cooking gold—the sun was setting and the party was just getting bigger and bigger.
\n\n“What are the party people going to do if the cops come break this up?” I thought to myself. Before long, I had my answer. The familiar sight of faceless stormtroopers lined one end of the block, preparing their assault. People pulled the gear inside the DJ van, shut its doors, and escaped down the alley in it. Of course, the black bloc rushed towards the police, eager for confrontation—but to my surprise, so did much of the candy crowd. Did they learn this from defending their illegal warehouse parties? Were they just excited to add a new kind of rush to their rave repertoire?
\n\n“I hope those goggles are rated for tear gas.”
\n\nAs I scurried out of the conflict zone, so as not to miss my 8 PM pick-up, I wondered who got the word to all of those ravers, and how? I knew how the anarchists got there—the night prior, Positive Force punks had handed us flyers for the march at the Wilson Center’s last show, an enormous DIY punk occasion. Had there been a rave somewhere in the city the previous night, too, simultaneously promoting the protest? On the subway, I reflected on the hidden size and strength of the underground. Punk rock was my own niche, but I had realized that ravers could also throw down and defend their temporary autonomous zones. How many more rebel communities were out there, each with its own style and soundtrack, ready to crew up and take down the imposed boredom of capitalism?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/06/19/2.jpg\")
Another archival photograph from the Washington, DC Reclaim the Streets action of October 2001.
\n\n\n\n“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
\n\n-Friedrich Nietzsche
\n
Reclaim the Streets was founded in the UK in 1991 to combat car culture. The group was just one current in the wave of anti-roads protests that kicked off all over the UK after Margaret Thatcher’s government approved an infrastructure project to build hundreds of new roads. In response, a constellation of occupations and campaigns sprang up throughout the 1990s, blocking construction sites and organizing under monikers like “Earth First!”
\n\nOne of the largest nodes in the anti-roads movement was the “No M11 Link” campaign in the suburbs of northeast London. For a year and a half, anti-roads activists used barricades, phone trees, tripods, treehouses, lockdowns, and building occupations to defend thousands of trees and hundreds of homes from destruction. The campaign culminated in December 1994, when over a thousand police were sent in to evict Claremont Road, the entirety of which had been squatted. The 500 residents and defenders fought back for five days as techno music blared in the background.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/06/19/10.jpg\")
Claremont Road.
\nIn its first year, Reclaim the Streets only organized small-scale stunts, like painting bike lanes on roads without permission. In 1992, Reclaim the Streets brought London traffic to a halt with its first street party, which was broken up when police arrested several participants. After that, the organization laid dormant until the British government proposed the 1994 Criminal Justice Act.
\n\nIn addition to curtailing traditional civil liberties—for example, the right to remain silent was altered so that judges could draw certain inferences from a defendant’s silence—the Criminal Justice Act was a direct assault on rave culture. In clumsy language, the bill specifically criminalized gatherings of ten or more people enjoying “sounds wholly or predominantly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.” In addition, one of the bill’s twelve parts was entirely dedicated to criminalizing collective trespass. In one fell swoop, the British government formed common cause between squatters, new age caravan travelers, ravers, anti-road activists, hunt saboteurs, and football hooligans—all of whom enjoyed lifestyles and strategies of resistance based on collective trespass.
\n\nThe Prodigy song “Their Law” was written in direct opposition to the bill.
\n\nFormal coalitions of civil liberties groups and sound systems1 organized three mass demonstrations ahead of the vote on the bill in London. The first was on May Day 1994 and drew 20,000 people. Two months later, nearly twice as many people attended the second demonstration. In October, over 100,000 people fought and overpowered police in order to move two large sound systems into Hyde Park and dance in joyous defiance of the law.
\n\nIn the end, the Criminal Justice Act was passed, but the alliances built around opposing it did not disappear or slow down.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/06/19/9.jpg\")
Police threatening a demonstration in Hyde Park against the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill, October 1994.
\n\n\n\n“On 14 May 1995, two automobiles collide in the city of London. Their drivers, overcome by histrionic rage, get out of their vehicles and start to destroy them. In reality, it is all theatre. The cars, which are second-hand, have been bought especially for the occasion by members of Reclaim the Streets. Stuck in the middle of the road, their debris blocks motorized traffic, leaving crowded Camden High Street free of cars. The street fills with people and sound systems start to work, using electricity generated by the constant pedaling of bicycles. The ‘repetitive rhythms’ of rave can be heard and some three hundred people throw themselves into dancing in the first party [of the reborn Reclaim the Streets movement].”
\n\n-Julia Ramírez Blanco, Reclaim the Streets! From Local to Global Party Protest
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/11/30/4.jpg\")
Reclaim the Streets takes the M41 motorway with stilt-walkers and jackhammers on July 13, 1996.
\nWhereas around 300 people attended the May 1995 Reclaim the Streets party, by the July party two months later, attendance had increased tenfold, with nearly 3000 people reclaiming the London neighborhood of Islington to rave and revel. The following year, Reclaim the Streets launched what was probably its most glorious offensive, when over 8000 people broke through police lines to dance for nine hours on London’s M41 highway.
\n\n\n\n\n“The sight of thousands of people running onto an empty motorway shut off by large tripods is an image that stays with you… Thirty foot ‘pantomime dames’ [stilt-walkers] glided through the party throwing confetti. Food stalls gave away free stew and sandwiches; graffiti artists added color to the tarmac; poets ranted from the railings; acoustic bands played and strolling players performed. At the height of the festivities, beneath the tall panto dame figures dressed in huge farthingale Marie Antoinette skirts, people were at work with jackhammers, hacking in time to the techno, to mask the sound from the officers standing inches away, digging up the surface of the road until large craters littered the fast lane… to plant seedlings from the gardens smashed by the bulldozers at Claremont Road.”
\n\n-“Reclaim the Streets Rewild the M41 Motorway, Shepherds Bush
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/06/19/8.jpg\")
Never mind the ballots—reclaim the streets.
\nIn 1997, an anti-election rave in Trafalgar Square—“Never Mind the Ballots, Reclaim the Streets”—transformed the exterior of the National Gallery into a bombed-up graffiti wall. Prosecutors charged a group of DJs from the event with attempted murder for driving their van too close to police lines, indicating the state’s impatience to suppress the growing movement.
\n\nIn early 1998, Reclaim the Streets activists went to Geneva for the first-ever meeting of People’s Global Action, an international coalition of radicals and revolutionaries responding to the Zapatista’s call for a different kind of globalization: global resistance to capitalism. People’s Global Action’s first International Day of Action included a 200,000-strong demonstration in India against the World Trade Organization, a 50,000-person march led by landless peasants in Brazil’s capital city, and over thirty Reclaim the Streets parties from San Francisco to Sydney to Toronto to Lyon to Berlin. In Birmingham, England, 5000 Reclaim the Streets partiers contributed to the Day of Action by paralyzing the city center in opposition to the annual G8 meeting.
\n\n\n\n\n“There were some great comic scenes of police incompetence, including them surrounding the small sound system (disguised as a family car) and escorting it into the middle of the party. They never once asked why the ‘frightened family’ inside wanted to escape by deliberately driving the wrong way around the roundabout towards the crowd. By the time they realized their mistake, it was all too late… the decks were under the travel blankets, boys. What threw you off the scent? The baby seat, or the toys?”
\n\n-Do or Die, “Down with Empire, Up with Spring!”
\n
With the success of People’s Global Action’s first worldwide day of protest, the so-called anti-globalization movement stepped into the ring like an underdog boxer with an untz untz untz entrance song, ready to knock out the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund—putting global capitalism on its heels.
\n\nAs word of the successful actions in Britain spread across the Atlantic, punks and anarchists in North America began organizing Reclaim the Streets actions—not only in urban centers like Washington, DC, but also in rust belt cities like Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and smaller towns like Greensboro, North Carolina. For young people who had been chiefly active in subcultural contexts, the model offered a way to leverage subcultural connections to immediately enter the field of disruptive public action.\nCutting their teeth with such events, the participants quickly moved on to confronting global capitalist summits. The movement gained momentum steadily until the attacks of September 11, 2001 shifted the discourse, though Reclaim the Streets actions continued around the world for years afterwards.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/06/19/3.jpg\")
Another archival photograph from the Washington, DC Reclaim the Streets action of October 2001.
\nA 1998 Reclaim the Streets pamphlet offers a glimpse into the era:
\n\n\n\n\nSingle issue? Just against the car?
\n\nFor all of the mainstream media’s attempt to define [us] as such, for those involved it expresses much more. The street party, itself reclaimed from the inanities of royal jubilees and state “celebrations,” is just one recent initiative in a vibrant history of struggle, both to defend and to take back collective space. From the Peasants’ Revolt to the resistance to the enclosures, from the land occupations of the Diggers to the post-war squatters, on to the recent free festivals, peace camps, land squats and anti-roads movement. Everywhere, extra-ordinary people have continually asserted not only the need to liberate the commons but the ability to think and organize for themselves.
\n\nFor the city, the streets are the commons, but in the hands of industry and power brokers the streets have become mere conduits for commerce and consumption—the economic hero of which is, of course, the car. A symbol and a symptom of the social and ecological nightmare that state and capitalism create, the car which promises individual freedom ends up guaranteeing noise, destruction and pollution for all. For Reclaim the Streets, the car is a focus—the insanity of its system clearly visible—that leads to questioning both the myth of “the market” and its corporate and institutional enforcers.
\n\nWith a metal river on one side and endless windows of consumerism on the other, the streets’ true purpose, social interaction, becomes an uneconomic diversion. In its place, the corporate-controlled one-way media of newspapers, radio, and television become “the community.” Their interpretation [of] reality. In this sense, the streets are the alternative and subversive form of the mass media. Where authentic communication, immediate and reciprocal, takes place.
\n\nTo “reclaim the streets” is to act in defense of and for common ground. To tear down the fence of enclosure that profit-making demands. And the street party—far from being just anti-car—is an explosion of our suppressed potential, a celebration of our diversity and a chorus of voices in solidarity. A festival of resistance!
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/06/19/7.jpg\")
\n\n\n\n“Insurrection is a party. We take joy in the din of their defeat.”
\n\n-Communique #13: We Attacked the British Embassy (Fuerzas Autónomas y Destructivas León Czolgosz)
\n
In America in the year 2024, the closest thing we have to street reclamation in the spirit of the history recounted above is the takeovers and sideshows model—celebrations of cars that seem to run counter to the values of the 1990s Reclaim the Streets movement. However, beyond superficial aesthetic preferences regarding motor noise, there is a deeper contrast between these two models of temporary autonomous spatial reclamation: for a full decade now, anarchists have celebrated, analyzed, and (to some degree) participated in sideshows without infusing those efforts with broader militant politics or harnessing their power to spread instances of ungovernability beyond their dedicated subculture. What would it look like if the anarchist fascination with drifting cars charted a course like the one of rave music in the UK, in which the networks and sound systems behind the scene decided to utilize their resources to catalyze massive and widespread combat with the state?
\n\nThe history of Reclaim the Streets shows not only that militant, revolutionary struggle can also be joyous—something that anyone who hit the streets during the summer of 2020 knows—but also that the skills and bonds developed through underground subculture (how to scope out a spot, set up a generator, get the word out without blowing up the scene) are powerful tools for crafting other kinds of temporary autonomy that are not just clandestine, but openly confrontational.
\n\nGood music doesn’t make the party. Good drugs don’t make the party. People make the party. When the party draws together people who seek to break with the imposed limits of their society, a clever mix of songs or an ecstatic experience can suggest other creative possibilities, liberation of a larger scope. In contrast to the way a conqueror plants his flag in the ground to claim territory, loud dance music can fill an area with freedom, making it a blank canvas for the expression of forbidden desire. Illegal desires.
\n\nIf most techno music takes place in licensed clubs with admission costs and pricey drinks—or worse, in isolation through streaming platforms—this says more about how capitalism homogenizes the way art is consumed than about the essential character of the music and subculture.
\n\nTechno’s history is one of…
\n\nTechno’s future is…
\n\nYou can read other accounts of the Reclaim the Streets action in Washington, DC in October 2001 here and here. An earlier Reclaim the Streets action had taken place in DC the previous June; there are photographs of that action here.
\n\nAtari Teenage Riot performing in Berlin on May Day 1999.
\nA contemporary documentary on Reclaim the Streets.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/06/19/6.jpg\")
\nThe term “sound system” refers to the assemblage of speakers, amplifiers, and mixers needed to produce loud dance music, but also the collectives that manage the technological means necessary to produce a good party. ↩
\nTo observe the 210th birthday of the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, we present a photoessay and virtual tour of his birthplace and family home, Priamukhino, including the museum documenting his life and the lives of his relatives and friends. Owing to the unfortunate conditions prevailing in Russia today, it is not easy for many of us—including many Russians—to visit. This is a misfortune, because Priamukhino has served as a gathering place for anarchists since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/129.jpg\")
An old photograph of the Bakunin family house.
