On April 16, 2000, tens of thousands of people gathered in Washington, DC to mobilize against the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. This was one of a series of Global Days of Action against neoliberal capitalist institutions including the G8, the World Trade Organization, and the IMF/World Bank. At the time, opponents of these organizations were loosely described as the anti-globalization or alter-globalization movement; later, as the global justice movement.
\n\nWhile resistance to those institutions dates back to their founding at the end of the Second World War, this movement was arguably launched by the Zapatistas, a revolutionary insurgency in Chiapas, Mexico. The Zapatistas appeared on the world stage in an armed insurrection against the government of Mexico beginning on January 1, 1994, the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect—a trade agreement between Canada, Mexico, and the United States that bankrupted 1.3 million Mexican farmers.
\n\nPeople’s Global Action emerged from the Intercontinental Gathering of the Zapatistas encuentro in 1996. This provided a framework for organizing against neoliberal trade institutions, drawing together thousands of grassroots organizations, affinity groups, and anarchist collectives. These motley radicals were joined by traditional labor unions, environmental groups, Non-Governmental Organizations, nonprofits, and individual activists. It was a big umbrella, rife with contradictions, riven by messy debates about tactics and strategy, inclusion and identity, violence and non-violence. The goals of the participants ran the gamut from reforming neoliberalism to destroying capitalism.
\n\nAfter the world-famous demonstrations that shut down the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle in November 1999, preparations for the IMF/World Bank meeting in April 2000 spread the momentum to the East Coast, showing that the events in Seattle were not an anomaly but a stage in the emergence of a powerful movement. In a series of spokescouncils, protesters planned to shut DC down with blockades; in the end, the police effectively conceded the city to protesters by shutting down a massive portion of downtown themselves.
\n\nThe following oral history brings together the experiences and voices of some of the participants in the actions of A16.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/41.jpg\")
A delegate trying to reach the IMF/World Bank meetings, flanked by demonstrators from the black bloc intent on stopping him. This photograph, the header photograph above, and others herein were taken by Orin Langelle, a documentary photographer and activist and the co-founder of the Global Justice Ecology Project. You can see more of his photographs here and read more information about him below.
\n\n\n\nThese anti-WTO protesters are a Noah’s ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions, and yuppies looking for their 1960s fix…
\n\n-Thomas Friedman, New York Times opinion writer Senseless in Seattle
\n
\n\n\nFrom his point of view, that’s probably correct. From the point of view of slave owners, people opposed to slavery probably looked that way. For the 1 percent of the population that he’s thinking about and representing, the people who are opposing this are flat-earthers. Why should anyone oppose the developments that we’ve been describing?
\n\n-Noam Chomsky, Author, linguist, and anarchist in response to Friedman
\n
Our narrators arrived at A16 from a variety of backgrounds and points of entry.
\n\nRyan: The older activists and organizers who especially influenced us, as young anarchists in DC in the late ’90s, were people of color: folks in the Black community who organized around Mumia and police brutality and Indigenous organizers working on freedom for Leonard Peltier. There was a lot of that organizing happening at the time and they were super supportive of us as young activists and approached us as mentors. We saw them as elders, folks to learn the ropes from.
\n\nBen: In 1992, we saw the videos of Rodney King. And those cops were beating him down. We were at Claremont College, and every white pudgy-faced cop was let off. I remember thinking “Holy shit!” and I saw the campus emptying out. It was a raw, sick in the stomach feeling. I remember things starting to burn. One of my friends was dancing and screaming “It’s been 400 years!” And it just expanded all across Los Angeles. I remember looking at downtown LA and seeing flames going up in the air. That was not a march!
\n\n“It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” was already out. Does life imitate art or art imitate life? “Straight outta Compton” was the soundtrack, with “Fuck tha Police.” We were listening to that all spring before the riots. And these movements were raw, that was the moment I realized that history was alive. I’d had this sense that history doesn’t happen in the United States, it happens far away, but wow, history was happening right here.
\n\nGabby: I was raised by two old hippy militants who got burned by the COINTELPRO operations, they felt very betrayed by the movement they were a part of. Because of their disillusionment with that, they were very dismayed when I got involved with politics, but I basically grew up a red diaper baby. I grew up being pushed around picket lines in my baby stroller, with my dad and with my mom, to pro-choice marches. But I didn’t really learn about my parents’ radical youth until I started getting arrested at protests and hanging out with no-good anarchists.
\n\nPanagioti: I was living in a trailer park in Florida. I’d dropped out of high school and was living with people who decided to participate in youth anarchist organizing. We were doing local organizing, stuff like Food Not Bombs, Zine Distros, local shows.
\n\nVikki: I went to high school in Jamaica, Queens. And now we’d consider that a school-to-prison pipeline school, this was the 1990s, so we didn’t really have the language then to describe a school that was Black, Brown, and mostly immigrant; it was under-resourced and underfunded. It had a bunch of school security guards, you had to go through metal detectors every morning and put your bag through an airport scanning X-ray machine. It was like going to jail, every single day.
\n\nThere were several thousand kids there, super overcrowded, and it was a perfect recruiting ground for gangs. And a whole bunch of my friends joined gangs, dropped out and got arrested for gang-related activity, mostly armed robbery. Because their families didn’t have any money and they weren’t able to post bail, they ended up in Rikers. That was my first “What the hell is this?” awakening.
\n\nI started to go and visit them at Rikers. I had to bring an adult with me each time because I was only fifteen and you weren’t able to visit by yourself until you were sixteen. I spent a lot of time in the Rikers waiting room: three hours if you went at the earliest time if you woke up at 6 am, or you’d spend six hours waiting if you went later. I would end up talking to all these other people who were there for their loved ones. It was mostly Black, Brown, and immigrant women waiting to see the menfolk in their lives.
\n\nPica: I was a college senior, majoring in history, destined for jobs as a barista and labor organizing. I feel like we were the children of that period of time, children of the Zapatistas, we really had to try and make our town better and build community.
\n\nLelia: I grew up in an activist house—my parents were activists, we had lots of roommates who were activists, it’s just sort of what I thought people did. If there is something going wrong locally or nationally, we need to do something about it. As soon as I got to college, I hit the ground running and joined every activist group that there was.
\n\nMark: I became politically active the first semester I got to college and that was the South African Divestment movement, in its full flowering. I’m an older Gen Xer, so I went to Hamilton College in 1986. The Divestment movement was probably at its peak then. There was an occupation in the President’s office that Fall, thirteen students were expelled from the college. It was pretty militant, everyone involved in the Divestment movement wore black armbands on campus, we had whistles. There was a pretty substantial right-wing reactionary student body, fraternities and hockey players, your typical meatheads.
\n\nNicole: I grew up in New York City, so in high school, there were multiple scenes, there was a lot of organizing around Mumia Abu Jamal and police brutality. In my senior year of high school, I went to what later became the Left Forum. I also went to some workshops based on Paolo Freire, which was cool.
\n\nBack then, there were always people tabling with literature, where people shared with me that there were protests happening around the Community Gardens in the Lower East Side and all around the city. Giuliani was auctioning them off, so I went down to Tompkins Square Park, right on time to join my first Reclaim the Streets protest.
\n\nR. Harvey: My first experience in being politicized was probably listening to the Clash and the Dead Kennedys when I was 13. When I was 14, I got into vegetarianism, as we did back then, going vegan. I got into animal rights very early on, getting PETA to send me some signs.
\n\nGil: For A16, I planned a poster to carry with me as I wandered the streets of DC. I was arrested there in 1972 when there was a police riot under the directorship of Tricky Dick [President Richard Nixon].
\n\nRyan: At Positive Force meetings, there would be a handful of people who attended to represent another group, asking for time on the agenda. They would run down something that you’d learn on a post now. The upcoming protests against the IMF meetings in ’99 or an upcoming Zapatista solidarity thing or whatever.
\n\nThey’d come with a bunch of literature and you’d leave with a stack of paper. Then you’d go home afterwards and look through everything, information similar to what you might access through a social media feed now.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/6.jpg\")
Before the age of widespread digital access, anarchists in New York City maintained a telephone hotline to connect people to local organizing.
\nAnother crucial thread drawing people together was support for political prisoners, especially from Black and Indigenous movements. The campaign to free journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, facing execution in Pennsylvania, provided a rallying cry against the systemic racism of the United States legal system.
\n\nR. Harvey: With Mumia, you know, the role that Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu Jamal played in our movement, these were folks from the 1970s and ’80s; the reason why people knew about them were the Black Panthers and MOVE, they never let people forget about Mumia. Who knew that they would have a side effect of politicizing the people who went out to confront globalization?
\n\nLelia: We went to Philly—I feel like we went to Philly a lot for Mumia stuff. Jericho Movement, that was huge. I don’t really remember much, other than the sea of people and the chant:
\n\n“Brick by brick
\nWall by wall
\nWe’re gonna free
\nMumia Abu-Jamal”
Gabby: I was heavily influenced by the Zapatistas, I used to do Books through Bars, went to marches for Mumia, prisoner support. It wasn’t a world I was living and breathing every single day, but I remember going to Philly for Mumia. I remember the “brick by brick” chant, I was thinking that this was the best protest chant I’d ever heard.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/25.jpg\")
Anarchism has a long history in Philadelphia. A flier for a gathering in 1993.
\nJimmy: When I was in San Francisco for the Food Not Bombs in 1995, one of the most amazing things that happened was this really militant torchlit march for Mumia. He was on the kill-list, they moved him up on the execution timeline and they had a date for killing him. There were protests across the country.
\n\nThose San Francisco and East Bay anarchists, they really did us proud! We’re marching right up Market Street, through the construction zone, knocking over barricades, picking up shit to throw if needed. And bicyclists are coming down all the side streets in support, with bundles of torches, dropping them off at the street corner for the march. It was intense. People along the route were so excited, hanging out of windows, cars honking for Mumia. We’re telling people and passersby “Come on, join us!”
\n\nSo we marched through the Castro. I was running with people I met at the Chicano Youth Center, an infoshop-style place, these Chicano punk teenagers and anarchists, this woman Red Moonsong, who was a queer radical grandmother anarchist hippy. The cops freaked out and started to counterattack. Red Moonsong, I remember her saying “Um, this is the part where grandmothers leave.” Later, you know? So, she dipped out. Me and the dude from LA were folding up the big Food Not Bombs banner we had, stuffing it into a backpack, and the concussion grenades were exploding around us.
\n\nBen: I was writing my novel, my roman à clef, in the Kilowatt, or maybe it was 500 Club, by the Roxie, somewhere on Valencia Street in San Francisco, working on the notes in my journal. And I heard some shit going down in the street outside, I was like “What the hell is that?” and it was going against traffic. I asked someone, what’s going on? And they said “March for Mumia!” And I was like “Who’s Mumia?”
\n\nPeople were screaming and somersaulting and jumping between cars. They weren’t exactly breaking things but there was a feeling—is this a march? Is this a riot? Besides ACT UP, I wasn’t plugged into anything. There was a rawness. And someone said that it was about the Prison Industrial Complex. Oh that! There was an immediate sense that this was a live issue. People are talking about Malcolm X and it’s a real thing. It’s not a past thing, they’re listening to the Last Poets, to Gil Scott Heron, “The Revolution Will Not be Televised.” That album, along with “A Nation of Millions,” was the soundtrack.
\n\nMimas: A major current of American activism in the 1990s was prisoner support and anti-police-brutality campaigns, especially around political prisoners like Mumia Abu Jamal. Through awareness of him, we also learned about the repression of the Black liberation radicals and anarcho-primitivists in Philly. The Philly police actually used an incendiary device, a literal bomb, and dropped it on the MOVE house. That’s how far they were willing to go to stop them, to literally kill Black people with bombs.
\n\nWhile awaiting execution, Mumia became a vital critic of the death penalty, an author of books and articles about police state and the criminal justice system, with his supporters campaigning for his release from prison. He also had a coolness, a sense of calm righteousness that truly captured our hopes and aspirations for a better world. Many of us were radicalized by or otherwise supportive of Mumia, prior to and during the anti-globalization movement.
\n\nVikki: When I wasn’t going to this arduous bus trip to Rikers, I’d make the trek to the City [i.e., Manhattan], go to St. Mark’s Books. I’d just stand in their prisons section and read these things because I didn’t have enough money to actually buy these books and everything there.
\n\nI realized that this is not a system that is broken, that it’s actually functioning as designed. The system is designed to monitor, control, and to surveil these Black, Brown, and immigrant bodies. That’s why the waiting room and the visiting room looks like the way it does; that realization in the Rikers waiting room was my politicization.
\n\nR. Harvey: I went to Millions for Mumia on April 24, 1999. That was my first big protest. I was in the anarchist punk scene in Baltimore, I was from Towson, where we had our own scene. We were listening to local bands, bands like Aus Rotten, A//political, Anti-Product, these kinds of groups and they were talking about these issues.
\n\nRyan: Millions for Mumia was a big one for us. It was the first black bloc I was ever in for sure.
\n\nMillions for Mumia.
\nIn the United States, activists began to align themselves into a movement, gravitating around Food Not Bombs, Critical Mass, Youth Liberation summits, Earth First! campaigns, Reclaim the Streets actions, Latin American solidarity movements, and campus organizing. The international day of action on June 18, 1999 marked the convergence of many of these currents.
\n\nMark: Prior to Seattle, there was the G8 meeting, which happened on June 18, 1999. Reclaim the Streets was a global formation that started in London, specifically around the M11 link road and the rave protests—the anti-roads movement and the anti-rave legislation that had been passed. They later went to work with the dockworkers and so forth, but they really jumped into and were formative in the Alter-Globalization movement. It then spread across Europe through the Reclaim the Streets form, so in New York, we were paying a lot of attention to Reclaim the Streets UK.
\n\nIt was the early days of the internet, but Reclaim the Streets UK had one of the coolest websites you’ve ever seen; it’s archived somewhere. It was basically a Borges “Garden of Forking Paths” structure where you could get lost in it; lots of quotes from Abbie Hoffman, the Diggers, and the Levelers. The images were just incredible.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/24.jpg\")
The rave aesthetics of the J18 organizers in London are exemplified in this palm-card distributed to promote one of the rallies.
\nNicole: That was my first time seeing protests like that, before you could get news from social media or the internet. I hadn’t been exposed to those kinds of images at the time, the radical far left. It always felt good, whether it was Reclaim the Streets or Critical Mass, to be in the streets.
\n\nWhat always felt really powerful was taking the streets and changing the narrative of what things should be like. Any chance to change your thoughts and make a cleavage with what normally is; that was really attractive to me, especially when it comes to saving the planet or helping people that were oppressed.
\n\nBen: I remember Food Not Bombs was so great locally in San Francisco, because they were risking arrest all the time for the critical offense of giving food away… how could anybody think they were a hindrance to the quality of life?
\n\nFood Not Bombs prefigured a whole movement with their name, like the More Gardens! Coalition or Housing Works. It’s very relevant. “Food not bombs?” It’s very hard to argue with.
\n\nGabby: Food Not Bombs was really important. When I was traveling, I knew I could show up anywhere with a Food Not Bombs and meet people and figure things out. Or, is there an infoshop in this town? There was a whole network and infrastructure. I slept on so many floors around the country.
\n\nI also spent a lot of time at ABC No Rio, I was definitely involved with bike culture, riding Critical Mass. Later, when I was tree-sitting, I’d sit in my tree and dream of Critical Mass Rides in New York City.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/18.jpg\")
ABC No Rio, a squatted venue in the Lower East Side, was one of dozens of community centers and infoshops across the country that formed the infrastructure of the anti-globalization movement.
\nVikki: Because I didn’t have friends to hang out with, because they were locked up, I started to coming down to the Lower East Side to ABC No Rio and Food Not Bombs. From there, I fell in with a bunch of punk rockers who were really political. And it was really eye opening, the idea that you could be an anti-authoritarian! That was not something I would have thought about before, instead of going to law school or medical school to be successful, which is the immigrant narrative that a bunch of us are fed. So if you are reading, you have to read things that get you closer to law school or medical school.
\n\nIt was eye opening that you could be anti-authoritarian, that the system was fucked up. But I was still this bookish kid who liked to read about things, so you could actually be smart and like books, but it didn’t mean you had to follow this capitalist program. The women there, especially, at ABC No Rio kind of took me under their wing, would take me to this or that thing. That brought me even further into political organizing, when I was 17 or 18.
\n\nRyan: I remember getting a postcard for the Carnival of Chaos, J18 at an event in downtown DC; I think it might have been the spring meeting of the IMF in 1999. The protest was small, like 50 people outside their headquarters, they were passing out things about the Carnival Against Capitalism, and different events.
\n\nThose 50 people protesting the IMF in spring 1999 mostly worked for NGOs, walking down the sidewalk trying to take the street a little bit. Shortly after J18 was Seattle, then A16, with tens of thousands of people for the same IMF meetings just a year later.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/20.jpg\")
On June 18, 1999, the most well-known demonstration took place in London, but in fact, actions took place across the world, including this one in San Francisco.
\nMimas: A set of protests was called to coincide with the meeting of the G8 in Germany on June 18 that year, which brought together the leaders of the world’s wealthiest democracies (the G7) plus Russia. As early formation of the anti-globalization movement, J18 kind of created a template for later actions, its slogan was “Our resistance is as transnational as capital.”
\n\nThe London protests in particular drew wide attention with the street carnivals, samba bands, Critical Mass bike rides, and blockades of corporate headquarters. Other international protests also took place on J18 in Canada, Australia, and Nigeria, where they shut down Shell oil infrastructure, as well as dozens of actions across Europe and the US.
\n\nBack here in the US, those involved in J18 protests and those in Seattle were more likely than not also participants in movements such as Food Not Bombs, Critical Mass, Reclaim the Streets, Earth First!, the Ruckus Society, and international solidarity campaigns. Those pre-existing actions and groups became fertile ground for the American iteration of this global movement. Back then, each country was a little different in how they approached the fight in terms of rationales, but we had a common target—the neoliberal institutions that supported the expansion of inequity and exploitation around the world.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/23.jpg\")
“Our resistance is as transnational as capital.”
\nR. Harvey: The Carnival against Capitalism in London was taking a lot of inspiration from the No Roads Movement, which came out of the anti-nuclear movement. Crass was really inspired by the anti-nuclear movement.
\n\nPanagioti: We were doing youth liberation summits and Mayday gatherings back then. I’d see the same people in slightly different circumstances, doing and talking about the same things.
\n\nI remember these videocassettes of the forest occupations at Cove Mallard in Idaho back in 1996, seeing people using lockboxes and tripods. We had a crusty old copy of the video from Whispered Media, they were an IMC predecessor. We probably showed that thing 50 times at different conferences, workshops, and trainings to let people know what was happening. We amassed a collection of those videos.
\n\nThe idea would be that you’d bring videos you’d collected along the way, gather 20 people together in a room, then eat mediocre vegetarian food and watch this video to find out what was happening.
\n\nMark: I was involved in the first Critical Mass bike rides in San Francisco for several years after I moved there in 1992/93. I didn’t meet Chris Carlson until many years later, but I’d show up at the Embarcadero at 5 pm on the last Friday of the month, like a bunch of other people. My buddy Sheffer ran a bike shop called Pedal Revolution and he was making Frankenbikes, crazy tall bikes.
\n\nThese rides were really celebratory, really goofy, I don’t remember in those days any conflicts with police. That might have happened later on, when things got edgy at times. We’d always wind up on a beach somewhere, smoke some weed, hang out with the Mothers of Perpetual Indulgence and Cacophony Society people, the latter stages of those people. I didn’t know what I was doing, just that my buddy made these tall bikes in the Mission and I was going along. They were really just a blast, just really very fun.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/28.jpg\")
The reverse of the poster promoting the demonstrations in San Francisco on June 18, 1999.
\nNicole: I got really involved with environmental activism, local issues like the community gardens. I started going to the Wetlands Center, working with people who did anti-Gap and Banana Republic campaigns, because they were destroying old-growth forests. This was the time of anti-sweatshop organizing, that was very big in campus activism.
\n\nBen: My dad’s best friend died of AIDS. I started going to ACT UP demonstrations, and it wasn’t just a march, it was going to Sacramento for a direct action. There are some drag queens on the way, there are people carrying the ashes of their lovers that they are spreading and throwing at the cops. The cops rushed them, there was screaming and crying. Ashes in the air, then we’d go out for a drink and have a great time. There was a march, and a funeral procession, and then we’d go dancing. That was ACT UP. Activism was a practice; it wasn’t an identity.
\n\nAIDS activism was always my driving force, but after the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, they started to build South Central Farm. I saw it as a prefigurative community-building gesture that was bringing people together to share space, to share food, to share histories.
\n\nThat garden was a big common space that people shared. There was a lot of food and a lot of healing. When people get together and share a space outside of capitalism, where no one is arguing about who owns what, we can build a space together. People can do really beautiful things.
\n\nGetting back to land is belonging. We have this industrial idea that we’re supposed to be surrounded by concrete, but touching earth is important for human beings. bell hooks’ book about belonging is all about going back to Kentucky because the dirt called her: “This is my home, this is my people, we’ve been farming this land for a long time.” And I think people have a raw sense of connection when they touch the earth.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/19.jpg\")
Radical queer activists played an important part in the anti-globalization movement, just as gay and lesbian liberation activists in the 1970s served as inspiring antecedents.
\nPica: Community gardens were really magical places in every city you’d visit. That sounds corny, but if you ever spent a sunset in one with friends, with a fire, or someone making food in the casita… You got legitimate cultural exchange, locals hanging with the weird travelers from all over, with outcasts and rejects.
\n\nBen: I really fell in love with the movement in New York in the ’90s. I’d walk to the subway to go to the Bronx from the East Village and I’d see these little patches of land as I walked by. And I thought, “I love these spaces.” You can just sit down, nobody cares, with whatever you’re bringing in, you could eat your dinner and have a coffee.
\n\nThe gardens movement in New York City was a food security movement. There were Black Panthers involved in that, Young Lords, there were a lot of through lines to the community empowerment movements. And there were the squatters! The squats and the gardens overlapped and when the squatters showed up, you knew you were going to have power.
\n\nI hate this term, “green gentrification,” but gardens do improve neighborhoods. They increase the number of eyes on the streets, that’s what Jane Jacobs said. You need people to look at the neighborhood. You don’t need cops; you need individuals in the community looking in the streets to make sure everybody is OK. But they do increase property values because people can sell you a building, and say “Look at this beautiful green space that the neighborhood made, right around here.”
\n\nLelia: At American University, one of the compelling groups was the Free Burma Coalition. At the time, there were four student activists who were arrested for leafleting in public, just passing out papers to people. It was the first thing I signed up for as a freshman.
\n\nIt wasn’t just at AU, it was all over. There was a big Burmese population there, folks who had to leave their country, living in the DC community. There was intergenerational activism; we had letter writing, benefit dinners, fashion shows—that’s funny to me, because I’m so not fashionable. We also did civil disobedience.
\n\nWe had this long campaign with letter writing, including all the proper quote-unquote “steps,” and we began thinking on what we have to do to move down the chain of demanding more action. I arrived at school, in maybe August, and I was arrested by October—I had decided that it was enough letter writing for me and it was time to move to civil disobedience. We had a divestment campaign as well, getting the university to stop doing business with certain companies.
\n\nMark: I landed in NYC in the fall of 1998, I came to do grad school at New School. Just before I arrived in New York, I’d been to Bread and Puppet Theater, in Glover, I’d been going there since 1994. I was puppeteering and I met Aresh from More Gardens! in the costume room in the barn, and Trudy and John from Great Small Works, of course, and the Bread and Puppeteers. They were really involved in the community gardens struggle in that moment, and Charas El Bohio community center, which had been auctioned off.
\n\nAnd then it was Steve Duncombe, who guest-lectured in a media studies class I was taking at New School. He talked about Reclaim the Streets, and I was like, “Hmm, tell me about that.”
