![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/19/2.jpg\")
A memorial at the site where Carlo Giuliani was killed, not long after his death.
\nOn July 20, 2001, at the peak of the movement against capitalist globalization, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Genoa, Italy to oppose the summit of the eight most powerful governments in the world—the G8. During the massive demonstrations that ensued, a police officer named Mario Placanica shot and killed a 23-year-old demonstrator named Carlo Giuliani.
\n\nThe following text was written by Tomas Rothaus, a fellow participant in the battle of Genoa.
\n\n A memorial at the site where Carlo Giuliani was killed, not long after his death.
\n\n\n\nIf we are speaking seriously of revolution, then we need to take a serious look at history and see what the consequences are, not only if we fail, but even if we are triumphant. Revolutions mean blood, death, and suffering. If we are not willing to accept this, then we should not be calling for them.
\n\n—“The Lessons of Genoa.” Barricada #8. Summer/September 2001
\n
I wrote those words once upon a time, Carlo, when your blood was still fresh on the pavement and your name still in every newspaper and on every television. I published them in our anarchist journal, Barricada, and I continue to stand by them. But please don’t misunderstand them. I’m sorry you’re gone and I experience your death as a tragedy. I think about you to this day more than you could imagine. Hopefully, I’m not alone in that regard.
\n\nFor years and years, as long as I could, I made sure that every July 20, we directed the rage that we carried for you in our hearts against our enemies. In the random cities of whatever country I happened to find myself in, we made sure that Molotov cocktails lit up the night, that it rained stones in the dark against banks, that we ambushed cop cars, that we etched your name upon the walls of Boston, Goettingen, Paris, Berlin. Sometimes, to celebrate your life and not your death (as well as to throw off the cops), we chose to avenge you on your birthday, March 14, rather than the day of your death.
\n\nToday, decades after that 20th of July of 2001, I’m often reminded of you in the most unexpected ways. I’ll see a person in their forties. Decently dressed, tidy, maybe wearing a business suit or some kind of work uniform. A human just old enough to look worn from the inevitable stresses of life, love, and labor, but young enough that their youthfulness still shines through from behind the five o’clock shadow and incipient beer belly. Because when I see this random person, any random person, who is about the age you would be today, I’m reminded of the day when the cop’s bullet took away your life—and your future.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/19/3.jpg\")
\nI’m not as outraged by your death as I am by all the life you were robbed of.
\n\nWe had an affinity in battle, and it was only fate that put you in that particular battle, on that particular plaza—the one my friends and I happened to not be at. The one time on that particular day that the police aimed their bullets not at the sky, but at the head of a human being. Your head.
\n\nFrom what I’m told, if we had lived in the same city, chances are good we wouldn’t have gotten along very well. I’m told you were one of Genoa’s punkabbestia, which (from what I understand) is like the chaos punks or street punks we had in my cities. Not particularly organized, sometimes dropping in on political meetings but definitely not an activist, militant, or any kind of cadre. The Tute Bianche, whose words to this day I’m obviously still reluctant to take at face value, called you “not particularly political.” They said that you used to spend your time at the Piazza Delle Erbe, where you would “beg and hang out with friends and stray dogs.” All of which I have nothing against—but we all know that the street punks and the obsessive young orthodox anarchists often didn’t get along very well.
\n\nNone of that matters, though. What matters is that they froze you in time. You will forever be a young street punk, if that’s indeed what you were, robbed of the opportunity to do whatever it is that brought you joy and made you feel whole as a person in the years and decades that should have still been left in your life. Maybe your youthful rebellion would have eventually faded, you would have finished your university studies, gotten a degree, moved on, and looked back with disdain at your days on the streets as a rebel and an outcast. Or maybe you would have looked at them with wistful nostalgia, as a healthy chapter you went through in your life before assimilating, getting a good union job thanks to your dad’s connections, starting a family, and throwing a coin toward the next generation of punkabbestia as you passed them on the streets that used to be yours. Or, who knows, maybe you would have become an old punk, graying but still free, dog at your side, panhandling on the streets of Genoa to this very day.
\n\nBut you were robbed of a future, so you will never be any of those things. You won’t betray us, you won’t move on, you won’t walk among us. And, even if my adventures hadn’t exiled me from Europe and I could find myself in Genoa once more, we’ll never reminisce together about that hot, sunny summer day when you could have gone to the beach but instead, outraged at the police invasion of your home, joined us in battle.
\n\nYou’ll never have a chance to move on, regret your choices, denounce the excesses of your youth, or spend your entire life staying true to them. You’ll forever be, as your best friend Daniele remembered you just a few days after your death,
\n\n\n\n\n“someone who had that evil inside, the one that is here in the air, that we all have. He didn’t fit in the society, in the system. He suffered a lot, and since he was more sensitive than us, more generous and kinder, he was also more fragile.”
\n
Forever a twenty-three-year-old, just a few short years beyond a teenager, looking at us through an aging photo, or reminding me of the brutal price of rebellion as the picture of you lying in a pool of blood flashes constantly in my head.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/19/8.jpg\")
\nJust as I’m outraged that you were robbed of whatever future you were yet to choose, I’m alarmed as I see your memory fading in time from the collective consciousness of those who came after you. I don’t even know why I’m addressing you in a letter. I don’t believe in the afterlife, and I doubt you did either. Maybe it’s my desperate way of grasping at a sense of control over what seems inevitable: that time eventually devours us all. That, while the circumstances may be different, both death as well as the passage of time will one day come after me just as they came for you. Still—and here I assume we’re also similar in spirit—just because it’s inevitable doesn’t mean it’s going to stop me from trying to prevent it.
\n\nYet many years have passed, Carlo, and I’ve had to lay down my weapons as well. So, since I can no longer do my part to keep your memory alive with action, here we are: a godless anarchist writing a letter to a dead street punk. Hoping others will read it and inquire about you, and about the conditions, dreams, and adventures that led to the rising tide of our movement, and the wave that swept your life with it that day. It’s the only useful weapon I can find in my arsenal today to fight the idea that you will be forgotten, just a footnote in a distant clash of a long-forgotten movement. Your face, your hopes, your dreams, and eventually your name just fading into the history books.
\n\nWe’ve been fighting the battle for your memory since the day you were killed. We’ve tried our best to be fair to it. To not assign you roles or aspirations you might have rejected. But it hasn’t been easy, and I apologize if we didn’t represent you as you would have liked. In Barricada, we boldly and without hesitation branded you an anarchist, never knowing if you identified with the word. In our defense, you can’t imagine what those hours, days, weeks, and months after you died were like.
\n\nThere were some among us, well-intentioned but misguided, who hallucinated you into an organized anarchist militant. A frontline fighter of the black bloc. They wanted to turn you into a willing martyr who gladly laid down his life for the cause. But I know you didn’t choose this, because you were close to not even showing up that day. More importantly, because none of us do. Unlike fascists, we celebrate life, not death.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/19/5.jpg\")
“Carlo lives—it is you who are dead.”
\nThen there were the pacifists and the reformists. These days, I try to steer clear of the hyperbolic anarchist sectarian language of my youth, but when I remember them—their actions and their words when talking about you—it comes roaring back. If you could have seen the crocodile tears of the scum of that movement! They invoked your name, pretended to hold high your memory—but they celebrated and remembered you only because you died. Those of us who acted with you, like you, who were your comrades on that day but whom fate didn’t place in the way of a cop’s bullet that afternoon in Plaza Alimonda—they denounced us. They said we were responsible for the violence, that we had brought the rage of the state upon the good demonstrators. That indirectly, we were the ones who were responsible for your death, not the state, not the cop that fired the gun. They spread absurd conspiracy theories that the black bloc and the massive, generalized, dignified resistance were the work of undercover cops and fascists.
\n\nAdrift in the parallel reality that their narrative created, they tried to attack us, tried to expel us from the movement, pushing us out toward the cops, calling us fascists and hooligans. And the next day, as we set out to avenge your death, they directed their chants of “Assassini!”—murderers—at us just as much as at the cops. They, too, made every attempt to claim you as a martyr of their movement, but in their case with the incredible cynicism and hypocrisy of vindicating your memory while denouncing all the others who acted as you did. To them, you were better dead than alive. A hooligan in life, a martyr in death.
\n\nThe ATTAC folks, the Genoa Social Forum, the Tute Bianche, the parties, the reformists, and the whole alphabet soup of aspiring managers of discontent—all of them tried to make you into a victim. A hapless and misguided youth, murdered by the state. They wanted to deprive you of agency—as they often do with those whose choices they can’t understand or don’t respect. I’m still not sure how much of it is cynical opportunism and how much of it is that they actually can’t conceive of any form of struggle beyond political maneuvering and mediated clashes. So every time we put the cops on the run—every time we opened up enough fronts to keep them at bay, so that some of us had a chance to calmly deconstruct the landscape of capitalism and take much-needed and much-deserved breaks between battles, lounging on the bank furniture we had set up in the streets with the leisure of a backyard campfire—they hallucinated some grand police master plan to justify repression against the whole anti-globalization movement. Those of us who lived were fascists, hooligans, and provocateurs, while you, by virtue of dying, became a victim and a martyr. They simply could not accept that the rebellion in Genoa was not only organic and authentic but also successful.
\n\nYou died precisely because, on that day and in that moment, we were succeeding. The cops were retreating. I don’t know if you ever knew it, but it wasn’t just there on the Piazza Alimonda—they were on the run throughout the entire area. I know this will be controversial, but given the circumstances, I’m not even sure that it’s correct to say that they “murdered” you. I’ll spare us both the voyeuristic reconstruction of the minutiae of your final moments. There were years of endless discussions about whether the bullet hit you directly or ricocheted off of something, whether you were throwing the fire extinguisher or just holding it. The soldier who shot you was eventually found to have acted in self-defense and acquitted of any wrongdoing. I’m also not so sure that it matters, honestly, aside from the need of many comrades, even anarchist comrades, to seek out the role of victim of police brutality, as if positioning ourselves in the role of perpetual victim in the face of the big bad state would lend us some moral high ground in the eyes of broader society. It’s defeatist and I hate it, as I assume you would too. The justice we were looking for was never that of the state and its courts.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/19/9.jpg\")
Carlo Giuliani Park. Photo by Pinciolola.
\nSpeaking of fear, this is what the soldier who shot you, Mario Placanica, said to the judge shortly after killing you:
\n\n\n\n\n“I fired because I was afraid of dying. I don’t know what happened. I remember they were surrounding us, attacking us, that the jeep was an inferno. My hands were shaking and I fired without looking outside.”
\n
Don’t misunderstand me—I’m definitely no friend of cops or soldiers—but I don’t have any difficulty believing him. At the time, he was twenty years old, barely more than a teenager, sent out into the streets of Genoa that day after being told by his superiors to “be on the lookout” because demonstrators would be “throwing bags of infected blood” and that there would be “terrorist attacks.” He said, “The feeling was as if we were going to war.”
\n\nI’ve been in similar situations, including elsewhere in Genoa on that very same day. I’ve stood in the place you stood, but at a different time and in a different place, and looked into the eyes of the uniformed person in front of me. If I were the cop or soldier, I too would be afraid. Perhaps I too would pull the trigger, especially if I were a young soldier, a believer in God and country, facing an advancing and seemingly uncontrollable horde of masked anarchists.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/19/1.jpg\")
Carlo Giuliani Park. Photo by Pinciolola.
\nFor what it’s worth, the man who killed you is a shell of a human being now. Let go from the carabinieri in 2005 due to psychological problems, today he represents himself as a “destroyed, lonely, and consumed man” who battles depression.
\n\nUnsurprisingly, I have next to no sympathy for his plight. But is he personally a murderer? I don’t know. We could never really make up our minds about that—so much so that the back cover of the issue of Barricada that we published immediately after the battle of Genoa, which was dedicated to you, in which we vowed to avenge you, includes the line “Carlo was not a victim of police brutality” while also proclaiming, “They murdered an anarchist.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/19/7.jpg\")
“In Loving Memory of a Fallen Comrade.” Barricada #8. Summer/September 2001.
\nAs much contempt as I hold for the man who killed you, a few years ago, he said something that helps me to understand why I, like so many anarchists, identified so strongly with you and felt your death so personally and passionately:
\n\n\n\n\n“That day for me remains a trauma, trauma for the death of a boy like me, also a victim on that tragic day. I am not an executioner, I am not a vigilante. That day I did not hold the gun for Mario Placanica, I held it for the Carabinieri, for the Italian state.”
\n
For a moment, let’s ignore the wallowing self-pity and false equivalency of how he paints himself as a fellow victim, since we both know that he was a not a conscript but a professional who willingly chose his profession. He is nonetheless correct that it was the Italian state that put the gun in this child soldier’s hand and gave him free rein to fire it against whose who rebelled. They shot you because you were “one of us.”
\n\n“One of us.” We spray-painted that on walls for years. One of the thousands and thousands on the streets of Genoa that day who chose to rebel. One of us, one and the same, regardless of what political label we slap on ourselves, regardless of whether some spend their days editing anarchist journals and plotting actions while others spend their days panhandling and hanging out with their dogs on the streets of their city.
\n\nOne of us. All of us, regardless of our more specific motivations, were there on that day because we saw this world as broken and refused to stand idly. You chose to rebel, just like us, a rock in your hand, your face masked, unbowed in dignity. No intermediaries, no staged or managed or curated spectacle of rebellion catering to the imagined tastes of the masses. Just your body as a weapon and the comrades who stood by your side as your strength. You chose this path not to die, but to live. Because you wanted to live, free and unchained.