\nMikhail Bakunin’s revolutionary ideas did not spring forth fully-formed like Athena from the skull of Zeus. They emerged from an environment of participatory dialogue and collective education. His sisters were among his earliest and most passionate interlocutors; later, Russian writers including Vissarion Belinsky, Ivan Turgenev, and Leo Tolstoy spent time at Priamukhino with his siblings. This makes it an important focus of study for researchers in a variety of historical, philosophical, and literary fields. We hope that this photoessay will be of use to those who cannot themselves visit—and that the political situation in Russia will change soon.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/2.jpg\")
Mikhail Bakunin.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/3.jpg\")
Mikhail’s equally fierce sister, Varvara Bakunin.
\nAfter the collapse of the Soviet Union, anarchists began gathering at Priamukhino—some to participate in the Priamukhino Free Artel,1 tending to the land and buildings, others for annual conferences. Some came from as far away as Italy, the United States, and Brazil.
\n\nFor those who wish to learn the history of the Bakunin family, John Randolph’s The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism offers a good starting place. To provide more context for this photoessay, we present a short preface by the photographer.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/1.jpg\")
Plan of the Pryamukhino estate, created on the basis of the “Geometric Special Plan” of the estate from 1797; the buildings that have survived into the present day are highlighted in black. 1 - Manor house; 2 - Church; 3 - Bell tower; 4 - Factory; 5 - Barn; 6 - Gardener’s house; 7 - Consumer co-operative; 8 - Library; 9 - Crypt; 10 - Rotunda; 11 - Gatehouse; 12 - Chapel at the holy spring; 13 - Dam (XIX century); 14 - Hospital; 15 - Dam (XVIII century); 16 - Bolshaya Street; 17 - Sadovaya Street; 18 - Grandfather’s Hill; 19 - Children’s Alley; 20 - Decembrist Oak; 21 - Stable; 22 - Animal Farm; 23 - Cemetery; 24 - Chapel; 25 - Riga (Turkish bath); 26 - Hill named for A.A. Bakunin; 27 - Parterre glade; 28 - Bathhouse; 29 - A gazebo designed by Lvov: 30 - Kutuzovskaya Hill; 31 - Elm Hill; 32 - School; 33 - Spring named for I.M. Bakunin; 34 - Upper new pond; 35 - Batyushkin (sterlet) pond; 36 - Lower new pond; 37 - Artificial pond; 38 - Swimming pool; 39 - Mother’s Pond; 40 - Pond under the garden; 41 - Bath; 42 - Church slope; 43 - Beautiful hill; 44 - Little Grove; 45 - Circle of larches; 46 - Greenhouse; 47 - Greenhouse; 48 - Main village street; 49 - Road to Korostkovo; 50 - Brick factory road.
\nFinally, I got to see the legendary Priamukhino!
\n\nI have been hearing about the “Priamukhino readings” for many years since I became an anarchist. Anarchists have been coming here since the moment that the Soviet Union loosened its grip on political dissent. People used to come to Priamukhino for a few days every year to live collectively, working together to renovate what remains of the Bakunin family mansion and forest, and also to read and discuss anarchist texts outside the distractions of urban life. The Priamukhino readings had been interconnected with the artel work since the 1990s, but they ceased in 2018 due to differences within the Priamukhino Free Artel.
\n\nThe work of the artel continues, however. The forest around the village beside the Bakunin family mansion needs regular maintenance, and the mansion itself needs renovating.
\n\nNo active anarchists live in Priamukhino itself, but at least one used to live close by. In addition, there are people in Priamukhino who sympathize with anarchists; since the 1990s, they have undertaken a tremendous effort to preserve the village’s historical heritage and affirm the anarchists’ agenda. Relations with the other villagers are generally good, as well. The only strained relation in the village is with the priest, who openly denounces anarchists. Many villagers prefer to attend church services elsewhere.
\n\nWhat I found in Priamukhino this year was quite different from what I expected. Likely owing to the situation in Russia, only a few people came to join artel work, none of whom I knew from before. Nonetheless, I received a very warm welcome.
\n\nWe spent the next two days cutting fallen trees, carrying wood, washing monuments, taking out trash, and digging out hogweed, which was invading the whole forest. We also cut the grass to clear paths in the forest around the mansion and the Decembrists’ Oak—an oak that two Decembrists, the brothers Muravyov, planted there in 1816, which was destroyed by lightning in the 1970s. Another oak has been planted there in its place, and nearby, there is another small oak tree planted by anarchists. We worked up to four hours each day and spent the rest cooking food, talking, watching movies (among them, W. Allen’s Love and Death), swimming in Osuga river, and taking walks around Priamukhino’s beautiful scenery of forests, village roads, and river banks. We also took a trip to Kuvshinovo, a nearby town named after the capitalist Julia Kuvshinova, to see its architectural features.
\n\nIt was interesting to walk the little roads and paths through the forest, to touch the mighty old trees that witnessed the childhoods of all eleven of the Bakunin siblings in the 19th century, to imagine young Mikhail walking here as well, conversing with his sisters and friends. It makes one reflect on how environments and circumstances can influence our lives. Who would imagine that the son of a family that lived in a mansion maintained by more than a hundred serfs could become a world-famous revolutionary, hated and feared by those who own mansions? The mosaic of life’s circumstances can give rise to the most surprising results.
\n\nI am honored to visit a place that holds a part of this legacy, where so much love and work has been put into it, connecting anarchist history to one more place on Earth.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/4.jpg\")
A map of Priamukhino in a booklet about the estate.
\nWe attended the Bakunin family museum located on the edge of Priamukhino. The museum is run by a kind old woman who gave us a tour. It documents the history of the family, focusing on each Bakunin starting with Mikhail Bakunin’s father. A significant part of the museum is given over to Mikhail Bakunin himself, exploring his involvement in revolutionary history.
\n\nI also encountered some publications about Bakunin that I hadn’t seen before: N. Pirumova’s Bakunin, published in 1970; M.P. Dragomanova’s Critical-Biographical Note on Bakunin, published in 1906, a copy of which was given to the museum by a descendant of the Bakunins; Memories of Bakunin by M.P. Sazhin (Arman Ross), published in 1926 by the publishing house of the All-Union Society of Political Convicts and Exiles, section Library of Exile and Hard Labor. I took the opportunity of being alone in the museum to take some of them out from under the glass and take pictures of them.
\n\nI also looked through the samizdat publications of “Priamukhino Harmony,” a zine that anarchists have been producing during the Priamukhino Free Artel and Priamukhino readings. Apparently, in all the years since it first began to appear in the 1990s, this paper has not been photocopied or digitalized, and the only originals were kept in the village. That worries me, because at any time something could happen to them and they would be lost to anarchist history. I hurriedly photographed all of them.
\n\nIn addition, I recorded a sort of virtual tour of the museum.
\n\nA video walkthrough of the museum at Priamukhino. The music is Alessio Lega’s “La tomba di Bakunin.”
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/16.jpg\")
\nI took this picture of a frog near the Bakunin family house. The frogs at Priamukhino have been part of the legend of the place since at least 1995, when anarchists renovated the ponds that they inhabit. Subsequently, in place of a red star, anarchists put a red frog on a black banner, which has become a symbol of the anarchist project in Priamukhino.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/17.jpg\")
Russian anarchists in 1995 displaying the “kvakanya” red frog banner associated with Priamukhino.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/132.jpg\")
This picture shows volunteers and locals just a couple years ago, displaying the same banner.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/76.jpg\")
Museum of the Bakunin family.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/77.jpg\")
A map showing some of the places Mikhail Bakunin was active.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/112.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/114.jpg\")
A bust of Mikhail Bakunin with books and a torch behind him.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/78.jpg\")
A bust of Mikhail Bakunin.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/79.jpg\")
Another bust of Mikhail Bakunin, showing books and a torch behind him.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/80.jpg\")
The back of the second bust of Mikhail Bakunin, showing books and a torch behind him.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/81.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/82.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/83.jpg\")
A desk in memorial to Natalia Mikhailovna Pirumova, who contributed a lot to the preservation of Priamukhino and supported the activities of anarchists in the village.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/84.jpg\")
Certificates from descendants of the Bakunin family and various civil institutions expressing gratitude to the Bakunin museum for its cultural and educational work.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/85.jpg\")
Some people who contributed to creating the museum.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/86.jpg\")
A plaque in memorial to Vladimir Ivanovich Sisoyev, a writer, local historian, and activist for the preservation of the Priamukhino estate’s cultural heritage.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/87.jpg\")
A desk observing the 70th birthday of Vladimir Ivanovich Sisoyev.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/88.jpg\")
Mikhail Bakunin as a young man.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/89.jpg\")
The picture in the upper right shows Mikhail Bakunin at the close of the 1840s.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/90.jpg\")
An image of Mikhail Bakunin and depictions of the Dresden uprising of 1849, for which he was condemned to death before being handed over to another country that was also seeking to execute him.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/91.jpg\")
More photographs of Bakunin’s family.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/92.jpg\")
Mikhail Bakunin in 1869.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/93.jpg\")
An invitation to the event in Paris in 1847 at which Mikhail Bakunin made a famous speech in solidarity with Polish people resisting Russian rule, for which he was exiled from France.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/94.jpg\")
A map of the Priamukhino estate and its environs.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/95.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/96.jpg\")
The Bakunin family house.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/97.jpg\")
The Bakunin family tree.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/98.jpg\")
Mikhail Bakunin and his sisters Tatiana and Lyubov.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/100.jpg\")
Portraits of Mikhail Bakunin as a young man, his parents, and others.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/101.jpg\")
Portraits of Mikhail Bakunin and the thinkers Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose philosophy influenced his.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/116.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/102.jpg\")
Portraits of two of Mikhail Bakunin’s sisters.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/103.jpg\")
Another model of the Bakunin house.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/104.jpg\")
Mikhail Bakunin in his youth.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/105.jpg\")
Mikhail’s sister Varvara Bakunin, among others.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/106.jpg\")
A photograph of the Decembrists’ oak in 1967.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/107.jpg\")
A bust of the French author Voltaire. When she lived in Berlin, Varvara Bakunin displayed busts of Friedrich von Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Voltaire in her apartment—German romanticism interrogating French rationalism.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/108.jpg\")
“Penal Servitude and Exile”: Memories about Mikhail Bakunin, by M. P. Sazhin (Arman Ross). Edition by the All-Union Association of Political Convicts and Exiles, Moscow, 1926.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/109.jpg\")
Tatiana Bakunin.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/113.jpg\")
A book written by N. Pirumova about Mikhail Bakunin and his family.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/115.jpg\")
A small concert hall in the museum.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/118.jpg\")
Another room in the museum.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/120.jpg\")
Bakunin, a biography by N. Pirumova.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/122.jpg\")
A part of the room with literature and other items related to Bakunin family.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/123.jpg\")
Editions of Mikhail Bakunin’s works and brochures and books about him.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/124.jpg\")
In the bottom right, a photograph of Giuseppe Garibaldi, Italian revolutionary Republican and socialist and colleague of Mikhail Bakunin.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/125.jpg\")
A portrait of Yekaterina Mikhailovna Bakunina (1810-1894), a Russian nurse during the Crimean War, who contributed to the establishment of nursing in Russia.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/126.jpg\")
Memories of Mikhail Bakunin by M. P. Sazhin (Arman Ross). Edition by All-Union Association of Political Convicts and Exiles, Moscow, 1926
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/127.jpg\")
Photos of an Italian delegation to the Bakunin museum. Alexander Bakunin, Mikhail’s brother, fought in Italy in the army of Garibaldi for three years.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/128.jpg\")
A gift to the Bakunin museum from a Bakunin family descendant. Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin. A Critical Biographical Essay, by M. P. Dragomanova. Printing house of D. M. Gran, Gostinodvorskaya Street. Kazan, 1905.
\nOne part of the museum documents the friendship of Mikhail’s brother, Alexander Bakunin, and Leo Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/99.jpg\")
An exhibit showing the connections between the Bakunin family and Leo Tolstoy, who visited the family estate.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/111.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/121.jpg\")
A part of the museum dedicated to Leon Tolstoy and his relationship with the Bakunin family.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/110.jpg\")
A couch from the Bakunin house on which Leon Tolstoy and Aleksandr Bakunin, both veterans of the defense of Sevastopol, once sat together.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/117.jpg\")
A black flag with Kvakunya, a frog that inhabits the ponds in Priamukhino that anarchists cleaned in 1995. The flag rests on the couch on which Leo Tolstoy once sat while visiting the house.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/18.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/19.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/20.jpg\")
A picture of a painting made in 1883, hung a church in a Tazovo village in the region of Kursk. The painting is titled “Tolstoy in Hell,” apparently in response to the decision of the Church to exclude Leo Tolstoy.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/21.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/22.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/23.jpg\")
\nThe former Beautiful Hill, now Kutuzov Hill, is named after the Russian military leader who defeated Napoleon at the beginning of the 19th century. The legend goes that Aleksandr Bakunin, Mikhail Bakunin’s father, was friends with Mikhail Kutuzov and the latter stopped at Priamukhino for a day. There is no official evidence confirming this besides the fact that Kutuzov’s regiment once stayed very close to Priamukhino for a day or two for no apparent reason. Aleksandr Bakunin renamed the hill after the defeat of Napoleon.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/35.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/36.jpg\")
“Larches grown by Alexander Mikhailovich Bakunin from seeds donated by N.A. Lvov in 1793. A group of trees was planted around the so-called ‘beautiful hill,’ later named ‘Kutuzovskaya Gorka’ [Kutuzov Hill], as well as in the park area behind the Osuga River.”