\n\nBen: By 1998/99, there was an action every week in New York, whether it was a garden action, or a Fed Up Queers Action, ACT UP. I remember when Matthew Shephard, the young college student in Wyoming, was killed, we tried to have a funeral march in Manhattan, and Giuliani tried to arrest all the organizers and wanted us all to be on the sidewalk. 5000 people don’t fit on the sidewalk, Giuliani!
\n\nIf he would have let us march for an hour, we’d have gone to the bar afterwards. But no, he swept everyone up, and everyone went to jail for the night and the next day, your friends are doing jail support. We were covered in the New York Post and the Daily News, and I was arrested with Charles King and Keith Kyler from Housing Works. And Sylvia Rivera was in the pen with me, when we were all daisy chained together with restraints. Michael Cunningham, who had just won the Pulitzer Prize for The Hours, was with us. There were epic groups of people together and every week there was another action.
\n\nAnd then we started hearing about the rumblings of [the mobilization against the WTO ministerial in] Seattle in Adbusters. We planned our solidarity march with Reclaim the Streets. We had one to save the gardens, and another to Times Square. I think people thought it was an MTV video, so they left us alone. Mark got really badly beaten up by the cops. You’d do jail solidarity, with yoga going on outside, and then people got straight out of jail to go to the airport for Seattle.
\n\nNicole: In New York, right before the demonstrations against the WTO in Seattle, there was a big Reclaim the Streets action. That Reclaim the Streets was one of the most exciting protests I’d ever been to at that point; we showed up to Union Square, and then had a subway party, with people in costumes, people hanging from the bars on the subway. People dancing and singing, we got up to Times Square, then, later, Bryant Park. It was massive, people taking over an intersection. There was even a tripod, this was the early days.
\n\nVikki: Seattle was visceral, people were on the streets and they were fighting. When I first got to the Lower East Side, one of the things that really drew me in was that it was the tail end of the large-scale squatter movement. I came in right after the 13th Street squat [was evicted] with a tank, so those two were linked in my mind.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/7.jpg\")
Anarchist organizing and outreach in New York City before the age of digital connectivity.
\nPrior to the Zapatista encuentros, the institutions driving neoliberal adjustment—the WTO and its precursor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the IMF and World Bank—were obscure entities. By targeting their annual meetings and ministerials, activists took the abstract phenomenon of neoliberal globalization and made it concrete. You can’t abolish capitalism with a bullhorn, but with 20,000 of your closest friends, you can disrupt a meeting of bankers and bureaucrats.
\n\nEric: After World War II left Europe devastated (and centuries of colonialism and resource plunder had severely damaged what is now called the “Third World”), a conference was convened at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944 to create institutions separate from the United Nations that could oversee the regulation of international trade and assist in the building of Europe. The result was the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which became the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
\n\nThe stated goal of the World Bank was to aid Europe’s reconstruction and help to develop poor countries around the world. The original mandate for the IMF was to facilitate global trade while leaving countries free to establish their own economic guidelines.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/2.jpg\")
A16 protest flyer distributed at the Convergence Center in Washington, DC.
\n\n\n\nThe IMF is like a loan shark. When a country has problems paying its foreign creditors—for example, when interest rates skyrocketed in the 80s—the IMF will provide an emergency bailout. The price of this bailout is that the country has to sell its soul. The IMF and WB both require what they call Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs). “They SAP the poor to fatten the rich.” SAPs include a number of common attributes. Everything a country has will be liquidated to pay off loans—but the loans never get paid off, so they remain stuck in crippling debt. The country must make drastic cuts in education, health care, food subsidies, and other things that the poor depend on. Environmental regulatory agencies must also be completely defunded, so any environmental laws that remain on the books cannot be enforced.
\n\nAnother part of the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) is privatization. Everything that might make a profit is sold off to foreign companies for pennies. Bolivia sold its water utility to a San Francisco-based company that immediately doubled water rates for the poor.
\n\n-A16 protest flyer distributed at the Convergence Center in Washington, DC
\n
Ben: AIDS activists went to Charlene Barshefsky’s office, who was the US trade representative. And they told her that she had to change the United States drug policy. You had the World Trade Organization rules that said that you can actually, in the healthcare crisis, create your own drugs, generics, and yet you’re suing South Africa that has a health crisis with AIDS going on.
\n\nTo me, the IMF protests were all about amplifying that injustice. I didn’t think we were going to stop the meeting. I think you had to make clear that what was happening in the meeting was bad and that if you care about health, you need to do this differently. They wouldn’t listen to us, or listen to anybody, if we played by their rules.
\n\nDid you know that Donald Rumsfeld, before he was Secretary of Defense, was the head of the Office of Economic Opportunity from 1969-71, under Nixon? That’s how anti-poverty programs become mechanisms of war—that thinking, using debt as a bludgeon. Literally the guy who pushed for the Iraq war started as a poverty guy. That’s the Herbert Marcuse idea—when the welfare state becomes the warfare state.
\n\nPica: The people in Cochabamba and their supporters across Bolivia—farmers, workers, residents, students—weren’t going to let Bechtel destroy their lives by tripling the price of water. They had a massive rebellion, blockaded the main roads in the country, essentially shut down the country. They fought back because their lives literally depended on it. As we were planning for A16, the shit was going down in Bolivia. These policies were being determined in boardrooms and ministerial meetings here in the US, we had a moral obligation to fight them here, on their home turf.
\n\nPanagioti: Pretty quickly, the basics of economic globalization became known. By the time A16 rolled around, we had to understand the acronyms better. The World Bank and IMF seemed a little more complicated, having been around longer, than the WTO, which was new. I was really open to learning things really quickly.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/5.jpg\")
A pamphlet from the turn of the century critiquing capitalist globalization.
\nMark: I remember going to see Life and Debt, the film by Stephanie Black, right around that time. To this day, it is a terrific description of structural adjustment programs as imposed on the island of Jamaica. It was very specific—what happened with the local milk production industry, the banana, all the trade policies that destroyed Jamaican farmers.
\n\nEric: The debt is not the result of the will of the people; governmental agents, encouraged and instructed by local elites and foreign investors, were the ones who accrued the debt. These agents of capital are the ones who have received the profits from investments and pork-barrel spending, but it is the public who must pay the costs. The bailouts orchestrated by the IMF and World Bank pay little attention to such nuances.
\n\nIf the government of Indonesia owes money to Swiss banks because they spent all their money buying tanks and bombs from the United States, then it is the people of Indonesia who must starve themselves and work for slave wages in order to pay it back.
\n\n\n\n\nThe mass mobilizations are key to maintaining pressure on these institutions, and to creating the change we are talking about. It is quite impressive when you get millions of people saying, “Cancel the debt.” It is quite impressive when millions of people are saying, “Stop structural adjustment programs,” “Open your meetings,” and “Stop environmentally destructive projects.” It is quite different than when you just have a few NGOs who are not necessarily pushing hard.
\n\nNjoki Njoroge Njehu, 50 Years is Enough
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/31.jpg\")
An anarchist banner on A16: “Global liberation, not devastation.”
\nPica: We knew we were seeing something special with this movement against capitalism, against corporate globalization. All of these groups and fights for justice, coming together—prison abolition, workers’ rights, queer activism, international solidarity, anarchism, feminism, campaigns to hold police accountable, all of it. All of our parallel paths came together arm in arm in the streets of Seattle and DC.
\n\nIt was very common for people, especially in small towns, to support other projects and campaigns. You might be a labor activist, focused on workers’ rights and raising the minimum wage, but you’d kick it with the vegans and join the roadshow to watch a Chomsky documentary about the media when it came to town. People had a baseline of solidarity in left radical circles.
\n\nGabby: As cool as things were in those days, I think I did a lot of FOMO. I felt like I grew up in the shadow of the radicals of the ’60s and the radicals of the Lower East Side, a place where a younger person could make a place for themselves. We still did it, we had a big squat called Camp C, it was unreal what we were able to get away with, it was like a square city block. The place was fucking huge.
\n\nThe DIY scene in New York was all about hanging on to the spaces that were left as the city got more policed and more expensive, it was about being a place where you could go and make things happen as a person trying to live outside of the money economy. We built a whole culture around circumventing that money economy. It cheapens it to just say it was about our lifestyles because we built a whole world that was not about going through money to live our lives and have our needs met.
\n\nNicole: This guy Tofu came to this conference at my college, he was a singer, I think he had been in Seattle. Also, there were the More Gardens! people who attended a political prisoners’ conference that we held. That conference was super powerful, Ramona Africa and Laura Whitehorn spoke there, they were amazing advocates who had been freed from prisons in the 1980s.
\n\nWe would later see people we knew personally imprisoned because of their politics. All these things were happening in person, people had to come to these meetings to learn about these topics.
\n\nBen: My favorite pre-Seattle action was against Disney. We went to the Disney store at Times Square and declared it our right not to live in a shopping mall. “Put down the mouse, put down the mouse” was our big chant. I’d never gotten arrested at a retail outlet for saying “Stop business as usual!” But I felt that we had a right to our own stories. Disney was sucking up our stories into their vortex. It was involuntary entertainment, we wanted to have a right to our own narratives. There was an absurdist defiance. It was fun, and Seattle became a part of that joyous moment.
\n\nPanagioti: In some ways, the formula to be an activist seemed similar to what I see now, but the process was so much more demanding. You’d read a flyer or pamphlet and go “Hmm, well, this makes sense.” And then, instead of just reposting it on Instagram, you’d go to a copy shop, make a hundred copies, cut and fold them and go to 20 different venues or coffee shops, hand them out or give them to people. Or make some stickers. The process of spreading information, and motivating people to mobilize—it was a lot more hands-on and tactile.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/26.jpg\")
A flier promoting “Anarchist Soccer”—a euphemism?—in Milwaukee.
\nThe protests against the World Trade Organization Ministerial in Seattle on November 30, 1999 were a watershed moment in the expansion of the movement.
\n\nVikki: The internet was still kind of new and young and someone was like “Hey, I have a ticket to Seattle for those dates for the WTO protest and I can’t go. Does anyone want this ticket?” Neither I nor any of my friends knew what it was. We figured we’d do some kind of Reclaim the Streets or something in New York that same weekend instead. We didn’t know what the hell she was planning on flying to Seattle for, so I don’t know if anybody took her up on that free ticket!
\n\nAnd then Seattle happened and everyone was like “Holy shit!” and we started paying attention to globalization. I was focused before on things that were local or regional and the things that I could put my finger on. Police, jails, prisons? OK.
\n\nThis larger idea of globalization? It didn’t occur to me to follow this, and people weren’t as online at that time, so you wouldn’t necessarily know about it from a morning newsfeed. Because of the “Battle in Seattle,” I started paying attention.
\n\nPica: I had a few friends who went to WTO in Seattle. I couldn’t go because I couldn’t get off two weeks from my job. It would have been the bus, no way I could have afforded to fly there. I went to the reportback in my town afterwards in early December. I couldn’t believe it worked. At most, we could get twenty-five or fifty people to a protest; how do you pull off 50,000? Shutting down a whole city? The first thing I wanted to know was “When are you doing this again?” Because I knew I would be there.
\n\nPanagioti: I ended up in Seattle mostly having had read zines about globalization. When I got there, it felt, you know, like something close to a revolution, at least in my mind. I wondered to myself, “What if we didn’t go back home? What if we just stayed in these streets?” Looking back on it, maybe we had delusions, thoughts like “This is the Paris Commune of my youth!”
\n\nI had read these historical accounts of those moments of insurrection and I had this sense of participating in that, in some small way. It was accurate in one sense, but also absurd based on the short duration. These things we were doing were a couple days, instead of months of sustained occupation.
\n\nMark: I had never been in that sort of situation before, what I saw in Seattle. I remember running to the Indymedia Center, I was there as a part of Paper Tiger TV collective, I was a media maker as well as a direct action organizer, and for Seattle, I was really focused on being a part of the TV production team for Indymedia. So we had embedded ourselves in a lockdown crew that included Carwill Bjork-James and Gopal Dayaneni; they were both in that lockdown.
\n\n“Breaking the Spell,” a documentary about the Seattle WTO protests.
\nJimmy: Lars was there at the reportback for N30. I remember him returning riding high on a wave of anarchy, he had that song, “We are winning / Grab a bandanna for the tear gas cloud / Get organized and come downtown.”
\n\nEric: The protesters in Seattle and DC were not, as many media reports claimed, confused kids with no place better to be who traveled in search of a good time and an expression of youthful rebellion. We took action because the policies of the IMF World Bank, and WTO are causing untold suffering, misery, poverty, and death.
\n\nWe spoke out because we want to live in a world based not on greed and profit, but on human needs, equality, and economic justice. We want everyone to have food, housing, medical care, and a decent standard of living. In a world as wealthy and bountiful as ours, there is no reason for caring people to accept the suffering that exists all around us.
\n\nR. Harvey: As November approached, I remember distinctly being at an A//Political show in a row house in Baltimore. I think they were playing with Anti-Product and they were passing out flyers. Basically, “We’re going to destroy Seattle” with a picture of punks dancing on the city. Typical imagery of that time period. They had a song called “Whose Trade Organization” with very explicit anarchist punk lyrics.
\n\nThat’s how I started to learn about it, but it wasn’t until the protests started to happen in Seattle that I went “Oh my god, they weren’t joking around. This is a real thing.”
\n\nLelia: I remember really wanting to go to Seattle. We put money in a pot and we decided we’d send representatives from DC to Seattle because we couldn’t all afford to go. I remember Dave going for our group. I remember thinking, “This is our moment,” that we had been working up to this as activists for all this time. It was really neat to have so many of us coming together, labor and environmental folks in the same space was really powerful—not to say they were always at odds, but they can be.
\n\nDebriefing was part of the deal for the folks we sent to Seattle: we want to hear about everything they experienced when they came back. We were living vicariously. We had to meet in person to talk about it and ask them questions. Then we used the spokescouncil model used at Seattle to organize A16, pretty much right afterwards.
\n\nR. Harvey: I was like 15 years old, I couldn’t go out to Seattle. After that, like many, that day, I was on the internet reading about globalization. During the WTO in Seattle, I remember reading Indymedia, I remember the Global Exchange website—they had a good set of Fact Sheets.
\n\nMimas: We were successful in disrupting the WTO ministerial by stopping delegates from actually attending the meetings through massive street blockades, which were met with tear gas, billy clubs, and general violence from the police.
\n\nThe street protests led to the emboldenment of African, Asian, and South American countries within the WTO meeting itself and effectively scuttled the progress of the talks which were heavily weighted for richer countries against the poor. It wasn’t a total victory—capitalism was not completely derailed that day—but it was much more than anyone could have expected.
\n\nSeattle was perfect in lighting a match—all our different projects now had an umbrella to live under. It would start with capitalism and the exploitation of the Global South, but it also fit later with the first George W. Bush Inauguration, the Democratic and Republican Conventions in 2000, and even the anti-war movements after 9/11. Later on, I think you can make an explicit connection to Occupy and an indirect connection to Black Lives Matter, as well. There was a broad understanding that you could wear multiple hats, be a part of different movements in solidarity.
\n\nMark: There was the whole plan, the whole ring to block off the intersections, to stop the delegates from attending the ministerial. Initially, that morning, we were like “OK, things are calm,” nothing was really happening. We went back around the convention center and it was a full on shitshow, it was massive, riot cops with tanks and tear gas canisters—all the images that you’ve seen—a war zone.
\n\nAnd they’re pepper spraying—these battles of pepper spray—so we stayed in the street for a while. We got to the Indymedia center with all this footage, and we were trying to get it downloaded so we could get it in the broadcast, trying to get it edited—we edited it all night, I didn’t sleep for two days. Or three?
\n\nI remember going into the Indymedia center and being like, “Oh my god, it’s a riot.” And Eric Galatas, who’s a Free Speech TV guy, Indymedia guy, one of the founders of Indymedia, said “No, it’s an uprising. Let’s be clear.”
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1200763806898626560\n\n\n
With Seattle setting the template, the next target was five months later in Washington, DC: the meetings of the IMF and World Bank in April 2000.
\n\nRyan: A16 was already being planned prior to Seattle, but the meeting and the planning for it increased exponentially after Seattle and showed that the movement was on a new trajectory.
\n\nThe Mobilization for Global Justice was a broad coalition that was anchored by three different categories of organizers. First, any activist who was interested off the street. Second were Unions. Third was international NGOs like 50 Years is Enough and Jubilee 2000, key NGOs working on debt relief in the Global South. Public Citizen had a presence in Seattle and also was involved with A16. This coalition was made up of dozens of smaller DC activist groups. It was a smorgasbord: DIY punk activists like my group of friends and many people who worked at NGOs but wanted to be part of something bigger.
\n\nLelia: I really remember Nadine Bloch being central in the DC organizing for A16, because she could say, “This is how it was done in Seattle, and this is what might be done here.” So we went from there, it felt both that we had some semblance of organization but it was still organic. It felt good. I was part of the spokescouncil meetings, plus the Infoshop folks, plus being part of the American University crew, so I don’t exactly remember what hat I was wearing at a given meeting.
\n\nMimas: A16 wasn’t just a single day. It was really a week of resistance culminating on April 16 and a few days after. People were there for over a week before that date itself. A16 was one of a series of global Days of Action against international capitalist entities, which included the first Carnival Against Capitalism the year before in June and, of course, the Seattle protests.
\n\nWhat you need to remember is that these Days of Actions were in direct response to calls for international solidarity by the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico. The Zapatistas were so damn cool; they were both completely inspiring but, how can I say this politely, also sort of too good to be true! Balaclava’d revolutionaries in the Mexican jungle talking about international resistance to NAFTA and neoliberalism? That definitely captured our full attention.
\n\nAs it turned out, the Zapatistas were the real deal. They were extremely important because they initiated a number of international meetings of activists, called encuentros, first in Chiapas in the jungle, then in Spain and Geneva, between ’96 and ’98. By getting all of these activists together, they helped to develop space for an international movement. By the time it came for Washington DC, A16 was just another link in the chain. The World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, NAFTA, the FTAA—we saw them as a part of a coherent system that needed to be resisted.
\n\nPanagioti: I remember a lot of trying to replicate what we saw other people doing in Seattle, people having a lot more experience than I had. I guess I’d gone to some Ruckus Society camps by that point; I volunteered at the kitchens. I don’t think I was climbing yet, Ruckus direct action climbing was a lot tighter than Earth First!’s. I think they’ve shored up those gaps in recent years.
\n\nWe were trying to figure out how, with limited experience and resources, to plug in and do the technical stuff, blockades, the structure of who makes calls. We were deciding pretty intensive shit, like, how many lockboxes do we need to build? Who’s going to put their arms in them?
\n\nI had just learned how to do these things myself—blockades, sleeping dragons, tripods—and now I was training hundreds of people how to do it. The experience we had in Seattle was formative enough that we thought, “We could just train everybody else, back on the East Coast.”
\n\nPica: I mostly understood the whole dropout thing, they were poor and squatted and trainhopped, they were dedicated to radical change. One thing that bothered me at the time was the whole “professional activist” thing. Maybe it was my naïveté, but the idea of someone getting a paycheck from some official reformist group to organize protests was somewhat of a contradiction to me. Today, I understand it, everyone has to make a living; but at the time, I thought it had to just be about passion while you did your crappy day job and hustled on the side through grassroots activism.
\n\nThese people seemed to have unlimited money and I really wondered where it came from, but maybe that was just my class war mentality coming through. Bless them for dedicating themselves to the cause, but if it comes with strings? If you are condescending? No way. Don’t lecture me about non-violence or alienating “normal people” if you’ve never held down a minimum wage job, you’re the one who is alienating us!
\n\nRyan: A certain amount of organizing locally had already occurred six to nine months out, and then, around the three month mark, someone would pay those people money to come in, they’d live in DC temporarily. They acted like hotshots, they were often slick glad-handers.
\n\nThese people and the funders, they want things to be set up in a certain way. “We want to move everything to look like this.” Our little crew of activists would go to Mobilization for Global Justice meetings, but for the most part we never felt welcome there. Most of the meetings we went to in DC, prior to A16, were majority people of color. That was something new with the anti-globalization movement, there being more white organizers and upper-class people involved in DC organizing.
\n\nThe Mobilization for Global Justice, at least on the surface and its professed approach, was a consensus-based organization. If you dig a little deeper and you understand the politics that were at play and where the money was coming from, the people who were the swoopers, there were definitely problems regarding who had power and who was given more say.
\n\nPanagioti: We organized really hard in Florida, coming back from Seattle after a few months of traveling. I was doing Earth First! a lot at the time, the first convergences, fusing those experiences. We did trainings for a few hundred people around the state, at a bunch of cities and conferences, and talked about the blockades in Seattle and our organizing there. From the blockades to jail solidarity to the follow-up anti-repression work that happened and the lawsuits that followed.
\n\nWe had a glimpse of that vision by the time the convergence in Washington, DC was called for. A lot of people who I still know today, I met at those trainings. The people who started the Miami Workers’ Center and the Coalition of Immokolee Workers, some of those people who were building their local or statewide projects around the same time period, we were communicating and organizing together. The idea was we were doing these trainings to put together these street blockades in DC.
\n\nSand: At 4 am, in the days prior to A16, we whizzed through DC to re-wrap the front page of 20,000 _Washington Post_s with a mobilization parody on the IMF.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/15.jpg\")
Stop signs, mailboxes, streetlights, bus stops, and other features of the urban environment expressed solidarity with the protests.
\nRyan: All the NGOs wanted to be connected to A16 organizing, environmental groups to animal rights to social justice. Everybody wanted to find a place for themselves and find themselves involved in the A16 organizing.
\n\nAnd there were the unions. The unions brought a lot of money, a certain amount of budget and certain restrictions on what things would look like. Then there were folks like the Direct Action Network, from Seattle, Rainforest Action Network, people connected to Ruckus.
\n\nBen: There was a ton of planning for RTS—too much, really. There was a cool kids club, who’d go to the spokescouncil meetings for the Direct Action Network, so it became a bit of a high school thing, a little ageist. If you were a teacher, maybe you were made to feel that you didn’t fit in. There was some sexism in the meetings, some people talked too much, a lot of the males. And queer people weren’t as always welcomed in the meetings. You professed it, but if you are always dominating, you’re not really making space.
\n\nPanagioti: I had mostly positive associations with the feeling of dispersed decision-making and collective process, but I’m also quite certain that if I were able to give it more thought and dig a little deeper, there were certain personalities who drove a lot of it as well.
\n\nRyan: They were of a particular generation, a particular age. We always called them the helicopter activists, we also called them the swoopers. They were often from California, more “progressive” places and were inclined toward imposing their culture and ways of working.
\n\nMark: I was already both feet into the deep end, the next year or two after Seattle, the movement such as it was really was my life for those years. It probably already was, but now even more so.
\n\nLelia: We were friends with Adam, we did a lot of wheatpasting. He organized these paid wheatpasting nights, with these beautiful posters for A16. Someone gave us money to wheatpaste!
\n\nJimmy: I was bummed I missed Seattle, but I was glued to TV news coverage, anything I could glean off the internet, newspaper articles, clippings. The reportbacks were a huge thing, really galvanizing. People were like, OK, what’s next? A16, here we come.
\n\nVikki: One of the things that came out of Seattle was this story of a pregnant woman who got tear-gassed, and she miscarried. I remember that people had criticized her for being there and then it turned out she was just going to get groceries, or whatever. And I thought “Why are the cops going around teargassing pregnant women? What the hell’s wrong with them?”
\n\nLiterally that afternoon, as we were heading down for A16, I was getting ready to get in the van and I was packing up my stuff. I hadn’t gotten my period for a while, which wasn’t something I normally tracked too closely. With that woman’s story in mind, I thought, well, maybe I should go get a pregnancy test. I’m sure it will be negative, I’m sure it’s because I haven’t been eating well. We had been working on opening a new building to squat, near the Adam Purple Squat on Forsyth Street, and I was sleeping there. I figured I just hadn’t been taking care of my body; this is probably why I’m late.
\n\nI got the pregnancy test and I peed on the stupid thing and I’m waiting, and I’m trying to figure what to pack in my bag, should I bring a big blanket or sleeping bag, you know, what would be best for this weekend trip? And then I looked down at the pregnancy test; and it was positive. OK, wow.