\n\nSo free, so unchained, that I know that our affinity probably only existed in the streets, in combat against those who we recognized as our common enemies. I won’t be striking any nostalgic notes here as to what a wonderful human being you were, although your dad says you gave him “the strength of your ideals” and taught him to not judge people by “a ripped shirt, holes in their pants, or colored hair.” There will be no grief voyeurism here; the press vultures did enough of that back in the day.
\n\nOne of us. Maybe not an activist or a militant, not a cadre of any organization or structure, but one of us because you chose to fight. To fight alongside us, side by side. One of us—and that’s why they shot you. We all know that the bullet that found you could just as easily have found any one of us. It was meant for any one of us, for all of us.
\n\nOver the months and years that followed your death, I came to understand just how painfully and viscerally true this is—as comrade after comrade fell to the bullets of the state or the knives of the fascists. The same year you died, the state unleashed a storm of bullets that killed dozens in Argentina. I couldn’t help remembering you as I took cover behind our improvised barricades, not knowing if the bullets speeding towards us were rubber or lead. Years later, when a cop murdered a fifteen-year-old anarchist in Athens, many of us who shared the streets with you in Genoa rained fire on the cops outside the occupied Polytechnic. You were on our minds then, as well.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/19/4.jpg\")
\nWhat I’ll say next might sound contradictory, but it will make sense to other combatants. After many years, I’ve concluded that that is what we are—combatants. Of course, we don’t go to war, and I don’t pretend that we are things that we are not. It is true that there is no comparison between the risks associated with the conflicts we participate in and the conditions of actual warfare. But my life experiences and the experiences of those around me involve constant proximity to death, prison, serious injury, exile. These are not the experiences, the traumas, that most civilians experience in this part of the world—at least, not yet.
\n\nAs a combatant, I believe two things simultaneously, even as they sound contradictory.
\n\nFirst, your death was tragic. I wish it had never happened. We have tried desperately to avenge you—both out of principle and also as a matter of basic self-defense. To send the message to the state that the blood of rebels, of anarchists, carries with it a steep price.
\n\nBut at the same time—and this is where a lot of people didn’t see eye to eye with us—was your death unexpected? Probably not. Should we call it murder? Maybe in the broad sense, but the question seems almost irrelevant. Above all: was your death a reason to stop our efforts? Absolutely not. Rebellion is important. But rebels die, particularly when rebellions start to succeed and the state begins to take its enemies seriously. And when the state takes their lives, I miss them, and love even those I never met.
\n\nIt sounds like demagogy to say you miss a person who you’ve never met, and who you probably wouldn’t even have gotten along with well. But I do. I miss you like I miss Dax and Carlos, taken by fascists’ knives in Milan and Madrid; like I miss Clement who fell fighting fascists in Paris; like I miss Pocho Lepratti in Buenos Aires, Alexis in Athens, and Tortuguita in Atlanta, all taken by the bullets of the police. Or like I miss that kid in Goettingen who came into our info shop one day, whose name I can’t even remember, who I’m ashamed to say I never took seriously, who went on to lay down his life fighting against Islamic fascism and for revolution in Rojava, like so many other international volunteers. I miss them and every other comrade gone, because those bullets and knives were aimed at all of us. I miss them because they were all part of the struggle for a common idea. I miss them, as I miss you, because while I may not know the person, I know the kind.
\n\nCarlo, I didn’t know you, but I’m sorry you’re gone. I never met you but I miss you. I’ll forever be holding high your memory and trying to avenge your death, because the blood of our comrades does not come cheap. And while I still can’t find the optimism to believe in a conveniently beautiful afterlife, I can’t help but hope that you’ve smiled down approvingly upon our efforts.
\n\nThis text is adapted from the book From Riot to Insurrection: The G8 Summit of 2001 & The Battle of Genoa by Tomas Rothaus.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/19/6.jpg\")
This mural in memory of those killed by police appeared during the George Floyd Rebellion of 2020 in south St. Louis, only a few miles from Ferguson, Missouri, the site of the historic uprising of 2014.
\nFor many years, we have joined others around the world in observing April 15 as worldwide Steal Something from Work Day. Last year, we prophesied that the arrival of a new cast of kleptocrats at the head of the federal government of the United States would only intensify the factors that give rise to workplace theft. In fact, the first fifteen months of the second Trump administration have seen workers around the country rapidly radicalizing and escalating their efforts to counter the ongoing plunder of our society. In 2026, when Large Language Models are pillaging the intellectual heritage of humanity in order to steal everyone’s jobs while underpaid workers are burning down warehouses and carrying out direct attacks on employers, Steal Something from Work Day is the moderate option.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/15/1.jpg\")
Jason Scott of Internet Archive speaking at the 2015 Game Developers Conference. “Steal from work,” he advised a crowd of game industry professionals. “Workplace theft is the future of game history.”
\nThis year, we present two accounts from nurses who steal for the common good. In honor of the fight that people in the Twin Cities have put up against the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement occupation of their communities, we share testimony from a nurse in Minnesota who reappropriates medical supplies from the workplace to equip those who are confronting ICE in the street.
\n\nTo learn more about other ways that nurses have helped to rescue people from the clutches of ICE, you could read this.
\n\nEveryone assumes that nurses are “good.” We get treated like God’s little soldiers. Nurses often feel a sense of moral high ground. People who aren’t nurses adopt this tone when they are talking about us, too.
\n\nThis shouldn’t be the point. Often, people who see themselves as “good” do a great deal of harm in the world, while people who are behaving badly actually help people. No one should be so focused on proving that they are “good” that they miss a chance to help someone.
\n\nThere are four general categories of workplace theft at the hospital:
\n\nIf you’re a patient in a hospital and a nurse is caring for you, chances are, some element of the care they are providing you is reaching you in defiance of the system that exists to exploit both nurses and patients. When it comes to being good, don’t be afraid to be bad.
\n\nWhen Metro Surge came to Minneapolis, it felt like a hammer falling—a hammer that had been hanging over us since election day. As January got underway, we could feel the pressure rising in the administration’s increasingly violent rhetoric—while the temperature continued to drop, setting the stage for one of the coldest and snowiest winters in recent memory. Still, none of us anticipated what was to come just a few days after the new year.
\n\nIn response to the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who was also a nurse, so many of us felt compelled to do something. This is one of the stories about what people did.
\n\nIf you were to ask me why I became I nurse, I would say because I want to help people. I know what it’s like to be in pain, to feel that nobody is around to help you, that all of your time and resources are going to something you cannot control, all while watching the oligarchic government and hospital CEOs slowly chip away at your life savings.
\n\nOn average, big hospital chain systems pay their CEOs between one and seven million dollars a year—while nurses are doing the real work at the bedside, risking our lives for a barely living wage. (Don’t get me started on the insurance CEOs who make between $20-30 million a year.) Manufacturing a one-liter bag of normal saline costs two dollars on average. Yet hospitals on occupied Turtle Island sell the bags at upwards of $700. Individuals who need to stay in the hospital incur costs for the room, with nursing staff and doctors adding another $2600 to $3000 a day to this cost.
\n\nAs of 2023, some 80% of the nursing workforce reported workplace violence impacting their ability to do their job. Does nobody see the correlation between this violence, the widening wealth gap, our patients’ inability to afford the care they need to survive, and the ever-growing greed of the few who want everything all to themselves? There are no beds to spare at the hospital and patients sleep in the hallways and ambulance bay, yet both rural and inner-city hospitals continue to close for lack of resources.
\n\nIn 2020, the city of Saint Paul closed St. Joes, the oldest hospital in the state of Minnesota. The community lost 253 beds at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the worst pandemic in modern history. In 2023, Fairview filed to sell the medical complex system that sits on both sides of the Mississippi to Stanford Health, seeking to merge the healthcare companies; if Fairview didn’t get someone to pay them out, they would have to file for bankruptcy. The CEO of Fairview, James Hereford, makes $4.3 million a year, which makes him one of the highest-earning healthcare CEOs in the Midwest. Yet the people who rely on the medical and Medicare system are the ones who are blamed.
\n\nThe “trickle-down system” is bleeding backwards, against gravity, up the pyramid to the top where the wealthy few are positioned. How can you claim to be a nonprofit company while the people at the top of the pyramid are making several millions of dollars in a year—and then nonetheless claim that the company is unable to stay afloat without a buyout?
\n\nRemember, nobody questions a nurse that looks busy.
\n\nSupply liberation and time exploitation should never come before bedside patient care. Ensure that your efforts to hold both identities as a nurse and a comrade don’t conflict with the ethical reasons you chose both sides of this work. Your goal is to decrease harm and pain: you are exploiting an unfair healthcare system while working directly with people who are in pain, many of whom understand that the system is exploiting them, too.
\n\nI liberate out of love, I expropriate in the name of harm reduction, I “steal” in the name of all of the people killed by the state of so-called Minnesota. I take in hope that these medical items can help to save or ease the lives of community members, so we don’t have to experience once again the trauma we experienced when we lost Alex, Nicole, Amir Locke, Winston Boogie Smith, Philando Castile, George Floyd, and too many others. Death at the hands of the state is so pervasive and the price of medical supplies is just too damn high.
\n\nTime theft is complicated when you’re a nurse. You work for the healthcare company, but you care for the patients; if you forget that and no longer see those you care for as human, you become part of the problem. The healthcare system is not human, and in any case, you will hurt your workplace very little by stealing things. But if you engage in time theft carelessly, you can strain the care that someone else is dependent on you for.
\n\nYou can take a longer break than your allotted time IF
\n\nYou can clock out a little late so that you can take the time to care for yourself between caring for patients and not have to rush your charting.
\n\nIf the hospital pays for your continuing education credits, you can use these to learn things that you can pass on to others in a community setting, such as diabetes education, CPR, and wound care. Rephrase the education you receive as a nurse when you present it as public-health community education: you’re not giving medical advice, but simply explaining how a body process or disease works.
\n\nAhead of the third No Kings worldwide day of protest on March 28, we published a call for anarchists to engage with the rallies as an opportunity to draw people into more concrete forms of organizing and action, and offered handouts for that purpose. Here, we share highlights and reports from some of the participants in the day’s events.
\n\nOrganizers claim that a total of eight million participants in the protests, up roughly a million from the October 18 No Kings rallies, which we had also published a call to engage with. Donald Trump’s popularity has reached an all-time low, as he continues to an unpopular war with Iran after his attempt to use Immigration and Customs Enforcement to terrorize cities like Minneapolis was thwarted by grassroots resistance. Yet concrete mass resistance has yet to take shape in most of the country.
\n\nThis makes anarchists’ efforts to demonstrate a way forward especially important. In Phoenix, in response to a local call for an anarchist contingent in No Kings expressing opposition to borders, ICE, and repression, anarchists displaying banners reading “Solidarity with the Prairieland Nine” and “First they came for the anti-fascists” marched at the very front of the crowd.
\n\nPhoenix, Arizona: Anarchists carry banners at the front of a march during the March 28, 2026 No Kings demonstrations.
\nMany of the flashpoints of March 28 took place at locations that have already become battlegrounds under the Trump administration. In downtown Los Angeles, protesters hurled chunks of concrete at Department of Homeland Security mercenaries outside the same federal detention center that was at the center of the clashes that touched off the uprising against ICE in June 2025. At the ICE facility in Broadview, near Chicago, Illinois, police arrested and brutalized several protesters. In Denver, protesters took over highway I-25, forcing police to respond with tear gas.
\n\nIn addition to the reports below, you can consult this report-back from anarchists in central Oregon.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/4.jpg\")
\nSupporters of the Prairieland defendants attended three No Kings events in DFW this past weekend. We passed out hundreds of fliers and had lots of conversations about the case, with both random attendees and activists. It was a great opportunity to see how far awareness of the case has spread—and it does seem to have spread.
\n\nIn Fort Worth, members of the DFW Support Committee had an official table and a speaking slot. We marched together, including two random young people who felt inspired to join our crew, with the defendant signs and a large banners that read “Free the Prairieland Defendants.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/2.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/3.jpg\")
\nIn Modesto, anarchists set up a free zine table with CrimethInc. stickers and color posters at the recent No Kings rally. The rally brought out hundreds of participants. We handed out free zines about the anti-ICE struggle and rapid response networks along with information about protest safety and more. Someone from a local group brought over a big bag of homemade whistle packs they had made at a recent event, featuring the number for the local rapid response line.
\n\nWhile thousands of miles away, the struggle in Minneapolis has had ripple effects here, pushing many to embrace the fight against ICE and get involved in local autonomous efforts. Many speakers at the event encouraged participants to get involved in anti-ICE organizing and to support calls for a general strike on May 1st—efforts we can all amplify and build toward.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/19.jpg\")
\nWe printed 800 flyers. Our little team distributed something like 700 of them in about two hours.
\n\nWe found ourselves circulating alongside the usual suspects selling socialist newspapers, but had positive response rates probably over 80%, with most of us remarking that sustained one-on-one conversations were a personal highlight. X—— and I talked to one older white woman living in Harlem who was giving out quarter sheet flyers that just explained how to download Signal. Lit.
\n\nI’m starting to feel that “liberal” (a coherent historical and political position advocating for free trade and political rights for citizens) is a poor descriptor of this kind of crowd. The widespread affect was both anger and directionlessness. X—— remarked that it would have been easy and politically striking to enter the crowd with huge banners on sticks or flags saying FREE THE PRAIRIELAND DEFENDANTS. The march offered physical and political space for that kind of heterogeneous vibe; an avant-garde contingent could have made use of it.