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/37.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/38.jpg\")
A monument to Mikhail Kutuzov.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/39.jpg\")
\nThis stone is a memorial stone for Kutuzov. During the Second World War, if I’m not mistaken, there was a military hospital in Priamukhino. The story goes that while Soviet soldiers were making a campfire under the stone, the stone cracked and part of it rolled down the hill and either stayed there or was taken elsewhere. What remains of the stone is still on the hill, as you can see.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/40.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/41.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/42.jpg\")
\nThese photos include the Decembrists’ Oak and the ruins of one of the wings of the original Bakunin house.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/43.jpg\")
A map of the area.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/44.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/45.jpg\")
“Oak of the Decembrists: At this place in 1815, in memory of their stay at the estate, the Bakunin relatives, the Muravyov brothers (A.N. Muravyov, N.N. Muravyov-Karsky, and M.N. Muravyov-Vilensky) planted an oak tree. At the end of the 1970s, during a thunderstorm, the tree was damaged and collapsed. In 1989, the descendants of the Bakunins planted a new oak tree on this site.”
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/46.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/47.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/48.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/49.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/50.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/51.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/52.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/53.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/54.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/55.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/56.jpg\")
The sign reads, roughly, “Do not enter! Dangerous to life—collapse!”
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/57.jpg\")
A depiction of the Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/58.jpg\")
A depiction of an anarchist sailor, perhaps associated with the Kronstadt uprising.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/59.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/60.jpg\")
A depiction of Leo Tolstoy having tea with Alexander Bakunin in 1891. Alexander is depicted in a red Garibaldi shirt on account of his participating in Garibaldi’s campaign in Italy. Tolstoy and Alexander Bakunin both fought in the Battle for Sevastopol in 1885; they met at the Bakunin estate for tea in 1891.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/61.jpg\")
“Manor house (second half of the 18th century to first half of the 19th century). The Pryamukhino estate was purchased in 1779 from the Shishkov nobles by Mikhail Vasilyevich Bakunin (1730-1803) in the name of his wife Lyubov Petrovna. The middle wooden part of the house has been preserved from the previous owners. The Bakunins’ son, Aleksandr Mikhailovich (1765/68-1854), made extensions on both sides and built a two-story outbuilding on the south, in one of the rooms where there was a chapel. On the north side, the outbuilding was one story, and the outbuildings, connected to the main house by brick one-story passages, were decorated with four-column Doric porticoes. There was a ground clearing in front of the house in the park.”
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/62.jpg\")
This memorial plaque reads “In this house, Mikhail A. Bakunin was born and spent his childhood and teenage years—a famous militant of the international revolutionary movement, one of the founders of and a theorist of anarchism, a Russian thinker. 1814-1876,” then lists some of the many historical figures who visited the estate.
\nWhen you enter Priamukhino via the bridge over the river Osuga river, one of the first things you encounter is the old Bakunin church, where you can also find the Bakunin family memorial.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/5.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/6.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/7.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/8.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/9.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/10.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/11.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/12.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/13.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/14.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/15.jpg\")
“Bell tower built by Alexander Alexandrovich Bakunin (1821-1908, a famous Tver zemstvo participant and lawyer, and a participant in the defense of Sevastopol during the Crimean War and the famous ‘Expedition of the Thousand’ with Giuseppe Garibaldi in 1861. Built according to the design of the Tver provincial architect V.I. Nazarin in 1903-1907. In place of the old wooden one, the bell tower became the last building built on the estate by the Bakunins. In 1996, a descendant of the Bakunins installed new bells in the bell tower.” Coincidentally, the underground paper that Mikhail Bakunin’s comrades Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Ogarev published was called Kolokol, “the Bell.”
\nThis cascade of ponds was made in the 19th century. By the 1990s, it was in a horrible state, until anarchists renovated it.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/25.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/26.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/27.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/28.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/29.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/30.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/31.jpg\")
“Cascade of Ponds: A cascade of three ponds was built by the owner of the estate A.M. Bakunin in the first half of the 19th century. Upper pond (containing underground springs and springs that provide water), Sterlyazhiy or Batyushkin pond (in memory of A.M. Bakunin’s father, Mikhail Vasilyevich Bakunin) and Lower pond. Near Father’s Pond, there was a bathhouse and a swimming pool.”
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/32.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/33.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/34.jpg\")
\nWalking in the village of Priamukhino and its surroundings.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/67.jpg\")
The road sign for Lopatino. The village of Lopatino is right across the bridge over the Osuga River, a fifteen-minute walk from Priamukhino.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/68.jpg\")
A bridge over the Osuga river.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/69.jpg\")
The Osuga River.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/70.jpg\")
The road sign for Priamukhino.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/71.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/72.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/73.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/74.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/75.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/24.jpg\")
A Soviet memorial for Priamukhino villagers who went to the front in WWII and didn’t come back.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/63.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/64.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/65.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/31/66.jpg\")
\nThere is a Telegram channel for the Priamukhino artel.
\n\nA movie about Priamukhino made by a Swedish visitor.
\nIn prerevolutionary Russia, an artel was a cooperative association of craftsmen living and working together. ↩
\nOnce again, it’s April 15—Steal Something from Work Day! Every April, millions of workers around the world observe this day as a chance to settle accounts with those who are profiting off their labor. For us, it represents an opportunity to reflect on why so many people steal from their workplaces and what it would take to create a world in which that was unnecessary.
\n\nFeared by right-wing hacks like Glen Beck, Steal Something from Work Day is celebrated from Bulgaria to Greece, Spain, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands. You can learn about Steal Something from Work Day on the official site, or listen to this podcast about it, or watch this charming video.
\n\nOr just, you know, participate.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/15/1.jpg\")
A dishwasher uses a sink as a shield during clashes with police in Santiago, Chile on November 8, 2019. Let’s turn the roles that capitalism forces upon us into weapons against the system itself.
\nThe United States Department of Commerce estimates that every year, “businesses lose $50 billion as a result of employee theft.” Let’s zoom in on that word, “lose.” They aren’t saying that $50 billion just disappears; it isn’t simply mislaid, nor willfully destroyed. They mean that $50 billion ends up in the pockets of the workers, rather than in the bank accounts of corporate executives. In other words, the problem is that the money ends up in the hands of the people who are doing the work that produces it.
\n\nIs this a problem, really? Even if you are an avowed proponent of capitalism, the market needs people spending money to function. Workers who are struggling just to pay their rent and put food on the table are going to put that money right back into the economy. Corporate executives would more likely sit on it, or use it to buy up more real estate, making it even harder for the rest of us to afford rent.
\n\nOf course, if you’re not invested in capitalism as a good in and of itself, if you value equality and human life above the “health” of the market, there are even stronger arguments as to why the workers should be the ones to go home with this money, not executives and investors.
\n\nLet’s be clear that when we talk about workplace theft, we’re not talking about a self-seeking criminal minority enriching itself at everyone’s expense. Apparently, three quarters of all employees have stolen from their employer at least once. Workplace theft is arguably the most widely practiced form of wealth redistribution. It might also be the most effective—though we can aspire to come up with even more effective models.
\n\nWhat if workers in the United States took home $50 billion less every year? The richest 1% of United States citizens now own more wealth than the entire middle class. The top 10% control more wealth than everyone else added together. The combined wealth of the billionaires in the United States has almost doubled over the past half decade, reaching $5.529 trillion—that’s all money that they have accumulated from other people’s labor.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/15/2.jpg\")
This chart from 2017 tells a different story about who is committing the most theft in the workplace. Even according to the laws that are currently on the books, which overwhelmingly favor employers over employees, it is employers who commit the majority of theft in this society, both in the workplace and outside of it.
\nNow imagine taking another $50 billion away from workers in the United States every year. Imagine plunging families further into poverty, making it even harder to afford groceries, rent, utilities bills, car insurance, tuition. In fact, employers aim to do precisely that—that’s why they are investing in surveillance technology, security guards, and new inventory systems rather than paying the people whose labor enriches them. If there is a self-seeking villainous minority out there, it is not those who steal from their employers, but the capitalists who want to hoard even more of the wealth of our society in their hands.
\n\nThis is why a growing anti-work movement has begun to question the foundational premises of capitalism and exchange economics. Labor unrest is ramping up, but the majority of workers in North America lack labor organizations that are capable of asserting their interests with the firmness that they deserve. It’s time to reimagine what the tactics of a previous era, such as the general strike, could look like today in our current conditions. At the same time, we can look at the activities that the vast majority of workers already engage in—including workplace theft and other informal or clandestine forms of resistance—as points of departure for new strategies.
\n\nIn the following narratives, two authors from different parts of the Midwest recount their experiments with stealing from their employers—one individual, one collective.
\n\n(Yes, the header photograph at the top of this page is a real stock photograph about workplace theft. The horror!)
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/15/4.jpg\")
From 1830 to today, we must weaponize the ordinary conditions of our daily lives if we are to defend ourselves against our oppressors.
\nDuring the last few months of my senior year of high school, when I stopped attending class, a friend got me a job at a gas station convenience store after my car went on strike and refused to deliver any more pizzas. The morning after graduation day, I moved into a two-bedroom apartment with a couple of friends.
\n\nA two-bedroom apartment with a couple of friends. In other words, I was staying on the couch in the living room.
\n\nAt the time, I cared about very little besides hanging out with my friends, riding bikes, reading fantasy novels, and drinking beer. I needed money to pay my rent, pay for food and beer, pay for gas and car insurance, and so on, but it was possible to squeeze by with a terrible minimum wage job.
\n\nThe gas station was owned by a typical franchise owner. He was mostly hands off, except when he was hands on. We all worked five ten-hour shifts by ourselves every week. Working alone meant that we had to take bathroom breaks as fast as possible, between customers. At that time, it was possible to pump gas without paying for it, so we had to hope that someone didn’t pull up and pump gas while we were in the bathroom. It wasn’t as if I cared if someone stole gas, but gas was one of the few items that was actually tracked by the inventory system, and we would catch hell if the gas numbers were off.
\n\nThe upside to this situation was that tons of other merchandise was not tracked in the inventory, and the CCTV surveillance system didn’t work. I’ve worked dozens of jobs in my life, and I don’t think a single job I’ve ever worked has succeeded in preventing me from stealing something from them while I was on the clock. But this job failed to prevent me from stealing a whole lot of shit while I was on the clock.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/15/5.jpg\")
\nFor most of each of my ten-hour shifts, I had nothing to do. There is only so much time you can spend stocking and straightening the shelves, making pots of foul coffee, and staring out the window at gas pumps. I started eating and drinking the stock solely in order to pass the time. Pretty soon, every shift, I was drinking several bottles of juice and eating countless snack cakes, bags of chips, packs of cookies, candy bars, and terrible deli sandwiches.
\n\nThen I started taking food and beer home to share with my roommates. It wasn’t like there was good food available at a Midwest gas station, but we were in a thieves-can’t-be-choosers kind of situation. While one of my roommates had a regular manual labor job, the other had no job at all; he was surviving off of small-scale weed dealing and the kindness and generosity of his roommates. At the end of pretty much every shift, I would load up my car with a grocery bag or two of food and a couple boxes of beer. I tried to take a variety of stuff in the course of each week in order to make it less obvious what was being stolen, but ultimately, I wasn’t as subtle as I thought I was.
\n\nAll of my underage friends and acquaintances started coming in, hoping to get beer without being carded. I saw another opportunity here. Beer was another item that wasn’t easily tracked by the primitive inventory system, so it was easy to avoid ringing the beer up in the register and just let people hand me cash for the beer at a steep discount. After I realized this, I put it together that pretty much any item that was likely to be paid for in exact change (like a 50 cent newspaper) didn’t need to be entered in the cash register. I would wait to ring them up until I could see whether the customer had exact change. Soon, I was taking home between $50 and $100 at the end of every shift, at a time when I paid $125 a month for rent.
\n\nOne day, the friend and co-worker who had gotten me the job told me that the manager had asked him if he knew whether I was stealing from them. Apparently, they didn’t realize that he was my close friend. He told them that he was positive that I would never do such a thing, and they left it alone. Looking back, I’m sure that the vague inventory numbers must have looked incredibly suspicious, but they had no way to confirm what was happening.
\n\nEventually, I wound up quitting that job to take another job that was less horrible in some ways but nowhere near as lucrative—aside from the free late-night access to the office photocopier. A couple weeks later, that gas station went out of business. I was sure that my efforts had something to do with it. If a full accounting were to be done, the owner of that place probably stole more hours of my life than I stole from him, but I did my best to even the score.
\n\nIn the years since then, my politics have become more sophisticated, and so have my ways of striking back at the employing class. You could say I’ve become more ambitious. But just as every prisoner is a political prisoner, every cashier in every gas station is a fighter in the class war. People steal from work because it is demeaning, because their workplaces don’t engage their creativity, because they want to share things with others, because it’s bullshit to have to waste time just to turn a profit for a boss.