\n\nSo I called my partner. And he picked up the phone, this was back in the day before cell phones and luckily he was home. So I called him and I told him I was going to DC for the weekend and he told me to have fun and I said “Oh by the way, I’m pregnant, so if I don’t get tear gassed and miscarry, we should have a conversation when I come back.” You know? “I’ve got to catch this van,” and I hung up the phone and left.
\n\nI told two people on the van ride, in case something happened to me, in case I started bleeding. You wanted people to know what was happening if you’re having a miscarriage on the street. When I got to DC, there was a communal kitchen. I ran into an old roommate who was there and told them, and they started talking about how it wasn’t known what the long-term consequences are if you get tear-gassed and you don’t miscarry. She was explaining that we don’t know what happens, if I chose to keep it, to your later baby if you inhale a shit-ton of tear gas. And I hadn’t thought about that. My plan was to run with the black bloc and go fuck shit up.
\n\nAfter that conversation, I decided I wasn’t going to go to the black bloc. Someone mentioned there was a legal protest planned. I figured that sounded boring; I could have just stayed home if I wanted to go to a legal protest. Why come all the way to DC and sleep on the fucking floor just to go to a legal protest? I wound up joining the Food Not Bombs flying brigade, we made food, put it in a shopping cart, and fed people all weekend out on the streets.
\n\nMy daughter isn’t impressed by this story, by the way, she doesn’t really care! I think she turned out fine.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/40.jpg\")
Black bloc demonstrators in Washington, DC on April 16, 2000. Photograph by Orin Langelle / Global Justice Ecology Project.
\nA major mobilization demands months of logistical organizing. It means setting up a convergence center, legal support teams, street medics, houses for dozens of people to crash, kitchens to provide free food to thousands, and Independent Media Centers for activist journalism. It involves building giant puppets, forming brass bands, planning for creative resistance such as banner drops and direct action.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/4.jpg\")
The Mobilization for Global Justice produced a pamphlet including a calendar of events for the protests and explaining why demonstrators were resisting the IMF and World Bank.
\nSand: The check-in hall at the convergence center was flooded with information and help. You could buy a T-shirt, find out when the next training was, or post a notice for a friend. There was a whole garage area for making the large puppets usually with about 20 busy bees hammering, painting, and papier-mâché-ing. You could just stand there and soak up empowerment.
\n\nMark: We had shark fin hats, and polyester leisure suits that we got famously from Harry Bubbins at Casa Del Sol, which we traded him in exchange for a canoe. He had like 400 of these polyester leisure suits, blue, who knows why the fuck he had them, but they were perfect for us. He said “I’ll give them to you for free, but I need a canoe.” Which we did!
\n\nWe had all had our gear at the Reclaim the Streets crew and we wound up sleeping on the floor of one of those churches you wind up sleeping in. We had a van. We were rolling with the Hungry March Band, they were our soundtrack. So, HMB and RTS, we were wedded and it was a blast. We were a roving cluster, we didn’t lock down, the whole idea of trying to shut down the meetings didn’t materialize.
\n\n\n\n\nMany of us have come from Asia to be with you today. We did not come to dialogue with the World Bank and IMF. We did not come to negotiate. We actually came to shut down these institutions.
\n\n-Walden Bello, Filipino Activist, Focus on the Global South
\n
Sand: I loved making cheers, skirts, and pom-poms: rounding up Radical Cheerleading squads. We did cheers in metros, restaurants, department stores, and at Farragut circle for 30 cops parked on their bikes (you know they loved us).
\n\nThroughout the week prior to A16 itself, you could go to a ton of other political actions: a banner drop attempt on Monday, Iraq sanctions lobbying, a Free Chiapas rally, the day action for Iraq, a Global Network rally against nukes in space, School of the Americas lobbying and fast, Jubilee 2000, and rally against the Prison Industrial complex. I never even had time to go out for Ethiopian food! On Saturday, we sent surprise press releases and at least 100 media outlets came to Dupont circle for our huge street performance.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/17.jpg\")
Radical cheerleaders in Washington, DC for the mobilization.
\nLelia: I was at the mass arrest on A15, at the Prisons rally. I was in college and I had a final or something so I couldn’t miss class; I dodged through an alley, out a parking lot, and managed not to get arrested. All my friends got arrested. It was a large open space, they had cornered us and corralled everyone by blocking off the streets.
\n\nMark: For A16, I wore both hats fully, Paper Tiger TV and Reclaim the Streets, so I was involved in bringing online the second Indymedia iteration, which Eddie Becker was involved with and DeeDee Halleck and Michael Eisenmenger, all these amazing people. And Rick Rowley and Jackie Soohen from Big Noise films, who were amazing.
\n\nA lot of the same players from Indymedia Seattle were in place and I was at those meetings trying to figure all that out and figure out what my role would be.
\n\nMichael: On Saturday, April 15, the police shut down the protesters’ Convergence Center under the pretext of fire code violations. To paraphrase DC Police Chief Charles Ramsey’s explanation, this was done because he cared about the demonstrators’ safety. The 1350 arrests, the tear gas and pepper spray, the beatings, the denial of legal and human rights to those arrested, the intimidation, surveillance and sabotage must have been Ramsey’s version of “tough love.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/9.jpg\")
Police on one side, puppets on the other. Iconic art from squatter artist Fly referencing the police raid on the convergence center in DC.
\nSand: The decision by the DC police to shut down the space on A15 was very strategic. It was a big blow, but some were surprised it lasted as long as it did. However, we had back-up sites available immediately.
\n\nRyan: There was a black bloc spokescouncil meeting the night before A16, there were maybe a couple of hundred people in that room. We had it at the Wilson Center, the same place we had many punk benefit shows at the time. The strategy discussed was that the black bloc would act as a flying squad to support the lockdowns in place to close off access to the IMF and World Bank meetings. On A16, the bloc really acted as a solidarity squad.
\n\nThere was a comms team—you know, “Police are cracking down at this intersection,” then we’d go there to give support and the bloc would roam around and help out wherever needed. It was very much under diversity of tactics, people had other plans to do this or that. The thinking was: we’re going to show solidarity to a certain set of values, we’re going to make anarchism and anti-authoritarianism visible and be a self-defense group for those who are locking down, to try to take some pressure off them.
\n\nThere was a conversation around the topic: we’ve been stigmatized as the troublemakers after Seattle; so what’s the best way to show up? We’re here in solidarity, so when the police are cracking down on other activists or other tactics, we’re here to show we back up everyone.
\n\nGabby: I cut class to go to A16, I was still in high school and I had decided I was going to these protests. I was too young to go to Seattle, it was too far away, so I was really a kid when Seattle happened. DC was close enough, I don’t know how I got there, whether it was a Chinatown bus, or a school bus running on grease, a grease bus that a lot of people jumped on. I didn’t really have any friends with cars at that point.
\n\nR. Harvey: I only went down on the day of the 16th, we got there at 9 in the morning, maybe. I remember driving in and having the feeling that this was a big thing, driving into the city. We stopped at a gas station, and there was a person coming into the station as well, and they’d just gotten out of jail, arrested the day before. I remember that was the first thing, we were just on the outskirts of the city and we meet someone who had just gotten out of jail. We were like—this is going to be big!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/42.jpg\")
Demonstrators blockade an intersection in downtown Washington, DC with lock boxes on April 16, 2000. Photograph by Orin Langelle / Global Justice Ecology Project.
\nA16 itself was on a Sunday. By the weekend, there were already 20,000+ activists from across the country plugging into a myriad of events, protests, rallies, marches, speak-ins, and direct actions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/22.jpg\")
A calendar of events in DC in April 2000, produced by the Mobilization for Global Justice.
\nLelia: I started the radical cheerleaders squad in DC, so I remember going down to our set intersection. I think we were between H and I on 16th street. I remember people planning on having the adult diapers, but when it came time to do it, people were like “I’m not actually doing that.” I was like, “This is serious! We’re not leaving this spot!” We linked arms for that intersection, we kept the crowd engaged and entertained with the radical cheerleading.
\n\nJimmy: I remember getting up at 4 o’clock in the morning and walking through the darkness, at some point meeting up with friends who had cell phones, they were the comms people. Oh, wow, these were tiny little things, not the yuppie cell phones from the ’80s anymore.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/13.jpg\")
The crowded streets of Washington, DC on April 16, 2000.
\nNicole: We had a small group of people who got in cars really early in the morning to go to Washington. We came with all this stuff in case we got pepper-sprayed, in case we got tear-gassed, handkerchiefs, vinegar, all that, and we’d wear glasses instead of contacts.
\n\nI wound up leaving the people I went there with—some of the people I went with were locking down with a Sweatshops event. A16 was such a huge thing, you could come at it from an environmental lens, or via American neocolonialism. Or it could be from a labor perspective, whether in the US or elsewhere. You could come at it from a variety of perspectives, or in solidarity with developing nations and people directly fighting neoliberalism.
\n\nJimmy: I will always remember that image of Panagioti stepping into the intersection at 5 in the morning; sticking his hand out at our assigned intersection for our blockade, and the car that would have been passing through just stopped. Then it reversed, it backed up as the cluster moved into place. I thought “Shit! We’re doing this!”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/14.jpg\")
Protesters blockade the streets of Washington, DC on April 16, 2000.
\nPanagioti: People were really determined not to get the shit kicked out of us again, so they brought extra padding, plus the football pants and the crazy homemade gas masks. Kip had this amazing body armor. We had gotten arrested together in Seattle. People rode freight trains across the country with a bag full of whatever materials they needed to protect themselves.
\n\n\n\n\nThere is good news coming out of the US when the youth of America rise up and take to the streets. I challenge you to rock the boat on Sunday!
\n\n \n
Ryan: Some of those affinity groups wanted to be in the black bloc, some wanted to do lockdowns, some only wanted to go to the rally. In those days, in my 20-year-old mind, I may have been a little judgmental—“So you just want to go to the legal rally?” But in the end, they were our friends, we supported them and they weren’t necessarily arrestable. We are all working through a lot. We were questioning a lot of assumptions within ourselves and trying to figure out where we fit into this exciting movement.
\n\nNicole: Early in the morning, the goal was to block traffic, to stop people from getting to the IMF meetings. I don’t know if that was successful, but I saw the lockdowns in the morning. There was tear gas, people running, people locking down, the cops coming.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/29.jpg\")
By daybreak on April 16, nearly every intersection in downtown DC hosted a lockdown, street party, or demonstration.
\nBen: For the IMF, my favorite bit of street theater was the “Twelve Days of Monsanto.” We were singing Christmas carols for all of the joyous aspects of Monsanto. Our flying squad was great. We’d sing “Mack the Knife” as loan sharks, with a kick line, and that kind of worked. I had a sense that we wouldn’t be able to block the entrances the way they did in Seattle, that just wasn’t going to happen.
\n\nBut I thought the message was powerful: If you wanted to get lifesaving drugs into bodies around the world, you had to address the IMF’s structural adjustment and austerity programs. The debt that was strangling governments like Haiti’s from being able to create their own health care programs. There were these groups like Partners in Health for Haiti, and Health Gap that were coming up, saying, “We can do better than this.”
\n\nThat was the moment right before Seattle that Al Gore was saying he would defend the drug companies—when they were in the process of suing Nelson Mandela! Now that’s tacky. Here’s the global non-violence hero of the century [sic],1 and you’re suing him for trying to make life-saving drugs for South Africa.
\n\nMark: Entertaining the troops was the mission, going to the people who were locked down for 15 hours and do a little routine for them and then move on. We got to see such a mix of people, young, old, Black, white, Brown, so many people; it was polyglot. That one in particular was very diverse. It was very multi-generational, multi-class, multi-racial, all together.
\n\nPanagioti: Part of our team, someone who’s now a lawyer in Oregon, was part of the comms team. We had handheld radios. I was in proximity with the people who were in more rigid responsibilities, I was like a block away breathing fire during the street theater performance. There are photos somewhere of me and —— breathing fire in the street.
\n\nLelia: There were delegates trying to get in, in a convoy, and the police trying to clear the intersection. I will never forget this to this day—we rushed from our separate lines, blocking the sidewalk, and rushed into the intersection. We sat down, we linked arms and there was a huge—it felt like a tank—but maybe just a very large police vehicle. All these guys jumped out with their SWAT gear. And they hit every other person who was locked down on the bridge of their nose. Every other person had a busted, bloody nose.
\n\nI’d seen police violence previously, and I’m familiar with police violence that was worse than this, but I’d never before seen police walk into a crowd of people and slug people like that. Just with abandon. I’ve never looked at police the same way, I’ve always looked at them with distrust, but I couldn’t have imagined that they took their billy clubs and hit every other person across the nose, one by one.
\n\nI remember it. Luckily, I was not one of the people who got my nose smashed, but tending to those people—it was really nuts. They tried everything to get us to move.
\n\nThe black bloc came at that moment when blood was streaming down people’s faces and essentially pushed the police out of our intersection. They were just this wall of bodies that pushed them out and saved our intersection from any further police abuse. I’ve forever been grateful to that black bloc for hearing on the walkie talkies that we needed help and coming so powerfully to our aid.
\n\nMark: The black bloc was in full effect. They were very militantly opposing police aggression and defending protesters, that’s how I would put it. They were picking up whole chain-link fences and charging police lines, you know, forcing the police back on their heels.
\n\nSince I was with a roving cluster, we experienced some of that, but we tried to steer clear of the most intense stuff. But you know, we inevitably saw it all, we were roving around all day. It was exhausting but exhilarating. And then that night, I went back and edited video for the Indymedia broadcast.
\n\nClashes in Washington, DC during A16.
\nMichael: I was at K and 18th St. when, unprovoked, police fired tear gas and went on a rampage, clubbing demonstrators as they tried to get away. Eventually, the intersection was completely militarized, with over 100 police, the National Guard, and a small tank securing the area. Elsewhere, tear gas, pepper spray, and clubs were being used liberally on nonviolent demonstrators.
\n\nJoe: All of us who went to Washington, DC for the A16 protest have an obligation to represent to others what we went through. It’s not often that human behavior can lead to such massive power and chaos all at once. To challenge authority so greatly that it fights back, reveals its tactics and weaponry, just as we are revealing our strengths and tendencies in stating our demands, in massing and marching. That characterized A16.
\n\nLelia: There was so much energy. I worked on a large puppet, I did a bunch of puppets over the years. We did a Critical Mass ride as well, the police motorcycles started running into us. My partner got arrested in that. I remember the moment they were handcuffed, it was crazy watching them get arrested for riding a bicycle. Getting arrested for attending a normal rally.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/11.jpg\")
A giant puppet depicting a pig with the world in its mouth like an apple, representing the IMF, appeared in DC in the early hours of April 16, 2000, as protesters got in position to establish blockades.
\nR. Harvey: It was exhilarating, it felt like something was happening. We were there to disrupt the meeting. If you’re doing something to disrupt the meeting, then it’s effective. The thinner spread the cops are, the less quickly they can arrest the people who are locked down.
\n\nPeople came to DC with a wide array of visions regarding what A16 was about and a wide range of tactics and strategies with which to do their part.
\n\nFootage from the protests against the IMF/World Bank meetings in Washington, DC in April 2000, from the film “A Year in the Streets” by the Cascadia Media Collective.
\nJoe: Many people heard and read more about the issues of globalization and the role of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The protests did work on that level. Delegates, too, know there’s no free ride: no invisibility to their actions. Many others also got a first-hand look at the power of the people, felt the kinship and oneness that a mass-movement organization can provide.
\n\nThey also got a lesson in media literacy—one of those rare opportunities when there is massive sensationalized media coverage of an event with many, many people. The distortions and bias of the media, along with their sensationalism (and the tendency of people not involved to believe it) became apparent to all who were there.
\n\nGabby: A16 was my first time getting arrested and my first time being beaten up by the cops. What was really profound for me was that I had this feeling of looking out at a crowd and feeling that these were my people. I try to really listen to myself when I approach a space—and when I saw the streets of A16, I had that “Holy shit!” feeling.
\n\nI was pretty fearless in those days. I ended up getting a picture snapped of me and my friend getting beat up by the cops. We were on the front cover of the New York Times on April 17. I had bright red hair. I had it framed at one point at my house, right next to the absence note for school from my mother. It said “Please excuse Gabby, she was detained in Washington, DC and could not attend classes.” I had them right next to each other.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/1.jpg\")
The cover of the New York Times on April 17, 2000.
\nJimmy: The radical marching bands, like the Rude Mechanicals Orchestra, were around. There was a whole “carnival of chaos” vibe.
\n\nMark: I also remember the black bloc, the more Northwest Earth First! types, there were lockdowns, there was a Clown Block, the Puppetistas, a lot of chaos. Really chaotic, it made it really difficult for the delegates. There were a lot of absurd images, really beautiful art. Radical cheerleaders were out in full effect, doing all of their cheerleading; running to the lockdown crews to literally cheer them on.
\n\nNicole: What happened with this movement in general was that there was the Ben and Jerry’s side and the, you know, radical activist side. I don’t know if you need to have one to have the other?
\n\nJoe: The direct action street challenge (and the labor-sponsored rally on the Ellipse that weekend) was composed of a lot of youth, primarily, ranging from drumming, dancing eco-freaks to clean-cut college kids, punk-rock-inspired anarchists in black clothing and masks to a large mix of older activists. Amid these groups were beautiful costumes and puppets there to celebrate and give hope for a liberation from that which threatens us: global greed and exploitation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/12.jpg\")
A photograph from DC on April 16, 2000 showing massive puppets created by or inspired by Bread and Puppet from Vermont. This puppet commemorates those killed at the Rio Negro Massacre in 1982, in which the Guatemalan government and its military proxies murdered over 5000 villagers who were protesting the Chixoy dam, which displaced their villages.
\nRyan: There was a concerted decision to be this autonomous group, but the main objective was not to “just break windows.” The black bloc was higher profile; we couldn’t just do the same thing people did in Seattle, because the police were going to expect that tactic. That tactic has been used and it was successful, it got all eyes in the world on us, that box was checked.
\n\nWhat we needed to do at that point, at A16, was to help people understand what anarchist ideas really are. It’s not just about being a set of secret cells breaking windows, because we are a real part of this movement that needs to be taken seriously.
\n\nAs participants in the black bloc, the thinking was: we’re not going to get voluntarily arrested; or we’re not going to sit in the street while they put pepper spray in our eyes. We are going to fight back against police abuse, if needed. That was planned and coordinated. There weren’t reps of every single affinity group, or whatever, in that initial discussion on tactics, but there were hundreds of people with us in making that strategy successful.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/10.jpg\")
During the A16 protests, demonstrators used banners to conceal themselves and their equipment from the eyes of police.
\nJimmy: We were one of the first street blockades in position and we were the last one that broke up for the day. We were prepared to hold it longer, but the other blockades were breaking down. We were like “Fuck that shit, we’re not breaking down.”
\n\nIt happened that there was a big march coming down past us, it was a funny mix of anarchists with plastic trashcan lid shields and rain ponchos to protect themselves and a giant mass of animal rights activists with these enormous long banners. So we negotiated with them to stop their march. It went something like “Hey, can we have some cover to smuggle out these lockdown devices? We don’t want the cops to see what we were doing.” So they positioned these banners across our intersection, so the cluster could break down the lockdown and smuggle them out safely.
\n\nI remember this one kid, he was such a wingnut, this total protest warrior of the wasteland, with a trashcan lid with the circle A on it, and he was so serious but so friendly. He was a big chubby kid and he and his crew were at the front of the march. They provided the visual barrier, to block off what was going on with the banners as we broke down our blockade. The technical people were in the middle, they smuggled everything out with a vehicle, on the edge of the park.
\n\nWe’d been there all day and it was late afternoon, 5 pm or later, when we finally broke down the blockade. It was only then that I got a full sense of what we had accomplished. And what we were up against; the massive police state, the snipers on the roof. We’d seen the choppers in the air, but now they were following our march.
\n\nRyan: Things like the radical cheerleaders, I thought all that stuff was great. Some of it was compelling to me personally. Some of it felt like just “This is the stuff people do in this world I’m in.”
\n\nNicole: There was a lot of marching, big puppets, lots of chanting, lots of bucket drums. There must have been a legal march, or at least the cops didn’t bother to harass us. We were in the streets singing and dancing. It felt good to be in the streets.
\n\nA montage of footage from A16.
\nGabby: I remember dancing; it was a pretty festive thing, moving between these phases. Going to big protests like that, I feel that’s where I learned to dance. I used to be really shy, but the energy of the crowd with everybody being there, I could let loose more.
\n\n\n\n\nAt the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening, a cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman], a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.
\n\nI grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world—prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.
\n\n-Emma Goldman, Living My Life
\n
Jimmy: That intersection that the pagans had was so cool. I remember they had made a giant spiderweb to block the street.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/43.jpg\")
“People, not profit”—yarn strung in spider webs to block access to the meetings. Photograph by Orin Langelle / Global Justice Ecology Project.
\nPica: These people were from all over the country, all over the world. There were Tibetans, the Mexican farmers, college kids, dropouts, union people, there was a real sense of the gathering of the nations of the world. These were all people against a specific form of capitalism that they called globalization, but there were other things that motivated us. The peaceful labor march, the prison-industrial complex protest that got busted where they arrested 400 people.
\n\nMark: There were a lot of discussions from people who were organized with the black bloc and the rest of the organizers about diversity of tactics. That was what everyone was talking about after Seattle.
\n\nAs I recall, that was handled really well at A16. The black bloc, they understood that they should not endanger anyone who was vulnerable or anyone who was in a position that was in jeopardy. They understood themselves as a defensive front to push back against police violence, they were very effective in pushing back, and they made that their job in a way, that made people feel a lot safer.
\n\nIt didn’t feel like they were escalating things, it felt they were pushing back against violence. I think that sentiment was widely shared, but I don’t know if that was shared by everyone. It was my perspective.
\n\nR. Harvey: I remember at A16, there was that carnival vibe—you’d go to a new intersection and wonder “What are these people up to?” Then something completely different at the next one—people in costumes, people drumming, people burning stuff, an animal rights contingent led by Compassion Over Killing, the Pagan Cluster.
\n\nNicole: I did not want to get arrested. My friends locked down and it was crazy because we got there so early in the morning. It wasn’t light yet, and very quickly you could hear cop cars and everything was happening. Pepper spray, people were sitting down and chanting.
\n\nAfter walking around, I found myself on a lawn, it was sunny, and it was a totally different scene, like it was people with their children. It was like an alternate rally, so I went from the radical lockdown area to this lawn, and I swear, the Indigo Girls were playing! But I could be wrong? We’ll have to look that up.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/39.gif\")
RC/DC (Radical Cheerleaders of DC) performed cheers to people locking down in intersections on April 16, 2000 in DC. An example cheer was this or something similar: “My back is achin. My bra’s too tight. My booty’s shakin, from the left to the right. Shout it out, revolution! Shout it out, support the union! Enough is enough. We all must rise up. Didn’t eat today. No place to stay. So kiss the back of my butt. Uh! Kiss the back o’ my butt. Uh! Kiss the back o’ my Kiss the back o’ my Kiss the back o’ my butt. Uh! My acka backa, you’re a soda cracker, your money, your jobs, Your institutions that never listen, to the people’s needs. It’s all about greed — I Said, Beep beep beep. Take your voice to the street!”
\nThe DC police preemptively shut down a massive part of Washington, DC, using tear gas, pepper spray, and batons indiscriminately and employing motorcycles as weapons.
\n\nJimmy: There was one kid who went by the name Grapefruit. He was staring down a cop on a motorcycle, and the cop bumped it forward and hit him with his bike. The cop knocked him down, and that motorcycle wheel rolled up his body, just past his crotch and rolled back off him. I thought “Oh my fucking god! That guy just got his junk crushed.” And then he got up and dusted himself off. He was fine, because he was WEARING A CUP! I mean… he could have had a crushed pelvis or his genitals destroyed forever, but no, he was fine. He looked like a goofy hippy, but he was prepared. I was like, “You are one smart kid.”