\n\nIt would have been moving to me to do something like that. It probably been useful for creating a pole to flyer and start conversations around, assuming we had a concrete project to involve people in.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/17.jpg\")
Anarchists carry banners at the front of the march on the Capitol building in Phoenix, Arizona during the March 28, 2026 No Kings demonstrations.
\nWe live in a college town of less than 100,000 people. We published an open call for an anarchist contingent in the No Kings demonstration here.
\n\nThe demonstration was to begin downtown, then march through the business district to a rally a half hour’s walk away. We knew it would be very difficult to find each other in the crowd, so we chose a convergence point several blocks away, at a location that has often served as a gathering point for previous anarchist demonstrations.
\n\nAs it turned out, however, some of us met there and proceeded to the main starting point together; others showed up at the starting point of the main demonstration, and indeed became lost in the crowd; and still others went directly to the site of the rally to set up literature tables, as they had done at the previous two No Kings demonstrations.
\n\nOnce those of us who met at the convergence point reached the crowd—which consisted of many thousands of people—we began distributing stickers and handbills promoting anarchism and an upcoming date on the Breaking the ICE speaking tour that was booked nearby. We gave out several hundred of these, but the march got underway before we could find each other again, so we marched in smaller knots, carrying our banners separately rather than in a single bloc. In the end, it may not have made much of a difference—almost everyone on the streets was in the march, so there was no crowd of spectators to witness a coherent anarchist contingent.
\n\nWhen the march reached the rally, it was easier to find each other around the folding tables that our comrades had set up and covered with zines. Throughout the rally, people came up to the tables; this turned out to be the part of the day when we were most identifiable as a political pole within the crowd. One smart tabler put up flyers throughout the rally area encouraging people to download Signal and subscribe to the local announcements-only Signal thread promoting anarchist events in the area.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/18.jpg\")
An anarchist literature table at a No Kings protest on March 28, 2026.
\nAmong ourselves, we took different approaches to engaging with the crowd. I spent the entire time proselytizing for the upcoming speaking event, just trying to get people into the room to learn about direct action. By contrast, one comrade got into a shouting match with a liberal carrying a sign proclaimed “I want to be governed, not looted”—the liberal simply would not understand why an anarchist would prefer to loot and not to be governed.
\n\nAlthough students at the university make up fully a quarter of the population of this town, the majority of the participants in the demonstration were in their forties or older. That underscores the fact that, while many millions of people have participated in the No Kings demonstrations, millions more who oppose Donald Trump—especially from the demographics that were the driving force behind the George Floyd rebellion—have stayed home. So far.
\n\nAfterwards, I spoke with anarchists in several mid-sized Midwestern cities whose efforts to engage with No Kings had gone similarly: they had showed up with banners and marched together in small groups, without anything happening that was especially worth reporting on. But they did distribute a lot of handbills, whether about the Prairieland case or other things.
\n\nI still think it would be advantageous to be able to show up to these demonstrations in large numbers with black flags and march together in a coherent bloc. If we want people to be interested in participating in anarchist initiatives, we have to show that we are a force to be reckoned with. When the streets are already full of people and the police have their hands full, doing so should be easier and safer than usual.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/5.jpg\")
A banner displayed by an anarchist contingent in a No Kings demonstration on March 28, 2026.
\nWe live in a mid-sized city, somewhere around 180,000 people. Our previous No Kings events were pretty substantial, and this weekend was no different with maybe 2000 people participating. A medium-sized group of us showed up in full black bloc. Before we even reached the protest, we were heckled by trucks and passersby. Fortunately, we were not the only anarchists there—we immediately found others in bloc that we didn’t even know. Once we combined numbers, we comprised a decent proportion of the protesters present.
\n\nWe spent much of our time leading chants and dancing to music, while the liberals around us sat in almost dead silence. We also handed out about 100 pamphlets and zines and talked to even more people about what being an anarchist means for us.
\n\nOur location in the protest was interesting—we were located on the sidewalk adjacent to a busy intersection, with us at the very end, facing the busiest corner in the area. Many drivers and passersby honked and chanted in support as they passed by. Others were less supportive. One truck dropped burning coal rocks in front of us; it was more pathetic than dangerous.
\n\nAbout 45 minutes in, we saw a crowd developing on the other side of the intersection, wearing MAGA hats and carrying flags and signs of hate. They kept shouting at us from the other side of the street and occasionally throwing things at us. Finally, some of the counter-protesters broke off from their group and walked towards our crowd.
\n\nWe interpreted this as a threat against the safety of every protester present, but also as an opportunity to show people that we don’t have to tolerate hate.
\n\nWe moved to the edge of the sidewalk and cut them off, preventing them from getting to the rest of the crowd. We yelled over them and refused to give them the opportunity to speak. When they got right up to us, they began yelling and threatening us, which caught the attention of some protest “marshals.” The marshals demanded that we let them pass and not give them any attention. We acted like we didn’t hear the marshals and continued blocking the counter-protesters off with a massive sign—poetically, it read “Fascists not welcome!”
\n\nEventually, the counter-protesters made their way back to their people. Altogether, they numbered no more than a dozen compared to our nearly 2000.
\n\nWe believed our presence at no kings was a local success. We spoke to a lot of people sympathetic to anarchism and anarchists. We made many new friends—and some enemies, but we did so unapologetically.
\n\nOne thing we did that we would like to recommend to anarchists everywhere else—stop bringing your phones to protests and instead bring Meshtastic LoRa devices. We were able to communicate effectively and efficiently without getting pinged by any cell towers. Our presence was basically invisible there, and being able to communicate that way gave us a unique advantage over our local surveillance adversaries.
\n\nThis video shows the conflict at the ICE facility in Portland on March 28, 2026.
\nAfter roughly 30,000 people flooded downtown Portland for the No Kings parade, a few hundred made their way to the ICE facility on the South Waterfront. People chanting “ICE out!” filled the driveway, stepping over the thin blue line that federal agents painted across the entrance to denote the point beyond which they are determined to arrest people.
\n\nAfter someone burned an American flag in the driveway, federal agents surged out and made an arrest. The crowd immediately pushed forward, forcing the agents to retreat back inside. Over a hundred people flooded the driveway. Projectiles flew towards the feds—water bottles, sticks, and random objects. Surprisingly, Department of Homeland Security agents did not respond with munitions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/1.jpg\")
The vicinity of the ICE facility in Portland, Oregon.
\nShortly after 6 pm, a band set up across the street, using a megaphone propped up on a mic stand. By sunset, the crowd had swelled to around 500.
\n\nAs the band played on, another rhythm took over: the rattle of the facility gates, shaking in time with the drums. Then—suddenly—they gave way. The gates burst open, and a few people stepped through.
\n\nDHS took their time responding. No Border Patrol, no Border Patrol Tactical Unit, no familiar wall of federal tactical gear—at least, not at first. For the first time in a long time, the feds in Portland hesitated.
\n\nIt turned out that they were waiting for backing from the local authorities.
\n\nSoon after DHS went back inside, Portland Police bike cops formed a line up the street at the intersection of Bancroft and Macadam. A riot van pulled in behind them and Oregon State Troopers spilled out to join the formation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/09.jpg\")
State troopers arrive.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/10.jpg\")
Police line.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/11.jpg\")
A Portland police officer known for his brutality.
\nTogether, they advanced on the crowd. The push from police was immediate and aggressive—they shoved people to the pavement, knocked older folks out of lawn chairs, barked orders to move back when there was physically nowhere to go. They forced the crowd back until they reached the edge of the facility, then declared the area closed, holding the line while the feds repaired their gate.
\n\nJust before 8 pm, nearly an hour later, police pulled back. The gate was fixed and local police had finished doing the feds’ bidding. The crowd erupted: “Whose streets? Our streets!”
\n\nThe fixed gate didn’t last two minutes.
\n\nHands were back on the gate. Metal groaned. And once again, it broke open. The crowd roared. Graffiti spread across the building: “Kill nazis,” among other tags. Within minutes, DHS returned—this time, with Border Patrol agents in full fatigues and gas masks. They carried out more arrests, bringing the total to at least four.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/12.jpg\")
DHS agents at night, before they retreated.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/13.jpg\")
DHS agents guarding the gate.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/14.jpg\")
The contested territory.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/15.jpg\")
One federal mercenary displaying egregiously bad muzzle discipline.
\nProtesters attempted to pull back those the officers targeted. They successfully de-arrested some people, despite being continuously obstructed by a wall of livestreamers and photographers raising their cameras.
\n\nEven then, however, the feds held back on using munitions. This was shocking, not what people have come to expect at the ICE facility. The officers moved in, made arrests, and retreated, only to experience another barrage of projectiles. Bottles, sticks, eggs, and other objects rained down until they disappeared behind their doors. While the restraint and lack of “less than lethals” on the part of federal agents was noticeable, this didn’t make the brutality of their arrests any less violent, as multiple arrestees were slammed down to the ground, piled on, and dragged away, and at least one officer pointed his loaded sidearm directly at people’s heads.
\n\nThroughout the night, a handful of far-right instigators were identified and forced out of the crowd. One of them was pummeled with water balloons filled with pink paint to the laughter and cheers of onlookers. Flags caught fire again—one American flag and one flag bearing a swastika. At one point, someone climbed onto the awning and dismantled a security camera piece by piece. This inspired people to take down several other cameras, pulling the wiring out.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/08.jpg\")
Right-wing instigators.
\nWhy did federal agents show unusual restraint? Why were local police left to do the bulk of the crowd control? These remain open questions.
\n\nBut one thing is not in question: people kept coming. They repeatedly crossed the blue line painted on the ground. They came back again every time federal agents attempted to push them back. Whatever strategy was unfolding behind those doors, it met with rage, defiance, and a refusal to back down.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/16.jpg\")
Mercenaries’ exit, stage left.
\nWe present a interview with Htet Khine Soe, an activist who organized in Burma1 for more than 20 years before relocating to Mae Sot in Thailand at the end of 2021. The interview was carried out by Ban Ge, a Chinese anarchist who has come back and forth to Mae Sot and worked closely with Burmese activists after the coup.
\n\nThis February, the military coup in Burma entered its fifth year. In Yangon, life appears to have returned to a fragile normality. Worn down by a revolution that seemed endlessly prolonged with no clear horizon of victory, many who once left their jobs to join the Civil Disobedience Movement have gradually returned to the system they once abandoned.
\n\nMeanwhile, in rural areas and border regions controlled by the armed forces of the resistance, the “Spring Revolution” has increasingly hardened into a stalemated civil war. The military junta’s drone strikes and aerial bombardments have become routine, and civilians continue to pay the price.
\n\nUnder these conditions, the military has moved forward with what it calls a long-delayed general election—widely described by observers as a sham election. With opposition parties dissolved or suppressed, there is little doubt that the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) will secure victory.
\n\nShortly after the 2021 coup, the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM)2 and nonviolent protests met with brutal military crackdowns. Some activists fled to the jungles, where they trained with ethnic armed organizations that had long fought against the military, forming People’s Defense Forces (PDF) and launching armed resistance. Others embarked on exile, scattering across the world. Mae Sot, the Thai border town opposite Burma, became one of the first destinations for many exiles and wounded resistance fighters.
\n\nIn February 2023, during events marking the second anniversary of the coup, I met Htet Khine Soe (Ko Htet), a Burmese anarchist activist, and decided to follow him to Mae Sot. We took an eight-hour bus ride from Chiang Mai, crossing the mountain ranges of Thailand’s Tak Province before reaching the border. Along the way, I told him about anarchist self-organized spaces and resistance networks in China. He, in turn, recounted stories from the revolution—flashmob strikes, urban guerrilla actions, assassinations, escapes, and exile.
\n\nDuring the first year after the coup, Ko Htet helped organize the General Strike Committee and flash mob strikes, and eventually became drawn into urban guerrilla operations. After a comrade he worked closely with was arrested, his name appeared on the wanted list and was circulated on a state-run media platform, forcing him to flee Yangon.
\n\nIn December, he escaped to Lay Kay Kaw, a town in Karen State, then known among young exiles as a “liberated area.” With PDF training camps located in nearby jungles, the town became a hub through which weapons and ammunition circulated, eventually making their way back into cities like Yangon and Mandalay to supply urban guerrilla groups.
\n\nBut this also made Lay Kay Kaw a military target. On December 15, five days after Ko Htet arrived, the military launched airstrikes on what had been called a “peace town.” He fled across the river into Thailand alongside waves of other displaced young exiles.
\n\nHis wife, Su Yi, an activist too, later arrived in Mae Sot with their two children to join him. The family obtained “stateless cards” and finally settled here. Their home gradually became a gathering place for the revolutionary exile community. After October 7, 2023, their children—an elementary-school-aged son and daughter—would tell visiting guests who brought Coca-Cola, “Don’t drink Coca-Cola—for Palestine.”
\n\nIn 2025, Ko Htet and Su Yi opened a T-shirt shop in Mae Sot called All Colours Are Beautiful—an anarchist wordplay hinting at the slogan All Cops Are Bastards (ACAB). Upstairs from the shop is their screen-printing workshop, where they produce many of the shirts sold there.\nOne of the most popular designs reads in English, No One Is Illegal. In a town where much of the population lives in various shades of legal uncertainty, wearing that shirt in public is strikingly provocative. Recently, Ko Htet sent me a photo of an immigration detention registration card showing a Burmese detainee standing before a height chart—the standard mugshot background—still wearing that same No One Is Illegal shirt.