\n\nAnd lots of people steal from work because they need to. If more advanced inventory systems have made it more difficult for cashiers to steal from their employers, that only means that life is even harder for workers and those who depend on them. Better anti-theft technology is one of the factors that are contributing to escalating inequality, as capitalists concentrate more and more wealth in their hands relative to the rest of us. Stealing from our employers is the very least we ought to do in this situation. Attack every gas station.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/15/3.jpg\")
\nI live in a second-tier Midwestern rust belt city with a deep legacy of poverty and segregation. Historically, there has been a lot of lawlessness and social rebellion here. This city is busted, broke, and broken.
\n\nDespite the challenges, we built a network of anarchists here, an informal community cultivating an ethos of rebellion. A gang of aspirational dreamers, scrappy squatters, and profound thinkers who took the question of how to create and push social struggles seriously. One advantage of this city is that it is possible to live very cheaply here, compared to other parts of the country. This afforded us the chance to experiment with different forms of daily life.
\n\nAt the time this story took place, most of us were service industry workers: cooks, servers, bakers, bartenders, cab drivers, baristas, home care workers, grocery store clerks, things like that. We often found ourselves on the lower rungs of the job ladder. We would work the tedious and unpleasant jobs that offered us some degree of flexibility and the freedom to live our weird lives.
\n\nWe set out to make the road by walking. We believed that we could build with those around us, drawing on our shared interests and common anguish to create the conditions for rebellion on a broader scale. Many of us shoplifted and stole from our workplaces. Someone in our community had the idea to try to make these secret individual acts into a point of connection.
\n\nI don’t remember exactly how it first started. A photocopied flier titled “The Team is Real” circulated, presenting a proposal. A small button accompanied each flier, like the buttons you get at punk shows. Someone in the punk scene had a button maker and was putting it to use.
\n\nThe flier set out the proposal:
\n\n\n\n\nStep one: Wear the button when you’re at work. Hook people up (discounts, freebies, extras, etc.).
\n\nStep two: Wear the button when you go out. Get hooked up. Remember to ask your teammates where they work.
\n\nStep three: Build the team. Talk to your friends and trusted co-workers. The more people on the team, the better.
\n
You can read the whole manifesto here.
\n\nThe proposal was basically to make a union of thieves that could expand beyond the limits of camaraderie, political alliance, and friendship, as a way to widen our connections with others based on our mutual material conditions and needs. It was a very simple system. If you don’t have access to the kind of button maker we used, you could use other types of pins, patches, shirts, hats—any type of common identifier. Of course, you have to be careful that word does not get out to anyone who can’t be trusted.
\n\nThe idea spread through our subcultural community and across the lines that separated us from other scenes. It reached our peers and co-workers.
\n\nAt the high point of our experiment, I could go out and visit a variety of establishments without ever spending money. I could get sandwiches, coffee, ice cream and gelato, and sometimes groceries from one of the fancy local grocery stores. Sometimes the people hooking me up were people I didn’t even know.
\n\nThat was good. But the flier described bigger ambitions:
\n\n\n\n\nIn our fantastical visions of the near future, we see ourselves reclining on patio furniture while savoring lattes, stocking our larders with the finest of produce from local markets. We are enveloped in sensations of pleasure foreign to our proletarian tongues as we drink freely of the bourgeoisie’s wine. When we travel, we are greeted by friends and strangers with gifts of bounty and luxury. And when guests are received by us in turn, we show them a night on the town like no other. A cornucopia of goods, freely taken and given, all at the expense of those who would exploit our lives, all in the spirit of the negation of capitalist relations.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/15/6.jpg\")
\nOur experiment could have gone further. It didn’t end up reaching far enough or lasting long enough to make a really deep impact on the tangible conditions of our daily lives. It did generate some conversations among coworkers, and that fostered a spirit of solidarity, or least insubordination. But materially, it was limited by what each of us was able to get away with in the workplace; we only had access to small quantities of what was available to us in our immediate environments. The real stockpiles of wealth are stored far from the outlets of the service economy.
\n\nI think this model could be more effective in a geographically smaller place—for example, a college town where there is a central concentration of cafés and stores. It also could be interesting to try it out in a place that is experiencing active rebellion, or in a time of widespread unrest like during the George Floyd uprising. In a situation like that, it could be way to extend the energy in the streets into other forms of experimental resistance. When we’ve experienced rebellions like that here, we’ve often wondered how we could expand and extend them into ongoing social and class war. The “great resignation” that followed the COVID-19 pandemic saw anti-work sentiment reach new heights; some people interpreted that as a continuation of the uprising. Maybe something like “the team” could have opened up a new front then.
\n\nWe are all fundamentally exploited in our daily experiences as workers under capitalism. We need new ways to experiment and spread class struggle outside of formal structures like unions, which aren’t available to some of us. Any gift shared freely heartens and encourages us, but if it is stolen back, it’s all the sweeter. Everything for everyone!
\n\n\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2024/04/01/a-moment-of-illumination", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2024/04/01/a-moment-of-illumination", "title": "A Moment of Illumination", "summary": "", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/01/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/01/header.jpg", "date_published": "2024-04-01T15:51:02Z", "date_modified": "2025-02-04T07:04:13Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "“The routine of robbing banks is no replacement for the carnival of storming them en masse. Something that holds true for many “survival” acts: better to loot than shoplift, to ambush than to snipe, to walk out than to phone in a bomb threat, to strike than to call in sick, to riot than to vandalize… Increasingly collective and coordinated acts against this world of coercion and isolation aren’t solely a matter of effectivity, but equally a matter of sociality—of community and fun.”
\n\n-War on Misery #3, summer 2008
\n
In the following narrative, our correspondent casts light on a little-understood episode of history.
\n\n\n\n\n“In fact, almost all the major breakthroughs are unexpected. It used to be we’d get bright people and just let them do whatever they want, and then suddenly, we’ve got the light bulb.”
\n\n-David Graeber, interviewed by PBS
\n
Fiat lux. In the beginning, there were three of us—the communist, the insurrectionist, and I, your humble narrator. It was the turn of the century and we were wandering in darkness.
\n\nIn a vacuum, light moves at a velocity of 299,792 km per second. We were moving considerably slower, not only on account of our ignorance of the metric system but also because we couldn’t see two feet in front of us in the abandoned warehouse. We had been forced to abandon our headlamps with our backpacks when we fled the train yard.
\n\nSome people abandon warehouses, other people abandon backpacks. That’s how it is under capitalism.
\n\nThe Hungarian feminist filmmaker Ildiko Enyedi completed her masterpiece My Twentieth Century in 1989, a pivotal moment in history. The film opens in Menlo Park, New Jersey, as Thomas Edison demonstrates his new invention, the electric light bulb. To the rapture of an enchanted crowd, a display of light bulbs arranged throughout the branches of the trees glows like a scale model of the heavens. Enyedi affords the viewer a glimpse of a man with a visage not unlike Errico Malatesta—who did indeed greet the opening of the 20th century in New Jersey—contemplating one of these miraculous inventions.
\n\nThen the scene shifts and we see the stars of the true heavens. The cosmos always exceeds our clumsy imitations.
\n\nWe found a stairwell and ascended through the gloom. The communist was grumpy. He always attributed our misfortunes to a lack of proper discipline. The insurrectionist was peevish. As she saw it, when things went wrong, it showed that we weren’t being brave enough. Myself, I was just thanking my lucky stars that we had gotten away from yard security.
\n\nVisible light is a kind of electromagnetic radiation—specifically, it is comprised of the wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation that fall within the range that the human retina can perceive. White light consists of a roughly equal mixture of all visible wavelengths. But there was no light of any sort in the hallway at the top of the stairs. We crept into the murk, hands before our faces, a single step at a time. Tenebrosity, that’s the literary term for what we were experiencing. Total darkness.
\n\nI was in the front. Space changes when you lose your ability to visually map it from a distance. When you have to feel every inch of it by hand, it expands. In the few tentative steps from the stairwell to the first door, it felt as though I covered as much ground as we had on the freight train over the past three days.
\n\nI fumbled through the door and made my way around the room. It was roughly square, without any doors other than the one I had entered, and apparently windowless.
\n\n“Even if there is a security guard outside the building, they won’t be able to see us in here,” I argued.
\n\n“Let’s post up here, then,” said the insurrectionist. “We can sleep until shift change, then go try to recover our packs.”
\n\n“I wish we had a light to read by,” said the communist. Every night, to catch up on the day’s news, he read a few pages of Das Kapital. Apparently, he’d brought it with him when he abandoned his pack.
\n\nI resumed my blind groping along the walls of the room. Eventually, I found a light switch and flipped it. No luck.
\n\n“What if the light bulb is just burned out, though? We don’t know for sure that the electricity is off.”
\n\n“Are you just walking around with a spare light bulb on you?” I demanded.
\n\n“There could be a utility closet,” answered the insurrectionist.
\n\n“That’s a good idea,” agreed the communist. “Where do you think that would be?”
\n\n“Do I look like a motherfucking theorist?” asked the insurrectionist from the darkness.
\n\nThe insurrectionist and I stumbled back out into the hallway. I took one side of the hallway, she took the other, and we traced our fingers along the walls until she reached another door. She swung it open. “I feel shelves.” She had found the utility closet. “I found something! I think it’s a light bulb!”
\n\nWe groped our way back to our room. But in the darkness, we couldn’t reach the ceiling to find the light fixture.
\n\n“How many anarchists does it take to change a light bulb?” I asked.
\n\n“We’re not here to change things for people,” said the insurrectionist. “The light bulb has to change itself.”
\n\n“‘Communism is not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality has to adjust itself,’” quoted the communist. “It is ‘the real movement that abolishes the present state of things,’ which is to say, the darkness.”
\n\n“So if we change the light bulb, it was communism that did it?” objected the insurrectionist. “Talk about gaslighting.”
\n\n“Lenin says ‘Communism is Soviet power plus the electrocution of the whole country,’” the communist answered.
\n\nI crept back into the hallway and resumed my search. Past the closet, I found another door. It, too, was unlocked. I stepped through it and immediately stubbed my toe on something in the murk. I reached out and felt something at hip level. A swivel chair.
\n\nI rolled the chair back down the hall into our room. The insurrectionist held it still while I stood on it, flailing my arms over my head in slow motion. And sure enough, there it was—the light fixture. I unscrewed the glass hemisphere that concealed it and lowered the glass to the insurrectionist, who passed me the light bulb from the hall closet in return. There was already a light bulb in the socket above me. I unscrewed it and handed it down to her.
\n\n“You know you can fill these with paint and throw them at police officers,” she informed me.
\n\nGingerly rotating the new light bulb into the socket, I held my breath, hoping against hope. What were the odds that the power was still on in this abandoned building?
\n\nLight consists of energy quanta called photons that behave like particles in some cases and like waves in other cases. Sometimes we are atomized individuals, doing our lonely part to contribute to the collective struggle. Other times, we become something that transcends the sum of our parts. We become a wave of change.
\n\nAnd suddenly, everything was illuminated. In a flash, I could see the ceiling over me, I could see the room around us, I could see the dumbfounded faces of my comrades squinting up at me from below. I was Prometheus, stealing fire from our corporate overlords to light our dismal way. We had accomplished the unthinkable. Let there be light!
\n\nThe communist got out his book. The insurrectionist started looking for things to steal. Flushed with success, I went back out into the hall.
\n\nNavigating by the ray of light from our room, I returned to the stairwell. I could see, now, that the stairs continued up. I ascended them two at a time, landing after landing. At the top, there was a ladder reaching up to a trap door.
\n\nThe view from the top of the building was breathtaking. The whole city was laid out before us in all its excess. A hundred thousand households sleeping side by side, oblivious to their collective potential. Capitalism had left this building dead, but we had brought it back to life. If three of us could accomplish that, what could all of us accomplish, together?
\n\nSuddenly, the insurrectionist was at my side. We stood there, looking out across the city. We were not powerless individuals. We were the froth on the edge of a wave of change, about to crash across an unsuspecting society. Raising our eyes from the electric lights of the sleeping city to the canopy of stars above, we knew in our hearts that our story had only just begun. If we could change a light bulb, we could change the world.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/01/1.jpg\")
\n\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2024/01/18/the-2024-zapatista-encuentro-report-back-and-footage", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2024/01/18/the-2024-zapatista-encuentro-report-back-and-footage", "title": "The 2024 Zapatista Encuentro : A Report-back with Footage of a Play about the Movement to Stop Cop City", "summary": "A report-back on the Zapatista encuentro celebrating 30 years since the 1994 uprising, including footage of a play about the movement to stop Cop City.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/header.jpg", "date_published": "2024-01-18T10:50:20Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:58Z", "tags": [ "Mexico", "stop cop city", "Atlanta", "ezln", "zapatistas" ], "content_html": "“A light bulb came on.”
\n\n-“Performing Folk Punk: Agonistic Performances of Intersectionality,” Benjamin D. Haas
\n
On January 2, 2024, members of the Weelaunee Solidarity Collective—an ad hoc group of US-based forest defenders and revolutionaries—presented a play about the history of the movement to Stop Cop City at the encuentro celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Zapatista uprising. The play recounts the recent history of Weelaunee Forest and the struggle to defend the vision of life it embodies against the militarized world of police and prisons represented by Cop City. The play was creative, playful, and amateur: all endearing qualities that characterize the cultural productions that Zapatistas presented throughout the gathering, at which collective participation in narrating history was valued as an end in itself.