\n\nJoe: My eyes, which spent a lot of time moving from place to place over the two and a half days that I was there, saw several instances where police inserted themselves into peaceful situations and made them worse. They turned peaceful protest into a tense confrontation, bringing violence with stick, spray, and “rubber bullet”-type weaponry to groups of people marching, drumming, and chanting or simply blocking a street in an already blocked-off section of the city.
\n\nGil: We were attacked by police in roving packs of Lambretta scooters. They aimed to run us over. The tactic was to aim at us, quickly turn away, let the scooter slide into us, and while we were attending to our hides, they would attack with clubs. I was splattered with the blood of a guy in our group whose head was split open.
\n\nI knew the DC constabulary to be vicious. I planned a sign to say something like, “In the land of the free and the home of the brave, we are governed by (controlled by) fascists. They will beat you, kick you, gas you, jail you and kill you, for freedom is an illusion if anyone is not free. We are none free until we are all free.” (Somebody else said that.)2
\n\nBut as you know, DC was a busy place and the sign did not get made, but I did have two others, and they said, “The police murdered Amadou Diallo” and “No one is guilty of anything. There is no protection from police brutality. There is no justice in law.”
\n\nIt is unfortunate that I know this to be true. Those of you who went to DC probably wouldn’t argue otherwise.
\n\nRunning battles between police and demonstrators intent on blocking traffic on April 16, 2000.
\nJimmy: I remember a guy from New York or New Jersey, seemed like a long-haired peace punk, he got fucking mauled. The cops pepper sprayed him, he’d already been tear gassed, they chased him down the street and then beat the shit out of him. He was puking and all mangled, he was miserable in the jail. He was definitely one of the worst cases of abuse from A16 that I personally saw.
\n\nGabby: There was a rowdy black bloc of young people, the freaks with the puppets that were really radical too, there was a big labor contingent. You could move between these different worlds in the streets and also at the convergence center.
\n\nWe were so crazy, so fearless. I remember at some point marching with the anarchists past this construction site. And a whole bunch of us picked up this fence, these couple of links of fence and charged the police line.
\n\nIt was so wild, the cops running away from us! That moment gave me the strength to really grab my life by the reins and take it where I wanted to take it. I decided I wasn’t going to go to college, for better or worse. That was my first big radical protest and it gave me a taste of being out in the world and having a radical life at a very young age. That was pretty profound for me.
\n\nRyan: I have not thought about “the fence” in years, but I was right there. That was probably one of the most empowered moments of my young life at the time. Running with the fucking fence, in that moment.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/3.jpg\")
Protesters charge the police with two sections of fencing on April 16, 2000.
\nR. Harvey: We walked straight into downtown, saw the blockades, the sleeping dragons, the big yellow puppet and went down to I street. All of the streets there were blockaded. We went to where George Washington University is located, there was a big lockdown there.
\n\nAnd then, it was pretty early, after doing a big loop, then we wound up right in that moment, where people grabbed the fence against the cops. I was in the back, as a viewer, thinking “What’s going on here?” So we followed along. There was a big standoff with the cops, we were running in the opposite direction of the fence. I wasn’t clear what the tactic was, maybe we just found a fence and decided to chase the cops with it?
\n\nDefinitely, the fence battle was a moment, I was tear-gassed right after that. That was the first time I was tear-gassed, right there at 14th and I street. I remember how pissed off people were about that.
\n\nI remember Chief Ramsey, standing there at the intersection, with tear gas still in the air, getting interviewed saying “There was tear gas fired, but my officers didn’t fire it. I don’t know who did.” The interviewer asked if he was suggesting that the protesters tear-gassed themselves, and he said “No, my officers just aren’t the ones who did it.”\nI was so shocked about that.
\n\nArrests and jail solidarity in Washington, DC during the protests against the IMF/World Bank in 2000.
\nBen: For the IMF moment, the best thing about the global justice movement was to let a thousand flowers bloom. I know people don’t like that expression because of Mao, but it’s useful to have a zillion actions going on, where you could have a blockade, have a march, have the black bloc throwing things. It was great theater.
\n\nIt was those little moments where we’d try to do a street performance, whether it was the Students for an Undemocratic Society, or against Monsanto. You are having fun, but also critiquing and bringing that message to the stakeholders inside of the meetings. We’d give copies to them. Good street theater is a moment to educate—that’s where we pivoted and it was really effective in getting a message out there.
\n\nNobody pays attention to just a march. You have to throw some theater in there to make it useful. And I loved that, the protests against the IMF really got the word out. How many legitimate stories got out there? Church-based groups, Jubilee 2000—I didn’t know about the Jubilee stuff until I saw a sermon at Judson Memorial Church about debt relief. That’s another part of the story: public health and democracy are much more important than corporations and death. That’s just colonialism all over again.
\n\nRyan: For me, if they can mediate how we protest, how we speak, then everything is going to remain the same. If we follow their protest rules, we’re going to reify all of their rules about how life should be. And we can’t give them that. If we get an opening in the street, like the fence, that’s how we get another opening and that’s how we get another opening.
\n\n\n\n\n“No justice, no peace, fuck the police!”
\n\n-A black bloc chant at A16, which remains a rallying cry to this day
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/34.jpg\")
A banner on A16: “Whose power?”
\nAfter thousands of arrests, several supporters and the Midnight Special legal collective stayed behind to help people get out of jail and receive legal support. Years later, the courts forced the police to pay a multi-million dollar settlement for the illegal detentions and violation of constitutional rights at A16.
\n\n\n\n\nWe, the male prisoners arrested in Washington, DC during the week of the A16 demonstrations against the IMF/World Bank (April 16-22, 2000), wish to express our solidarity with our fellow inmates, as well as with prisoners around the world who die and are tortured daily, often simply because they ask to be treated fairly, equally, and justly. Second, we wish to express our sincere thanks to the many supporters who stayed outside the jail in solidarity with us, and to those many who sent emails, wrote letters, and made phone calls on our behalf. […]
\n\nWe were denied contact with our lawyers for consecutive periods of more than 30 hours at a time; left handcuffed and shackled for up to eight hours; moved up to 10 times from holding cell to holding cell. Many of us were denied food for more than 30 hours and denied water for up to 10 hours at a time. Though many of us were soaking wet after Monday’s protest, we were refused dry clothing, and left shackled and shivering on very cold floors.
\n\nFor no apparent reason, some of us were physically attacked by U.S. Marshals; we were forcefully thrown up against the wall, pepper sprayed directly in the face, or thrown on the floor and beaten. At least two individuals were forced against the wall by their necks in strangulation holds, with threats of further violence. This sort of violence was perpetrated against at least two juveniles in order to separate them from the larger group. […]
\n\nAfter our arrests last week, many of us chose to remain anonymous to protest these abuses. We chose to show solidarity with our fellow protesters who were unjustly charged with felonies and misdemeanors in the act of non-violent civil disobedience against the IMF and the World Bank. It is clear to us that the District of Columbia and the Federal Government, by trumping up charges, by arresting frivolously, and by keeping us in jail for a week, had much less of a problem with our alleged infractions than with the fact that we spoke our minds and faced up to their brutality and threats.
\n\n[…] We will continue to risk arrest, and if necessary resist with our very lives, until we expose this world as one in which profits come before people, so that a more just, humane, and free global society may take its place.
\n\n-A statement collectively written by 70 protesters arrested during the A16 protests and incarcerated for a week. “The writers consolidated ideas, suggestions, and editorial comments for the letter by passing suggestions between bars from cell to cell.”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/16.jpg\")
Police carried out arrests in Washington, DC at random on April 16, 2000, with apparent impunity.
\nJimmy: I stayed for jail support. I don’t even remember where we crashed, we were there for about four days. There was an activist encampment outside the DC jail, where most of our people were being held. It was a collection of shitty tarps strung together in the rain. There was a little sunshine, but it mostly rained. And we sat around in ponchos eating stale bagels, you know.
\n\nSugar: By Monday [April 17], 1300 citizens’ constitutional rights had been violated as they were arrested for practicing freedom of speech and the freedom to assemble. I witnessed police brutality against harmless and peaceful demonstrators—physically, mentally, and psychologically. People in jail resorting to chanting “I want to see my lawyer now.”
\n\nSomeone getting charged with “assaulting a cop” for vomiting on a cop from tear gas sprayed directly in their face. People getting bruised from police officers holding them “a little too tightly.” A woman cooperating and was still being thrown against a wall.
\n\nGabby: There were a handful of us who were arrested as minors. I got arrested in that early morning snake march on April 17. Arrested the same day my face was on the front page of the New York Times.
\n\nThey kind of didn’t know what to do with us as minors, they just “catch-and-released” us. I didn’t even get a court date. They were like, “What? Huh? You’re seventeen with no ID? We don’t even want to deal with you.” So they had this van full of children that they kept around for a while, for a couple hours, and then we were released.
\n\n\n\n\nIn the weeks preceding the two-day demonstration, Midnight Special organized progressive lawyers, led legal observer and “Know Your Rights” trainings, and began to document the intense surveillance and harassment of activists, including our own collective members, in the streets and at the convergence site. We trained over 1500 activists and 200 legal observers at a furious pace, wherever we could—in warehouses, schools, parks, and churches.
\n\nDuring and after the protests, Midnight Special staffed three phone lines around the clock, taking calls from arrested activists, concerned friends and relatives, and demonstrators on the streets. Over the course of three days, nearly 1200 people were arrested.
\n\nMidnight Special sent lawyer-activists teams to the jails to meet with the arrestees and help negotiate a universal plea bargain which would protect those in custody who were at risk. About 150 activists withheld their names, forcing the authorities to hold them in an already packed jail. By using legal solidarity, these arrestees forced the authorities to reduce the charges of everyone’s misdemeanors to a $5 jaywalking ticket.
\n\n \n
Jimmy: Midnight Special was great, I definitely remember Katya in particular, who was famous from Seattle ’99. It was great that they were there to support us in DC for A16. Lawyers from Midnight Special were definitely there. Jail solidarity was really cool, people were doing workshops, doing history lessons and know-your-rights trainings, food sharing, all kinds of creative scheming to get people into the jail, trying to get messages back and forth, trying to get lawyers in.
\n\nBen: I’m always glad to see DC in the rear view mirror behind us. I always like to show up, and I’ve been arrested a dozen times in DC. It was basically get arrested and get the hell out of there.
\n\nSugar: Many lessons came to me as I stood outside the jailhouse five days in a row, chanting, cheering, singing, and joining in solidarity with those of us left in DC for the aftermath and with the incredible Midnight Special Legal Team, whose periodic updates were the rainbows on our rainy and cold days outside.
\n\nWhether outside a jail, a courthouse, whether on Pennsylvania Ave. locked down or in a cool house near American University or in a metro headed east on the red line—this activist community is strong, tight, and full of good people, hopeful people, and strong people who join together, stay together, sing and dance together, make consensus together, and live together for a better world here and now and for tomorrow.
\n\n\n\n\nThe District of Columbia has agreed to pay $13,302,500 to settle a class-action lawsuit related to the illegal arrest of 680 people. Those people were arrested on April 15, 2000 in connection with the protest against the Prison Industrial Complex during the International Monetary Fund-World Bank demonstrations.
\n\n-Prison Legal News, October 2010
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/30.jpg\")
Police guard an alley in Washington, DC on April 16, 2000.
\nA16 was a life-changing experience for many participants.
\n\nRyan: Part of that time period, what I gravitated towards and why A16 was so compelling, was that it was an opportunity that came out of a culmination of realizing what the world really was, wanting to immerse myself in a real fight for a better world.
\n\nThe world I grew up in was really neoliberal, it repressed so much reality. There was a certain pulling back of the veil that happened with Seattle and A16, when you strip it down to its raw components of people versus power: that’s what the fence represented. People on one side, power on the other. That’s what the fight was about.
\n\nPica: A16 was right in the middle of that era, not the highest high, but a formative experience for many people.
\n\nGabby: I had a bit of a time period of being a hater about all the summit hopping. The really dedicated cool kids got there really early, and often, had cool adventures getting there. I thought it was a blast, but clearly, we didn’t manage to overthrow capitalism by doing that. Instead, we did create this whole world for ourselves.
\n\nI’m not a hater anymore. I believe in grassroots movements, but I also think some of these decisions I made in my hater period were along the lines of “No! You should stay at home and slog through this ‘really important’ organizing instead of going to the big party, the big anti-capitalist gala.” The RNC used to be the anarchist Olympics for years, somebody was going to get it and we’d all go. It was a family reunion. If I could talk to that hater version of myself back then, I’d say, “Go to the party.”
\n\nI don’t know if this current generation needs to listen to me, but I do think it is valid, you know, to enjoy your life and have a good time while being a revolutionary. I don’t think we should be too self-aggrandizing about it, trying to be the most radical, thinking you’re doing the most important work—but there is a real value in experiencing some of those big highs, being there with your people and having wild times. You don’t need to just slog through things because people tell you that those things are more important.
\n\nMichael: The mainstream media did not discuss how IMF and World Bank policies make poor countries much poorer with structural adjustment programs. Instead, they chose to ridicule the protesters as a bunch of misguided youngsters, “A ragtag band of ’60s recidivists and assorted ‘activists,’” as Washington Post pundit Jonathan Yardley so cleverly put it.
\n\nIf this is true, would that explain why police closed off 90 square blocks downtown for a few bankers? Why did DC, under fiscal strain, spend $5 million to arm and train 1500 police, federal marshals, and FBI agents with Robocop riot gear and “non-lethal” chemical weapons? Why were 1350 people arrested for exercising their freedom of speech? Was this ragtag band truly so threatening with their cries of “People before Profits” and “This is what democracy looks like”?
\n\nJoe: We who went, for our myriad of reasons, wanted to send a message that the corporate-dominated cultures, whose appetite for resources, consumption, and low-wage exploitation are exceeding any kind of sustainable economy for the planet, need to be challenged. These are the practices that put some of the poorest people on the planet at great hardship and bring down the quality of life for many others while enriching only a relative few.
\n\nBen: We’re not going to stop globalization, just like you couldn’t stop mercantilism. But we can democratize it. Have we achieved that? Maybe in certain nooks and crannies. But what I liked was that politics is local and they were abundant and you could stake out your claim for change. It’s still really powerful and we’re still working on all those issues.
\n\nLelia: It felt good after A16 and we thought “What next?” There was Seattle, then A16, then what’s the next project we’re going to do to show up to make our world better? I was on the coordinating committee for the National Conference for Organized Resistance for several years in DC. The first conference I helped with was 1999, where I started by organizing just one workshop. Then after that, I joined the coordinating committee.
\n\nAfter that, as we kept doing it for years, it was definitely a labor of love. There were so many smart people in one spot, thinking about how to make the world better in so many different ways. I just loved everything about it. There were definitely some harder years, but it was a really meaningful space for people to connect across projects and across regions. We’d do the same thing every year too, in Vermont, joining the RAT conference, Renewing the Anarchist Tradition.
\n\nAround that same time, we were developing the Brian Mackenzie infoshop in DC over nearly a whole decade. The first meetings were in 1998; it eventually closed in 2008.
\n\nSand: Most important for me was the sense of community between the activists. We were there because we cared enough to create a new path. As long as we build with community, we will be able to offer an infrastructure to support the masses when consumer culture can’t and won’t anymore.
\n\nJoe: That’s our obligation. We must continue the organizing work—and let people know what is really going on, so the people and power of the A16 weekend can continue and grow.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/27.jpg\")
A flier promoting a protest against the IMF and World Bank meetings a few months after A16, in September 2000.
\nR. Harvey: If Seattle was the thing that really sparked me, A16 was my baptism or whatever. Leaving A16, I was thinking—I’m in. And I’m ready for the next one.
\n\nNicole: It felt like being young, to be part of something. I had found my community. I didn’t have any idea of the massive size, of that many people. Those moments of being there in the streets of A16, it felt like an expression of all the local stuff that we were doing; it was a homecoming. It wouldn’t have felt as powerful in a vacuum, on its own. It felt good because we were already doing this activism with other people.
\n\nRyan: There was a lot of non-violence dogma before A16, which was sort of a big dividing line for the younger generation that I was part of. This nonviolence dogma in relation to tactics made spaces like the Mobilization for Global Justice less accessible.
\n\nAfter A16, inspired by organizing in Canada against the 2001 FTAA ministerial, we created the Washington, DC Anti-Capitalist Convergence, which was intended to create an alternative to the Mobilization for Global Justice. The Anti-Capitalist Convergence prioritized creating a space organized around anarchist and anti-capitalist principles that was intentionally anti-racist, anti-sexist, and in support of a diversity of tactics.
\n\nThe bigger NGOs were not supportive. Public Citizen and those kinds of groups? No. But I recall that 50 Years is Enough was one NGO that was very open to the ACC and thought we were moving things in the right direction. They were led by people from the Global South for whom anti-capitalism was not stigmatized the way it is here.
\n\nR. Harvey: The anti-globalization movement is really significant. In our lives, it was really significant, because if a single protest or series of protests or a movement produces people like us—who still believe, who are still doing work that stems from that politicization—it’s clearly very important.
\n\nIf everyone was depressed in 2004 because they felt that this time period had ended, then that means that it mattered, it was of significance. We may misjudge or inflate the impact that the part of the movement based in the US had on the world, because it meant so much to us personally. But don’t forget, they overthrew the government in Argentina five times, there were huge protests in South Korea, South Africa, Indonesia, this was all part of the worldwide movement, produced by these social movements, of which we were the US version in the streets. We were part of that.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/8.jpg\")
John Timoney served as First Deputy Commissioner of the New York City Police Department, Police Commissioner of Philadelphia, and Police Chief of Miami during the demonstrations against the Free Trade Area of the Americas ministerial in 2003. He was famous for the same police strategies employed at A16: mass arrests, indiscriminate use of tear gas, the deliberate abuse of arrestees. Though he did his best to crush movements for liberation, we outlived Timoney and enthusiastically wrote his obituary in 2016.
\nBen: I think the best movements are a mix of generations. We had a guy in ACT UP, and I got so sick of hearing him talk about being at the Stonewall Riots, but at the same time, you know what, he plugged that experience into a story for fighting for homeless queer youth. It wasn’t just him bragging about being at Stonewall, it’s reminding us that those homeless youth were some of the ones who fought in the riot and they’re still in the park right now. What are we going to do to put them in the center of our story?
\n\nRyan: When I think back on this trajectory of protests… summit hopping and convergences like A16, once Seattle happened, this movement emerged where people were searching for the next opportunity to fight in the streets for a better world. To have a place to bring myriad issues and concerns into the public sphere and wrestle with them. That was core to that movement.
\n\nAnarchists in the anti-globalization movement were true believers. We didn’t throw ourselves into this because it was popular or trending. Maybe some did, but so many of us stuck with it and continue to fight for a better world now, in and outside of social movements. All movements are like that—these windows of time and possibility open up where things that were previously unpopular to talk about become part of mainstream discourse. In these openings, ideas and truths are introduced and they can’t be suppressed again.
\n\nFor instance, during the George Floyd uprising, ideas like police abolition and defunding the police that existed in the grassroots for decades came to the surface. Mainstream conversation started to consider “Could we live in a world without police?” In these movement moments, ideas go to the top of societal discourse, even if for a few months, and it evolves the discourse going forward. Even when the momentum of movement settles down, specific ideas have been introduced into discourse as acceptable or familiar. Potential for change and future movements builds from there.
\n\nBen: If you study any movement, there are always through lines. I see the anti-globalization movement as opening a door. There were a thousand direct actions that created Seattle, then Seattle points us in the direction of the IMF protests. And there were actions in Bolivia, in Chiapas, in New York, in Durban, there are these flashpoints of action that point to a more humane way of living. And you keep doing that work, which fades into another set of actions that becomes Occupy Wall Street, then Black Lives Matter, and I think it’s important to see that one thing doesn’t just stop and another starts. There is a through line of people that are participating all the way through, waves of action ebbing and flowing.
\n\nI mean, there are people talking about Fred Hampton at Black Lives Matter protests. Well yeah, the guy was shot face down in his bed. We should still be talking about that! We should still be making sense of that, so that’s a through line. Maybe the Black Panthers were shut down by the government, but those ideas never go away. With the affinity groups of ACT UP, it may not be as large, but the work around Global Apartheid, around AIDS vaccines, that still continues. We need to make the vaccine free. We did an action just this summer on 42nd street.
\n\n“The Miami Model,” a documentary about the protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas ministerial in Miami, Florida in November 2003.
\nGabby: In later years, I had a moment of disappointment, feeling that “We always lose.” We do these activist campaigns and we always lose. I was so sick of it. And my friend said something that stuck with me. He helped me remember that all the time, there are people in suits sitting in board meetings making big decisions that affect the world. Having that discussion and they have this moment of cost/benefit [analysis]. If we do this plan, are there going to be protests? Do we want to bother with them? And sometimes, they say “Yes,” and plow forward anyway, and it’s true, they do tend to cut all the trees, or smash the union. But sometimes, the answer is ‘No.” And they don’t bother, and that’s a win. Every time they say “Don’t bother,” we win, and we never even know it.
\n\nComing to A16 on the heels of Seattle was so exciting, because it was such a surprise win. It awakened the imagination of a whole generation—certainly here, but maybe even in other countries, also. With these big movements, things become different; I think we saw that with Occupy and with Black Lives Matter. And we’ll see it again! When those moments happen, they feel mystical, but really, they happen because we build them and we make them happen.
\n\nLelia: I feel like everything you do prepares you for what you do next. I’m still an activist today. I don’t think it’s in the past.
\n\nAnd things today, I mean, I’ve been going to Black Lives Matter protests since I was four, it was just called something different: the march against police brutality. I have been out there and I’m committed to being out there and fighting for change. I still feel the pull of the streets; I need to be in the streets, even when it’s been tricky navigating our comfort level with COVID-19 and all the other things today.
\n\nIn the past few years, I have felt in my activist heart that I have to go and be in the streets. I remain compelled.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/04/14/32.jpg\")
Anarchists on A16.
\nThis account was compiled by the OUR Histories Collective and it is the first of several narrative oral histories to come. If you have a story to tell or would like to contribute to this ongoing effort, please get in touch.
\n\nThe header photograph and several others are by Orin Langelle, a documentary photographer and activist. His work spans five decades over five continents covering social, ecological and economic struggles. He has photographed protests at the WTO, World Bank, FTAA meetings, UN Climate conferences, and much more, including the Zapatista struggle in Chiapas, Mexico and the 2019 People’s Uprising in Chile. Langelle co-founded Global Justice Ecology Project and is currently archiving his photos. You can see more of his work here.
\n\nRoughly a quarter of workers in the United States quit their jobs in 2021. There has been a lot of talk about a supposed “labor shortage.” In theory, these conditions should be conducive to labor organizing—yet a real strike wave has not emerged. How have employment conditions changed, and what new strategies are likely to succeed in enabling people to stand up for themselves and each other against the capitalist economy? In a forthcoming series of articles, we will explore these questions.
\n\nThis week, workers at Kellogg’s concluded a strike, accepting a new contract that their union declared to be a victory. A notorious anti-work Reddit page played a role in preventing the company from replacing the strikers, pointing the way to a symbiosis between workplace organizing and anti-work subversion. Here, we present a narrative about the working conditions that laborers face in another industry served by the same union.
\n\nCongratulations to the Kellogg’s workers at the end of their 77 day strike! Their struggle is especially close to my heart, because I too was a member in good standing of the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers’ International Union (BCTGM) for nearly ten years during the 2000s, during which time I worked seasonally at a beet sugar factory in Minnesota. As a small show of solidarity, I’d like to share an account that I wrote about the job back in 2005, which was printed in the first issue of Rolling Thunder.
\n\nNeedless to say, much has changed since then—in the factory, the town, the union, and the world at large. My account is perhaps most interesting as a snapshot of industrial work at a particular time and place, and of a few of the frozen exploited maniacs who could be found laboring there at the point of production. What has not changed is that life under capitalism is nothing sweet, and that nothing is gained without struggle. Victory to the Kellogg’s workers!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/12/22/8.jpg\")
Supporters of the striking Kellogg’s workers made these silent agitators to affix to grocery store shelf labels and cereal boxes. For use with Avery brand 8160 Address Labels or the equivalent. Click on the image to download a pdf for printing.