\n\nOn the fifth anniversary of the coup, I invited Ko Htet to reflect on the revolution from an anarchist perspective: the tensions between their movement and the mainstream revolutionary forces represented by Aung San Suu Kyi, and how leftist networks of Burma—formed before the coup—have continued to organize and survive through exile.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/10/4.jpg\")
Htet Khine Soe in a flash mob strike in Yangon, March 2021.
\nAfter the 2021 coup, how did anarchists in Burma mobilize within the anti-junta movement? And what were your main disagreements with mainstream supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi?
\n\nOn the eve of the coup, rumors were already circulating, but almost nobody truly believed it would happen. The 2008 Constitution3 had already granted the military enormous institutional power, including an automatic 25% of seats in parliament. Under such arrangements, it seemed unnecessary for the military to seize power outright. Yet, on February 1, 2021, the coup took place.
\n\nOn the morning of the coup, I discussed with comrades who used to work with the All Burma Federation of Student Unions (ABFSU)—one of the country’s main leftist student organizations—and with members of our anarchist antifa group how to mobilize people to take to the streets. However, senior figures of the National League for Democracy (NLD) who had not yet been arrested, along with supporters of [Burmese politician] Aung San Suu Kyi, called on the public not to act immediately and instead to wait seventy-two hours. They were spreading the belief that international aid—and even an R2P intervention4—would soon arrive, encouraging people to stay home rather than take to the streets in protest.
\n\nBut that same day, the internet was cut off. Suddenly neither the military nor the NLD could effectively spread their propaganda. The movement I was involved in struggled to bring people onto the streets during the first three days. Communication between us was difficult, and organizing under those conditions was extremely challenging.
\n\nThe female workers of the Garment factory in Yangon’s well-known industrial district of Hlaingthaya were among the first to take to the streets in protest, while ABFSU, ignoring the NLD leadership’s calls for restraint, began organizing on their own. Meanwhile, ordinary people started spontaneously banging pots and pans from their balconies every evening in protest.5
\n\nFebruary 6 was the first, biggest day. Garment workers in Hlaingthaya again took to the streets while the military quickly blocked the roads. But on that same day, a nationwide wave of demonstrations began. Even people I knew who were normally indifferent to politics joined the mass protests.
\n\nAt that moment, nearly everyone united under the same slogan: opposing the coup and demanding the release of Aung San Suu Kyi. I even responded to NLD calls by buying red clothing and wearing it to demonstrations.
\n\nOn February 12, I became involved in organizing the General Strike Committee (GSC), which was formed for the fight against dictatorship from the people’s movement, made out of party members from a total of 25 groups, including ABFSU, labor organizations, and political parties. The GSC’s core demands were resisting military dictatorship, freeing Aung San Suu Kyi and all political prisoners, and abolishing the 2008 Constitution altogether. At that time, any political mobilization that did not include the demand to release Suu Kyi would struggle to gain public support. Still, we always emphasized the release of all political prisoners, not only her.
\n\nOur main disagreement with the NLD concerned the 2008 Constitution. NLD leaders and their supporters hoped to use the 2008 Constitution as a framework to restrain the military and preserve the outcome of the election. We, on the other hand, believed that this era had ended and that the constitution itself must be abolished. People needed to unite not just to defend an election result, but to dismantle the military’s structural role in Burma’s political system.
\n\nAt that time, protests took place almost daily. Public enthusiasm for resisting military rule was overwhelming. Whether or not people fully agreed with our political positions, once a crowd gathered, more people kept joining. During demonstrations, we organized speeches and morale-boosting segments explaining why removing the 2008 constitution was necessary.
\n\nOn March 3, during a protest organized by the General Strike Committee, more than three hundred people were arrested. After that, some groups began making crude explosive devices and noise bombs to push back against police and military repression in the streets. At the same time, the NLD and its supporters began accusing us of resorting to violence. They argued that once protests became violent, the revolution’s image in the international community would suffer.
\n\nOn social media, NLD supporters also labeled the General Strike Committee as communist or leftists. Because of decades of state propaganda portraying communism as a national threat, such accusations easily created suspicion and hostility toward us among the public.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/10/1.jpg\")
March 27, 2021, “Anti-Fascist Day”: leftist groups burning the 2008 Constitution on the street in Yangon. (Photo: Mar Naw)
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/10/6.jpg\")
March 27, 2021, “Anti-Fascist Day.” Leftist groups burning the 2008 Constitution on the street in Yangon. (Photo: Mar Naw)
\nAfter the military’s bloody crackdown on March 27, large-scale peaceful protests in the cities became almost impossible, and many people went to the jungles to begin armed resistance. But some chose to stay and continue the struggle in urban areas. Could you describe what that period was like?
\n\nMarch 27 was Burma’s Armed Forces Day, known locally as Tatmadaw Day. That day, large anti-coup protests once again broke out in major cities such as Yangon and Mandalay, and we took part as well. The military responded with brutal force, killing hundreds of protesters across the country.
\n\nIt is important to understand the historical meaning of that date. March 27 was once known as Anti-Fascist Resistance Day (ဖက်ဆစ်တော်လှန်ရေးနေ့)and was only renamed Tatmadaw Day in 1955. Originally, it commemorated the birth of the very army that later staged the coup: on March 27, 1945, General Aung San led Burmese forces in an uprising against Japanese fascist occupation. After Burma gained independence in 1948, Aung San’s Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League became the ruling political force.
\n\nSo on that same commemorative day in 2021, people took to the streets to protest against the coup carried out by that army, effectively reclaiming and redefining the meaning of the day through resistance. The massacre that followed demonstrated once again that the force once celebrated as anti-fascist had itself become fascist. After the crackdown, many of us deliberately began referring to March 27 once again as Anti-Fascist Day.
\n\nAnother day we have tried to reclaim is Martyrs’ Day on July 19, which commemorates the assassination of General Aung San. In official narratives, only ethnic Bamar figures are recognized as martyrs. Leaders from minority ethnic groups who died in conflicts with the central state are rarely, if ever, granted that status.
\n\nAfter the March 27 crackdown, it became increasingly difficult to organize peaceful demonstrations in cities. Many of my comrades left for the jungle to receive military training with ethnic armed organizations. Some went to Kachin State along the China-Burma border and Rakhine State bordering Bangladesh to train with the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and Arakan Army (AA), while others went to the Karen State border region to join the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA).
\n\nLater, some who returned from those areas told us that when new arrivals reached the camps, they were often greeted with a simple question as a test: “Are you joining the revolution to liberate the people, or just to free Aung San Suu Kyi?”
\n\nAs for me, I chose to remain in Yangon. From that time on, together with other comrades, we began organizing flash mob strikes—brief, rapidly assembled demonstrations that dispersed before security forces could respond. Many young people enthusiastically joined these actions, allowing resistance in the city to continue, even under increasingly dangerous conditions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/10/7.jpg\")
March 27, 2021, a flash mob protest in Kyi Myin Daing, Yangon. The banner says, “We will throw the fascists’ bones into the Bar Ka Yar ravine.” In Kyi Myin Daing, there is a large ravine called Bar Ka Yar. The flag in the photo is ABFSU flag. (Photo: Mar Naw)
\nHow did strategies change for those who stayed in Yangon compared with the earlier phase of resistance?
\n\nFlash mob strikes continued in Yangon until the end of 2021. During this period, our demands were no longer limited to opposing military rule or calling for Aung San Suu Kyi’s release. Instead, we began using protests to communicate broader political messages and bring forward issues that mattered to us.
\n\nAs mentioned before, we worked to reinterpret historical commemorations such as Anti-Fascist Day and Martyrs’ Day. We also pushed discussions about gender issues within the revolution, the impact of mining projects and land confiscation, ethnic relations, and the need to confront long-standing Bamar chauvinism. On anniversaries related to the Rohingya genocide, we organized actions in Muslim neighborhoods that connected solidarity with the Rohingya to broader global struggles, including solidarity movements for Palestine.
\n\nPeople carried banners into the streets expressing remorse for the role that members of the ethnic majority had played, directly or indirectly, in the persecution of the Rohingya. Looking back now, it is clear that while many people sincerely expressed regret, others treated such gestures as tactical tools for anti-coup mobilization; deep down, many still held Bamar nationalist views.
\n\nIn mid-April, the National Unity Government (NUG) was formed in exile, and several leaders from grassroots movements were incorporated into its structure. But many of their strategies and decisions were difficult for us to understand. While young people were still risking their lives by staging flash protests in the streets, the NUG began calling for “silent strikes,” asking people to stay home and shut down economic activity instead of protesting publicly.
\n\nAt the same time, internet shutdowns continued, making communication increasingly difficult. In response, we launched the Molotov Newsletter project in April. Our editorial collective were all leftists and the paper was published weekly.
\n\nWe printed and distributed physical copies in Yangon. The first issue, released in April, received an unexpectedly strong response: we distributed about 5000 printed copies there. Later that same month, the authorities declared it an illegal publication. Ironically, in the atmosphere of that time, this only made it more popular.
\n\nSince it was difficult to reach other regions physically, we uploaded the newspaper’s PDF online so people in different areas could download and distribute it themselves. Each issue received around 30,000 to 50,000 downloads on average.
\n\nSome of those who went to the jungles for training returned to the cities after only a month or two, and armed resistance began to appear in urban areas. Could you talk about that period?
\n\nAround May, some of those who had gone to the jungle for military training began to return to the major cities. They brought weapons with them and began carrying out urban guerrilla operations. Weapons started circulating in Yangon, and from then on, many young people joined flash mob protests during the day and took part in guerrilla actions at night.
\n\nIn August, the military raided an apartment on 44th Street in Yangon that served as a base for a group of young activists. Shortly before the raid, those young activists had planted a bomb beneath an anti-junta banner; when police came to remove the banner, the device exploded.\nLater, we learned how the location had been exposed. A taxi driver who regularly worked with the group had been arrested by the military. He himself had actively supported anti-junta activities after the coup and was someone we trusted. Under brutal interrogation, he was forced to reveal the location of the safe house on 44th Street.
\n\nOn the day of the raid, five people leaped from the rooftop in a desperate attempt to escape arrest. Two were killed instantly when they hit the ground, while three others were critically injured and taken to hospital. Inside the apartment, three more were captured alive. The survivors were later charged with the illegal manufacture and possession of explosives and sent to prison, where two of them died behind bars.
\n\nOnly one person managed to escape that day. He hid for twelve hours beneath a small rooftop “shelter”, barely daring to move as soldiers searched the building below. Under cover of darkness, he finally slipped away and later crossed the border illegally into Mae Sot.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/10/5.jpg\")
In the beginning of 2024, Ko Htet organized the funeral for the boy who fled 44th Street raid. The funeral turned into a protest. (Photo: El Kylo Mhu)
\nIn the winter of 2023, he fell ill with what should have been a treatable disease, but without proper identification documents, he was unable to receive adequate medical care in Thailand. He eventually died in Mae Sot. I helped organize his funeral, and what began as a farewell soon turned into a protest.
\n\nAfter the 44th Street raid in Yangon, more young people, driven by outrage, joined assassination operations in the city. They named their group the “44th Street Urban Guerrilla Group,” and revenge became a major motivation behind their actions.
\n\nPersonally, I always felt conflicted about these operations. I never actually aimed a gun at anyone. But because I worried about those comrades—most of them Gen Z kids—I often helped in other ways, keeping watch or driving them to and from operations. Step by step, I found myself involved anyway. For me, killing someone, or even seeing someone die in front of me, is extremely difficult to bear. It is a line I have never been able to cross emotionally.
\n\nDuring one of the operations, I saw a military affiliated woman shot. She collapsed right in front of me. For the next two years, she kept appearing in my nightmares.
\n\nOne day in 2023, I received a call from a stranger’s profile on Facebook Messenger. When I answered, it turned out to be one of the comrades from 44th Street who had been arrested. He had briefly gained access to a phone while being taken to court and used the chance to call me. He told me that the woman we believed had been killed was actually alive and was now testifying against him in court. I don’t think he expected my reaction. Hearing that she had survived, I felt an enormous sense of relief.
\n\nDuring that first year after the coup, how would you describe the relationship between leftist movements and the broader anti-coup revolution?
\n\nIn the first year after the coup, leftist organizing was highly structured. The revolution enabled our networks to expand rapidly. Many young people who had previously been apolitical or deliberately kept away from politics became radicalized, while those who already shared similar values were finally able to find one another.
\n\nBoth the streets and the public sphere became spaces where different political forces competed for hegemony within the movement. At that time, one of the slogans raised by the General Strike Committee was “Uproot the Fascist Military,” and it quickly spread and became widely popular. Another slogan people embraced was, “We Have Nothing to Lose but Our Chains,” from the Communist Manifesto. I even printed these slogans on T-shirts, and they were warmly received by protesters.
\n\nLeftist language began to enter the revolutionary space in a visible way. More and more people used the vocabulary of leftist struggle and anti-fascism in street protests. Through Molotov Newsletter, we tried to provide historical context, explaining what fascism and anti-fascist movements actually meant, so that these slogans would not remain merely emotional expressions but become part of a deeper political consciousness.
\n\nAnti-fascist protest songs were also created from the leftist community to remind people that, historically, many forces that once claimed to fight fascism eventually became oppressive themselves. That was not a path we wanted to follow. For example, when Aung San Suu Kyi stood alongside the military at the International Court of Justice, defending Burma against accusations of genocide, many of us saw that moment as her becoming an accomplice of fascism.6
\n\nDuring your formative years, how were people able to access leftist or anarchist ideas in Burma?