\n\nIn the following account, participants in the Weelaunee Solidarity Collective describe their experiences at the gathering and their reflections about what the ongoing Zapatista project can teach aspiring revolutionaries elsewhere around the world. We also share footage of the play they performed at the encuentro in memory of Tortuguita, who was murdered one year ago today.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/8.jpg\")
\nIn 1994, the Zapatistas refuted the claim that humanity had reached “the end of history” by carrying out an uprising in response to the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The proponents of neoliberal market economies had prematurely declared victory over the last remnants of the worker’s movement, hoping to consign the dream of a dignified life in common (which Zapatistas refer to as Lekil Kuxlejal) to the dustbin of history. The Zapatista uprising and the decades of autonomy it secured are living proof that history itself is not over—that the present, like the past and the future, remains a site of contestation and struggle.
\n\nIn 2023, in defiance of a society bent on destroying life itself—a society that is responding to the crises produced by capitalism by redoubling investment in police, borders, plantations, prisons, extraction, and militarized control—a group of militants traveled to Chiapas from the so-called United States of America to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the 1994 uprising.
\n\nNearly a year after Georgia State Patrol murdered our friend and comrade Tortuguita, we arrived in the Lancandon jungle with Tort in our thoughts. While Tort was murdered far from the cloud forests of southern Mexico, they inhabited a landscape of revolutionary possibility that the Zapatistas had helped to create. Tort often spoke of the Zapatistas. We placed a portrait of Tort on the memorial altar lining the front of the stage at the encuentro, alongside photographs of murdered Zapatistas and other freedom fighters.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/2.jpg\")
“We placed a portrait of Tort on the memorial altar lining the front of the stage.”
\nWhile not all of us knew Tort, we have all been involved in the struggle to defend the forest over the past several years. We did not travel to Chiapas as passive observers, but as active revolutionaries who find ourselves on the same side of the global civil war as the Zapatistas, striving to defend a dignified collective life. We know that for a revolution to be possible, we will have to weave together our struggles across the Americas, recognizing each other as combatting different heads of the same capitalist hydra.
\n\nIn the movement to stop Cop City, we have come to a point at which we are facing serious repression: the murder of Tortuguita, comrades facing charges that could mean decades in prison, the loss of the forest as a space of life, assembly, and experimentation. All of these have contributed to a state of stagnation and disorientation, posing challenges to those who aspire to see the movement develop a mass character. In attending the encuentro, our intention was to share the stories of our struggle and to learn whatever lessons the Zapatistas could share with us on the basis of decades and centuries of resistance. We arrived curious about recent Zapatista communiqués describing the difficulties caused by narcoviolence and announcing a new reformulation of their structure of autonomous government. In the face of total devastation—”the great storm,” as they call it—we must not succumb to resignation.
\n\nOver the past few years, Zapatista communities have begun to contend with narcotrafficking, a new regime of violence in Chiapas’s already contested terrain. This has led to necessary reconsiderations regarding how the Zapatistas can maintain their way of life against the incursions of the state and wealthy landowners, which are now deeply entangled with the area’s competing cartels.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/7.jpg\")
\nMany of us living in the United States have been impacted by crises caused by some of the same forces. There is a crisis along the US border, justified by a police state that has no intention of doing anything to diminish the violence resulting from a criminalized drug trade that it has contributed to creating. At the same time, a crisis has emerged out of the criminalization of drug use in the United States, involving a wave of overdoses intensified by unsafe supply, alongside cyclical and racialized incarceration. Some reduce this to an oversimplified formula: narco violence in the Global South is fueled by the consumption habits of the Global North.
\n\nSpeaking to those facing the threat of narcoviolence in their territory, we found it important to present an alternative framework emphasizing the interconnected nature of these crises and the repressive forces that purport to engage in “crisis management.” If we are to forge paths toward an internationalism that is capable of connecting struggles across ever more militarized border regimes, it is especially important to unearth the links between our unique contexts.
\n\nAfter a long, crowded ride from San Cristobal in a combi, during which we passed military bases and the silent streets of towns struggling with the incursions of the cartels, we were greeted by banners welcoming us to the Caracol of Dolores Hidalgo. An autonomous enclave in the heart of Zapatista territories, Dolores Hidalgo is in a large valley surrounded by breathtakingly beautiful mountains and cloud forests. This valley had been a hacienda until the Zapatisatas redistributed it after the 1994 uprising. Dotted throughout the valley are many Zapatista communities, each with parcels of land being worked communally.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/13.jpg\")
“Welcome to the Caracol of Dolores Hidalgo.”
\nThe Zapatistas built an entire village to host the encuentro, welcoming thousands of strangers and neighbors. In the center was a massive field where plays and performances took place daily. As we arrived and looked for a spot to rig up our massive tarp, we passed Zapatistas from the caracol of Oventik who were reenacting the centuries of servitude on the hacienda, the indignities of forced labor and sexual exploitation. Such plays function as a form of storytelling and political participation for the Zapatistas, enabling their communities to engage in historiography and to pass on shared memory. Coming from a land where the memories of struggles barely last a single generation, we bore witness to these acts of collective retelling, inspired by the struggle to wrestle the memory of the past and the rebellious lessons it contains from those who would prefer to consign them to oblivion.
\n\nPerformances of many kinds filled the days, both on the field and elsewhere around the site. Music rang out continuously throughout the encuentro, with brief silences between 4 and 6 am. Even in that silence, one could still hear the low hum of daily life: conversation, the cries of a baby, laughter, animals stirring.
\n\nSurrounding the central field were thousands of bicycles carefully maintained, covered, and guarded by EZLN militants. One could not get within a few feet of the bikes without being asked to back up. Why there were so many bikes and what they are going to do with them remains a mystery to us. Even the EZLN guards seemed at a loss regarding the purpose of the bicycles. Were they a demonstration of their increasing focus on hyper-localism? A feminist praxis? An environmentalist gesture? There is an entire communiqué dedicated to a video of their new bicycle fleet so you can wonder for yourself.
\n\nBeyond the bikes, on the edges of the site, were spaces to eat, receive medical treatment, sleep, wash your clothes, shower, and more.
\n\nThere were many little worlds within the world of the encuentro. The world of the Zapatista-run restaurant for visitors, where people from all over stood in line for over an hour to order from a large menu that was almost always limited to a single item; the world of the cocina para visitantes, a free kitchen, if you could find it, where there were no lines; the world we created under our large tarp, where twenty of us slept on the hard and slanted earth, sliding into each other, staying up late into the night talking about revolution and discussing our situation in the United States while EZLN militants silently marched past us in lines, carrying bowls of beans and cups of coffee up to their camps on the hill above; the world of play, involving us and children and even the dogs; the world of the encounter we shared with a group of Germans who asked us to be in a photo with a banner reading “Freedom to those underground and on the run,” in solidarity with a group of anti-fascists who have recently gone underground to evade the charges brought against them after a fascist gathering in Budapest. Our discussions with them illuminated parallels between the RICO charges in Atlanta and paragraph 129, a similar law increasingly used in Germany to prosecute political organizing as criminal conspiracy.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/5.jpg\")
\nAll of these worlds were worlding together in a robust ecosystem, on the basis of shared life and land in common—a defining element of Zapatismo. Indeed, if there was one word that was repeated over and over again, it was commons. The Zapatistas understand the commons as sites of insurgency. The foundation of revolution must be the commons—to share life in common is to revolt together, and to share work in common is to refuse alienation and the isolating effect empire has on life. The commons are an interruption of capitalism. As sites of insurgency, they are antagonistic to capital’s rapid flows. Insofar as time itself has become a function of capital flow today, the commons slow down time. Where time is slower, one can attend to intention—in laughter and joy, discovery and death, play and performance.
\n\nTo us visitors, this intentional, communal action was apparent everywhere: the infrastructure and arrangement of the site, the way ordinary tasks were carried out, the breaking of a piñata. A swarm of children formed a large circle around the piñata, which was decorated as a Yankee monster with an American flag hat, terrifying eyes, and a monopoly spirit. The master of ceremonies let the children take turns swinging as the piñata bounced up and down. Eventually, it cracked open—but to our surprise, no candy fell out. We Americans were accustomed to a downpour of treats and the ravenous race to get what you can—”you better be quick, or it will all run out.” What we saw, instead, was the opposite of competition rooted in a false sense of scarcity and an accelerated temporality. After the piñata broke, the kids were all handed candy in an egalitarian manner; there was enough for everyone, and the kids understood this.
\n\nThis moment illustrated how every ritual conceals the possibility of changing worlds. At the encuentro, it felt as if every action was directed at the development of a historical consciousness as the resilient unfolding of life. This awareness and intentionality is necessitated by the commons and the commons necessitate it. The people and the earth have become reified as opponents alien to each other. The commons represents the reunion of the two in reciprocal liberation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/4.jpg\")
\nIn the worlds sustained by the bad government, children are relegated to school, away from the serious adults who are focused on the details of their own exploitation. The elderly are imprisoned in senior centers or else often left homeless, deteriorating in the abyss of isolation, taking with them memory and potential wisdom. This makes it difficult to intentionally shape a collective consciousness according to aspirations that are informed by a time frame that extends deep into the past and future. Likewise, when children are not able to participate in memory-making, it is easy to forget about fantasy and possibility. The processes of making history and making memory are intertwined.
\n\nIn Zapatista territory, the youthful and the old are not excluded from social life. A healthy forest includes both old growth trees and saplings, which often grow out of decaying logs alongside their mycelial relations. In this regard, Dolores Hidalgo felt like a healthy forest, creative and alive.
\n\nAs visitors, we borrowed some of the imaginative practices that the Zapatista children shared with us and put on a play of our own. The Zapatistas have always incorporated an internationalist framework. They performed the stories of their struggle for us because they want us to know them, but they also invited all visitors to share in our own ways so that we could learn from each other. We decided to share our struggle via the same mode of communication they were using to share their struggles with us. This meant stepping outside our comfort zones. It challenged us to construct a performance involving a large group of people.
\n\nIn writing the play, we rediscovered how easy and spontaneous collaboration and art making can be. One does not need to be a professional playwright, director, or actor to put on a play. Anyone can do it by maintaining a childlike playfulness and focusing on the most crucial elements of the story. At first, when we were brainstorming, we wanted to include every detail of the struggle: the spiraling of offensive time with weeks of action, the strategy of targeting contractors, and all the different ways people exerted pressure, including home demos, office demos, call-in campaigns, and sabotage.
\n\nWe eventually simplified our narrative to a few key points: we fought the police and protested for Black lives, then we lived communally in the forest to protect it from destruction, then the police raided, ripping a forest defender from their tree house and murdering Tortuguita. At this point in our performance, we lifted up Tortuguita’s body, representing the carrying on of their spirit, and then they walked with us on the path forward. Our bodies, cloaked in black t-shirt balaclavas and carrying branches, became the trees, the animals, the forest defenders, our fallen comrade, and eventually, the fire that burned down the beginnings of Cop City on March 5, 2023. We became the living memory of history, oral history against specialization. Our play ended with everyone, arms linked, in a tight circle facing outward to represent our solidarity in the face of repression. As we slowly moved outward and apart, we beckoned the audience to join us, as our narrator concluded, “This is not an end to our story. The movement continues.”
\n\nFootage of the play that the Weelaunee Solidarity Collective performed at the Zapatista encuentro.
\nTwo nights before we performed our play, we celebrated New Year’s and the 30th anniversary of the Zapatista uprising with the thousands of Zapatistas and others who had gathered in Dolores Hidalgo. Shortly before midnight on New Year’s Eve, over a thousand EZLN fighters in full army fatigues marched in formation, tapping along to the beat of Como Te Voy a Olvidar by Los Ángeles Azules. This time, they were marching with sticks, not guns. Thousands of spectators watched. Most had traveled many hours to be there; many of them were recording on their smartphones.
\n\nThe demonstration was serious yet playful, something the Zapatistas have become known for over the years. The women of the EZLN marched in first, and the men followed, facing towards them. Then the women militants broke out of formation into a skipping dance, waving their arms in invitation, spiraling all around the open field. The performance ended with the men moving simultaneously outward, linking arms to create a perimeter surrounding the entire crowd.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/10.jpg\")
“The women with rebel dignity—EZLN.”
\nThe procession did not display military power, per se. Rather, it attested to the Zapatistas’ continuing ability to organize.
\n\nAs the Zapatistas advanced in their not-so-military formation, we reflected on their saying: lento pero avanzo. Paso a paso, step by step, slowly but advancing, so we can continue our struggle for another ten, twenty, thirty, fifty years.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/1.jpg\")
Lento pero avanzo. Slowly, but we advance.
\nSome of us left the Lancandon jungle with more questions than answers. However, we left with the faith that we had helped to foster deeper connections with the Zapatistas and others around the world. For the friends who had the time to stay, more intimate conversations will be possible in the days following the encuentro.
\n\nThe Zapatistas are able to offer access to land, food, healthcare, education, and a justice system as immediate existential benefits for participating in life in common. This is the recruitment pitch. Sustenance, education, continuity in collective memory, a dignified and communal life.