\nSo here’s the deal. Every fall I work in this beet sugar factory in western Minnesota. A whole lot of the sugar that goes into all kinds of processed food comes from sugar beets, and a whole lot of those sugar beets come from western Minnesota. The county where the factory is located is dead flat, except for the Minnesota River valley, and it contains precisely three things: corn, soybeans, and sugar beets as far as the eye can see. It’s completely rural, but at the same time, it’s every bit as unnatural as Los Angeles or Disneyland.
\n\nEvery year in September, the beet farmers start pulling their crops. They pull them out of the ground with a combine, load them onto a semi truck, and drive them down to the plant. It takes the plant until spring to process the whole harvest, so they have to store the beets outside in seven gigantic piles, and they have to hire seasonal workers to run the machines that unload the trucks. By the end of the harvest season each one of the piles is bigger than a football field, and up to thirty feet tall. It’s one whole hell of a lot of beets.
\n\nIt’s good money. The farmers pull beets all day and night, unless it’s too hot, or too cold, or too wet. Seasonal workers—beet pilers—work twelve hours a day, every day, as long as the farmers are pulling. This amounts to eighty-four hours a week if the weather cooperates, and the overtime adds up quick. Anything over eight hours a day or forty a week is time and a half, and Sunday is double time. If I live extremely frugally, I can make enough money there to fund my activities for the better part of the rest of the year.
\n\nThe town is exactly like every other agricultural town of its size. There is a bar, a diner, a hardware store, two gas stations, a post office, a library, and a police station. The faces behind the counters almost never change from year to year. The tallest building is the grain silo, and the town ends abruptly where the beet fields begin at the edge of the last family’s yard. If you walk the railroad tracks two miles east you’ll get to the factory. The whole place is ordinary in every way, except that once a year it is crawling with beet pilers.
\n\nThere are three kinds of people that pile beets: the Locals, the Latin@s, and the Kids. Western Minnesota was stolen from its original inhabitants in the nineteenth century, and has been populated almost exclusively by white people of Scandinavian heritage ever since. Recently, however, a lot of Hispanic folks have moved up there looking for work. There is a sizable Latino/Latina minority in both the town and the factory.
\n\nAnd then there are the kids. It’s a strange phenomenon, but every fall the town is overrun with wild looking young people from Somewhere Else with dogs and facial tattoos who work beets because the money’s good and they don’t ask many questions. I am one of them.
\n\nThere really isn’t anywhere in town to accommodate all of us in any conventional sense, so almost every year we end up staying somewhere different. There used to be a fleabag motel down the road that would rent to beet pilers, but they got shut down for copious code violations. Last year about forty of us occupied an abandoned farm just past the outskirts of town. It was sort of like a band of vagabonds descending on a medieval village. I was a little bit worried that babies were going to start turning up missing and that the townspeople were going to come after us with pitchforks.
\n\nOne year, the weather was terrible. Nobody was working or getting paid, and nearly everyone was camped out at the bar for days on end, getting ferociously drunk and terrorizing the town. Eventually the law got involved. But the hell-raising proved to be a surprisingly effective strategy. The next year the company tried really hard to work us no matter how bad the weather got, presumably just to keep us off the streets.
\n\nAnother time, the bartender went down to the farm to hang out with us after work. She rolled up on a grim horde of beet pilers, solemnly skinning and eating a puppy around the camp fire1. She was understandably horrified by this, even after someone explained that the puppy had not been murdered. It had been killed accidentally by one of the larger dogs, and the person who was responsible for it had decided that this was the most respectful way to deal with its death. She always seemed a little wary of us after that.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/12/22/2.jpg\")
\nWorking beets can be a positive experience in many ways. There is a real camaraderie and a kind of solidarity that can develop out of living and working and eating and sleeping collectively with a group of people under trying conditions. There are people who make a kind of circuit together throughout the year, piling beets in Minnesota, raking blueberries in Maine, canning fish in Alaska, and doing a variety of other things. It’s one way to make work, and life, a little less alienating and isolating.
\n\nIt can also be terrible. The extreme drunkenness and perpetual drug abuse can get to be a bit much, and working eighty-four hours a week in the freezing cold while sleeping on a pile of straw in a barn for a month and a half without any running water or electricity will really put you in the mood to not take any shit from anyone.
\n\nThe work is really easy. A well-trained orangutan could run a beet piler. You press the same buttons and pull the same levers over and over and over. It’s mostly just really loud and monotonous and cold.
\n\nIt’s also fairly dangerous. You have to keep an eye on all the tweaked out truckers so they don’t run you over. You have to make sure not to fall into the machine. Somebody gets killed on a beet pile somewhere in Minnesota or North Dakota almost every year.
\n\nThe inside of the factory is even crazier. There are unfathomable mazes of incomprehensible machines, catwalks and conveyor belts to nowhere, and ancient engines caked in a foot of beet pulp. There is the deafening racket of a thousand endlessly grinding gears, an entire floor of the factory that is always about a hundred and thirty degrees, and a place called The Pit where no supervisor will ever go. The whole place is completely inhuman. There is no shortage of opportunities to hide—or to get maimed or killed.
\n\nI work outside on the pilers unless the weather is bad, but sometimes I work inside the factory. Here’s a story. One day, I clock in and the bossman gives me a great big squeegee. He takes me to a particular pipe deep in the bowels of the factory which has sprung an enormous leak and is spraying massive amounts of half-processed syrup everywhere. “Mop up this juice,” he says, and then leaves, never to be seen again. So for twelve hours, the pipe runneth over, and I push the lake of juice—which never gets any smaller—down a drain. The drain feeds into a sump pump, which then pumps right back into the pipe!
\n\nAfterwards, while meditating on the absurdity of that task, I watched a couple of guys with a backhoe spend half the day digging a big hole in the ground, take lunch, and spend the rest of the day filling it back in. I started to imagine that everyone there was doing the same thing on some level. The welders cut slabs of steel in half, take lunch, and weld them back together; the mechanics disassemble engines, take lunch, and put them back together; and the whole place is actually a giant meth lab or loss leader for the Mafia. There’s the method to the madness of production for you.
\n\nThe factory is supposed to be owned cooperatively by the farmers, but the evil agribusiness giant Cargill has its hands in the management of it. There was a month-long lockout last summer, when the union overwhelmingly rejected a contract that would have left workers with fewer benefits and higher health insurance costs. The lockout was wildly unpopular, and was eventually resolved, but the town and the factory are behind the times in a lot of ways. I have no doubt that the next few years will see more attempts to bust the union, and more of the downsizing, automation, and outsourcing that have already decimated most of the decent paying industrial jobs in the rest of the country. The beet plant will be an interesting arena of struggle when this does inevitably happen. There is certainly the possibility there for profound alliances to be born out of necessity amongst workers of diverse racial and cultural backgrounds.
\n\nThe beet harvest works pretty well for me, and I keep going back, but I sure am glad to get the hell gone the minute I’m done. As soon as I get there, it feels like I never left, and it only ever takes about a week or so before I start having dreams about beets again. I can’t imagine how hard it must be to stomach working there every day for years on end. I do know that the company had to start making full-time workers clock in by scanning their retinas because so many people were scamming the timecards.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/12/22/3.jpg\")
\nLast year, someone started writing “BDTF!” everywhere. Burn Down the Factory! Remember that song by Fifteen? It started turning up on the pilers, in the factory, in town, scrawled in the dust on the sides of cars in all manner of different handwriting styles. Maybe it was just the kids who were doing it, but maybe not.
\n\nMake no mistake about it: sugar is evil. It’s addictive, it rots your teeth, and it’s largely responsible for an epidemic of diabetes among poor people in this country. The process by which it is produced wastes a staggering amount of water, is horrifically destructive to the environment, and is viscerally just plain gross.
\n\nYou can’t have your cake and eat it, too. If you want that sugar, you have to accept that huge amounts of land will be used to grow the beets, that enormous quantities of pesticides and fertilizers will be used on that land, that there will be a sacrifice zone somewhere on a totally denuded moonscape where the factory will go, that some folks will spend the best years of their lives inside that factory, and that a mountain of fossil fuels will be burned to power it. You also have to accept that some doped up crust punk is probably going to poop in the beet pile. In my opinion, it’s just not worth it.
\n\nWhen I first started working at the plant, I swore I would never eat anything with beet sugar in it again. Later, I started thinking about where cane sugar must come from, or corn syrup, or any kind of processed food, period. It all comes from some factory, somewhere. It’s sobering to realize that the whole way that food is produced and distributed in our civilization is so deranged and destructive. The problem is a whole lot bigger than almost anyone cares to admit.
\n\nThere are a lot of good people—including myself—whose livelihoods are dependent on that factory, or on others like it, or on all sorts of other messed up jobs. I wholeheartedly support workers’ efforts to better their lot within the confines of industrial capitalism, but I’ll be honest—ultimately, I’d like to see the beet plant wiped off the face of the fucking earth. I want to give the land a chance to recover, and I want to be part of a society where that would be possible. I know that’s not going to happen without some truly revolutionary change.
\n\nSometimes I will be sitting up in the booth running the piler, looking through the clouds of dust at the pillars of smoke and steam rising out of the factory, and it will hit me right in the chest: two hundred years ago, this was a tallgrass prairie teeming with buffalo, and now here I am like every other white person, trying to make a buck off of this land. I don’t exactly feel guilty about it; I am trapped in this heartless economy just like so many others, and I have to make some compromises if I am going to have any resources to fight it with. If I am going to make those kinds of compromises, though, I do feel a very grave responsibility to follow through on that commitment to fight. I’m willing to bet that I’m not the only one who feels that way.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/12/22/1.jpg\")
Burn down the factory.
\nDedicated to the memories of Oakle, Justin, Mosca, Jared, Steph, and Flee—fellow beet pilers who have passed away since this article was first published. You are missed, all of you.
\n\nAuthor’s note: Please let me take this opportunity to assure the gentle reader that I played no part in the puppy skinning. Thank you very much. ↩
\nContinuing our back-to-school theme this week, we offer a memoir about how university students can engage in class mutiny, weaponizing their access to resources in order to contribute to broader struggles against capitalism. This narrative charts the trajectory of one rebel from the confrontational dropout politics of the anti-globalization era to an effort to infiltrate and undermine the institutions of power from within, ending with a rousing call for people of all professions and social positions to subvert their roles for the sake of collective liberation.
\n\nThis text appeared in 2007 in Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization, a book edited by Erika Biddle, David Graeber, and Stevphen Shukaitis. For another take on some of the same themes, composed around the same time, you could begin with “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses” by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/04/6.jpg\")
The occupation of Wheeler Hall at the University of California at Berkeley on November 22, 2009.
\nCan students and white-collar workers play roles in an uncompromising revolution for total liberation?
\n\nThe world has changed—it seems for the worse—since the high tide of revolts by unions and student radicals. Contemporary schools and universities in the United States are not exactly hotbeds of revolution. In fact, with the exception of some union organizing among graduate students and janitors, they are barely keeping the leftovers warm, in contrast to their contemporaries in France and Chile. This is a shocking state of affairs, given the once-respected position of students as igniters of global insurrection. What has become of the student mobs throwing teachers out of classrooms and lecture halls, the general assemblies in university auditoriums, the walkouts, the communiqués sent to presidents and prime ministers advising them of their coming demise?
\n\nAnd where are the masses of organized workers struggling for the destruction of capitalism? We need the second coming, the Wobblies of old, or the union organizers in West Virginia who were ready to take on the army itself at the Battle of Blair Mountain. Organized labor today seems barely able to combat the decline of wages and benefits, and is more terrified of strikes than capable of calling them. With people now feeling lucky to have a job, any job, it seems radicals have the impossible task of organizing a nation of phantoms: office workers, single mothers, the depressed and uninspired, the brokenhearted and overworked, all caught up in the system and unable get anywhere no matter what they do. What about the infamous dropouts? Has the composition of classes changed so much that revolution is now impossible beyond personal rebellion and individual revolt?
\n\nMeanwhile, the United States government and its allies seem to be hell-bent on bringing about a worldwide apocalypse, and an explosive revolutionary situation in the belly of the beast might be our only chance of survival. While students in the US have always been tamer than their comrades worldwide—research what students did in Mexico in the Vietnam War era and prepare to have your paisley-colored glasses blown away—things are quieter than ever on the Western Front. Worse, those closest to the source of the problem—the middle-class, the “creative class,” the white-collar workers, office managers, high school teachers—are living up to their reputation as mere drones.
\n\nRather than complain about all the sectors of society that don’t live up to\nour revolutionary ideals, however, we have combed the files of CrimethInc. agents who made the ultimate sacrifice, going to schools and workplaces with the explicit goal of undermining capitalism. In the course of several years in and out of high schools, universities, offices, and other psychiatric wards,1 these agents have formulated strategies and tactics for expropriating the white-collar world for revolutionary ends.
\n\nHere follow the assembled notes of one such class mutineer.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/04/2.jpg\")
The occupation of Columbia University in 1968.
\nEducation as we know it exists primarily to indoctrinate habits. It is designed to produce obedience and nurture a willingness to complete mindless\nand meaningless tasks without complaint. Since humans naturally prefer\nto have meaningful lives and do practical, useful things, this innate tendency must be repressed at all costs by authorities at the earliest possible\nage. Given enough time, the educational system can usually\nstamp out all traces of creativity and critical thinking. Indeed, now that the\nfamily, in former times the oppressive institution par excellence, is breaking\ndown, only education can fill the gap it leaves. For children in school, every\nmoment is regimented and controlled, every moment is devoted to some\ntask—any task except actually pursuing their own desires.
\n\nPreviously, keeping most workers until the end of high school was\nenough to ensure their domestication, not to mention provide them with the\nbasic reading and writing skills necessary to pay taxes. With the advent\nof global capitalism and the subsequent specialization of work on a global\nscale, new and more intensive forms of education are increasingly required.\nUniversities, formerly havens from reality for the spawn of the ruling class\nto network and mate with each other, have now been opened as holding cells\nfor the children of the serfs.
\n\nWithin the modern university, the sciences serve as convenient cover for\nstate research into control techniques and methods of mass murder and exploitation. Likewise, the empire of machines requires people with mechanical backgrounds to fix cars, program computers, and balance the books of its various corporations. Since these require technical aptitude beyond basic arithmetic, schools offer everything from business and accounting classes to engineering and computer science programs. From time to time, the system needs apologists for the terrifying destruction caused by capitalism, so people are ushered into journalism schools and departments of economics.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/04/9.jpg\")
The occupation of NYU (New York University) in 2009.
\nDepartments of political science and international relations prepare others\nto join the minor bureaucracy of the state apparatus itself, where they can\nparticipate in repression and murder by relaying commands to soldiers and\npolice themselves. Holdouts who still believe in romantic notions of education are directed to humanities curriculums or “art schools” where they\nwaste years of their lives myopically burying their heads in books or other\nself-indulgent activities until they are humiliated enough to take up service\nindustry jobs for which their high school diplomas would have qualified\nthem. How many dishwashing philosophers does the world need?
\n\nThe truly remarkable thing is that people subject themselves to these\nforms of “education” willingly. In a massive scam, capitalism convinces\npeople to pay for the privilege of being “educated,” and thus to go into\ndebt from which they can never emerge, permanently yoking them to the\nsystem!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/04/1.jpg\")
The Hetherington Research Club (HRC) occupation at Glasgow University in 2011.
\nPermit me to zoom in on my own experience here. Many of my comrades—hell, most of them—approached school solely for the sake of a career. A nice\nstable family. A job, respect in the community. Despite their punk bands and\ntheir activism, their causes and their marches, they still wanted fundamentally the same thing as their parents, or at least, they couldn’t imagine anything else. Whatever their political commitments were, they seemed to regard those essentially as a hobby that they would have to give up sooner or later for the inevitable assimilation into working life; “politics” and “work” formed a dichotomy that could never be bridged or mixed.
\n\nI found all this incredibly disturbing. After all, the jobs they sought\nconsisted for the most part of endless processions of paperwork, number-punching, and pointless meetings—and we’re not talking about working-class jobs, but privileged white-collar work! What joy could there be in that\ndrudgery? When we were children, most of our parents were so busy they didn’t even have time to play games with us or to read us books. Instead, they put us in front of the television with a fast-food meal before collapsing in front of the television themselves. What community respected jobs like that, especially when most of them involved directly or indirectly pillaging the world’s remaining free resources and peoples? The most that my parents had for “community” was a few friends from work unlucky enough to be in the same circle of hell as them, plus the people they saw at church. Did it matter if the job was selling organic food or working in a supermarket? Being part of the Social Security bureaucracy or killing people in the army? It all seemed like one big scam.
\n\nIn despair, I did what most people in that situation do. I began drinking\nheavily. I developed a taste for malt liquor, calculating that it was the cheapest way to obliterate consciousness. I started cooking bags of instant rice in malt liquor. I figured if life was just a long and drawn-out suicide, I might as well end it quickly and enjoy the trip down.
\n\nThen one day, in the supermarket getting ready to buy my next forty-ounce, I met two lanky individuals who were in the process of stealing no small amount of food, the smiling woman running a distraction while the other escaped out with a bag full of groceries. Shocked by how easy it was and their suave confidence, I approached them outside. It ended up they were homeless, jobless… but they were also artists, anarchists, lovers, writers, and creators. As I sat talking to them, I realized that their lives had meaning. Their eyes shone with an energy I saw lacking in my all peers who had to drink themselves to bed just to wake up the next morning and face work. Impressed, I decided that at the next opportune moment, I too would drop out of school, drop out of work, and never come back.
\n\nIt didn’t take long for my opportunity to come. Sitting among the ruins\nof our house with my friends, with a degree and no cash, I decided I was going to do it. I was going to drop out, to go all the way in pursuit of my dreams. I know what we’ll do: we’ll go on tour! We won’t even need a band!
\n\nAfter criss-crossing the country, running countless scams, throwing donuts at cops in the middle of street fighting, making love underneath the canopies of ancient forests, and composing and performing a full-scale musical about anarchism, I felt something I hadn’t felt in years, despite the fact there wasn’t a cent in my pocket and my prospects for survival looked grim at best. I realized I was alive.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/04/10.jpg\")
A university occupation in Bogotá, Colombia.
\nLet’s not lose sight of the obvious—no one is an island, including those\nwho have dropped out. Like everyone else, dropouts depend on a whole\nnetwork of people to keep them alive. Dropouts must learn survival skills\nsuch as dumpster diving and scamming, but it is the sympathetic cafeteria\nworker who turns a blind eye to the anarchists sneaking into the school\ncafeteria, the social worker who gives them food stamps, the employee who\nknows that there is no way these people bought this multi-hundred dollar\nelectrical tool but will let them return it for full cash—it is these people who\ncreate the holes in the system that dropouts need, in which it is possible to eke out an existence with minimal work. These workers are crucial to the survival of the unemployed, even if some of them do their anti-capitalist work almost unconsciously.
\n\nBut how long can the unemployed anarchist, the prototypical dropout,\nsurvive off the kindness of strangers? When the last scam is shut down, when even the school cafeterias require retinal scans, when every store is crawling with armed security thugs and scrutinized from closed-circuit cameras, what then? Is our dropout doomed? And if capitalism ever undergoes a major economic collapse, when the oil is gone and the food has stopped coming to the shelves of the local supermarkets, what then? Is our dropout just on a more enjoyable trip to hell with the rest of us?
\n\nLet us return to the idea of the network of sympathizers and transform\nthat into the network of revolutionaries. There is sometimes an unequal\npower distribution between dropouts and their sympathizers, with the former having no material ways forward and the sympathizers being stuck in\nsome hellish corner of capitalism. In order to overcome this, we must go\nbeyond this dichotomy of “dropouts” and “workers.” Let us inspect the more\ninteresting roles of “sympathizer” and “revolutionary.” The difference between a sympathizer and a revolutionary is mainly a matter of commitment.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/04/11.jpg\")
A university occupation in Bogotá, Colombia.
\nIn this regard, many dropouts are themselves just sympathizers. Sure, they\nmay be minimizing their impact on the ecosystem by not working, but the entirety of their activity is made up of just trying to survive. The main risk for revolutionary dropouts is that they become mere dropouts without adjectives, secretly wanting cars, jobs, careers, heating, and a regular source of food rather than taking advantage of every moment to push for liberation. (Ben Morea of Up against the Wall, Motherfucker called this “Pancho Villa syndrome,” when illegalist revolutionaries end up as petty criminals.) But if a dropout can indeed be a revolutionary, then an employed person can be more than a sympathizer too.
\n\nWhat would it entail to be a working revolutionary in this day and\nage? Would it involve organizing a union? Perhaps. Would it involve selling Marxist-Leninist papers to fellow workers who have not yet “Got Revolution?” Certainly not. One of the most obvious tasks confronting the working revolutionary is simple: seize and redistribute resources. Instead of feeling guilt about privileges, the working revolutionary does anything and everything to “abuse” those privileges, cashing them in for the material resources needed by revolutionaries who lack access. This could mean anything from sneaking out photocopies to smuggling guns. Imagine the countless resources that are at the disposal of clever employees if they approach work as a scam that they milk as thoroughly as possible without getting caught.
\n\nRevolutionaries need resources, need to eat, sleep, and have clothing. For\npeople of color, unemployed people, people with families they can barely\nsupport, especially people brought up in generations of poverty, to be a full-time revolutionary without income is impossible. Yet if some of their friends and allies can work, can find jobs, they can make this easier. If the employed\nrevolutionary is willing to live frugally, she can provide for dozens of her\ncomrades—especially if she is absolutely merciless towards her superiors,\nalways looking for a way to steal something, anything, from work to be put\ntowards the revolution. No job but the inside job!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/09/11/header.jpg\")
A barricaded school in Chile.
\nEven for the staunchest of politicized dropouts, the goal is not unemployment, but revolution. Both the unemployed and employed revolutionary—and all those in between, who take jobs when necessary and refuse to work when they can—face occupational hazards. The occupational hazard of the unemployed revolutionary is simply to become merely unemployed, indistinguishable from their grizzled peers who are just spare-changing for the next drink. The occupational hazard of employed revolutionaries is probably more dangerous—to begin to believe in their jobs and the system they play a part in, or at least to accept these as unchangeable elements of reality. To accept their positions in the economy and actually start following the rules, slowly adjusting to the idea that they are somehow different from, perhaps even superior to, all those unemployed people out there. To betray their dreams and begin living their death in life. It’s a slippery road, and every employed anarchist should watch out.
\n\nLet us here resume the story begun above, taking up the thread some\ntime after we left off. It was September 11, 2001, and my friends and I conceded that our careful preparations for the upcoming IMF/World Bank protests had been rendered moot by the terrorist attacks of the day. A couple of us raised in various suburbs in the United States had converged in a sushi joint outside of Georgetown to reflect on our experiences as dropouts and plan for the years ahead. Our conversation was a heady mix of despair and tactics. Both of us had similar “résumés”—we were anarchists from middle-class or upwardly mobile working-class families. Both of us had been primarily concerned with destroying capitalism for several years, and had college degrees but no plans for utilizing them. We had hopped trains across the country, fed our friends and whoever else showed up at Food Not Bombs, and donned black masks to take to the streets. Yet after organizing protests, skill-shares, conferences and feeling closer and closer to revolution only to watch it all go up literally in flames, we felt strangely empty. Where to go next? Somewhere else, somewhere unimaginable…
\n\nWhat would we do? We both had families at this point—families not of\nblood, but of something stronger—families of life. People beside whom we\nhad fought tooth and nail, with whom we had experienced the greatest joys\nand the bleakest hells. People we would take bullets for. It happened that by\nchance—or perhaps not—our comrades weren’t from white, middle-class,\ncollege-educated families. They were high school dropouts, folks\nwho had wised up before us or grown up in poor families. Our friends—and more recently, we as well—had been sent to jail. Been raped. Been\nhurt. Starved. Lived in tents in the cold, beneath concrete pillars under bridges. It seemed so unfair that the noblest and most creative of our generation, people who had departed from the standard career path by force or by choice, were pushed to near death. We were always struggling for the next dollar, having to hustle just to get by. How the hell were we going to take down the entire fucking government, the global capitalist system, if we were always worried about our next meal and couldn’t find a place to lay our heads?