\n\nLeftist forces in Burma have long existed under heavy repression. When I was a teenager, books about contemporary student movements were extremely difficult to find. There were only a handful of books covering Burma’s history after independence. By contrast, there were plenty of works about the monarchy and the British colonial period. In official education, anti-colonial nationalism dominated the historical narrative, while discussions of resistance movements and social struggles after independence were often erased altogether.
\n\nMost writings on post-independence resistance or alternative political thought were published abroad following different waves of exiles, and bringing such books back into the country was difficult and sometimes dangerous.
\n\nBefore 2007, internet access was still very limited in Burma. To hear perspectives that differed from official propaganda, we relied largely on foreign radio broadcasts such as the BBC or Radio Free Asia. At the time, some propaganda and literary materials from the Burmese Communist Party circulated, along with a publication called Revolution (အရေးတော်ပုံ), which we could occasionally access online in fragments. We could also find some materials related to the All Burma Federation of Student Unions (ABFSU). But it is important to remember that, in those days, listening to so-called “enemy radio stations” or reading banned publications could lead to serious punishment, including imprisonment.
\n\nThe ABFSU has been the most important leftist student network in Burma. It was founded in 1936, when Burma was still under British colonial rule, and later played crucial roles both in the struggle for independence and in repeated anti-military movements.
\n\nAfter the military coup in 1962, student protests were brutally crushed, and the regime blew up the historic student union building at Rangoon University. Yet student resistance did not disappear. New waves of student protests erupted in 1974, 1975, and 1976. Then, during the nationwide pro-democracy uprising in 1988—the so-called 8888 Movement—the ABFSU flags returned to the streets and again became a symbol of resistance against military rule. Afterward, the military authorities frequently labeled the organization as a communist front or subversive force. When I was in university, I helped establish an ABFSU branch on my own campus.
\n\nAt the same time, the military’s propaganda machine consistently portrayed the Burmese Communist Party as one of the main sources of national instability and division. Ironically, after General Ne Win seized power in 1962 and established a decades-long military dictatorship, the only legal political party allowed by the regime—the Burma Socialist Program Party (BSPP)—claimed to follow socialism, promoting what it called the “Burmese Way to Socialism,” which in practice meant economic isolation, centralized control, and authoritarian rule.
\n\nYears of economic decline and social stagnation under this system led many people to associate poverty and repression directly with socialism. As a result, terms like “communism,” “socialism,” and even “leftist” became deeply stigmatized in public discourse. For many people, these words evoked fear or distrust. Because of this historical experience, mobilizing people around leftist ideas has always been extremely difficult in Burma.
\n\nWhen and how did you begin organizing actions in an anarchist way?
\n\nAround late 2013 and early 2014, we began forming anarchist reading groups and building networks for action. It was a very particular political moment. Formal military rule had ended in 2012, but Aung San Suu Kyi had not yet taken office—those years were widely described as a transition period. The military managed what it called a democratic transition; some political prisoners were released, and activities previously banned—such as public gatherings and publishing—became partially legal again. Civil society organizations began to emerge, and for a moment, it felt as if the country was moving toward normalcy.
\n\nAt the same time, Aung San Suu Kyi traveled around the country promoting a strategy of nonviolence and electoral change. She encouraged people to transform Burma through voting, but she did not support protests on the ground. Meanwhile, we became involved in organizing protests around land confiscation affecting farmers, workers’ labor rights, and later the student movement against the Thein Sein government’s National Education Law.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/10/2.jpg\")
An action carried out by Anonymous Burma in Yangon, 2014.
\nIn 2014, we created a group called Anonymous Burma and began carrying out actions under that name. Even in that period, organizing open street protests was still difficult and risky. So we wore masks, burned parliamentary posters in city centers, and set off fireworks to draw attention. Some people began calling us Burma’s version of “antifa,” and individuals with similar political views contacted us wanting to join.
\n\nZin Lynn, once a legendary leftist activist, now a political prisoner, was also part of our group Anonymous Burma. He had been a leading figure within ABFSU and was also a musician who wrote many revolutionary songs, including the anthem of ABFSU. He introduced generations of young protesters to classic revolutionary songs—writing Burmese lyrics for Bella Ciao, Do You Hear the People Sing, and The Internationale, so they could be sung in the streets, not just remembered from afar. After the violent crackdowns of March 2021, he went to the jungle for military training, later returned to Yangon to participate in urban guerrilla actions, and was arrested in September that year.
\n\nHe remains in prison today. You can see many leftist activists in exile paying tribute to him in their publications and during live performances.
\n\nIt was also during this period in Yangon that we began working with Food Not Bombs Burma. Kyaw Kyaw, the lead singer of the punk band Rebel Riot, had started organizing Food Not Bombs activities in Yangon in the early 2010s, and many of their political songs deeply influenced us. From then on, Food Not Bombs, Anonymous Burma, and ABFSU often worked together in protests and political/social organizing.
\n\nIn 2015, Burma held its first election of the transition era, and many ordinary people felt hopeful about the country’s future. But our resistance activities continued. That year, we organized what became known as the “Long March,” calling on students to march from Mandalay to Yangon in protest against the newly introduced National Education Law, which centralizes control over universities and increases state—and indirectly military—control over education. Thousands walked 600 km starting from Mandalay, and the government brutally cracked down in Letpadan, a city north of Yangon.
\n\nWith elections approaching, supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD were hostile toward our movement. They believed our protests would harm the election and disrupt the democratic transition. In their view, we were causing trouble at a critical political moment.
\n\nIt seems that, faced with the common enemy of military rule, the relationship between the Burma leftists and Aung San Suu Kyi was often ambiguous—sometimes cooperative, sometimes competitive.
\n\nIn fact, I have never voted for the National League for Democracy. In 2015, I did not vote. I also did not vote in the 2020 election. At the time, parts of the left started a “No Vote” movement. The only time I ever voted in Burma was during the 2008 constitutional referendum, and I voted against the constitution.
\n\nIn reality, before Aung San Suu Kyi came to power, much of Burma’s left had supported her. Since the 1990 election, ABFSU had strongly backed the NLD. When I was a teenager, I also took part in youth campaigns demanding her release from house arrest.
\n\nHowever, after her release in 2010, we soon realized that we could not agree with many of her policies and political agendas. For instance, while we demanded the complete abolition of the 2008 Constitution, she chose to accept its framework and participate in elections within it. Meanwhile, many large-scale mining projects continued under her administration, including the highly controversial Letpadaung copper mine, where we participated in protests against environmental damage and forced land seizures. Many of these projects had originally been signed during military rule with foreign companies, including Chinese firms. Instead of stopping them, her government responded harshly to local resistance.
\n\nThe same was true for projects such as the Chinese-backed Myitsone Dam in Kachin State, where protests were also suppressed. Her administration promoted economic development and foreign investment, but the result was often land confiscation and the displacement of local communities.
\n\nThe final break came with the Rohingya genocide in 2017. When she traveled to the International Court of Justice, some of us still hoped she might expose the military’s crimes. Instead, she publicly defended the military. Soon afterward, NLD supporters put up posters across the country showing Aung San Suu Kyi standing side by side with military leaders, with the slogan: “We stand with Aung San Suu Kyi.”
\n\nFor many of us on the left, that was the moment of definitive rupture.
\n\nOn October 7, 2023, mainstream “revolutionary circles,” including figures connected to the NUG and many representatives of the Bamar majority, openly expressed pro-Israel positions. Toward the end of 2025, when ABFSU issued a statement condemning what it described as US imperialism following the American intervention in Venezuela and the arrest of Maduro, it triggered intense backlash in Burma, with many people accusing ABFSU of being communist. In your view, when did the left begin to lose its mobilizing power?
\n\nIn the first year after the coup, leftists and anarchists finally found a battlefield where we could play a real role. At that time, we still had strong mobilizing power and were able to bring many left-wing issues into public discussion. Even into 2022, many activities continued, though increasingly underground. But as the initial revolutionary energy began to fade, leftist movements themselves also started to weaken.
\n\nBy 2023 and 2024, the Spring Revolution had entered a period of decline. The military kept advancing and consolidating control, while forces on the revolutionary side became increasingly fragmented and disorganized. Some revolutionary leaders openly made homophobic remarks, and reports of systematic sexual and gender-based violence emerged in certain so-called “liberated areas.” Yet under the banner of revolution, such issues were often deliberately downplayed or concealed, because many feared that internal criticism would weaken resistance against the junta.
\n\nMany comrades I once struggled alongside are now armed. Five years have passed. They are no longer the same people. The gun has become their form of power.
\n\nThose youth joined armed resistance out of anger and hatred toward military rule. But as the war dragged on, problems within the National Unity Government itself became more visible, and many fighters began to feel disillusioned. They had taken up arms to resist oppression, only to find that structures of power and hierarchy also existed within the revolutionary camp, the NUG leadership did not seem fundamentally different from the junta they opposed.
\n\nAs a result, more and more fighters chose to leave the jungles. Because of documentation and mobility restrictions, many could not travel far, and a significant number eventually ended up in border towns like Mae Sot.
\n\nDuring the early phase of the revolution, in Molotov Newsletter, we repeatedly stressed that armed resistance must be guided by political values, or else the struggle could degenerate into fragmented warlordism. But in reality, most People’s Defense Force units today are not politically oriented; their only unifying political position is opposition to the military junta. Similarly, any ethnic armed group that fights the military is automatically seen as a legitimate political force, often without further scrutiny.
\n\nYet many of these armed groups remain organized primarily along ethnic lines, and their political communities are built around ethnic identity. This risks reproducing new forms of ethno-nationalism rather than overcoming them. Even groups widely regarded today as among the most progressive, such as the BPLA (Bamar People’s Liberation Army), still operate within this framework to some extent. The difference is that they are more familiar with progressive discourses, and they attempt to regulate their conduct through such values, which is why they are still seen as one of the few armed groups that seriously engage with political questions.
\n\nNow it is the fifth year after the coup, the military has begun organizing what many observers call a sham election. How do you understand this moment?
\n\nMany people who left their jobs as part of the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) have eventually been forced to return to the very systems they once resisted, simply in order to survive. Others have sought asylum in third countries [after to Thailand]. The boycott movements that began in 2021 have become increasingly difficult to sustain. The military understands this reality very well, and it is precisely under these conditions that it has moved forward with what many see as another staged election.
\n\nSome political forces that stood on the margins of the NLD camp during the early days of the uprising, such as the People’s Party, are now participating in this widely criticized electoral process. At the same time, candidates in the election increasingly speak of “ceasefire” and “peace”—language that would have been almost unimaginable just a few years ago, when revolutionary momentum was still there.
\n\nI think that one important reason we have reached this point is that the National Unity Government (NUG) imposed its leadership on what initially was a spontaneous uprising led by young people, especially Gen Z protesters. Soon after the protests began, the NUG emerged, and most of its ministers came from the generation shaped by the 1988 uprising and the 1996 student movement. At the same time, some movement leaders who had strong influence among young people were incorporated into the structure, often as tokens, so that the leadership would not appear completely disconnected from the younger generation.
\n\nFor example, the NUG emphasizes what it calls representative politics—ensuring that women make up around half of leadership positions, or that different ethnic groups are included. But this does not necessarily mean that those women representatives oppose patriarchy, nor that ethnic representatives genuinely fight for the collective right of their communities. Often, such representation serves more as a display of diversity.
\n\nPeople still hate the military junta, but they are also tired of the Spring Revolution itself. Many who once devoted themselves fully to resistance are slowly returning to ordinary life, worn down by reality. I feel this personally. In the first year after the coup, I could devote myself entirely to the revolution. Now, like many others, I also struggle to survive.
\n\nFrom my perspective, the “Spring Revolution” has already failed. This is very difficult to say openly, and after so much sacrifice, many people cannot accept it. But I do not think we can continue living under the illusion that victory is just around the corner. If one day we want to win again, the only path forward may be to return to political education, to organizing young people, and to reclaiming the terrain of ideology and values.
\n\nAt the same time, I must add that my experience and my assessment of the revolution do not represent all leftist resistance fighters in Burma. The comrades who went into the jungles for military training and continue to fight in ethnic armed territories or in regions like Sagaing in central Burma experience the revolution very differently.
\n\nMore recently, in November 2025, the Spring Revolution Alliance formed. Many armed groups joined this alliance and moved away from the leadership of the National Unity Government. They pledged to guide themselves through shared progressive principles. For many people, this alliance still represents a remaining hope for unity within the resistance.
\n\nOn one hand, it feels as though revolutionary momentum is fading. On the other, here in Thailand, it seems that within the Burmese exile community, the “revolution” has become an NGO-driven industry. How do you see this?
\n\nIn fact, this trend did not begin after the Spring Revolution. Its roots go back to the earlier period of democratic transition.
\n\nAfter Aung San Suu Kyi came to power in 2015, Burma did experience a period of relative opening. For many people, it was the first time they felt Burma was reconnecting with the wider world. It was also during those years that a large number of Western NGOs entered Burma, bringing substantial funding into civil society.
\n\nMany former grassroots activists began establishing their own NGOs and became part of this new institutional ecosystem. Agendas were often shaped by donors, and activists increasingly worked according to funding priorities. Activism gradually became a profession.
\n\nBetween 2015 and 2020, you could clearly see that many projects and programs within civil society were shaped by externally driven agendas, sometimes poorly aligned with the actual needs of communities on the ground. During this process, it was painful to watch how some activists who had once been full of energy and conviction were gradually absorbed—and sometimes corrupted—by the NGO system.