\n\nThis challenged us to reflect: What are we able to offer? Friendship, cultural events, adventure, collective purpose? If the most that a struggle can do is to temporarily counter our loneliness and alienation, this may not be sufficient to sustain it. If that is all we have to offer, we are only competing with other subcultures to play the same role. On the other hand, we are living in a time when obtaining housing, food, and health care is once again becoming a real struggle for many of those who live in America. Perhaps making some of these necessities available was an important element of what the Weelaunee forest occupation offered. While there are strategic disadvantages to holding space that is vulnerable to attack from all sides, and at worst, occupations may hinder the broadening of a movement beyond a specific location, the loss of the forest as a commons leaves us with the task of creating a commons elsewhere. The question is how.
\n\nThe “how” will necessarily be messy, complicated, and contradictory. That’s the nature of struggle, of operating within a field of forces pushing and pulling in different directions. Zapatista territories are territories in struggle; they are not free of market influence. Zapatistas drive cars, drink Coca Cola, operate roadside stores, use smartphones and social media; we suspect that there is a corner of Facebook where one can find long threads of comments in Tsetal beneath videos of young EZLN men dancing with internationalists. Autonomy is not a question of purity; it is an ongoing practice. It means making breaks from capital and becoming the collective authors of our shared destiny, starting now.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/6.jpg\")
\nThe Zapatistas began this process forty years ago in clandestinity, drawing on decades of consciousness raising and cultural practices that predate capitalist systems altogether. Sometimes these breaks may not look clean. The Zapatista network is not entirely severed from capitalist networks and supply chains; it is a constellation of liberated territories, collective projects, support bases, and flows of information, people, and materials. All the elements of the constellation have varying degrees of relation to capitalism, yet they nevertheless form part of the constellation of struggle. The liberated communal lands, the health clinics, the Zapatista stores in San Cris selling Zapatista-made goods, the pizza restaurants, cinemas, and bars operated by support bases, all of these form part of the constellation that is a community in struggle. This is the reality of the struggle today, in a world in which capitalist relations have colonized every part of the planet.
\n\nBecause struggle is dynamic, and the terrain on which we struggle shifts according to the strategies of our enemies and our own accomplishments and failures, any enduring struggle must be capable of transforming itself. It must be fluid, mutable, flexible, modular, and non-dogmatic. This has been one of the most inspiring elements of the Zapatista fight for life: their continuous ability to reinvent their struggle. This does not mean refusing to set attainable concrete goals, nor does it mean declaring an effort a success when it fails to achieve its goals. Strategies should be falsifiable. It does, however, mean being flexible, always thinking about how to turn each situation to the advantage of the movement, even when it may represent a failure by the original metrics.
\n\nDuring the encuentro, we struck up a conversation with an older Zapatista man, likely in his seventies. He told us he had been involved with the organization since the days of clandestine activity. We asked him how he got involved. “At that time, they were just going door to door, one by one,” he said. Someone came to his door asking if he wanted to join the organization and he agreed. He shared that he has a wife and six children, none of whom wanted to become Zapatistas. The rest of his family are partidistas—they vote for and support the political parties in Mexico’s electoral system. His decision to join the struggle remains a point of contention in his family. He told us that this kind of division is common in Zapatista families. We asked him if, after everything he has been through, he is happy with the state of things for the Zapatistas today. “I’m very sad,” he answered. He explained that for him, the days of being clandestine never ended—that he still cannot go into the city because he is a known Zapatista organizer, that he still sees himself as clandestine.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/12.jpg\")
\nThis was just one conversation, but it illustrates something that many internationals don’t realize: for many, the aspirations of the 1994 uprising were much greater than what Zapatismo has become today. Subcomandante Moises echoed this in his speech on New Year’s: “We are as alone now as we were thirty years ago.” When the Zapatistas rose up in 1994, they asked others to get organized and rise up with them, but no one did. While they received a great deal of support and solidarity in the following years, both nationally and internationally, no one took up arms alongside them to overthrow capitalism. Consequently, they did the best they could with the situation they found themselves in.
\n\nIn many ways, this very situation led to the new and creative forms of autonomous organizing that continue to inspire many internationals today. It provides us with an example of what it means to think strategically and dynamically, adapting to changing conditions without losing sight of our goals or setting aside our convictions. It also makes us wonder how things might have turned out if other people had risen up with them, and what hopes and aspirations were never realized by those who fought and died for their revolution. (For further reading on Zapatista organizing and aspirations before the uprising, we recommend John Womack’s Rebellion in Chiapas.)
\n\nThrough the trials and tribulations, across the shifting terrain of struggle, the Zapatistas continue to attract new participants by relatively simple means. They offer a real alternative to the existing capitalist and state systems. They offer people land and health, the fundamentals for a dignified life. Questions of land have always been at the heart of the Zapatista struggle. They recovered large amounts of land after the 1994 uprising, which provided fertile soil for growing crops.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/9.jpg\")
\nIn addition, the Zapatistas offer a communal form of organization to manage the land and formal processes for dealing with land disputes. They also operate autonomous health clinics in each of their caracoles. These clinics are often the closest place to get healthcare in rural areas, for Zapatistas and non-Zapatistas alike. This care is free, apart from the cost of any medication prescribed, which is sold at cost. This means that, especially for rural people, Zapatista autonomous health clinics are often the most affordable option accessible.
\n\nThe way they attract new people to their ranks, then, is by offering alternatives to the life that capitalism can provide. This challenges us to ask ourselves: what do we have to offer people? How can we provide viable alternatives to the ways of living offered by the capitalist system?
\n\nWe recommend reading the entirety of the newest series of Zapatista communiqués, all of which can be found here. You can read a foundational primer on the Zapatista rebellion here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/18/3.jpg\")
\nIn the following account, a CrimethInc. agent describes a series of adventures on the road to the 2024 Zapatista Encuentro, a gathering celebrating thirty years since the uprising that established an autonomous zone in Chiapas.
\n\nTomorrow, we will follow up with more reporting from the encuentro itself.
\n\nThe banner in the above photograph welcomes people to the Zapatista encuentro, reading, “Land belonging to no one. Land belonging to all. Here we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the armed uprising against forgetting, against death, against destruction.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/16/3.jpg\")
\n“It would be safest if you went with the caravan.”
\n\n“The caravans always fall apart.”
\n\nWe were asking about how to get to the Zapatistas’ New Year’s encuentro. Whether we asked at the anarchist social center, around the autonomous Panchos1 neighborhood in Mexico City, or by emailing the contacts listed on the Zapatista website, we always received one—or both—of these replies.
\n\nA gathering in rebel territory is always something special, but this year marked the 30th anniversary of the debut of the EZLN [Zapatista Army of National Liberation] in an armed uprising against NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994] and, more broadly, against capitalism itself.
\n\nMuch has changed for the Zapatistas since those days. The charismatic Subcomandante Marcos has stepped away from both lens and pens. While they still defend their territorial autonomy, the armed aspect of the EZLN’s military operations has been outshined by the construction of schools, clinics, and a new politics for their people.2 In November, to the shock and dismay of radicals worldwide, the Zapatistas announced the dissolution of their autonomous municipalities, leading many to speculate that narco-capitalism and paramilitaries have become as much of an obstacle for the Zapatista project as the Mexican government and neoliberal megaprojects. However, one thing has not changed: their welcoming internationalism towards those in solidarity with their struggle for the land to be held in common by all who work it.
\n\nThe GPS routes me through Mexico City’s glorietas and bulevards to what I’m told is the office from which the caravan will leave.
\n\nExcept it’s not exactly an office. It’s not really a social center, either. Wait—I remember you! The Convergence Center? Is it really you??? It has to be—the snack station at the front, the registration tables for the buses, “Comrade, where’s the bathroom?” I knew it was you! It’s just been a minute. How long has it been? Since Seattle? Prague? Genoa? Cancún? J18, A16, J20? Too long, that’s for sure.
\n\nAnd you’re still full of backpacks. Look at all those backpacks! A recently landed extraterrestrial—this is an intergalactic encuentro, after all—here to register her UFO in the caravan might easily misunderstand the Zapatistas as a movement of 40-liter hiking packs that use humans as their workhorses.
\n\nOh, I remember this part, too—my affinity group’s weird plan doesn’t fit in with the public-facing structure. That’s okay. Time to do what I always do: step into the densest mass of comrades standing around and shout my question into the void: “Is anyone else taking their own car?”
\n\nCrickets.
\n\n“…so we can, uh, coordinate?”
\n\nUncomfortable stares.
\n\nEven the alien knows what this means: it’s just me and the tour buses. Like a giddy, oblivious puppy in a parade of elephants.
\n\n“So, like, how often will the buses be stopping for gas?”
\n\n“Gas? We filled up. We won’t need to stop for gas.”
\n\n“But like, bathroom breaks?”
\n\n“There are bathrooms on the bus…”
\n\nThe trip is 14 hours long. Mostly highway. I will need to stop for gas, and for relief. Will I lose the caravan?
\n\n“…but there is a truck stop where we will regroup because the caravans always fall apart. After that point, the highway can get a little hairy, so it would be safest if you went with the caravan. I’ll text you the name. They’re open 24 hours and have tamales and coffee.”
\n\nI gather the affinities and we’re off. I’ve never thought of the van as fast, but between our head start and the sloth with which the massive buses grind into gear, I figure we’ll make up for our refills and rest stops.
\n\nBesides spewing the road with all of my fancy LucasOil additive because I neglected to tighten down the oil pan screw, the first leg of the drive is fairly uneventful.
\n\nThere are five of us from four different countries, so there’s a lot to talk about, whether up front with the pilot and the jam box or in the back lounging on the bed. The stories about revolts that have reached us across national borders. Secrets, traditions, and magic from our respective territories. This song, that movie. It’s a road trip.
\n\nThere’s silence, too. The silence is good for a cigarette. And after the smoke, “There’s this other thing I don’t know if you know about…”
\n\nIt’s 2 am, truck stop o’clock. About half of the tour buses pull in right after us. The other half are stuck behind an accident a hundred kilometers away, so we wait.
\n\nAfter a couple more hours, the sun is rising and I’ve drunk way too much coffee.
\n\nWe’re still here.
\n\nThey’re still stuck behind that accident.
\n\n“The caravans always fall apart.”
\n\n“I think we should just go on ahead. It’s light now, and I know somebody we can crash with in San Cristobal de las Casas. Who knows how long we’ll be stuck here waiting?” says an affinity who knows the route. Now the plan is to go to the registration site outside of San Cris on our own and wait for the caravan there.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/16/8.jpg\")
\nOn my phone:
\n\n\n\n\n“Hey, I’m with the human rights observers at Puente Chiapas. When you cross the bridge, stop and say what’s up. I’ve got some information for you.”
\n
In the harsh light of day, our chatterboxes have wound down. It’s not unfriendly, but there’s a lot more grunting. We’ve been on the road for twelve hours now. The lack of conversation is offset by the gorgeous tropical wetlands, rivers, and majestic vistas that we zoom through while rounding the hills and valleys of Veracruz and Chiapas. Foggy clouds stretch over the canopies like the hammocks of God.
\n\nWill we make it to a gas station before we run out of fuel? There hasn’t been anything but road and jungle for a long time.
\n\n“Oh shit, look, it’s Puente Chiapas.”
\n\n“Nah, that’s not the bridge your friend meant,” says the affinity who knows the route.
\n\n“What do you mean? It says Puente Chiapas right there.”
\n\n“Yeah, but there’s another Puente Chiapas, closer to San Cris.”
\n\nIt’s easy to convince me to give up looking for the human rights observation team and let my gaze wander back to the lush islands in the middle of the river crossed by the bridge. An hour later, my phone signal kicks in and I get a message from an hour earlier:
\n\n\n\n\n“Dude, I just saw your van cross the bridge. Why didn’t you stop?”
\n
It was that Puente Chiapas. Opa.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/16/7.jpg\")
\nNow it’s noon. We’ve been driving for 16 hours. Originally, we were supposed to arrive two hours ago, but instead, there are still a few hours left before we get to San Cris.
\n\nWhen we finally arrive, we spill out of the van and zombie crawl, each in a different direction: food, cigarettes, pharmacy. I take advantage of the solitude to siesta in the back of the van. My phone vibrates and I’m back:
\n\n\n\n\n“Hey, can you fit my two friends from Mexicali? The buses just left Puente Chiapas. The Mexicalis know where the buses are meeting up in San Cris.”
\n
It’s time for an affinity group meeting.
\n\n“Can we fit two more in the back?”
\n\n“Shouldn’t we go crash at my friend’s? You’ve been driving forever.”
\n\n“Comrades, I too can drive. We should at least see what the buses’ plan is, because from here on, it’s small, rural roads and it would be safest if we went with the caravan.”
\n\n“If you can drive, then I’m OK cramming in the back with two more punks. I can also make another seat up front out of the jam box.”
\n\n“But the jam box!”
\n\n“OK, I can make it out of the snack crate.”
\n\n”But the snacks!!!”
\n\nWe pick up the additional passengers and they tell us where to park. As soon as we pull in, the tour buses start arriving. Hundreds of backpacks trot out atop their human steeds. Out come the tortillas, the bagged beans, the queso and avocados and oranges. People pass around tobacco and ibuprofen along with the details of the sternly hashed-out meeting between the coordinators and the drivers.
\n\n“They’re waiting for one more bus to arrive.”