\n\nWhile this state of affairs kept us sharp, it was slowly having an effect on\nthe less hardy of our comrades. One by one, those who could started settling\ndown, getting jobs, having children, and becoming “normal” again. If we were truly serious about a revolutionary future, we would have to find the resources to take care of children and the elderly in our communities.
\n\nWe cooked up a plan. It seemed crazy and morally wrong, but in our experience such plans were often the only ones that worked. What did we have going for us at this point? We had degrees. We could read and write. We could do the impossible. We could get jobs.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/09/11/15.jpg\")
Rebels defending a school occupation in Chile.
\nWhen one is shoplifting, a bizarre inverse logic operates, the inverse\nof the logic applied by the usual shopper. Since the punishment is always\nmore or less the same, you seek to steal the most expensive items as opposed to the cheapest ones. This inverse logic operates in a similar fashion in workplace scamming. Conventionally, people are accorded social status according to their rank in the workplace, but many revolutionaries get credit for their job in proportion to how low-paying their job is—for example, working at a organic health food store for low wages—or for how obviously their job relates to social justice—such as going door to door with petitions. Revolutionary union organizing is as laudable as ever, but the revolutionary who works for the primary purpose of seizing resources should aim for the job with the most resources that requires the least amount of commitment.
\n\nIn this regard, the educational-industrial complex is especially ripe for\nlooting. With the exception of recent events in the Sorbonne, most teachers\nand professors today seem to be in full support of the system, whether this\nmanifests itself in papers about global macro-economics or in postmodern\nliterary analysis. Even professors who oppose systems of oppression rarely\nmake their voices heard beyond the world of papers and journals, let alone\ntake action beyond that. If you look at the modern educational system not as a site for resistance but as a supply depot for looting, things brighten up quickly. While it is rapidly being destroyed by neoliberal “reforms,” the domain of the ivory tower is still notoriously slack easy to take advantage of.
\n\nAs a student, one can qualify for all sorts of loans and money. If you wish to, you can default on them and just keep the cash, as long as you are willing to commit to a future free of state-sanctioned employment. What is the world going to look like in twenty years, anyway? Also, one generally has little work to do as a student—if you can manage to read books outside of class or impress the professor with your intelligence, you don’t even necessarily have to attend classes regularly to get good grades. One can show up to a class, travel to another state to fight the minions of capital for a few weeks, come back, and often nobody even notices. Few jobs offer such flexibility.
\n\nAdditionally, schools are known to give money to students for the flimsiest of reasons. If the locals of a heavily repressed country are calling for international assistance in the preparations for their next protest, say in Russia, what better time to go abroad for an immersion course in Russian? Or if you want to support revolutionary efforts to help people become self-sufficient in the wake of a disaster such as the one in New Orleans, why not make it a school project? You can band together with like-minded students and form an organization to seize control of even more funding, with which to set up conferences for local anti-capitalists and invite revolutionaries to speak at your school—in return for a fair bit of cash, which goes right back into the struggle.
\n\nThere are all sorts of other resources in schools that are as good as gold to\nthe revolutionary. Schools may offer access to computers—and even free printing—that are hard for most people to come by. You could steal copies from the school to stock local infoshops or to distribute anarchist propaganda.
\n\nSchools also have cafeterias, which are often unguarded. One could steal food from the cafeteria and bring it to deserving fellow revolutionaries, and if one has some sort of “meal card,” one could always bring local hungry people into the cafeteria for a meal at your—or preferably the school’s—expense. Schools also feature strange locked closets, small rooms, and even entire abandoned buildings. There’s no reason to pay for rent, even if you’re working—that rent money can be spent on more exciting projects when squatting is an alternative! CrimethInc. agents have inhabited broom closets in libraries, set up shop in empty rooms in philosophy departments, and even lived in tree-sits while being “in school.” And for the clever revolutionary, not only is there a limitless supply of pencils and paper, there are countless other opportunities. One can walk in and steal just about everything from chalkboards to trashcans, and furnish a whole collective house!
\n\nIf one is privileged enough, it is also possible to become a schoolteacher, or even a professor. Becoming a professor gives you a few more\nyears of graduate school to live off of and continue the lackadaisical student\nlife. Once one is a teacher of some type, one can also, as all great teachers\nsince Socrates have done, corrupt the minds of the young. For example, one\ncould focus on books like 1984 that have snuck into the curriculum of many schools when picking readings. You could have your students make zines as an assignment or more ambitiously, take on projects like building community gardens. If you are a professor and have enough leeway, you could teach classes on revolutionary theory or subjects like “Social Movements.” A truly great teacher should be able to make even geometry a revolutionary discipline! Teachers can encourage students to organize everything from radical student unions to street demonstrations.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/09/11/7.jpg\")
Rebels defending a school occupation in Chile.
\nAnd so, once more, we’ll return to my own experience, at another point\nin my life. The university where I had spent the last three years had become\na hotbed of revolution. As a giant anti-globalization protest came to town,\nwe few local hosting anarchists were overwhelmed. As former out-of-town\nshock troops against capital ourselves, we understood how important it was\nfor the out-of-town black bloc to be able to meet safely and get a good night’s sleep to be ready to riot in the morning. After the G8 protests in Genoa in 2001, we had the unhappy suspicion that the police would raid any private landowner that rented space to us. Indeed, the local police had already done their rounds, warning everyone to avoid suspicious characters that asked to rent large amounts of camping space.
\n\nIt happened that a friend of a friend in our local Indymedia collective\nhad attended high school with a left-leaning member of the local government. After nearly endless meetings (“But you realize we can’t have peaceful protesters sleeping next to the black bloc!” If only he had known to whom he was speaking!), the town government decided it was better to get all the anarchists in one place, instead of having to deal with them squatting all over town. They hadn’t suspected that we’d prefer to have somewhere\nlegal and safe to sleep rather than getting ourselves trapped by the police in\na squat defense the day before the big action, anyway.
\n\nYet there was still no place for anarchists to meet and plan! I was morose—until one day, a thought struck me. The police would never raid the Student Union at the oldest, most privileged university in town. It was a virtual historical monument!
\n\nWith a little convincing, the head of the Democratic Student Union\nhanded over the keys to the building, ostensibly to be used for a conference\nthat happened to run the duration of the protest. As the big event approached, anarchists from all over the country showed up, and they all needed Internet access and photocopying machines. Almost overnight, my previously quiet little Department of Political and Social Studies metamorphosed into a full-scale hotbed of revolutionary activity, and one anarchist even snuck in and got his own desk as a “Visiting Professor.” I had managed to procure the keys from the night-guard, so when night came, we simply took out our sleeping bags and crashed in the office.
\n\nAs the protest neared, it became clear this was no ordinary conference.\nThere were direct action trainings, medical trainings, videos shown about previous summit protests. A horde of black-clad miscreants occupied the Student Union. Shortly before the day of action, a huge anarchist assembly took place upstairs in the Union, at which the forces of global insurrection decided to blockade the President and his cronies by whatever means necessary.
\n\nAt this meeting, we had the horrible realization that very few of the participants knew the layout of the city. So under the cover of night, we snuck even more comrades into the Department of Political and Social Studies to mass-produce maps of the locations to be blockaded and research the details about important local centers of global capital. We turned on the departmental photocopier, and, thanks to a stolen password, proceeded to make thousands of copies of blockade maps, while\nburning CDs with photos of important locations on the secretary’s computer. We rushed the mysterious box of maps right out the front door and to the cars waiting for us at the Indymedia Center.
\n\nAs I was leaving, I noticed that it was nearly nine in the morning, and to my horror I saw the head of the department, an ancient and respected professor, climbing up the stairs to the front door. He looked at me and smiled, “Up all night, eh? You won’t believe it—those unwashed protesters just spray-painted an anarchy symbol on our building!” I just smiled and walked out with the secret plans.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/04/7.jpg\")
The occupation of the New School in New York City, December 2008. The student occupation movements that began with this one were essential in building the momentum and the tactical framework that led to the Occupy movement getting off the ground in September 2011.
\nLet’s take this story to its logical conclusion. Being a parasite and scamming money from a job is not the be-all end-all of revolutionary activity. If anything, anarchists invading the university is uncreative. It would be more creative for anarchists to invade everyday jobs at all walks of life, for the express purpose of causing trouble. As the surveillance state shuts down possible avenues of escape, strategically placed anarchists in the DMV and security agencies would be worth their weight in gold. If the state and corporations send infiltrators to our meetings, we should return the favor and place anarchist infiltrators in their offices!
\n\nAnarchists often talk about getting our comrades out of jail. Why not get jobs as prison guards? Qualifying should be easy enough for those of us without arrest records. One could learn the ins and outs of a prison and plan the perfect escape route for prisoners. (Russian nihilists did exactly that in the 19th century.) Anarchist librarians, anarchist carpenters, anarchist chefs, and\nanarchist bankers—there should be no job that we cannot subvert. If there is\na job we cannot turn to the ends of anarchy, that will attest to our lack of ingenuity, not to the strength of capital.
\n\nWe anarchists need both material and human resources to fight the system successfully. Let us make no mistake about this: we’re fighting a war, and in war, you have to make use of everything you can get your hands on.
\n\nThe capitalist system seems to be doomed to collapse. Revolutionaries\nneed urban social centers, both legally paid for and—if possible—squatted.\nRevolutionaries sometimes need jobs, so we may as well start up cooperative vegan cafés and similar ventures, so long as we channel all the resources we can into the struggle. To buy land and to buy buildings requires cash some anarchists can earn, while others who have more time than money can learn to farm and cook and so on. These roles should never remain fixed, though certain roles will be more accessible for some than others. If we take the idea of dual power seriously, we will develop counter-institutions that people can fall back on as the scanty remains of old social safety nets are destroyed by looting capitalists. If all anarchists do is travel from protest to protest, we’ll never build the local strength, momentum, and roots we need for others to trust us and—more importantly—themselves when the system enters total collapse. A total collapse hopefully caused by us.
\n\nYet the true test is not whether we can push the system into collapse, but what we can do in the here and now—how we take advantage\nof any opportunity, including collapse, to spread anarchy. Let it never be\nmisunderstood that the only path to revolution is for all anarchists to drop\nout. No, the important question is how we link the efforts and desires of those within the system to those without its assurances and controls. To this end, we need more analysis of how mixed-class alliances have helped\npush forward the revolutionary struggle throughout history. Such a study\ncould begin with the impoverished masses who permitted Russian aristocrats like Kropotkin and Bakunin throw their lot in with them, and extend up to the mixed-class groups cooking and serving Food Not Bombs today.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/04/5.jpg\")
The role of education in revolution.
\nIt’s not just a question of using whatever resources we have to further\nrevolution—we must also turn any and every situation to the ends of revolution, including white-collar jobs and university lecture halls. In this sense, every revolutionary must be a situationist, an artist of situations. If we are unyielding in our demand for world revolution not tomorrow, not after exams, not after the next book is written or after hours, but now, then we must put you—dear reader—in a precarious position
\n\nAdmittedly, we barely know you. You could be an embittered revolutionary, who has already spent all your money on countless hours of organizing, and is considering getting a job at the postal service. Perhaps, reading about academics attempting to walk their talk, you feel jealous of their privilege at not having to deal with the monotonous and endless nine-to-five grind. Where is the book composed by a collective of revolutionary postal workers, the book speaking of the lives and dreams of clerks and janitors? You swear to write that book.
\n\nOr maybe you are a student who recently stayed up all night reading the\nCommunist Manifesto and, after a binge of underage drinking, proceeded to declare your dormitory a People’s Republic. Confronted with the choice of\nendless classes ranging from Linear Algebra to Biological Anthropology, it all seems so meaningless, and the university no better than a vast factory of obfuscation and bureaucracy. Instead of deciding what you want to do with your life, which seems tantamount to putting an end to your life then and\nthere, you want life itself! Reading about academics trying to create that life in actuality, perhaps you may find it easier to feel that—even within the\nivory tower—action can be taken, and you can take that action.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/04/4.jpg\")
Protests at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 2019.
\nOr perhaps you are a professor who has spent countless hours lecturing students on obscure postmodern philosophy. As a young\ngraduate student, you dreamed of changing the world, lighting it on fire with your ideas, writing famous books that would inspire the following generations to rise up and create a new world. Perhaps somewhere in the endless publish-or-perish cycle, you lost that dream, and now you write endless articles for journals no one will ever read, much less find inspiring. Now, reading this text, you wonder if you could change things, if instead of just talking about revolution, you could create it yourself. A dream has been rekindled. Who knows? These are just thought experiments. We don’t know anything about you!
\n\nYet this we do know: everything depends on you. Your actions, over the\nnext day, month, year, decade, lifetime, will determine whether or not you survive, whether the world itself survives. If you surrender to a life-in-death of obedience to the system, you will be fully complicit in its bloody end. However, within the deepest recesses of your being, you have the resources to do something beautiful, something that can change the world. You might think it is unfair for us to put all this weight on the shoulders of a stranger. After all, you’re clearly not a revolutionary. Maybe you have a job that is counterrevolutionary to the core, and what type of revolution can be incited by someone with that type of job?
\n\nThis is the crux of the argument: you can approach any job, anywhere, in a revolutionary manner. The less revolutionary potential you think a job has, the more likely that it will actually be radical to subvert it, if only you can find the courage!
\n\nOn the other hand, perhaps your background’s not right, you don’t feel like a capable and sexy young revolutionary. You’re too old, or too tired, or not confident, and so on. Consider that this might be a hidden strength, that the very diversity of our lives is and must be the basis for a true revolution. A revolution brought about by only student revolutionaries, or for that matter by any other demographic alone, would lead to disaster. Yet a revolution brought about by cunning alliances between the least likely of us will create exactly the type of situations we need, situations that can break us free from the chains of habit and separation.
\n\nNo matter how they are arranged, words alone cannot create revolution. Likewise, despite our constant calls for action, neither can action without thought. Revolutionary situations arise when people bring their words and dreams into alignment with their actions on an everyday basis. No book, no article, no matter how well written or insightful, can provide that last crucial step. That step involves closing the book, setting aside the computer, stepping back, and stepping forward into your own life.
\n\nSo—go on. Confess your love, grab that gun, plant that seed, lay your body in front of that bulldozer. Seize your life by any and all means necessary. At the moment you take action, the giant lie that has cast its shadow across human history will begin to dissolve.
\n\nWhat lies on the other side of history, no one knows. Yet we can promise you this—we’ll see you there.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/04/8.jpg\")
The occupation of the New School, December 2008.
\nAs Michel Foucault famously put it, “Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, all of which resemble prisons?” ↩
\nTwo and a half 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. We’ve finally scanned the last five issues of one of these zines, Inside Front, to add to our archives. Bear in mind, these are relics from a very different time. We hope, in putting them at your disposal, to offer new generations of anarchists—and punks?—some context for what came before. We’ve also added the hardcore compilations that came with issues of Inside Front to our music page for free downloading.
\n\nOnce upon a time, in another century—
\n\nWhen only doctors and lawyers had cell phones, and long distance calls were so expensive that punks used hacked phone dialers to trick pay phones into letting them place calls free of charge;
\n\nWhen zinesters secured freedom of the press by scamming photocopies on a scale today’s social media users cannot imagine;
\n\nWhen traveler kids sneaked onto freight train cars to ride for free, watching mountains and oceans whizzing by as the earth rumbled past beneath them;
\n\nWhen the singer of every hardcore band spoke earnestly to introduce each song, if only to entreat audience members to cause each other serious injury;
\n\nWhen punk itself was not an ossified tradition, but a living challenge to corporate aesthetics, in a process of constant challenge and change;
\n\nWhen DIY bands traversed a network of squatted social centers from Trondheim to Santiago, and you could play a hundred shows in a row without ever performing in a venue that was legally owned or leased;
\n\nWhen dropouts lived on bread alone in order to dedicate themselves entirely to lives of daring adventure;
\n\nWhen MAXIMUM ULTRAISTS committed to risk-tolerant experimentation organized guerrilla noise shows in convenience stores and mashed pies into the faces of corporate entrepreneurs;
\n\nWhen young people inspired by punk music set out to reclaim the streets and destroy the World Trade Organization, and everyone understood that anarchists were among the foremost threats to capitalist globalization;
\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, one of the first projects to bring together people who still collaborate on CrimethInc. projects today. We invite you to explore its pages, as if holding a candle up to the dusty walls of the past.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/journals/inside-front-14/inside-front-14_front.jpg\")
Click the image above to access the PDF
\nYou can download the CD compilation that came with the final issue of Inside Front here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/journals/inside-front-13/inside-front-13_front.jpg\")
Click the image above to access the PDF
\nYou can download the CD compilation that came with Inside Front #13 here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/journals/inside-front-12/inside-front-12_front.jpg\")
Click the image above to access the PDF
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/journals/inside-front-11/inside-front-11_front.jpg\")
Click the image above to access the PDF
\nYou can download the CD compilation that came with Inside Front #11 here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/journals/inside-front-10/inside-front-10_front.jpg\")
Click the image above to access the PDF
\nFifteen years ago, we published the following text introducing anarchism to the general public as a total way of being, at once adventurous and accessible. We offered the paper free in any quantity, raising tens of thousands of dollars for printing and even offering to cover the postage to mail copies to anyone who could not afford them. In the first two weeks, we sent out 90,000 copies. It appeared just in time for the “People’s Strike” mobilization against the IMF and World Bank in Washington, DC; the pastor at the Presbyterian church that hosted anticapitalist activists in DC preached her Sunday sermon from the primer as she spoke to her congregation about the demonstrations. Over the following decade, Fighting for Our Lives figured in countless escapades and outreach efforts; read this story for an example. In the end, we distributed 650,000 print copies.
\n\nFighting for Our Lives has been out of print for several years, as we’ve focused on other projects such as To Change Everything. We’ve now prepared a zine version for our downloads library. From this vantage point, we can appreciate both the text and the project itself as ambitious and exuberant attempts to break with the logic of the existing order and to stake everything on establishing new relations. We’ve learned a lot in the years since then—but we haven’t backed down one millimeter.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/28/23.jpg\")
\nWe dropped out of school, got divorced, broke with our families and ourselves and everything we’d ever known.
\n\nWe quit our jobs, violated our leases, threw our furniture out on the sidewalk, and hit the road.
\n\nWe sat on the swings of children’s playgrounds until our toes were frostbitten, admiring the moonlight on the dewy grass, writing poetry on the wind.
\n\nWe went to bed early and lay awake past dawn recounting all the awful things we’d done to others and they to us—and laughing, blessing and absolving each other and this crazy cosmos.
\n\nWe stole into museums showing reruns of old Guy Debord films to write faster, my friend, the old world is behind you on the backs of the theater seats.
\n\nThe scent of gasoline still fresh on our hands, we watched the new sun rise, and spoke in hushed voices about what we should do next, thrilling in the budding consciousness of our own limitless power.
\n\nWe used stolen calling card numbers to talk our lovers through phone sex from telephone booths in the lobbies of police stations.
\n\nWe slipped into the offices where our browbeaten friends shuffled papers for petty despots, to draft anti-imperialist manifestos on their computers and sleep under their desks. They were shocked the morning they finally walked in on us, half-naked, brushing our teeth at the water cooler.
\n\nWe lived through harrowing, exhilarating moments when we did things we had always thought impossible, spitting in the face of all our apprehensions to kiss unapproachable beauties, drop banners from the tops of national monuments, drop out of colleges… and then gritted our teeth, expecting the world to end—but it didn’t!
\n\nWe stood or knelt in emptying concert halls, on rooftops under lightning storms, on the dead grass of graveyards, and swore with tears in our eyes never to go back again.
\n\nWe sat at desks in high school detention rooms, against the worn brick of Greyhound bus stations, on disposable synthetic sheets in the emergency treatment wards of unsympathetic hospitals, on the hard benches of penitentiary dining halls, and swore the same thing through clenched teeth, but with no less tenderness.
\n\nWe communicated with each other through initials carved into boarding school desks, designs spray-painted through stencils onto alley walls, holes kicked in corporate windows televised on the five o’clock news, letters posted with counterfeit stamps or carried across oceans in friends’ packs, secret instructions coded into emails from anonymous accounts, clandestine meetings in coffee shops, love poetry carved into the planks of prison bunks.
\n\nWe sheltered illegal immigrants, political refugees, fugitives from justice, and adolescent runaways in our modest homes and beds, as they too sheltered us.
\n\nWe improvised recipes to bake each other cookies, cakes, breakfasts in bed, weekly free meals in the park, great feasts celebrating our courage and kinship so we might taste their sweetness on our very tongues.
\n\nWe entrusted each other with our hearts and appetites, together composing symphonies of caresses and pleasure, making love a verb in a language of exaltation.
\n\nWe wreaked havoc upon their gender norms and ethnic stereotypes and cultural expectations, showing with our bodies and our relationships and our desires just how arbitrary their supposed laws of nature were.
\n\nWe wrote our own music and performed it for each other, so when we hummed to ourselves we could celebrate our companions’ creativity rather than repeat the radio’s dull drone.
\n\nIn borrowed attic rooms, we tended ailing foreign lovers and struggled to write the lines that could ignite the fires dormant in the multitudes around us.
\n\nIn the last moment before dawn, flashlights tight in our shaking hands, we dismantled the power boxes on the buildings where fascists were to host rallies the following day.
\n\nWe fought those fascists tooth, nail, and knife in the streets, when no one else would even confront them in print.
\n\nWe planted gardens in abandoned lots, hitchhiked across continents in record time, tossed pies in the faces of kings and bankers.
\n\nWe played saxophones together in the darkness of echoing caves in West Virginia.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/17/17.jpg\")
\nIn Paris, armed with cobblestones and parasols, we held the gendarmes at bay for nights on end, until we could almost taste the new world coming through the tear gas.
\n\nWe fought our way through their lines to the opera house and took it over, and held discussions there twenty-four hours a day as to what that new world should be.
\n\nIn Chicago, we helped create an underground network to provide illegal abortions in safe conditions and a supportive atmosphere, when the religious fanatics would have preferred us to die in shame and tears down dark alleys.
\n\nIn New York, we held hands and massaged each other’s shoulders as our enemies closed in to arrest us.
\n\nIn Quebec, we tore up the highway and pounded out primordial rhythms on the traffic signs with the fragments, and the sound was vaster and more beautiful than any song ever performed in a concert hall.
\n\nIn Santiago, we robbed banks to fund papers of transgressive poetry.
\n\nIn Siberia, we plotted impossible escapes—and carried them out, circumnavigating the globe with forged papers and borrowed money to return to the arms of our friends.
\n\nIn Montevideo, in the squatted township, we built huts from plywood and plastic sheeting, pirated electricity from nearby power lines, and conferred with our neighbors as to how we could contribute to our new community.
\n\nIn San Diego, when they jailed us for speaking our minds, we invited our friends and filled their prisons until they had to change their policies.
\n\nIn Oregon, we climbed trees and lived in them for months to protect the forests we had hiked and camped in as children.
\n\nIn Mexico, when we met hopping freight trains, we traded stories about working with the Zapatistas in Chiapas, about floods witnessed from boxcars passing through Texas, about our grandparents who fought in the Mexican revolution.
\n\nWe fought in that revolution, and the Spanish civil war, and the French resistance, and even the Russian revolution—though not for the Bolsheviks or the Tsar.
\n\nSleepless and weather-beaten, we crossed the Ukraine on horseback to deliver news of the conflicts that offered us another chance to fight for our freedom.
\n\nTense but untrembling, we smuggled posters, books, firearms, fugitives, ourselves across borders from Canada to Pakistan.
\n\nWe lied with clean consciences to homicide detectives in Reno and military police in Santos.