\n\nNow, five years after the coup, we see the emergence of yet another generation of so-called NGO activists. Some use the revolution and people’s suffering to build personal careers—obtaining scholarships abroad, entering international NGO networks, and becoming spokespersons for Burma’s democratic struggle. Yet in reality, many of them are increasingly distant from what is happening on the ground.
\n\nFor my part, I have always followed a different logic. I maintain my own small business so that I can sustain myself independently while participating in social movements. Whether during the transition period or now, my comrades and I have continued to organize according to anarchist principles, relying on crowdfunding and mutual aid rather than writing budgets, applying for grants, or submitting project reports to keep our work going.
\n\nCould you describe how you are involved in social organizing now, in exile?
\n\nAt this stage, most of what I do focuses on organizing within the exile community. I arrived in Mae Sot at the end of 2021. From then on, I stopped my work with the General Strike Committee and shifted toward local community organizing.
\n\nMae Sot hosts a large transient population. Many are young people; many others are families who fled with their children. Quite a number of them once participated in the Civil Disobedience Movement and, after leaving their jobs, were blacklisted by the military authorities. Unable to leave Burma legally, they ended up stuck in this border town in a kind of temporary existence. Mae Sot is also a place of rest and supply for many PDF fighters. Some are still active in jungle-based resistance and only come here occasionally to rest. Others have left the battlefield because of injuries or disillusionment and are trying to survive here for now.
\n\nSome of these people may eventually resettle in third countries, but I believe many will one day return to Burma. For now, almost everyone here lives in a state of suspension—without stable work and without a real home. Yet many revolutionaries do not see these displaced people as part of the revolution anymore. Gradually, I realized that this is exactly where we need to work: organizing those who are stranded in these border spaces.
\n\nSo I started what we call the “Mae Sot Home,” using it as a platform to organize everyday activities—football matches, film screenings, reading groups—to bring together people from very different backgrounds: migrant workers, exiled resistance fighters, Bamar, Karen, and members of Muslim communities. Through these gatherings, we talk about anti-fascism, gender issues, and ethnic relations.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/10/3.jpg\")
An iftar during Ramandan in Maesot, 2024. Food Not Bombs Mae Sot providing food to the Muslim community.
\nAt the same time, together with other comrades, we established Food Not Bombs Mae Sot. We cook meals for displaced Burmese refugees, but not in a charitable, top-down way. Instead, we want to convey ideas of mutual aid and solidarity. Some people involved in armed resistance mock or even attack us, saying that now is the time for weapons, and that Food Not Bombs sounds like anti-war activism. But in reality, we were already organizing Food Not Bombs activities in Yangon in the early 2010s, long before the coup. We are fighting the military today so that one day we can live peacefully again—not so that society remains permanently militarized.
\n\nWithin the work of Mae Sot Home, football has become one of our most important organizing tools, partly for safety reasons. Many people here lack legal status, and public gatherings often exist in a gray zone. We once tried to organize a concert and were reported to the authorities, which forced us to change venues at the last minute. Football matches, however, are easier to hold, since the sport is widely accepted and popular locally. More importantly, football has almost no barriers to entry, and Burmese migrant workers in Mae Sot already have a strong football culture. It becomes an easy way to bring together young exiles and migrant workers. We also organize women’s teams and youth matches, and during these events, we discuss issues such as domestic violence, gender equality, and anti-fascism.
\n\nSome people who had migrated here before the coup originally felt distant from the revolutionary movement; but through playing football together, they gradually began to engage in conversations and understand the struggles others are facing. At the same time, some young people who arrived after the coup, especially those from big cities, sometimes become absorbed in their identity as “revolutionary exiles” and look down on those who came earlier—often migrant workers or Muslim cross-border traders—seeing them as not progressive enough. But in reality, racism and Bamar chauvinism also exist within the revolutionary movement itself. Rather than constantly drawing lines between friends and enemies, I think it is more important to leave room for people to change.
\n\nBurma’s education system has produced generations shaped by nationalist prejudice. Now, through the ruptures caused by the coup, revolution, and exile, we may finally have a chance to win some of them back.
\n\nMany Burmese anarchists use the English term “Burma” instead of “Myanmar” because of the latter’s association with the ruling military regime since its official adoption in 1989. Other Burmese leftists prefer “Myanmar” despite this association, because “Burma” (also preferred by the liberal National League for Democracy) is linked more closely to the Bamar majority, as well as to British colonialism. The terms are identical in Burmese; the different English spellings represent the literary and colloquial pronunciations. Both terms derive from the Bamar term for their own ethnic group. ↩
\nLaunched after the February 2021 coup, the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) of Burma is a nonviolent resistance movement, in which civil servants and workers went on strike and refused to cooperate with the junta, becoming a central force in the Spring Revolution despite severe repression. ↩
\nThe 2008 Constitution, drafted under military rule and approved in a controversial referendum shortly after Cyclone Nargis, is widely seen by opposition forces as a tool to preserve military control. It reserves 25 percent of parliamentary seats for the military, effectively granting it veto power over constitutional amendments. ↩
\nThe Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is a United Nations-endorsed international norm adopted in 2005, designed to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. It posits that sovereignty implies responsibility, and if a state fails to protect its population, the international community must intervene via diplomatic or, as a last resort, military means. ↩
\nThe practice of banging pots and pans from balconies at dusk comes from a traditional Burmese folk belief that making loud noises at twilight drives away evil spirits. ↩
\nIn December 2019, then State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi appeared before the International Court of Justice in The Hague to defend Burma against charges that the military had committed genocide against Rohingya Muslims. ↩
\nOn Saturday, January 24, an ICE agent murdered Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Five agents tackled and beat him, then an agent shot him multiple times. Video footage from multiple angles confirms that the agent shot Pretti after he had been disarmed. Immediately following the murder, the Whittier neighborhood rose up and battled ICE, Minnesota police, and Minnesota State Troopers for over four hours, eventually forcing them to withdraw.
\n\nThis murder occurred one day after a historic general strike in which more than 100,000 workers in the Twin Cities walked out against the ICE occupation. Many people in the streets expressed the opinion that the federal agents murdered Alex as an act of revenge for the strike.
\n\nOnce again, we note the role that local and state police play in enabling ICE to continue murdering with impunity. Democrat politicians have expressed disapproval of ICE tactics, but they and the police who supposedly answer to them have yet to do anything concrete to stop federal agents from terrorizing, abducting, and murdering.
\n\nThe following is an eyewitness account from an anarchist in Minneapolis.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/25/4.jpg\")
\nI woke up at 9:15 this morning to my phone buzzing over and over. The first text I saw read, “URGENT FROM WHIT/UPT IN FRONT OF GLAM DOLL DONUTS: Someone has been shot by ICE.” I groggily squirted some caffeine syrup into my water bottle as I processed this information. I threw on five layers of clothes, a pair of goggles, and a mask, called in sick to my job, and rushed to the scene.
\n\nWhen I got there, there was already yellow crime scene tape up around a three-block stretch of 26th Street. Masked ICE and Border Patrol officers guarded the perimeter, armed with shotguns and pepper spray cans. An ambulance was still there. A crowd circled around the crime scene tape, but did not cross it. A friend recognized me in the crowd and patted me on the shoulder. Someone told me the victim was dead. One person was weeping. Most people were cursing at the feds. An old woman was shouting “You are going to hell!” in the face of a Border Patrol stormtrooper. He was threatening her with a can of pepper spray.
\n\nBehind us, on 1st Avenue, three people started rolling a dumpster into the street. An ICE agent fired a tear gas grenade at them. My friend and I started running south on 1st Avenue to get away from the gas. We turned right, then right again onto Nicollet Avenue, bringing us to Nicollet and 26th, where ICE had murdered the man hardly half an hour before. There was a much bigger crowd here facing off against a skirmish line of feds. We recognized another friend of ours and ran up to them.
\n\nJust then, we heard the loud crack of flash-bang grenades being fired maybe two or three blocks northwest of us. “We’ll take my car,” our friend yelled. He was parked right there on Nicollet. We piled into his car and he flipped a U-turn and sped away from the ICE agents. We made a few turns and ended up at 25th and Blaisdell.
\n\nThere was a line of MPD Riot Squad cops at the far end, closer to Nicollet. I recognized them by their yellow vests. Between us and the pigs, closer to Blaisdell, a group of people were building a barricade out of dumpsters, trash cans, cinderblocks, and wooden pallets. We heard the ubiquitous call-and-response chants of “FUCK ICE, ICE OUT!” People drummed on the trash cans along to the beat. Someone was sprinkling what appeared to be home-made caltrops in front of the barricade.
\n\nAs we approached the barricade, people in the crowd started rolling the dumpsters forward toward the police line. Somebody lit one of them on fire. One man was shouting at us, futilely trying to peace-police the crowd, but no one wanted to hear it. A few people promptly escorted him away. Flames engulfed the burning dumpster. People rolled that one forward too.
\n\nFlames engulfed the burning dumpster.
\nThe police started shooting tear gas and rubber bullets. Their aim was not particularly good. This was the first time this year that I’ve seen them use rubber bullets rather than pepper balls or gas. The crowd fell back, and the cops charged forward and overtook our barricade. Three of them tackled and arrested one person near me, slamming her to the pavement. I yelled and turned back for a second, but instantly choked on the tear gas and was forced to fall back towards Blaisdell. Some people were chucking glass bottles and chunks of ice at the cops as they retreated.
\n\nThe crowd pulled more trash cans from the alleys and quickly began building another barricade further back. I had lost track of the person I had driven there with, but soon I found another person I knew. Some began shouting for people to fall back west on 26th and keep building barricades. This ad hoc strategy caught on. People ran down the street leaving trash cans and tires behind them, creating a series of small barricades as the cops advanced.
\n\nA woman was watching from her porch. Someone ran up and addressed her: “Ma’am, we’re out here defending the neighborhood against ICE. We need barricade materials. Is there anything in your yard you wouldn’t mind parting with?” She nodded urgently and showed them to her backyard, offering a flower bed, an old couch, and a lawn chair. Three people helped to carry these out and add them to the barricades.
\n\nWhile this game of cat-and-mouse progressed, Signal messages arrived from others who were holding down a different barricade three blocks away, on Nicollet on the south side of the intersection. Our crowd was facing off against MPD, but theirs was facing off against ICE. My friend and I decided to join them. We cut through a series of alleys until we came out on 27th Street.
\n\nWe ran left onto the stretch of Nicollet full of restaurants that locals know as “Eat Street.” There was a much bigger crowd there standing behind a barricade made mostly of wooden pallets. A skirmish line of ICE and CBP officers stood on the opposite side. We could see the fear in their eyes. It felt good.
\n\nNo sooner did we approach the barricade than ICE opened fire with tear gas. I’m not a stranger to tear gas, but they fired more than I’ve ever seen. Noxious white clouds enveloped us. My lungs felt like they were burning. Somebody picked up a canister and threw it back. We stampeded south on Nicollet to get out. When I turned to look behind me through the gas clouds, I saw ICE SUVs and a Bearcat armored car leaving the scene, headed east toward the highway.
\n\nWe ran down to 1st street, where I’d started out, to try to catch the agents as they retreated. We turned and ran north back up to 26th. People were peppering their cars with rocks and ice chunks as they drove off toward the 35W on-ramp. They fired more tear gas and green smoke out of the vehicles as they fled onto the highway.
\n\nAfter people chased off the ICE agents, we returned to 26th and Nicollet from the east. A huge number of state troopers were lined up on one end of 26th, facing the protesters on the other side. They had an LRAD on top of a Bearcat. One of the cops was reading a dispersal warning over a loudspeaker.
\n\n“SHUT THE FUCK UP!” one person shouted back.
\n\n“TRAITORS!” screamed someone else.
\n\nThe state troopers launched a barrage of tear gas and flash-bang grenades at us. Someone threw a powerful firecracker back at them. It exploded at their feet.
\n\nThe crowd hurried back and turned left onto another street. Everyone was exhausted from a long morning of activity; many were starting to move more slowly. I saw the state trooper vehicles speeding away through their own cloud of tear gas, just as the ICE agents had done. It took me a minute to realize that they were gone.
\n\nI ducked out of the ongoing protest. It was high time to buy a real gas mask. I went to a hardware store and picked up a big pack of hand-warmers to give out to the crowd. It wasn’t until my adrenalin eased up that I realized I hadn’t eaten yet. I was famished.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/25/1.jpg\")
\nI returned to the site of the murder about 45 minutes later. A massive crowd of well over 1000 people had gathered, filling up a whole city block. It reminded me unmistakably of George Floyd Square. The block that was once Eat Street had transformed into Alex Pretti Square.
\n\nIt appeared that all the little barricades that the people of Whittier had erected had been relocated here, blocking off Nicollet at both ends. People sat on top of dumpsters, drumming on the lids. The crowd looked more racially diverse than I’d ever seen that neighborhood before. A Mexican flag was waving near the middle of the crowd.
\n\nA young woman produced a PA system in the middle of the crowd. Everybody circled around it as people took turns making speeches.
\n\nA young man took the mic. He couldn’t have been more than 20.
\n\n“Y’ALL. NOBODY IS COMING TO SAVE US. WE MADE HISTORY YESTERDAY. WE WENT ON GENERAL STRIKE. WE SHUT DOWN THIS WHOLE FUCKING CITY. THAT’S THE BEST WEAPON THE PEOPLE HAVE, WE’RE THE ONES WHO MAKE THE WORLD RUN AND WE’RE THE ONES WHO CAN MAKE IT STOP. BUT ONE DAY’S NOT ENOUGH. WE GOTTA KEEP IT GOING INTO MONDAY.”