\n\n“The drive is only four hours, so we’d get there by 10.”
\n\n“They don’t know if it’s safe because there were reports of shooting between two communities on either side of the road we’d be taking.”
\n\n“It’s either drive up tonight or find somewhere for everyone on the buses to sleep. That’s a lot of people.”
\n\n“Is that even fair to the drivers? They’ve been at it for almost 24 hours now.”
\n\nIn our group, we reach a consensus. We’re exhausted—but if the buses go, we go.
\n\nThe last bus arrives and we’re off.
\n\nRight away, at the first turn off of the road out of town, a Mexican military checkpoint photographs each vehicle in the caravan, including our out-of-place eyesore of a van. This happens again twice over the following hour. The sun is setting and as we hit the 24-hour mark from the time of our departure, we’re smack in the middle of the buses at a steady 10 miles an hour. Lento, pero avanzamos.
\n\nWe pass through tiny remote villages on roads with potholes big enough to be hot tubs. It’s poor here, really poor, and I try to wrap my head around what kind of profit margin could possibly make it worth the gas, let alone the wear on the vehicle, to deliver basic goods to these sparsely populated distant reaches. These areas are clearly not served by capitalism. As I’m calculating gas prices and soda sales for villages of a hundred, a crisp, clean sign with balloons attached to it catches my eye. But it’s no birthday party—it’s a meeting for someone’s Herbalife club, the food supplement pyramid scheme.
\n\n“Oh yeah, those are everywhere in Mexico.” One of the affinities tells me, responding to my audible gasp.
\n\nBut this isn’t just Mexico. We’ve already passed signs for one Zapatista caracol: “Territory in rebellion against the Mexican government.” And Herbalife isn’t the same as Pokemon, BTS, or whatever the latest capitalist consumer fad may be—it’s a pyramid scheme that turns the exploited and desperate into agents extending the profit-driven logic of their own exploitation. Sure, there are countless capitalist evils you could plug into this equation. But we are talking about the juxtaposition of one of humanity’s longest-standing current examples of anti-capitalist struggle with an industrial supplement scheme that rewards whoever can most effectively prey on those around them by recruiting them to be salespeople—here on the very land that the Zapatistas fight to hold in common and whose lush, bountiful, organic harvest sustains their autonomy from the capitalist marketplace. I know which side of that conflict I’m on, and my allegiance is anything but casual.
\n\nAs the contrast between the half-finished cinderblock buildings and the cheery Herbalife promotional materials recedes out of sight, I vow my own private war on Herbalife. I am a Vandal, and Herbalife is my Roman Empire.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/16/5.jpg\")
A mural reading “It is preferable to die with honor than to live with the shame of having our lives dictated by a tyrant.”
\nIt’s midnight. 28 hours since we departed Mexico City. We must be close, right?
\n\n“We were supposed to be there two hours ago. Que pedo guey.” Under her breath, barely louder than a whisper.
\n\n“Oh good, another checkpoint.” I grunt.
\n\nThis time, the soldiers are caught off guard, scrambling to get out the cameras and stop the buses. They must have been napping.
\n\nThe soldiers take one look at our little van and urge us to get out of their way so they can document the caravan, which they assume consists of buses alone. Why would there be a single van in the midst of a convoy of buses, anyway?
\n\nI cackle deliriously. Fine then! Hasta la vista, baby!
\n\nWe pull over down the road and wait for the buses to get through whatever bullshit the military is subjecting them to.
\n\nAfter the buses pull up and park, it’s time for another meeting.
\n\n“So, how far are we now?”
\n\n“Four hours.”
\n\n“Four?! How???”
\n\nI debate in my head whether to double the four hours to eight or to add fourteen to four, making it eighteen, since our supposedly fourteen-hour trip has already taken twenty-eight hours. I split the difference and figure that we’re thirteen hours out.
\n\n“There’s a caracol just outside of town that can host us. We’ll keep going in the morning.”
\n\n“OK, we’ll follow you.”
\n\n“It’s only 20 minutes away.”
\n\nIt takes an hour, but that’s all right. I’m on my fourth wind from the euphoria of evading the military control and I’m fully saddled in the seat of time’s curves. Giddy-up.
\n\nAs we pull into the caracol, signs inform us that we are entering rebel territory in defiance of Mexico’s bad government. Murals of masked guerrillas welcome us, declaring “it is preferable to die with honor than to live with the shame of having your life dictated by tyrants.” The residents spring into action, barely even wiping the sleep out of their eyes, opening up the bathrooms, dormitories, and the collective store known as “the seed of the rainbow.” One of our hosts recommends the very parking spot under a tree that I was eyeballing when we pulled in. I like it here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/16/6.jpg\")
The collective store known as “the seed of the rainbow.”
\nApparently, a tumultuous storm followed the aforementioned events. Everyone is talking about it in the morning, but I seem to have slept right through it. In a shadowy, muddy shack, a team of women are cooking up the tastiest coffee I’ve ever had in the largest cauldron I’ve ever seen. It’s free.
\n\nWe pull out with the buses and bounce over four more hours of speed bumps before pulling in through lines of Zapatista soldiers standing at attention on either side of the road. Each soldier is suited in boots, green cargo pants, a brown long-sleeve shirt, a red bandana, a black balaclava, and a green cap. This goes on for at least a kilometer—either an impressive welcome or a sophisticated security system to deal with unwanted arrivals. For the final few hundred meters, we’re surrounded by bright, colorful murals on either side of the road, depicting Zapatista life, history, and values.
\n\nWe pull in near the entrance of the caracol and park the van.
\n\nI exhale. We made it.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/16/4.jpg\")
\nThe first thing we have to do is register. At the registration table, they ask what collective I am with. The compas in charge of registration have heard of CrimethInc.; they ask if I am there to provide counterinfo coverage of the event. I’ve thought about it, even discussed it with the podcast collective, but after they told me I would have to attend an orientation, the 36 hours of driving caught up with me. “No, that’s alright.”
\n\nNext, we have to find a place to park and rest. We are told that the internationals have dormitories in another caracol, 20 minutes away… “20 minutes.” I have not come all this way to go on driving. We snag a parking spot between the buses and Zapatista family camping. Over the following days, soldiers in balaclavas will guard my van every night. It doesn’t need guarding, but it’s a generous gesture. Thank you!
\n\nThe caracol hosting the encuentro is relatively new—only three years old. But in only three years, the compas have made a lot of progress. The caracol has ten kitchens—again, with the largest pots you’ve ever seen—that stay busy cooking beans and rice over wood fires. There is an autonomous healthcare building, dormitories with bunk beds, all the showers you could possibly hope for, and bathrooms. I don’t remember ever waiting in line for the bathroom at any point during the whole encuentro.
\n\nThe land is on a hilltop nestled among other Lacandon peaks. In the morning, mist settles into the trees like cotton candy strung between your fingers. It is green everywhere, and at night the sky glitters with stars. The center of the festivities is a field, about the size of four football fields side by side in a row. The field is surrounded by benches and hundreds of brand new bicycles under tarps. On one end of the field, there are basketball and volleyball courts, and on the other end of the field, a stage.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/16/9.jpg\")
In front of the stage, there is a memorial for martyrs who died in struggle.
\nIn front of the stage, there is a memorial for martyrs who died in struggle. It’s adorned with branches, flowers, candles, and messages. To the side of the stage is an area for musicians, with a 1970s-Jamaican-style gaggle of speakers frankensteined together by Chiapas’ most brilliant and resourceful sonidista. During the day, the field is filled with theater—mostly morality plays conveying warnings about selling the land to speculators, the honor of rebellion against the bad Mexican government, and stories about the legacy of resisting colonialism and capitalism. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen theater performed on a stage that is so many times larger than the area for the audience. The scale alone gives pause.
\n\nToward sunset, there are speeches from the stage and military formations on the field. The soldiers are not displaying firearms, however—each is equipped with two batons and a machete.
\n\nThe largest military ceremony takes place on January 1, marking thirty years to the day since the EZLN launched their first military operation, seizing San Cristobal de las Casas, proclaiming territorial autonomy and declaring war on the Mexican government. After the military ceremonies, there is music! Cumbias, rancheras, mariachis. The soldiers dance all night long, a sea of bobbing green caps.
\n\nI only saw one EZLN soldier partially raise his balaclava to smoke a cigarette. Most smoked through their masks.
\n\nAs the encuentro proceeds, I hear more and more Mayan spoken. The speeches and theater pieces are in Spanish, but all the conversation around me is in Maya. It drives home that the anniversary encuentro isn’t just a commemorative event. The caracoles and Zapatistas communities may all be located within the same state of Chiapas, but, as our journey showed me, they are in remote pockets of the mountains that are difficult to reach. The encuentro is a rare chance for the participants in the Zapatista project to gather as a whole—to share, to encounter each other, to commune.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/16/2.jpg\")
\nAfterwards, someone tells me that the Mexican media focused on how small the gathering was in comparison with previous years. Perhaps this is a result of waiting to publish the invitation until just a week before New Year’s. On the other hand, by any measure, it was a huge event. Thousands of people from dozens of countries attended. Worried speculation surrounds the recent Zapatista communiqués about their civil-political reorganization. I can’t shed any light on what this process will bring—I promised that my conversations in Chiapas would stay in Chiapas.
\n\nBut I can tell you this: the Zapatista project is far from over, and a new year has just begun.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/16/1.jpg\")
\nLos Panchos (Francisco Villa (Pancho Villa) Popular Fronta, FPFV) is a sort of urban corollary to the Zapatistas. Named after the other famous Mexican revolutionary, the Panchos also launched their project in 1994, taking over land on the outskirts of Mexico City and establishing territorial autonomy in which police are excluded, collective economics comprise a significant part of life, and people practice horizontal politics. While not anarchists, they have shown solidarity to anarchists in heightened episodes of struggle, like the 2006 siege on autonomously held Atenco. For more information about Los Panchos in English, you could start here. ↩
\nThe Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona summarizes the events via which the Zapatistas burst onto the world stage: “We grew tired of exploitation by the powerful, and then we organized in order to defend ourselves and to fight for justice. In the beginning there were not many of us, just a few, going this way and that, talking with and listening to other people like us. We did that for many years, and we did it in secret, without making a stir. In other words, we joined forces in silence. We remained like that for about 10 years, and then we had grown, and then we were many thousands. We trained ourselves quite well in politics and weapons, and, suddenly, when the rich were throwing their New Year’s Eve parties, we fell upon their cities and just took them over. And we left a message to everyone that here we are, that they have to take notice of us. And then the rich took off and sent their great armies to do away with us, just like they always do when the exploited rebel—they order them all to be done away with. But we were not done away with at all, because we had prepared ourselves quite well prior to the war, and we made ourselves strong in our mountains. And there were the armies, looking for us and shooting their bombs and bullets at us, and then they were making plans to kill off all the indigenous at one time, because they did not know who was a Zapatista and who was not. And we were running and fighting, fighting and running, just like our ancestors had done. Without giving up, without surrendering, without being defeated.” ↩
\nHappy new year! Congratulations on surviving. Let’s take stock of where we are.
\n\nIn our 2022 year in review report, we documented the ebb phase of social movements that followed the upheavals of 2019 and 2020, as the strategies that had previously been successful produced diminishing returns and the authorities learned from their defeats. It remains a defining feature of our era that even the fiercest struggles have largely failed to achieve their intermediate demands. Apparently, those who administer the increasingly fragile social order some call late capitalism are not in a position to give ground. Rather than offering concessions to the desperate and unruly, governments across the political spectrum are investing in repressive technologies and doubling down on their dependence on the police.
\n\nOverseas, the consequences of this were already clear a year ago:
\n\n\n\n\nThe invasion of Ukraine continued a process of militarization and displacement that had already gotten underway in Syria. Amid ecological collapse and war—the side effects of capital accumulation and its consequences—more and more people are being forced into exile around the world.
\n\nThe invasion of Ukraine is likely an indication of things to come. Over the past several decades, governments worldwide have invested billions of dollars in crowd control technology and military equipment while taking precious few steps to address mounting inequalities or the destruction of the natural world. As economic and ecological crises intensify, more governments will seek to solve their domestic problems by initiating hostilities with their neighbors.
\n
Unfortunately, the events of 2023 have borne out our fears. While the Russian invasion of Ukraine has given way to a grinding war of attrition, civil war broke out in Sudan, Azerbaijan invaded Nagorno-Karabakh for the purpose of ethnic cleansing, and now the Israeli government is carrying out ethnic cleansing in Gaza. These are not aberrations, but glimpses of the future if we do not manage to change course.
\n\nThis shows what is at stake in our awkward efforts to change the world. In these circumstances, if it is not possible to win intermediate demands, it may be easier to pursue revolutionary transformation outright.
\n\nFortunately, we are not the only ones concerned with these questions. This year, we have been inspired by the tenacity of participants in ongoing struggles such as the fight to stop Cop City—by the empathy that has moved people around the world to act in solidarity with the residents of Gaza—by the bravery of rebels from Ecuador to France. Our experiences coming together in demonstrations, mutual aid projects, concerts, book fairs, and passionate discussions have sustained our faith in the potential of humanity. This story is far from over.