\n\nWe told the truth to each other, even truths no one had ever dared tell before.
\n\nWhen we couldn’t overthrow governments, we raised new generations who would taste the sweet adrenaline of barricades and wheatpaste, who would carry on our quixotic quest when we fell or fled before the ruthless onslaught of the servile and craven.
\n\nWhen we could overthrow governments, we did.
\n\nWe stood behind the witness stand, one after another, decade after decade, century after century, and shouted so the deafest self-satisfied upright citizen at the back of the courtroom could hear it: “… and if I could do it all over again, I would!”
\n\nAs the sun rose after winter parties in unheated squats, we gathered up great sacks of broken glass and washed stacks of dirty dishes in freezing water, while our critics, sequestered in penthouses with maid service, demanded to know who would take out the garbage in our so-called utopia.
\n\nWhen the good intentions of liberals and reformists broke down in bureaucracy, we collected food from the trash to feed the hungry, broke into condemned buildings and transformed them into palaces fit for pauper kings and bandit queens, held the sick and dying tight in our loving arms.
\n\nWe fell in love in the wreckage, shouted out songs in the uproar, danced joyfully in the heaviest shackles they could forge; we smuggled our stories through the gauntlets of silence, starvation, and subjugation, to bring them back to life again and again as bombs and beating hearts; we built castles in the sky from the ruins of hell on earth.
\n\nOne of us even assassinated the President of the United States.
\n\nAccepting no constraints from without, we countenanced none within ourselves, either, and found that the world opened before us like the petals of a rose.
\n\nI’m speaking, of course, of anarchists—and when people ask me about my politics, I tell them: the best reason to be a revolutionary is that it is simply a better way to live. Their laws guarantee us the right to remain silent, the right to a public trial by a jury of our peers (though my peers wouldn’t put me on trial—would yours?)—what about the right to live life like we won’t get another chance, to have reasons to stay up all night in urgent conversation, to look back on every day without regret or bitterness? Such rights we can only claim for ourselves—and shouldn’t these be our central concerns, not the minutiae of protocol and survival?
\n\nFor those of us born into a captivity gilded by the blood and sweat of less fortunate captives, the challenge of leading a life worth living of stories worth telling is a lifelong project, and a formidable one; but all it takes, at any moment, to meet this challenge is to contest that captivity.
\n\nWhen we fight, we’re fighting for our lives.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/28/1.jpg\")
\nIt’s true. If your idea of healthy human relations is a dinner with friends at which everyone enjoys everyone else’s company, responsibilities are divided up voluntarily and informally, and no one gives orders or sells anything, then you are an anarchist, plain and simple. The only question that remains is how you can arrange for more of your interactions to resemble that model.
\n\nWhenever you act without waiting for instructions or official permission, you are an anarchist. Any time you bypass a ridiculous regulation when no one’s looking, you are an anarchist. If you don’t trust the government, the school system, Hollywood, or the management to know better than you when it comes to things that affect your life, that’s anarchism, too. And you are especially an anarchist when you come up with your own ideas and initiatives and solutions.
\n\nAs you can see, it’s anarchism that keeps things working and life interesting. If we waited for authorities and specialists and technicians to take care of everything, we would not only be in a world of trouble, but dreadfully bored—and boring—to boot. Today we live in that world of (dreadfully boring!) trouble precisely to the extent that we abdicate responsibility and control.
\n\nAnarchism is naturally present in every healthy human being. It isn’t necessarily about throwing bombs or wearing black masks, though you may have seen that on television. (Do you believe everything you see on television? That’s not anarchist!) The root of anarchism is the simple impulse to do it yourself: everything else follows from this.
\n\nPeople with very little actual historical background often say of anarchy that it would never work—without realizing that not only has it worked for much of the history of the human race, but it is in fact working right now. For the time being, let’s set aside the Paris Commune, Republican Spain, Woodstock, open-source computer programming, and all the other famed instances of successful revolutionary anarchism. Anarchy is simply cooperative self-determination—it is a part of everyday life, not something that will only happen “after the revolution.” Anarchy works today for circles of friends everywhere—so how can we make more of our economic relations anarchist? Anarchy is in action when people cooperate on a camping trip or to arrange free meals for hungry people—so how can we apply those lessons to our interactions at school, at work, in our neighborhoods?
\n\nTo consult chaos theory: anarchy is chaos, and chaos is order. Any naturally ordered system—a rainforest, a friendly neighborhood—is a harmony in which balance perpetuates itself through chaos and chance. Systematic disorder, on the other hand—the discipline of the high school classroom, the sterile rows of genetically modified corn defended from weeds and insects—can only be maintained by ever-escalating exertions of force. Some, thinking disorder is simply the absence of any system, confuse it with anarchy. But disorder is the most ruthless system of all: disorder and conflict, unresolved, quickly systematize themselves, stacking up hierarchies according to their own pitiless demands—selfishness, heartlessness, lust for domination. Disorder in its most developed form is capitalism: the war of each against all, rule or be ruled, sell or be sold, from the soil to the sky.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/28/3.jpg\")
\nWe live in a particularly violent and hierarchical time. The maniacs who think they benefit from this hierarchy tell us that the violence would be worse without it, not comprehending that hierarchy itself, whether it takes the form of inequalities in economic status or political power, is the consequence and expression of violence. Not to say that forcibly removing the authorities would immediately end the waves of violence created by the greater violence their existence implies; but until we are all free to learn how to get along with each other for our own sake, rather than under the guns directed by the ones who benefit from our strife, there will be no true peace between us.
\n\nThis state of affairs is maintained by more than guns, more than the vertigo of hierarchy, of kill-or-be-killed reasoning: it is also maintained by the myth of success. Official history presents our past as the history of Great Men, and all other lives as mere effects of their causes; there are only a few subjects of history, they would make us believe—the rest of us are its objects. The implication is that there is only one truly free man in all society: the king (or president, executive, movie star…). Since this is the way it has always been and always will be, the account goes, we should all fight to become him, or at least accept our station beneath him gracefully, grateful for others beneath us to trample when we need reassurance of our own worth.
\n\nBut even the president isn’t free to go for a walk in the neighborhood of his choosing. Why settle for a fragment of the world, or less? In the absence of force—in the egalitarian beds of true lovers, in the democracy of devoted friendships, in the topless federations of playmates enjoying good parties and neighbors chatting at sewing circles—we are all queens and kings. Whether or not anarchy can “work” outside such sanctuaries, it is becoming clearer and clearer that hierarchy doesn’t. Visit the model cities of the new world order—sit in a traffic jam of privately owned vehicles, among motorists sweating and swearing in isolated unison, an ocean filling with pollution to your right and a ghetto on your left where uniformed gangs clash with ununiformed ones—and behold the apex of human progress. If this is order, why not try chaos!
\n\nTo say that anarchists subscribe to anarchism is like saying pianists subscribe to pianism. There is no Anarchism—but there is anarchy, or rather, there are anarchies.
\n\nFor as long as power has existed, the spirit of anarchy has been with us too, named or nameless, uniting millions or steeling the resolve of a single one. The slaves and savages who fought the Romans for their freedom and lived in armed liberty, equality, and fraternity, the mothers who raised their daughters to love their bodies in defiance of the diet advertisements leering from all sides, the renegades who painted their faces and threw tea into Boston Harbor, and all the others who took matters into their own hands: they were anarchists, whether they called themselves Ranters, Taborites, Communards, Abolitionists, Yippies, Syndicalists, Quakers, Mothers of the Disappeared, Food Not Bombs, Libertarians, or even Republicans—just as we are all anarchists, to the extent that we do the same. There are as many anarchists today as there are students cutting class, parents cheating on their taxes, women teaching themselves bicycle repair, lovers desiring outside the lines. They don’t need to vote for an anarchist party or party line—that would disqualify them, at least for that moment—to be anarchists: anarchy is a mode of being, a manner of responding to conditions and relating to others, a class of human behavior… and not the “working” class!
\n\nForget about the history of anarchism as an idea—forget the bearded guys. It’s one thing to develop a language for describing a thing—it’s another thing entirely to live it. This is not about theories or formulas, heroes or biographies—it’s about your life. Anarchy is what matters, everywhere it appears, not armchair anarchism, the specialists’ study of freedom! There are self-proclaimed anarchists who never experienced a day of anarchy in their lives—we should know how much to trust them on the subject!
\n\nSo how will the anarchist utopia work? That’s a question we’ll never again be duped into disputing over, a red herring if there ever was one! This isn’t a utopian vision, or a program or ideal to serve; it’s simply a way of proceeding, of approaching relationships, of dealing with problems now—for surely we’ll never be entirely through dealing with problems! Being an anarchist doesn’t mean believing anarchy, let alone anarchism, can fix everything—it just means acknowledging it’s up to us to work things out, that no one and nothing else can do this for us: admitting that, like it or not, our lives are in our hands—and in each others’.
\n\nAnarchists might use democratic methods—but we don’t let democracy use us. For us, the first and last matter is always the needs and feelings of the individuals involved—any system to address them is provisional at best. We don’t try to force ourselves into the confines of any established procedures—we apply procedures to the extent that they serve human needs, and discard them past that point. Seriously, what should come first—our systems, or us?
\n\nWe cooperate or coexist with others, including other life forms, whenever it’s possible. But we don’t prize consensus, let alone The Rule of Law, above our own values and dreams—when we can’t come to an agreement, we go our own ways rather than limiting each other. In extreme cases, when others refuse to acknowledge our needs or persist in doing unconscionable, harmful things, we intercede by whatever means are necessary—not on behalf of Justice or revenge, but simply to represent our own interests.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/28/4.jpg\")
\nWe see laws as nothing more than the shadows of our predecessors’ customs, lengthened by the years to seem wiser than our own judgment. They persist as undead creatures, imposing unnatural stipulations upon us that do not enable justice, but only interfere with it—while at the same time estranging us from it, framing it as something we cannot carry out without arcane formalities and judges’ wigs. These laws, having multiplied and calcified over time, are now so alien and inscrutable that a priest class of lawyers makes a living off the rest of us as astrologers of the stars our well-meaning ancestors set in precarious orbit. The man who insists that justice can only be maintained by the rule of law is the same one who appears on the witness stand at the war crime tribunal swearing he was only following orders. There’s no Justice—it’s just us.
\n\nAnarchist economies are radically different from other economies. Anarchists not only conduct their transactions differently, but trade in an entirely different currency—a currency that is not convertible into the kind of assets for which capitalists compete and communists draft Five Year Plans. Capitalists, socialists, communists exchange products; anarchists interchange assistance, inspiration, loyalty. Capitalist, socialist, communist economies make human interactions into commodities: policing, medical care, education, even sexual relations become services that are bought and sold. Anarchist economies, focusing above all on the needs and desires of the individuals involved, transform products back into social relations: the communal experience of gardening or gathering berries or playing music, the excitement of looting a supermarket or occupying a building. The typical economic interaction in capitalist relations is the sale; in anarchist economics, it is the gift.
\n\nAnarchist economies depend on commons, which are the opposite of private property. Private capital disappears when utilized, as in the case of money spent by day laborers on food—or, when enough of it accrues, it serves to accrue more private capital at others’ expense, as in the case of the corporation that exploits those laborers. Commons, on the other hand, are available in abundance, and the more they are utilized, the more abundant they become: the community garden that produces more food the more people cooperate in it, the squatted building that is better renovated for community usage and better defended from the police the more people commit to it. In friendships, as in lovemaking, as in potluck dinners and dancing, the more one gives, the more everyone gets.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/28/12.jpg\")
\nToday, most of us participate in both kinds of economies at once. Ostensibly private property is still shared, at least in limited contexts: a teenager brings his basketball for the neighborhood game, a rock band buys a communal van. Even a house belonging to a middle class family, although off-limits for most, still hosts visiting relatives, a PTA meeting, a sleep-over party. Instances like these are reminders of how much more pleasurable sharing can be than commerce. Anarchists nurture visions of a world suitable for a sharing that knows no borders.
\n\n\n\n\nBut Who Will Take out the Garbage?
\n\nIt was in Barcelona, some years after the civil war, when the memory of the syndicates still remained, unutterable, under the iron heel of the fascist regime.
\n\nCity bus #68 was making its rounds one particularly sunny spring day, when the driver slammed on the brakes at an intersection. “Fuck this,” he swore in angry Catalan, and, opening the bus doors, stomped out into the sunshine.
\n\nThe passengers watched in shock at first, and then began to protest anxiously. One of them stood up and started to honk the horn. After a few tentative beeps, he leaned on it with all his might, sounding it like a burglar alarm; but the fed up ex-bus driver continued, nonchalant, on his way down the street.
\n\nFor a full minute, the riders sat in stupefied silence. A couple stood up and got off the bus themselves. Then, from the back of the bus, a woman with the appearance of a huge cannon ball and an air of unconquerable self-possession stepped forward. Without a word, she sat down in the driver’s seat, and put the engine in gear. The bus continued on its route, stopping at its customary stops, until the woman arrived at her own and got off. Another passenger took her place for a stretch, stopping at every bus stop, and then another, and another, and so #68 continued, until the end of the line.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/28/5.jpg\")
\nIt means figuring out how to work together to meet our individual needs, working with each other rather than “for” or against each other; and when this is impossible, it means preferring strife to submission and domination.
\n\nIt means not valuing any system or ideology above the people it purports to serve, not valuing anything theoretical above the real things in this world. It means being faithful to real human beings (and animals, and ecosystems), fighting for ourselves and beside each other, not out of “responsibility,” not for “causes” or other intangible concepts. It means denying that there is any universal standard of truth, aesthetics, or morality, and contesting wherever it appears the doctrine that life is essentially one-dimensional.
\n\nIt means not forcing your desires and experiences into a hierarchical order, but acknowledging and embracing all of them, accepting yourself. It means not trying to compel the self to abide by any external laws, not trying to restrict your emotions to the sensible or the practical or the “political,” not pushing your instincts and passions into boxes: for there is no cage large enough to accommodate the human soul in all its flights, all its heights and depths. It means seeking a way of life which gives free play to all your conflicting inclinations in the process of continuously challenging and transforming them.
\n\nIt means not privileging any one moment of life over the others—not languishing in nostalgia for the good old days, or waiting for tomorrow (or, for that matter, for “the” Revolution!) for real life to begin, but seizing and creating it in every instant. Yes, of course it means treasuring memories and planning for the future—it also means remembering there is no time happiness, resistance, life ever happens but NOW, NOW, NOW!
\n\nIt means refusing to put the responsibility for your life in anyone else’s hands, whether that be parents, lovers, employers, or society itself. It means taking the pursuit of meaning and joy in your life upon your own shoulders.
\n\nAbove all! It means not accepting this or any manifesto or definition as it is, but making and remaking it for yourself.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/28/20.jpg\")
\nWhat’s good for others is good for us, since our relationships with them make up the world in which we live; but serving their needs at our own expense would cheat them of our potential as free and happy companions, which is perhaps the best gift we can offer. Our vision of healthy relationships rests on the notion that self versus other, selfish versus selfless, is a false dichotomy, like all dichotomies. Those who preach self-sacrifice for the greater good are still working from the competitive model of individual-versus-society, as are those who would aspire to an individualist independence; for us, individuals and communities alike are both convergences of threads in the great web of existence, inseparable from one another, corresponding to one another. The freedom and self-determination we cherish are only possible in the context of the culture we create together; yet in order to contribute to that creation, we must create ourselves individually.
\n\nThat is: if you can save yourself, you could save the world—but you must save the world to save yourself.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/28/18.jpg\")
\nAs anarchists propose that friendship, or at least family ties, could be the model for all relationships, we prize above all those qualities which make good friendships possible: reliability, generosity, gentleness. Most of us have been indoctrinated into hierarchy and contention since we were born, and that makes it no small feat to interact in ways that liberate and enable more than cripple—still, it happens all the time! Each of us tries to give without demanding in return, to be a person with whom no one must feel ashamed. It’s been said that we are against marriage, but the opposite is true: yes, we emphasize that no one is the property of another, but even more so that everybody on this planet is already permanently intertwined—and we insist that everyone act accordingly.
\n\nAll this is not to say we approach soldiers with flowers when they come for our children—nor do we offer corporations our children when they come for our flowers. Sometimes love can only speak through the barrel of a gun.
\n\nNot to be forced by expectation, doctrine, or necessity to claim one fragment of yourself and disown others. Not to take sides within and against yourself, not to play judge and jury constantly at your own trial. Not to protect pristine ignorance with inaction, but to learn from mistakes and thus grow wise. Not to choose one path in life and follow it to the exclusion of all others, but to throw false unity and consistency to the wind—to give expression to every impulse and yearning in what you deem its proper time, and appreciate what is fertile in turmoil. To do this knowing you are a part of a community that cherishes you unconditionally—and to cherish others in their entirety, as they reflect parts of yourself.
\n\nTo live without the petty squabbles of pecking order and power structure inside any more than around—that is the anarchist dream of selfhood.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/28/13.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/28/21.jpg\")
\nA community in which people direct their own activities and look out for each other does not need a prison or factory built in it to “create jobs.” A community of people who share their own channels of communication are not at the mercy of any corporate media version of “truth.” A community of people who make their own music and art and organize their own social events would never settle for the paralyzing spectacle of reality television, let alone computer dating services and pornography. A community of people who know each other’s histories and understand each other’s needs can work through conflicts without any need for interference from uniformed strangers with guns. The extent to which we can create these communities is the extent to which we can solve the problems we face today, and no legislation or charity will do this for us.
\n\nInstitutions can only be as good as the people who make them work—and they usually aren’t, anyhow. Solutions “from above” have proved ineffective over and over: the red tape of medical programs, the inefficiency of social services, the lies of presidents. If you don’t trust the people, you can be sure you can’t trust the police.
\n\nAnarchism is aristocratic—anarchists just insist that the elite should consist of everyone, that the struggle of the “common man” can become the struggle of the uncommon women and men it produces.
\n\nWe have no illusions that there are any shortcuts to anarchy. We don’t seek to lead “the” people, but to establish a nation of sovereigns; we don’t seek to be a vanguard of theorists, but to empower a readership of authors; we don’t seek to be the artists of a new avant garde, but to enable an audience of performers—we don’t so much seek to destroy power as to make it freely available in abundance: we want to be masters without slaves.
\n\nWe recognize that power struggles and dynamics will always be a part of human life; many of us have a “tyrannical muse” we obey, albeit willingly, so we reserve even the right to command and serve when it pleases us. But, as they say, the only free human beings are the pauper and the king—the king being the less free of the two, since his kingdom still encumbers and limits him, while on her luckier days the hobo can feel that the whole of the cosmos exists for the sake of her pleasure and freedom—so we prefer not to trivialize ourselves by competing for such fool’s gold as ownership or authority. And—when struggle is unavoidable, we would still prefer to be at the mercy of the violence and stupidity of other individuals than the violence and stupidity of humanity as it is distilled and marshaled by the state.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/28/6.jpg\")
\nWe’re not egalitarians in the old sense: we’re not out to pull the rich and powerful down to “our level”—rather, we pity them for not being ambitious enough in their aspirations, and hope they will abdicate to join us in fighting to make it possible for everyone to ascend to greatness (that way, we won’t have to guillotine them). We’re not against the glory assigned to pop icons and movie stars, per se—we just deplore the way it is squandered on distant objects, when it rightfully belongs to the moments of our own heroic lives. We’re not against the homage and devotion that the monototheists’ God receives; we simply find it healthier to devote it to each other. We’re not against property, exactly, so much as we are the pettiness of bickering over it: for we understand that to rule the world, we must share it all—and not demolish or meddle with it, for that matter. The true pauper king walks the forests of his domain proudly, watching the interactions of the complex ecosystems in awe, knowing the only appropriate conduct for a monarch of such a wonderland is a policy of veneration and non-intervention (except to thwart the occasional logging corporation). We’re not waiting for “the” revolution to give us the rights we deserve; deeming ourselves the highest authorities we need recognize, we grant them to ourselves immediately and therefore make revolution constantly as a way to assert and protect them.
\n\nWe will settle for nothing less than total world domination, for one and all.
\n\nAnarchists not only deny the authority of God, Chief of Police of the Universe, but also maintain a healthy distrust of his successors: Nature, History, Science, Morality. We don’t account any being, system, or tradition the right to our unquestioning faith, since even when we esteem others’ knowledge or judgment better than our own we are still responsible for the choice to trust them. Accordingly, we don’t regard any contention or assumption as above dispute, and revel more in moving freely between paradigms than in debating which one is The Truth. We are especially suspicious of experts who would mediate between us and deities or spheres of knowledge, and prefer both to learn about the world and to contact the divine for ourselves.
\n\nJustice as Judgment we count of little worth: we want to be practical, to solve problems, not to treat human relations and conduct as another economic exchange with righteousness for currency. We apply the idea of personal responsibility only to the extent that it is useful in making our relationships work; otherwise, it is of little interest to us whether a person’s soul is damned or redeemed, whether conduct is moral or immoral, whether society or the individual is to blame for a wrong.
\n\nLet it not be said about us that we hold nothing holy! On the contrary, we hold everything holy. Denying hierarchy means venerating the singular, incomparable beauty of every creature, every feature of the cosmos, every moment. Only appraisal and condemnation are anathema to us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/28/19.jpg\")
Graffiti on a church in Lisbon, 2001: “Without truth, you are the looser.”
\n\n\n\n“The anarchist is a very fierce creature. It is first cousin to the gorilla. It kills presidents, princes, executives, likewise sabotages their summits and summer holidays. It has long, unkempt hair on its head and all over its face. Instead of fingernails it has long, sharp claws. The anarchist has many pockets in which it carries rocks, knives, guns, and bombs. It is a night animal. After dark, it gathers in groups, large and small, and plans raids, murders, plagues. Lots are drawn to select who must carry out the work.
\n\n“The anarchist does not like water. It never washes or changes its clothes. It is always thirsty and drinks only salt water. The home of the anarchist is in Europe, especially Italy. Some few have been exported to North America, where they are feared and hated by all decent folks and hunted wherever they show themselves.
\n\n“Papa does not like anarchists a bit. They give him bad dreams, he says. He has given orders to have them caught and put in cages, and he will not allow any more to come into this country if he can help it. If any sneak in, he will have them shot like rabid dogs, Mexicans, mountain lions, and such animals. I practice every day with my rifle so I can shoot these wild beasts when I grow up.”
\n\n-A White House nursery composition, 1904
\n
All of us have grown up divided and conquered along lines of gender and sexual preference, body type and ethnicity, class and race, bought off with privileges and beaten down with psychological warfare so we’ll do our parts to keep the pecking order in place. White supremacy, patriarchy, and heterosexism are the pillars of this civilization. We anarchists fight against these oppressive structures whether we find them in society or ourselves; but we aim for more than the liberation of human beings of all identities—we want the liberation of all human beings from identity.
\n\nThere are no universals. Group identities are self-perpetuating fabrications that begin with circumstantial evidence and end by imposing a false uniformity. There are two genders, for example, like there are “only” twelve tones in every octave: it seems true when you look at a piano, but try opening your mouth and singing! Though “femininity” may appear ordained by nature to those who grew up in environments where all women shave their legs and armpits, it is just a generalization drawn from generations of standardized behavior, reinforced by each replication. But—as there is no “pure” femininity, no substance the generalization refers to besides what all the individual instances are perceived to have in common, and so each generation is not the “original” but a “copy”—the entire paradigm is at risk in every new generation, as it may be transformed…or abandoned.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/28/7.jpg\")
\nAt best, generalizations like class and gender can be used to undo themselves—to expose and confront the patterns of oppression that run through individual lives, to find common cause in fighting the invisibility of certain experiences and histories. We want to get beyond these and all categories and conflicts, but it’s only going to happen if we begin by addressing them. In men’s groups, human beings constructed as men can exchange skills for rewiring their programming; in women-only spaces, those constructed as women can explore similarly without the presence of men interfering. We defend the right of individuals to choose how they want to be identified—and no vision of unbounded life is any excuse to pretend the world is yet free anywhere from power imbalances. But ultimately it is revolution we’re after, not reform: we’re not petitioning for more rights for special interest groups, or more freedom of movement between established categories—we’re taking and making our right to make and remake ourselves in every moment, and wrecking the system of divisions in the process!