\n\nThe crowd broke out into thunderous applause, cheering and drumming rhythmically on the dumpster lids.
\n\nThe young man started a chant: “NO MORE MINNESOTA NICE! MONDAY MINNESOTA STRIKE!”
\n\nIt echoed across the square.
\n\nThe ICE invasion of the Twin Cities has long since passed the point of no return. It is unthinkable that society could return to “normal” after what we have seen and felt. The powers that be know very well that they have to play for keeps now. So do we.
\n\nToday, at the Battle of Whittier, even through the tear gas, we could taste a softer, gentler future to come. These federal murderers know it, too. We will bury them beneath the new world in our hearts.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/25/2.jpg\")
\nOn January 23, thousands of people went on strike in the Twin Cities to oppose the ongoing campaign of kidnapping and murder that federal mercenaries have perpetrated over the past two months in service to Donald Trump’s program of ethnic cleansing. Over 1000 businesses shut down—some enthusiastically, others involuntarily. At the same time, a smaller number of demonstrators set out to prevent federal mercenaries associated with Immigration and Customs Enforcement from carrying out the abductions they had planned for the day.
\n\nEarly on the morning of January 23, in sub-zero conditions, roughly 75 demonstrators with shields and reinforced banners blocked the intersection of Minnehaha and Federal Drive, immediately adjacent to the Bishop Henry Whipple building, which ICE has been using as their base of operations in the Twin Cities. At the same time, someone left an RV trailer blocking Airport Service Road near the north end of Federal Drive (see map). This completely blocked two of the three means of ingress and egress to and from the Whipple building. Presumably, the blockade was intended to box ICE in at the north end of Federal Drive, blocking off every point of egress, but as it played out, they still had access to one exit.
\n\nThe RV trailer blocking Airport Service Road remained in place for about half an hour. The demonstrators blocked the intersection of Minnehaha and Federal Drive for two and a half hours.
\n\nThere was no sign of ICE or BorTac (the Border Patrol Tactical Unit, members of which have beaten and tear gassed protesters at prior actions by the Whipple building) during the entire two and a half hours. The ICE motor pool appeared almost totally full during the action, suggesting that they weren’t staging from any secondary location. It is possible that this action effectively trapped a large number of ICE agents at their headquarters.
\n\nEventually, after the trailer had been removed, Hennepin sheriffs threatened to attack the demonstrators with chemical weapons. The participants in the blockade dispersed five minutes later, before chemical weapons were deployed. Two arrests were reported in the area, apparently not in connection with the blockade at the intersection of Minnehaha and Federal Drive.
\n\nThe role of the sheriffs is noteworthy. From Chicago to the Twin Cities, local and state police that supposedly answer to Democrat politicians have played a fundamental role in violently suppressing protests in order to enable ICE to continue kidnapping and brutalizing people. Any movement against ICE will have to contend with this bipartisanship.
\n\nTwo weeks ago, on January 8, protesters blocked the gates of the Whipple building for one hour in response to the murder of Renee Nicole Good by federal agent Jonathan Ross. Today’s attempt raises the bar. It is inspiring that thousands of people participated in today’s general strike. The blockade at the Whipple building shows that some are prepared to go further, taking bold and creative action to directly impact what ICE can and cannot do.
\n\nIn the following anonymously submitted account, participants describe what they witnessed during the blockade and offer some context for their experiences resisting the ICE occupation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/24/1.jpg\")
Location 1: demonstrators blocked the intersection of Minnehaha and Federal Drive. Location 2: an abandoned RV trailer blocked Airport Service Road.
\n“It’s been the longest year of my life.” You can hear this refrain throughout the Twin Cities—and it’s only January. More than fifty days of occupation by federal forces has weighed upon the resolve and well-being of resisters and occupiers alike.
\n\nThe federal site at Fort Snelling, where the Whipple Building is located, is known for having served as a concentration camp imprisoning the Dakota people in the 1860s. This legacy continues today with the use of the site as the home base for thousands of masked kidnappers. The 3000 federal agents involved in this operation outnumber the ten largest police forces in the Twin Cities combined.
\n\nThe first abductions began as a trickle and built to a stream, then a flood like the mighty Mississippi. The most henious and evil acts are burned into our brains, reminiscent of the sort of attacks the Israeli army has carried out in the West Bank: ambushes on schools and hospitals, masked invaders using terrified children as hostages, shootings, even a public execution. The piercing tones of 3D-printed whistles are scorched onto our eardrums like tinnitus. Yet the violence of ICE has fueled a shared rage that many people never knew they were capable of. Many new resisters are waking up to this reality for the first time. Others have experienced wave after wave of struggle in the Twin Cities, which have prepared many of us for this moment.
\n\nFascism is not on the way. It is here.
\n\nIn response, people prepared to go on the offensive on the day of the general strike. This offensive involved three different struggles, none any less important than the others.
\n\nLike many on the global stage, we find ourselves in unfamiliar waters. The old rules have been thrown out the window. In the streets, ICE acts more like Nazis than like cops. This is especially apparent to those of us with experience in anti-fascist organizing. Their terroristic tactics combine a mixture of brutality and cowardice; their unpredictable nature has strained even seasoned veterans.
\n\nThis is the first form of conflict we must deal with: struggle against self.
\n\nUncertainty breeds fear. We have use threat modeling to identify what the risks are and which ones we are prepared to run. Movement tactics like positioning sharpshooters on roofs, using security checkpoints, and sending security teams to escort people through dangerous areas have become common once again, as they were in the height of the 2020 uprisings. This is the case even for large meetings now. We study and practice these skills over and over, doing our best to address our fears while seeking to assuage anguish over those who have already been disappeared.
\n\nCare must be taken when deliberating too, as frustration can easily flare up over minor or inconsequential issues. Recognizing and regulating our own emotional states is key to avoiding the tendency to act on fear. Group visualization techniques present an opportunity to imagine possible outcomes and prepare our responses in advance.
\n\nThe crime against humanity that we call genocide doesn’t just affect those who are abducted or killed. Those who remain must carry its weight. In the week leading up to the general strike, we wrestled with all of these things. Nonetheless, we pressed on.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/24/2.jpg\")
Demonstrators with shields and reinforced banners blocking the intersection of Minnehaha and Federal Drive.
\nThere is a difference between ordinary cold and bitter cold. It’s difficult to describe if you haven’t experienced it. In the bitter cold, there is almost a serene stillness to the air, a seeming tranquility daring you to underestimate its lethality. Literal arctic chills can spread through our state. A week ahead of the general strike, it became clear that it was going to be a very cold day.
\n\nThis second form of conflict is just as dangerous as any human violence: struggle against nature.
\n\nI’ve seen one exposure death before. The glassy black skin on their body isn’t a vision I will ever forget. ICE have recently been taking a page out of the Saskatoon Police force’s “Starlight Tours” and dropping off arrestees in the middle of the night in remote areas, intentionally using weather exposure as a weapon of torture. On the morning of the general strike, temperature adjusted for wind chill was about -30 degrees Fahrenheit (-35 Celsius). This can cause uncovered skin to develop frostbite within twenty minutes, a challenge that requires careful planning and specialized clothing to address.
\n\nIn the modern surveillance state, one must also take care to avoid being identified by one’s specialized winter clothing. Despite organized warming stations, several volunteers from out of town underestimated the risks and were injured from exposure alone. There surely would have been two or three times as many participants in the blockade were it not so bitter outside.
\n\nAs in the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline, there were concerns that state or federal forces might use water as a weapon. At one point, a scout identifed and radioed out what appeared to be preparations to employ a water cannon. In this weather, with no nearby facilities to warm up in, such a weapon could inflict permanent harm. Similarly, water to flush chemical weapons can pose a risk in these temperatures.
\n\nTensions were high, but with extra jackets and handwarmers, we were able to hold the line.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/24/3.jpg\")
The RV trailor abandoned in the middle of Airport Service Road.
\nBeing across the highway from the rest of the city, the Whipple Building is difficult to reach on foot and well-protected from pedestrians. Two days before the action, our adversaries added additional layers of fencing to create chokepoints and opportunites to trap demonstrators. They put up jersey barriers and fences on either side of Federal Drive, all the way down, separating the street from the sidewalk, blocking off every driveway—creating a sort of tunnel. Understood solely as a defensive tactic, this made sense in a mindset obsessed with violence. Though it also made it easier to blockade the route, as their fortifications left them only three exit points.
\n\nFour different groups prepared to take action to blockade those points. This is the final form of conflict we must confront: struggle against the occupiers.
\n\nOne group walked in from the city and train station, carrying shields, steel banners, and other items. Their goal was to block the primary access point, diverting traffic. Arriving early, I saw items being distributed as people huddled for warmth in the exposed parking lot. At first, the numbers looked concerningly small. The group pressed forward to the chokepoint, occupying the area before the tunnel. The demonstrators could not get in, but the mercenaries would not get out.
\n\nPerhaps the latter had not prepared for this mutual achievement of goals. In any case, the only forces that these demonstrators encountered were three squad cars from the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department. The federal forces remained holed up in the building, apparently afraid to step into the cold. The demonstrators chanted and taunted them to draw their ire; still, federal agents did not show themselves. They took no offensive action of any kind.
\n\nPerhaps the federal agents, too, are exhausted from their long campaign of contemptible violence. Perhaps they were stretched thin from preparing to deal with the general strike. Perhaps they were more afraid of nature than the demonstrators were. Or perhaps they were obeying strict orders from their commanding officers not to engage, for reasons we can only speculate about.
\n\nIn any case, it was unusual that they did not attack the blockade. The participants successfully retained all the equipment and supplies they had brought out to the action, which is unusual for such confrontations.
\n\nWhile that group held the city entrance, other groups took coordinated action elsewhere. One group towed blockading material into the highway entrance. The first convoy in this group apparently deployed an RV trailer and exited the area. A second convoy in the group left the area without deploying any sort of barricade, as sheriffs swarmed the trailer at the last second. The single RV trailer that remained nonetheless obstructed egress for nearly half an hour.
\n\nFinally, two other groups provided support and a human blockade on a side road. Unfortunately, sheriffs carried out two arrests there during an agressive push towards the fortified “tunnel.” Reportedly, snowballs were thrown at federal vehicles, shattering one window. Ice versus ICE.
\n\nAfter tear gas was deployed, many of the people in this area began coming over to the primary blockade, reinforcing the numbers at the intersection of Minnehaha and Federal Drive.
\n\nAs the hard barricades were cleared and others poured in, the demonstrators took a moment to consider the situation. They had already achieved their objectives for the day, coordinating between several groups and seizing the opportunity of the general strike as a whole to grind things to a halt at the Whipple building. Given the opportunity to leave without sustaining losses, they chose to take it, leaving before weapons were deployed. They marched back as a single unit in a tactical retreat, still protected by shields and steel banners, chanting “Minnesota’s got the ICE melt!”
\n\nFor two and a half hours, demonstrators had blocked all but one of the routes in and out of the Whipple building.
\n\nToday’s action only strengthens our resolve. Now we have more experience coordinating with one another and more knowledge of the terrain. The fact that federal forces did not show themselves reinforces the notion that they are not prepared to defend themselves in large confrontations—or at least, that they consider it preferable to avoid doing so. Their continued reliance on state police and sheriffs poses complicated strategic questions for us, but it could also create complications for them in the future.
\n\nAs local comrades recently stated in regards to Donald Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act:
\n\n\n\n\n“We must continue to organize communities, patrol our streets and build rapid response teams, push for workplace stoppages, and grind them down every step of the way. We must exact a price for every footprint they leave in our snow. When we have the opportunity, we will drive them from our streets and tear down their concentration camp. ICE will melt when the heat turns up.”
\n
Forever yours in struggle.
\n\nOn January 7, 2026, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed our comrade Renee Good in cold blood. The following is an account of the events that immediately followed her murder from the perspective of an anarchist in Minneapolis. These words are dedicated to her memory.
\n\nRenee Good was murdered a mere six blocks from where George Floyd was murdered in May 2020. This feels significant in two ways. First, South Minneapolis has a history and memory of resistance. Thousands of people here still remember fighting the police in 2020. Secondly, a similar dynamic could play out today, just as in the fiery summer of 2020, when the unrest in Minneapolis acted as the spark that ignited a national uprising.
\n\nFor 38 days now, the Department of Homeland Security has been occupying the Twin Cities to terrorize our immigrant neighbors. This Monday, they deployed 2000 more ICE agents to dramatically increase the number of abductions. This is an unprecedented escalation. No other city has yet experienced an ICE occupation at this scale.
\n\nThis escalation is a reaction to the groundswell of resistance against ICE that our communities have carried out over the past several weeks. More than 4000 people have participated in at least 81 rapid response groups—patrolling, tailing, and boxing in ICE vehicles, warning our neighbors, protesting at hotels hosting ICE agents, and confronting them as they attempt to go about their evil business. The current surge in ICE attacks has not driven us to despair; we believe that it indicates that ICE is like a wild animal backed into a corner. Its erratic and violent behavior is beginning to suggest desperation. It is an agency in crisis, an agency that can be defeated.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/08/2.jpg\")
People stand vigil for Renee Good after ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered her.
\nYesterday, on January 7, I went to the Bishop Henry Whipple building at 8 am with a friend. The Whipple building is the ICE headquarters for the entire Upper Midwest; it is where they stage before carrying out their raids. I took pictures of their license plates for about an hour. A third friend planned to join us. Then she texted me that she couldn’t make it because ICE had shot someone.