\n\n2024 will probably be a roller coaster ride. In the United States, the election season is shaping up to be chaotic indeed, and that will spill over into social conflict on the streets. It’s up to us to show that, rather than choosing between fascists and centrists determined to preserve a self-destructing system, people can come together in networks based in solidarity, mutual aid, and a more ambitious vision of what our lives could be.
\n\nThis is the best way to prepare for whatever is ahead.
\n\nHere, we’ll review our own efforts over the past year—the coverage we have provided from within social movements and the projects we have contributed.
\n\nOn October 7, militants from Hamas and other Palestinian groups breached the Gaza border fence and carried out a series of attacks, killing 1139 people. The Israeli government seized the opportunity to pursue ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip. They had massacred well over 21,000 Palestinians by the end of 2023, two thirds of whom were women and children.
\n\nIn response, the United States has seen a surge of protest and direct action. At the beginning of November, we published a text from the Fayer collective, a Jewish collective that has participated in the struggle to Stop Cop City in Atlanta, explaining why they are committed to solidarity with Palestinians and what they believe it will take to halt the assault of the Israeli military. Over the following weeks, we published reports from anarchists who participated in blockading the Port of Tacoma, a Raytheon facility, and various Amazon locations in order to interrupt the flow of weapons and money to the Israeli military.
\n\nAs we enter 2024, stopping the ethnic cleansing in Gaza remains one of the most urgent challenges before us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/3.jpg\")
A demonstration at the Port of Tacoma in Washington on November 6, 2023.
\nOver the past two years, the movement to stop Cop City and defend Weelaunee Forest has become one of the fiercest struggles in North America. Utilizing a variety of strategies, opponents of the proposed police militarization facility have repeatedly destroyed equipment and forced contractors to withdraw from the construction. In retaliation, the authorities have set new precedents in repression, murdering one forest defender and pressing outlandish racketeering charges against 61 more, including the members of a legal support collective. The first of those defendants is scheduled to stand trial beginning in early January 2024.
\n\nWe have published an array of perspectives from various participants in the movement, including material about the values that inspire them to keep fighting. In the latest installment of our comprehensive history of the movement, we trace its trajectory across the second half of 2023, exploring how the movement has sought to maintain a participatory and confrontational character even under tremendous pressure.
\n\nWe understand the fight against Cop City as a bridge between the George Floyd rebellion of 2020 and the movements of the future. In seeking to overcome the limits that the uprising of 2020 reached, the participants have set an example that will be of use next time large numbers of people are catalyzed into action.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/14.jpg\")
The Cop City construction site on March 5, 2023.
\nIn January, we published a photoessay documenting the showdown between thousands of police and protesters in Lützerath, where the German government set out to evict an ecological encampment.
\n\nIn February, we published an article about the imprisoned Italian anarchist Alfredo Cospito. By then, he had been on hunger strike for over 100 days, demanding to be released from solitary confinement. We argued that Alfredo’s strike was a warning—a message about the conditions being prepared for all of us in a society that increasingly treats human life as cheap.
\n\nIn March, we covered the movement in France against the pension reform as it escalated into a major conflict. In June, the streets of France exploded once more after the police murdered 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk. Unfortunately, as one of our contributors observed afterwards, over the past few years, different segments of the population of France have revolted successively, rather than all at once, enabling the authorities to weather the storm.
\n\nFurther east, we covered the mutiny of the Wagner private military company against the government of Vladimir Putin from the perspective of Russian anarchists. As we see it, such internal conflicts are the inevitable consequence of the militarization of society and the increasing centrality of armed force in the pursuit of state policy. In Russia, as in Sudan, the government armed mercenaries to do their dirty work, setting the stage for an armed conflict. In Sudan, the resulting civil war has been catastrophic for civilians.
\n\nElsewhere, we reported an inspiring story about solidarity between refugees and exiles, in which Russian anarchists living in exile in Armenia sought to support Armenian squatters. When Azerbaijan invaded Nagorno-Karabakh, we published the perspectives of Armenian anarchists on the events.
\n\nFinally, we explored how the Greek government’s decision to evict the self-organized refugee camp at Lavrio represents the intersection of the Turkish government’s war on Kurdish people, the Greek government’s war on autonomous spaces, and the European Union’s war on migrants.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/4.jpg\")
What goes up most come down. France in spring 2023.
\nIn honor of March 8, International Women’s Day, we published an account of the genealogy of the slogan “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” (“Woman, Life, Freedom”) showing how it spread from the part of Kurdistan that is ruled by the Turkish government to Iran and elsewhere around the world. Shortly afterwards, in response to the earthquake that wracked Syria and Turkey in February, we published statements from supporters of liberation movements in those regions showing how the Turkish and Syrian governments not only failed to protect their subjects but took advantage of the catastrophe to blockade and even bomb them.
\n\nLater that month, we published a report from an Israeli anarchist exploring how Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to consolidate power and the protest movement that emerged in response to it represented a conflict between competing elites and their respective colonial models, neither of which offered any real proposal to address the oppression and displacement of Palestinians. In October, the day after the October 7 attacks, we published a widely read interview with another Israeli anarchist, Jonathan Pollak, discussing the escalation of violence in Palestine and the repression the Israeli government metes out to those who act in solidarity with Palestinians.
\n\nWe followed that up with a perspective from a Palestinian in the part of Palestine occupied in 1948, describing life under colonial rule and emphasizing the importance of grassroots organizing and solidarity in the struggle for Palestinian liberation.
\n\nIn Brazil, 2023 began with a clumsy repeat performance of the incident on January 6, 2021 when Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol in hopes of keeping him in office. At the same time, in Peru, a tumultuous protest movement culminated in a march on the capital city of Lima. We spoke with Peruvian anarchists to get insight into those events.
\n\nThe year ended with Javier Milei taking power in Argentina. We conducted an interview with anarchists from Rosario in order to understand the decades of social struggle and economic restructuring that created the conditions in which Javier Milei came to power.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/11/26/9.jpg\")
Barricades surround the presidential palace on December 20, 2001 immediately before President Fernando De la Rua fled from the rooftop in a helicopter. The last time a government tried to impose unbridled capitalism on the population of Argentina, it ended like this.
\nOur history publishing this year focused mostly on the early 21st century. We chronicled how anti-fascists won the “battle of York” in Pennsylvania in 2002, comparing that pitched struggle with the much grimmer situation two decades later. We explored the history of the queer anarchist organizing umbrella Bash Back! ahead of a new Bash Back! convergence. Finally, to offer a historical reference point to those seeking to take action against arms traffickers today, we revisited the Smash EDO campaign in Britain a decade ago.
\n\nThis coming year, we hope to publish more work about the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
\n\nThe vantage point of a police officer in Sainte-Soline in spring 2023.
\nIn January, police murdered Manuel Terán, known as Tortuguita to their fellow forest defenders. Tortuguita had been occupying Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta for months, and bravely chose to reoccupy it after a police raid the previous December. The thousands of people who have participated in the movement to Stop Cop City have kept Tortuguita’s memory alive in defiance of the forces of repression and erasure.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/1.jpg\")
Manuel Terán, known as Tortuguita.
\nIn February, our longtime friend Jen Angel was killed in Oakland, California. Jen spent her life building infrastructure for anarchist organizing, publishing, and relationships.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/2.jpg\")
Jen Angel.
\nOn April 19, 2023, three anarchists were killed in battle near Bakhmut: an American named Cooper Andrews, an Irishman named Finbar Cafferkey, and a Russian named Dmitry Petrov. We published a biography of Dmitry. Over the course of a decade and a half, he had participated in revolutionary struggle in Russia, Belarus, Rojava, and Ukraine against a backdrop of intensifying tyranny. The story of his life offers insight into the recent history of the former Soviet Union. It is also an inspiring example of all the things an anarchist can accomplish, even in adverse conditions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/6.jpg\")
Dmitry Petrov.
\nActive Distribution has published a small book collecting our biography alongside some of his writings and those of his comrades. PM Press is distributing these books in the United States now.
\n\nOn December 6,1 anarchist insurrectionist and author Alfredo Bonanno passed away. Bonanno proposed the refusal of work and the pursuit of joyous revolt as revolutionary measures in the struggle against all forms of domination and despair; his ideas played an influential role in the development of our own collective projects. We prepared a short history of his life.
\n\nFinally, we want to give thanks for those we feared we might lose in 2023 who are still with us today. It was easy to imagine that Alfredo Cospito might not survive his hunger strike, but he did. Likewise, a participant in the confrontational demonstration in Sainte-Soline, France remained in a coma for many days because a police officer had attempted to kill him by firing a grenade at his head. Thankfully, Serge recovered.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/5.jpg\")
“Tortuguita lives; the struggle continues.” A banner displayed at a memorial march in January 2023 during which a police car caught fire.
\nIn 2023, we participated in book fairs and presentations in the United States from Boston and New York to Sacramento and Oakland, as well as in Canada, Mexico, Ecuador, Brazil, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Germany, Slovenia, and elsewhere.
\n\nOne of the most exciting events of the year was the worldwide anarchist gathering in Saint-Imier, Switzerland. This festival celebrated the 151-year anniversary of the founding congress of the federation known as the Anti-Authoritarian International—the continuation of the International Workingmen’s [sic] Association, one of the most important European labor organizations of the 19th century. Drawing a reputed 5000 people—mostly from central Europe, but also from as far away as Chile and Australia—the gathering in Saint-Imier may have been the largest exclusively anarchist event of the year.
\n\nWith the assistance of participants from Germany, Russia, Belarus, Finland, the United States, and elsewhere around the world, we published a thorough report on the gathering, and followed it up with a memoir reflecting specifically on dynamics and discourse around gender and sexuality at the gathering.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/11.jpg\")
A sticker seen during the gathering in Saint-Imier.
\nThis year, to celebrate the umpteenth reprinting of our classic gender poster, we released a 2023 remix of that poster addressing the current threats to gender self-determination and the countervailing forms of solidarity and collective self-defense. Alongside those, we published a discussion of the ways that the battle lines in discourse about gender have shifted over the two decades since we debuted the original. It’s one of the more thoughtful and reflective texts we have completed this year.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/13.jpg\")
Our new “gender remix” poster in action.
\nIn addition to those, we prepared posters in solidarity with Palestinians and with those who seek to defend the forest in Atlanta and elsewhere around the world. All of these are available to download, print out, and paste up on the walls of your community.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/10.jpg\")
Another of our posters in the wild.
\nThis year, we released fully five zines about the movement to Stop Cop City, covering the history of the movement in detail, the various strategies that participants have employed, the RICO charges, and more. These have been distributed in Atlanta and at support events all around the United States.
\n\nWe also published zines offering a perspective from Palestine, discussing the fight for gender self-determination, describing how to survive a felony trial, and recounting the lessons of the “green scare,” the federal operation targeting ecological activists.
\n\nTo make printing easier, we introduced a new “ink lite” option for printing our zines when you are short on toner.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/12.jpg\")
A street in Atlanta following a clash between police and Stop Cop City demonstrators in November 2023.
\nAfter a lull in our audio efforts, we pulled together a new team to prepare audio versions of our articles. This year, we released 20 such “audio zines,” including five about efforts towards Palestinian solidarity and five about the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta.
\n\nYou can listen to all of them here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/8.jpg\")
\nOver the course of 2023, we published dozens of articles in Spanish; over a dozen in French, Italian, and Polish; and several articles each in Basque, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, German, Greek, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Turkish. We also added texts in Danish, Dutch, Japanese, and Kurdish. We’ve published posters and zines in many of those languages, as well. You can find a comprehensive guide to our non-English content here.
\n\nWe’ve recently added a Turkish version of our introduction to anarchism, To Change Everything. It’s now available in a total of 34 languages.
\n\nWe are grateful to all the translators around the world who have worked with us to help us make our work accessible to more people. If you can help us translate anything we have published into any language, please contact us!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/9.jpg\")
Police and protesters face off in Lützerath, Germany in January 2023.
\nIn honor of the life of Alfredo Bonanno, we made a short film dramatizing the final section of one of his best-known works, Armed Joy.
\n\nWe also published a short video to celebrate Steal Something from Work Day, drawing on the work of Yugoslavian director Dušan Makavejev.
\n\nFinally, we invite you to participate in a holiday tradition by watching the 2023 edition of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.”
\n\nIt’s the most wonderful time of the year, 2023 edition.
\nThat hardly scratches the surface of everything we’ve accomplished this year—the adventures we’ve embarked on, the relationships we’ve nourished, the art forms we’ve shared. The most exciting parts rarely enter the public record!
\n\nAs always, all of our efforts are copyright free, produced and distributed by volunteer labor. We’re not trying to concentrate power in our own hands, but to establish reproducible models and put resources at the disposal of horizontal movements. This explains why we rarely pester you with fundraising requests. If you wish to support us financially, you can do so here—but the very best thing you could do for us is to undertake your own projects in the same spirit, or participate in our efforts.
\n\nThank you for sticking with us through another year. We look forward to what is ahead.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/7.jpg\")
\nDecember 6 happened to be the anniversary of the murder of Alexandros Grigoropoulos, which set off the Greek uprising of 2008. The way that the uprising in Greece unfolded arguably vindicates some of Bonanno’s arguments in favor of confrontational organizing and autonomous structures. ↩
\n![flyer](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/17/35.jpg\"){kind=link}