\n\nWe are feminists who would abolish gender, labor organizers who would abolish work, artists fighting to destroy and transcend art. Our class war is a war against class, against classes and classification. When we say that we are against representation, we do not only mean representative “democracy”; we also mean that each of us is an irreducible individual, that none can speak for another. Neither politicians nor abstractions, neither delegates nor demographics can represent us!
\n\nBeware of struggle. Not a few radicals get involved in politics because they know everything about resisting and little about anything else. They turn every interaction into a conflict between the forces of good and evil, taking a stand and drawing the line until it really is them against the world. For would-be career agitators, this can be a great way to maintain that career—but it accomplishes little else beyond getting people agitated in the strictest sense of the word. Most will just stop paying attention entirely—who doesn’t already have enough antagonism and unpleasantness to deal with?
\n\nThere are always wars waiting to be fought—against, against, against. Fighting these wars perpetuates the dualities that give rise to them. Anarchists anachronize wars, by transcending oppositions. That is revolution.
\n\nDon’t join an existing conflict on its terms and make yourself a pawn of its patterns: redefine the terms of the conflict—from “democracy versus terrorism” to “freedom versus power,” for example! Find ways to make premises subvert themselves, to draw people together in ways they thought impossible, to upset the entire paradigm of struggle.
\n\nSo if you want to provoke revolt, don’t draw a line between yourself and the rest of the world and threaten everyone across it. Don’t propagate a universal program, don’t campaign for recruits, for heaven’s sake don’t “educate the masses”! Forget about persuading people to your opinion—encourage them to develop the power to form their own. Everyone having their own ideas is more anarchist than everyone having The Anarchist Idea. Any central organization or recognized authority on revolt can only stifle self-determination by ordering it. Individuals acting freely, on the other hand, can inspire and reinforce liberty and resistance in each other: independence, like all good things, is available in abundance. It certainly doesn’t need to be—cannot be—doled out sparingly by a central committee to constituents waiting in breadlines!
\n\nWhen it comes to addressing others, don’t try to say “the” truth. Meddle with The Truth, undermine it, create a space in which new truths can form. Introduce questions, not answers—and remember, not all questions end in question marks. For the revolutionary, the essence of a statement lies in its effects, not in whether or not it is “objectively” true—this approach distinguishes her from philosophers and other idle bastards.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/28/22.jpg\")
\n\n\n\nHistorians tell of the mighty emperor Darius, who led his troops into the steppes with the intention of subduing the Scythians and adding their territory to his empire. The Scythians were a nomadic people, and when they learned that Darius’ forces were to descend upon them, they broke camp and began a slow retreat. They moved at such a speed that though Darius’ armies could always descry them on the horizon, they were never able to close in. For days they fled ahead of the invaders—then weeks, months, leaving all the food in their wake destroyed and all the water poisoned; they led the intruding armies in circles, into the lands of neighboring peoples who attacked them, through unbroken deserts where gaunt vultures licked bleached bones. The proud warriors, accustomed to flaunting their bravado in swift, dramatic clashes, were in despair. Darius sent a message with his fastest courier, who was barely able to deliver it to the laziest straggler of the Scythian flank: “As your ruler,” it read, “I order you to turn and fight!”
\n\n“If you are our ruler,” came the reply, scratched carelessly into a rock face they came upon the next day, “go weep.”
\n\nDays later, after they had given up all hope, the scouts made out a line of Scythian horsemen charging forward across the plain. They were waving their swords excitedly and letting out great whoops of enthusiasm. Caught unprepared but relieved at the prospect of doing battle at last, the warriors took up their arms—only to discern, in confusion, that the Scythians were not charging their lines, but somewhat to the side of them. Looking closer, they made out that the horsemen were pursuing a rabbit. Upon this humiliation, the soldiers threatened mutiny, and Darius was forced to turn back and leave Scythia in defeat. Thus the Scythians entered history as the most unconquerable of clans by refusing to do battle.
\n
…but it’s the kind of paradox we anarchists relish. Urging people to think for themselves, seizing power to abolish it, making war on war, these are all contradictions—but it’s good tactics to engage in obvious hypocrisy, if you want the rebels to depose you along with other authorities! Flying a black flag to express opposition to flags sounds senseless—but, living in the shadow of so many flags that flaglessness is interpreted as acquiescence, it may be sound senselessness. Better a black flag than a white one, anyway!
\n\nSo—Create momentum! Don’t sit endlessly in meetings, meeting about when you should be meeting to discuss how to conduct your next meeting. If your masochistic comrades feel the unfathomable compulsion to spend weeks, months, years of yammering hammering out the wording of a platform to which they can all pledge themselves, and then further years in internal dissension and rupturing, let them, but don’t feel obliged to join in just to prove how committed to the Revolution you are. Don’t feel obliged to join in anything—this is your revolution!
\n\nCreate momentum! Don’t demand change—realize it yourself with your actions. All you can accomplish is what you do yourself with your companions, and that’s a lot: this is how you keep your dignity in a mad world, how you write your own life story and thus let others know they aren’t powerless either. Acting on your desires puts you in touch with them—otherwise, you have to put the same energy into disavowing them. Skip down the street if you’re happy, burn down a building if it outrages you. Love blossoms on a battlefield—it’s easier to release yourself to it when you’re ready to back it up! When you live out your own most secret wishes, you’ll find you express those of others, too. Find yourself projects that engage you, that put you in situations in which you are wholly present in the moment. And don’t be afraid of being unrealistic—it is precisely the unreal that needs realizing. You can’t create unless you can dream.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/28/8.jpg\")
\nCreate momentum! Anarchists don’t give instructions—we give license. Help others give themselves permission to live, by setting precedents—and offer support, share skills, create opportunities for the civilians around you to express their own radical desires in action. You’ll be surprised who will fight the pigs in the streets, when the chance arises!
\n\nDon’t sighingly sign petitions, pose for the cameras, await some window of opportunity. Do participate in town parades and street festivals, break into abandoned buildings to throw great banners down the sides, start conversations with strangers, challenge everything you thought you knew about yourself in bed, maintain a constant feeling in the air that something is happening. Live as if the future depends on your every deed, and it will. Don’t wait for yourself to show up—you already have. Grant yourself license to live and tear those shackles to ribbons: Create momentum!
\n\nThese days it can be difficult, even terrifying, to be an anarchist. You may well be one of those people who hides her anarchism, at least in certain situations, lest others (equally scared, and probably by the same things) accuse you of being too idealistic or “irresponsible”—as if politely burying the planet in garbage isn’t!
\n\nYou shouldn’t be so timid—you are not alone. There are millions of us waiting for you to make yourself known, ready to love you and laugh with you and fight at your side for a better world. Follow your heart to the places we will meet. Please don’t be too late.
\n\nNot to be brusque, but haven’t you been paying attention? We’re not trying to get you to convert to a religion or vote for a party here—on the contrary. The best and the hardest part of this is that it’s entirely in your hands.
\n\nIn some moments, in this insane world, anarchy appears in fragments, whispering of hidden lives that beckon from within this one: those hours you spend with your best friends after work, the remains of a poster pasted on an alley wall, that instant masturbating or making love when you are neither male nor female, fat nor skinny, rich nor poor. In other moments, that insanity is the exception, the fragment, and anarchy is simply the world we live. One hundred thousand of us can found a new civilization, one hundred can transform a city, two can write the bedtime stories our children have been waiting to hear—and sow the seeds for millions to come.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/28/10.jpg\")
\nWhen one of us defies the protection racket of public opinion and “necessity” and drops everything to live as she has dreamed, the whole world receives the gift of that freedom. When we fill the streets to dance and blow fire, we can remember with our bodies that we deserve such dances and such space for them. When the ski resorts burn and department store windows shatter, for a moment “private property” is neither private nor property—and we create new relations between ourselves and a cosmos that is suddenly ours, and new, once more. If we risk our lives, it is because we know only by doing so can we make them our own.
\n\nSee you on the front page of the last newspaper those motherfuckers ever print—
\n\nNoam Deguerre, CrimethInc. Writers’ Bloc
\n\nA Fable
\n\nIn the beginning, harmony: communities of human beings live as one, gathering and eating and playing and sleeping and singing and making love and telling stories together. And, occasionally, discord: an argument breaks out, strong words are exchanged, a blow is struck.
\n\nWhen this happens, the community meets and arrives at a resolution. Communities that cannot do this break up, and the members starve or freeze or are hunted down by wild beasts, or join another community that can resolve conflicts. Conflicts between communities are resolved in a similar manner. For thousands upon thousands of years, this way of life works and endures.
\n\nBut one day, some cultural or technological innovation enables one group to accumulate power in such a way that they do not have to concern themselves with resolving conflicts—they can offload the negative consequences on others. Now discussion, placation, even combat do not serve to conclude hostilities; the combatants do not find their way back to peace as the others did before, but seek only to obtain more power. Intent on controlling and dominating others, even at the cost of their own happiness or safety, they become machines of war.
\n\nTheir relationship with the environment shifts: the earth must be disciplined, now, to provide them reserves of food to last through their struggle. Their relationships with each other change: they evaluate others as potential comrades-in-arms or enemies, appraising might above all other qualities.
\n\nThe neighboring communities do not escape unscathed. Soon they are embroiled in this struggle, as well, and must contend with an enemy such as they have never encountered. Many of these communities perish outright; others, determined survive at any cost, find that they too must become war machines. They too subjugate the earth and its animals, enslave their vanquished foes, even their own people, anything to endure in the face of this terror. They become the terror, they outdo it, and this is their undoing.
\n\nSpreading like a cancer, from community to community, strange changes sweep the face of the earth. Little communities merge to become big communities, and ultimately nations; temporary military leaders become hereditary monarchs; the vision of once peace-loving peoples becomes clouded with carnage.
\n\nAnd it is not only in military matters that these communities change. Territory is claimed and marked, and becomes the source of new conflicts. Patriarchy appears: the undeclared war between the sexes, the gendered roles of warrior and servant, institutionalized and enforced by each generation on the next. Market economics arises: peoples who no longer trust each other insist on trade where gifts once sufficed—and scramble to outwit each other, to profit at others’ expense even in peacetime. Organized religion is invented: now men not only vie for land, food, property, and power, but also to govern each other’s minds and hearts.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/28/14.jpg\")
\nAll of these innovations are catastrophic for human beings. They try to offset the effects with new innovations, and the new innovations prove to be greater catastrophes. Governments, convened to protect peoples, extract taxes from them and thrive idly off their sweat and toil; police fill the streets to prevent crime, and perpetrate worse crimes with impunity. Defending themselves from the monstrosities of civilization, these peoples breed more awful monsters.
\n\nMinor nations, hell-bent on withstanding the assaults of greater ones, arm themselves to the teeth—and go on fighting and conquering in exaggerated response to the original threat until they become great empires. So the Roman Empire finds its origins in the resistance of rural farmers to Etruscan encroachments; so the rest of Europe becomes a snakepit of competing empires, as a consequence of hundreds of years spent fighting Rome. Later historians will look at the bloody wars waged on the edges of every civilization as evidence that the “heart of darkness” beyond this frontier is a bloody barbarism; but perhaps it is the peace-loving barbarians who are defending themselves from the bloodthirsty. The true heart of darkness lies at the center of these empires, in the eye of the hurricane, where violence is so deeply ingrained in human life that it is no longer visible to the naked eye: slaves go about in the streets as if of their own volition, powerless even to rebel; gladiators slaughter each other in the circuses and it is called entertainment.
\n\nThe next military campaigns are a symptom of social viciousness, not just a cause. Now the invisible violence of economics ordains the visible violence of armies: soldiers cut paths into the last wilderlands of barbarism so further resources can be seized by merchants, and the freshly destitute barbarians become a new consumer base. Whole continents are despoiled and the inhabitants enslaved—and then the looters cite their destitution as proof of their racial inferiority! Missionaries are in the front lines of the assault, enforcing the reign of the jealous One and Only God as surely as the soldiers enforce the reign of brutality. Terror for territory, blood for money, money for blood, He ordains it all—as it ordains Him.
\n\nThe successors of the missionaries pray directly to the market. These new priests are even more successful than the soldiers in imposing the rule of power: a day comes when shackles are no longer needed to keep the population servile, when idolatry alone is enough to keep people fighting amongst themselves. Now no one can remember any other life, and son fights brother fights father fights neighbor, as the specters of fear and avarice look over their empire from above. Kings, generals, presidents rise and fall, but the system, hierarchy, remains: competition itself holds the crown, picking and discarding its champions without pity.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/28/16.jpg\")
\nEveryone in these relationships of violence still wants, desperately, to escape, but again and again they bear the seeds of this violence with them, destroying every refuge as they enter—as the refugees who flee to the “New World” do, and the Communists who overthrow the Tsar. Even those who do escape, like the artists whose communes gentrify neighborhoods, whose provocative innovations set precedents for the next generation’s fashion photography, only pave the way for the steamrollers that follow in their footsteps.
\n\nViolence reaches an all-time high. Schoolchildren, mailmen, formerly the very picture of sociability, begin to gun down their companions in cold blood. Ministers molest altar boys, fathers batter their daughters, teenagers rape their dates. Prisons overflow. Millions perish in holocausts, and the maimed survivors initiate subsequent holocausts. Nuclear missiles point at everyone until the imminence of the final holocaust can only be discussed in platitudes. Now we are all on death row, all political prisoners. Even in the loftiest citadels of the United States, protected by the most sophisticated and well-equipped military in the history of the solar system, white-collar workers with full benefits and health insurance are no longer safe—airplanes crash, skyscrapers fall. Terror threatens us all.
\n\nTonight a Palestinian youth struggles to work out the equation: have his enemies filled his world with enough misery that he feels more hatred for them than he does love for life? He thinks of his crippled father, of his bulldozed house, of his departed friends—who computed this same equation daily, always coming to one conclusion, until the day they came to another.
\n\nWhere, through all this, is love? It is still here, in the forms it has always taken: families eating together, friends embracing, gifts given simply for the pleasure of giving. We still forgive, converse, fall deeply in love; it even happens occasionally that new communities federate to confront a common antagonist—not out of malice, but for the sake of peace, hoping to resolve conflicts as they were resolved in the days before warfare and commerce. These moments, even when they occur between only a few individuals, are as powerful and precious as they ever were. And they are still infectious, as infectious as violence and hatred, if only they can find unarmored hearts in which to catch hold.
\n\nThe world now waits for a war on war, a love armed, a friendship which can defend itself. Anarchy is a word we use to describe those moments when force cannot subdue us, and life flourishes as we know it should; anarchism is the science of creating and defending such moments. It is a weapon that aspires to uselessness—the only kind of weapon we will wield, hoping against hope that this time, through some new alchemy, our weapons will not turn on us.
\n\nWe know that after “the” revolution, after every revolution, the struggle between love and hatred, between coercion and cooperation, will continue; but, then, as now, as always, the important question is—which side are you on?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/11/28/11.jpg\")
\nWe’re pleased to present Cienfuegos’ Critique of State Socialism as part of our “From the Archives” series. Originally produced by anarchists in Belfast in 1981, this comic juxtaposes Bakunin’s critique of statist revolutionary movements with the events that subsequently confirmed it. Please print these out, staple them at the side, and share them far and wide!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/state_socialism/state_socialism-b.gif\")
\nClick here to download PDF [25 MB].
\n\nAnarchists have long argued that all statist approaches to social change are doomed to authoritarian results. This comic illustrates how Bakunin’s critique of state socialism, composed a century and a half ago, was borne out by the events of the 20th century.
\n\nJust as Bakunin’s concerns about power-hungry socialists and communists proved prescient, this comic retains its value today, when new politicians and parties are attempting to co-opt popular movements. We should never forget the hard-learned lessons of the Russian Revolution and the Spanish Civil War: those who would wield state power, whether in the name of the people or any other abstraction, can only be obstacles to liberation, if not actual foes of it.
\n\nReaders who lack context for 20th century history may find some passages a little perplexing—who was Oswald Mosley, exactly? But if nothing else, this comic provides points of departure to learn about many of the most fascinating and pivotal events of that era. There are plenty of other sources out there, should you wish to learn more about any of these!
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2008/04/09/from-the-archives-seattle-logistics-zine", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2008/04/09/from-the-archives-seattle-logistics-zine", "title": "From the Archives: Seattle Logistics Zine", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2008-04-09T13:03:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:30Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "We are delighted to debut a new category on our blog, From the Archives. Here, we will rescue valuable texts from the dustbin of history, putting them at the disposal of those best equipped to make use of them today.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2008/04/09/seattle_logistics_readingb.gif\")
\nOur first text in this series is the fabled Seattle Logistics Zine. Immediately after the Seattle WTO protests of 1999, many of the people who had coordinated essential aspects of the infrastructure of that mobilization collaborated on a zine exploring what they learned from their experiences. The zine covers organizing and security at the convergence spaces, volunteer coordination, the medic team, tactical communications, legal support, the squatting action described in N30: The Seattle WTO Protests, and the actual tactical and strategic planning that made the mobilization a success.
\n\nIn the years since its publication, this zine has been widely sought but almost impossible to find. We expect it will provide helpful context not only to historians but also to those who are coordinating mobilizations this coming summer.
\n\nDownload Reading PDF [3.5 MB] to read on screen.
\n\nDownload Imposed PDF [6.7 MB] made for mass producing on copy machines and unreadable on screen.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2003/12/01/destructive-production-can-we-really-expect-to-manufacture-complex-technologies-in-an-anarchist-society", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2003/12/01/destructive-production-can-we-really-expect-to-manufacture-complex-technologies-in-an-anarchist-society", "title": "Destructive Production : Can we really expect to manufacture complex technologies in an anarchist society?", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2003-12-01T19:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:43Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "by Infidel Castro
\n\nThe modern manufacture of computers, automobiles and other complex technological products requires an exorbitant amount of waste and pollution, a dramatic division of labor, and an international hierarchy. As anarchists, regardless of whether or not we adopt the viewpoint of primitivists, we must either develop brand new ways of manufacturing complex technologies which circumvent these problems, or we must understand that an anarchist society will be unable to produce complex technologies without compromising our principles. I will examine the personal computer as an example of the problems posed by manufacture of complex technologies – a process I call “destructive production.” The heart of a computer – the tiny part which makes modern computers so fast and small – is the semiconductor chip inside. You may have heard of various brand names like Intel Pentium, Motorola, and so forth.
\n\nManufacturing these chips requires approximately 400 steps in a complicated process that begins with mining silicon dioxide (silica). It’s the most abundant substance in the Earth’s crust, so it’s not too difficult to find or extract. The silica is then heated along with carbon to form carbon dioxide and silicon. That silicon is then heated again with hydrochloric acid and hydrogen in the process of forming a pure rod of silicon which is then sliced into millimeter-thick wafers and shipped to the chip factory.
\n\nThis factory is over twice the length of a football field and contains over 100 different brands of machinery from around the world. The chips must be manufactured in “clean rooms” that use powerful air filters to reduce airborne contaminants to only 1 particle per cubic foot of air (hospitals have 10,000 particles per cubic foot and normal outdoor air contains 500,000 particles per cubic foot). However, these filters do not work on the toxic vapors created by the chipmaking process.
\n\nWorkers in the chip factory use microscopes, ultraviolet light, photosensitive chemicals and chemical baths (all toxic), and precision instruments which carve tiny patterns and implant phosphorus and boron on each chip wafer. Workers also apply microscopically thin coatings of copper and gold to the chips, then ship them off to the factory that makes circuit boards.
\n\nThe circuit board factory uses copper, fiberglass and epoxy resin to make the boards, then coats the boards with copper and tin-lead solder, then etches them with circuit patterns using techniques similar to those in the chip manufacturing process. This generates acidic fumes and other toxic wastes.
\n\nThe plastic used in making the computer’s exterior comes from oil which requires extensive refining, not to mention the complicated process by which it is extracted from the Earth.
\n\nFinally, all of these parts are put together in yet another factory and shipped around the world to various distribution centers.
\n\nAs you can see, the manufacture of a single computer requires a great deal of division of labor. From mining (for copper in Chile, gold in South Africa, tin in Brazil) to oil drilling to manufacturing to assembling, complex technologies such as these required alienated labor supposedly anathema to anarchism. And yet many anarchists, unwilling to confront the reality of ecological destruction and hierarchical structure behind complex technology, assume that manufacture of computers can continue as normal “after the revolution.”
\n\nI have heard anarchists attempt to circumvent the division of labor issue by saying that we can “take turns” doing the various jobs, but that seems nearly impossible for practical reasons. Would we take turns traveling from continent to continent to mine resources and refine them into usable parts? It seems doubtful.
\n\nAnother proffered solution is to assign the various tasks of computer manufacture to people who volunteer because they want one of the final products. However, it seems unlikely that anyone would volunteer for such a task given the health risks involved (workers in computer factories report higher incidences of lung disease, skin rashes, and miscarriages). And how much would one have to work to “earn” a single computer? 20 hours, 40, 80, six months, an entire year’s worth of full-time work?
\n\nAre there anarchists willing to engage in that much work just to get their own newly manufactured computer? In addition, anarchists who don’t mind living without computers might not be excited about dealing with the pollutants and byproducts that come with making the machines. Silicon Valley, where many computers are currently manufactured, has vast areas of contaminated groundwater and the largest concentration of Superfund cleanup sites in the United States. Computer manufacturers generate millions of pounds of toxic waste each year – manufacturing one computer chip creates 90 pounds of waste and uses nearly 3000 gallons of water alone! And the process of refining copper used to create chips contributes to acid rain. Since the non-computer-users aren’t going to tolerate living with that waste and pollution, are the pro-computer types willing to live with it? A lot of manufacturing-generated pollution, such as contaminated groundwater and acid rain, can’t be limited to one location either. What will the non-computer-users do when their drinking water is ruined by the computer-makers upstream?
\n\nSuppose that an ecologically sound method of producing computers is developed that requires virtually no division of labor. The process would still be unimaginably complex and certainly would be geographically diverse, requiring workers and materials from around the world. It is conceivably possible to coordinate a global effort based upon anarchist principles, but such an effort would likely be less “efficient” (in other words, no Fordist concept of tyrannical schedules and division of labor) and thus produce less than desired. It also seems unlikely that people would be willing to jump through all these hoops (copper and gold mining, exposure to dangerous chemicals, painstaking factory-line assembly, etc.) in order to have their own personal computer, and so there would be even fewer people to actually take part in the process, which again means less efficiency. Management positions would invariably develop in order to deal with the “problem” of inefficiency, and the managers would probably receive the latest and greatest versions of computers as compensation for their efforts.
\n\nThus, when it comes to complex technology, we cannot be satisfied merely with occupying factories, taking over mining sites, and seizing (instead of destroying) these horrific means of production. And so, there are only two ways for computers to exist in an anarchist world:
\n\nManufacture no new computers, but use existing resources to maintain current machines.
\nDevelop new, non-polluting, non-alienated methods of manufacturing computers (unlikely, but remotely possible – however, the process of researching new methods of manufacture would generate its own pollutants, division of labor, etc.). And computers are not the only (or worst) example of destructive production. Cars are far worse, for example, and a similar analysis of automobile manufacturing could easily become a lengthy book.
\nI hope I’ve shown that you don’t need to be an anti-tech primitivist to see why we cannot expect the production of complex, modern, technological conveniences to continue in an anarchist society, as they require ecological destruction, division of labor, and pronounced hierarchy.
\n\n(A major source for the factual information presented here was the book Stuff: the Secret Lives of Everyday Things, by John Ryan and Alan Durning, published by Northwest Environmental Watch. This book also discusses cars, coffee, newsprint, t-shirts, shoes, and other artifacts from our daily lives.)
\n\n" } ] }![a tank](\"https://www.sethtobocman.com/images/War-In-The-Neigborhood-med.jpg\"){kind=link}
![these beautiful posters](\"http://sinkers.org/stage/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/moreworldA16series650w.jpg\"){kind=link}