\n\nMy friend and I left Whipple and sped towards Portland and 34th, where the shooting had just taken place. When we arrived, Signal stopped working for both of us, as if our phones were being jammed. There was yellow crime scene tape up and dozens of MPD officers were protecting ICE officers in full tactical gear. The cops had a Bearcat with an LRAD on top. Greg Bovino himself, the “commander at large” of Border Patrol, was standing there in tactical gear. A crowd was forming—not just recognizable activists, but also ordinary neighbors who lived on that block coming out to cuss at them. We started a chant: “Cops! Pigs! Murderers!”
\n\nThings heated up when an agent tackled a protester about a block away. He grabbed them by their clothing and tried to force their hands behind their back in a snowbank. Somebody else body-checked the agent, knocking him down. A few people from the crowd ran over to see what was happening. A middle-aged local demanded to know why they were arresting the person.
\n\n“She was slashing tires,” the ICE agent answered.
\n\nThe man yelled back, “I’m gonna do that too, motherfucker!”
\n\nThere was a standoff for a couple minutes until the agent let the person go and retreated to the larger group of ICE agents.
\n\nThe crowd started to gain confidence, getting in the faces of the ICE agents and chanting more aggressively. MPD cleared an exit for ICE to leave by heading south on Portland Avenue; they began to drive their vehicles out. Some people started shouting for people to get into the street to block them. The crowd hesitated at first, but a few people got into the street and blocked an ICE vehicle. Seeing this, more people began to get into the street. MPD officers shoved them out of the way. People kicked the ICE vehicles as they sped off. One person almost got hit.
\n\nAs more of the crowd blocked Portland Avenue, the cops tried to clear a different exit for them, aiming to enable them to head west on 34th. People started chanting “Fists up, feds down, get the fuck out of town!” ICE guys with less-lethal launchers and shotguns were guarding an SUV as it tried to leave. People started throwing snowballs. The crowd surged forward and I came face to face with an ICE agent sticking the barrel of his launcher in my face.
\n\n“What are you gonna do,” I demanded, “shoot me too?”
\n\nHe shot the launcher at my face at point-blank range. My first thought was “I just lost an eye.” That’s how it felt. Street medics pulled me back and started flushing my eyes. Off to my right, I could see people chasing some ICE agents into an alley behind some houses. I saw the same middle-aged man who had intervened on behalf of the other protester also take a pepper ball to the face at very close range. The agents shot tear gas and tackled somebody else.
\n\nTwo comrades who were helping to give me medical treatment assisted me in moving to a house two blocks away to get cleaned up. I showered and put gauze on the wound on my face. When I got out of the shower, I saw more commotion down on the sidewalk. It was hard to tell whether ICE was chasing people or people were chasing them.
\n\nSome people erected a barricade at Portland and 33rd, a block away from where Renee was murdered. The barricade remains there today, with protesters camping out there—including some familiar faces who held down the George Floyd Square autonomous zone half a mile away for over a year.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/08/3.jpg\")
The barricade at Portland and 33rd, a block away from where Renee was murdered.
\nI went home to nurse my wounds and wash the pepper spray out of my clothes. A couple hours later, I heard reports that ICE was raiding Roosevelt high school and had rammed an observer’s car with one of their cars, weaponizing their vehicle as we’ve frequently seen them do. A fight broke out outside the main entrance. They arrested a protester, but they failed to catch the student they were trying to kidnap. This should remind everyone that they aren’t invincible: when we commit ourselves to our actions, we can beat them.
\n\nAt about 4:30 pm, a group of 30 or 40 protesters breached the doors of the Federal Courthouse downtown. As security guards pushed back against the revolving doors to keep them out, someone smashed out a window. No one was arrested there. The spontaneity of the moment and the sheer number of little protests flaring up around the Twin Cities made it impossible for the authorities to react to all of them.
\n\nThat night, there was a mass vigil to mourn Renee’s death. Some ten thousand people came out, crowding around burn barrels as they flooded Portland Avenue as far as the eye could see. It felt like everyone on the Southside was there.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/08/1.jpg\")
People stand vigil for Renee Good after ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered her.
\nSince the beginning of the invasion of the Twin Cities, messy contradictions have abounded in the network of rapid response groups that has sprung up. In the early days, there were major clashes with ICE at the Bro-Tex paper factory and on the eastside of St Paul. Some weeks later, there was a clash at 29th and Pillsbury, where they tackled a pregnant woman. Following these, there was a lot of peace policing and debating about nonviolence. Liberal elements have gained ground, and things that we could take for granted in 2020 are no longer established.
\n\nA lot of the people in the rapid response groups come out of 50501 and the No Kings protests and are very green and inexperienced. This can be a blessing and a curse. There is a huge wellspring of creative energy; various neighborhoods are trying all sorts of different strategies for alert systems and mutual aid. At times, the liberals running dispatch have been doing de facto counter-insurgency by telling people not to go to the scene of an abduction. Well-attended patrol trainings have instructed people to stay at least 30 feet away from ICE at all times. There is a culture of referring to ourselves as “observers,” an insidious brainworm for those of us who want to do everything we can to disrupt and interfere with ICE operations. There is a heavy emphasis on collecting ICE license plates, which has proven less and less useful as agents switch out their plates and 2000 new vehicles infest our streets. We have found foot patrols around hotspots like Lake and Bloomington to be increasingly effective since the surge began on Monday. It doesn’t take long to find an ICE agent skulking around.
\n\nIn my opinion, we will have to fight on two levels to defeat the ICE invasion. We have to become more agile and more courageous at stopping abductions promptly and forcefully, and we also have to defeat them on a political level by popularizing the idea that ICE represents an attack on society as a whole. The conditions for another uprising like 2020 are bubbling just below the surface. It is a subterranean fire and the feds cannot put it out.
\n\nWe owe it to our fallen sister Renee Good to push on these tensions until we break through to the other side.
\n\nThe barricade at Portland and 33rd, a block away from where Renee was murdered.
\nThe barricade at Portland and 33rd, a block away from where Renee was murdered.
\nFuck ICE.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/08/4.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/08/5.jpg\")
\nFollowing the “No Kings, No Masters” call to establish an anti-authoritarian presence at the October 18 “No Kings” rallies around the United States, we reached out to anarchists in a dozen cities and towns to learn how their efforts went and how they understand the challenges and potential of these protests.
\n\nMany of the official organizers of the No Kings demonstrations are passionately invested in emphasizing that they are peaceful and law-abiding. At the same time, federal agencies are making a point of displaying their brutality and disregard for legal precedent, while steadily amassing more resources with which to harm communities and suppress opposition. Absent a concrete plan to address the fact that Donald Trump clearly does not intend to leave office voluntarily, the focus on symbolic, legalistic, and inconsequential protest can only be self-defeating.
\n\nTo rise to the challenge posed by ascendant fascism, the movement against Trump’s power grab will have to find concrete ways to exert leverage, likely including the tactics and strategies that anarchists have developed. Far from frightening away participants, this will draw in those who tend to remain aloof from struggles until there is something substantial at stake—including many of the poorest and most oppressed, who participated in the George Floyd revolt but have largely stayed on the sidelines during the No Kings protests thus far.
\n\nDespite the desire of many No Kings organizers to remain innocuous, Donald Trump and his supporters are determined to portray them as crazed extremists. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise called No Kings a “hate America rally.” House Speaker Mike Johnson described the participants as “Hamas supporters,” “antifa types,” and “Marxists,” while House Majority Whip Tom Emmer described them as representing “the terrorist wing” of the Democratic Party, a “small but very violent and vocal group.” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told Fox News “This is part of antifa, paid protesters.” All of this is laughably mendacious, but it should drive home to Democrats that they will gain nothing whatsoever from attempting to show how peaceful and compliant they are. Trump and his lackeys aim to intimidate them into passivity—but regardless of how passive they are, the administration intends to treat them as terrorists.
\n\nLet extreme-right grifters and Donald Trump himself charge that the No Kings protesters are “antifa,” or, contradictorily, that anarchists are attempting to infiltrate the No Kings demonstrations. Their very claims will undermine the credibility of those talking points in the eyes of the general public, while compelling millions of people to ask themselves whether they, too, are indeed anti-fascists who should avail themselves of the lessons of the long tradition of anti-authoritarian resistance. There are already signs that this is happening.
\n\nThe anecdotes below, taken from a variety of contexts across the country, show the beginnings of anarchist participation in a movement that must expand and intensify if we are to avert collective disaster.
\n\nA group fluctuating between five and ten people with a banner, a flyer, and a couple of megaphones managed to reroute and lead the largest march I’ve ever seen in the mid-size urban sprawl of [location redacted]. I’m not sure how large the march was; it was definitely massive by local standards, probably in the thousands, an order of magnitude larger than what we saw in 2020, as it completely surrounded a park with a circumference of over three miles.
\n\nAt first, we marched by ourselves on the streets next to Indivisible’s sidewalk marchers, skirting various interactions with peace police telling us to get off the road. “If a crowd is larger than 100 people, we’re allowed to take one lane” worked fine. We gradually assembled a large enough contingent to stop at an intersection, then turned around to march against the direction of the slithering circular sidewalk march. As a consequence, pretty much anyone under 60 (and some brave elders), including many with pro-“Antifa” signs and a couple One Piece flags, wound up taking the streets in a massive angry march that defied protest marshals. Friendly scooters and motorcyclists spontaneously protected the rear. We stopped at intersections to deliver our messaging over the megaphones and invite the crowd to follow up with us by attending an event we had organized ahead of time (see flyer). Marching through downtown with little to no police presence, having left the peace police behind us, even one or two people who had prepared properly could have gotten away with a lot more and perhaps kicked off something historic. But this intervention—the first one in a long time in which I have seen protesters successfully perform something akin to a breakout march—is a harbinger of things to come.
\n\nThe video shows how it started and then how it went. The photos show the flyer we distributed and read over the megaphone and the zine table we set up at the park, minus all the donuts, water, and masks that we distributed.
\n\nA lot of folks seem very hesitant about engaging with people outside of the movement right now. I think that’s a mistake. The fascists have crashed the economy, systematically alienated every demographic except Twitter nazis, and destroyed the legitimacy of federal law enforcement, the media, the Supreme Court, and both political parties. People are furious, scared, and looking for answers. In many ways, it is the ideal environment for anarchists, but we have to be willing to step outside of our comfort zone, openly and proudly advocate for our ideals, and take some risks trusting ordinary people. More importantly, the last nine months have shown that no one is coming to save us. If we don’t rise to meet the moment—not just anarchists, but all the dispossessed people who oppose fascism—it could very well cost us our lives.
\n\nThat’s why I went to the rally. I wanted to let other rebels know that they aren’t alone, that there are other ways to resist besides toothless liberal marches, that we don’t need to wait for permission from some national organization to take action.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/10/20/1.jpg\")
\nI attended the No Kings rally here because comrades had helped organize it, and because it was the best local space I could imagine for meeting other people who want to organize, resist, and fight back.
\n\n50501 is basically just a meme backed up by some signal threads and facebook groups. It’s extremely diverse politically and many anarchist and communist friends have been involved locally and in the statewide “structure.” I literally don’t know what it means to say that a network this loose works with police or Democrats; that just means that some figures within it (whether important or minor) have done so, but that doesn’t reflect a collective agreement endorsing that behavior. Under these circumstances, I think we should avoid generalized accusations, and instead just push the political average away from police collaboration or dependence on the Democrats.
\n\nThe risks were close to nil. A lot of paranoid rumors spread in the days beforehand; comrades worked to debunk those and to reassure those new to political activity, who were the real targets of the rumor mill. It’s clear that fear is our biggest obstacle right now, more than actual repression, violence, or drama.
\n\nI saw an elderly friend who experienced a decade of federal harassment because she had been friends with some of the Green Scare indictees; she never really recovered and doesn’t go out to political things very often, as a result of the trauma and fear. She was overjoyed to be at this event, and participated in the illegal breakaway march with us and perhaps 400 other people. She was trying to come up with new chants and was chatting happily with me close to the front of the march.
\n\nI think it would have been better for comrades to have come not just with handbills and radical zines, but also with banners and tools to make the march more confident and capable. Given how much energy there was, even this large crowd, excited but also fearful, would have probably been excited to take more steps towards militancy, with small things like chalk and fireworks. As it happened, it was decisive that some people brought their own mobile sound system, separate from the one used by the official speakers.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/10/20/2.jpg\")
\nAt the first No Kings rally in our town, in June 2025, a bloc of anarchists and other anti-authoritarians started at a different location further down the famous local strip and marched past the No Kings rally in a funeral procession with a casket for Donald Trump. That intervention was a great success, drawing about a hundred people from the crowd at City Hall to the Federal Building, one of the only targets here that is actually tied to the regime in Washington, DC. The Federal Building was heavily guarded by DHS agents who had been put on high alert after an action a few weeks earlier in which someone apparently used a sharpie marked to tag “Fuck ICE” on a glass door.
\n\nBecause of that intervention, the local Democrat front group that runs the liberal 50501 nonprofit protests moved from the historic strip (a two-lane one-way highway that is very easy to block traffic on) to a park on the West Side pushed up against an eight-lane highway. In 2020, liberals wanting to avert the possibility of a march after the murder of George Floyd also held a vigil at this park, though fortunately, local high-schoolers made their own intervention in response. It was clear to the anarchists and street punks that it was a counter-insurgent effort intended to limit our ability to get out onto the streets. Following up on the success of the performance art the first time around, people dreamed up another idea of how to intervene. The plan was to construct a King Donald Trump puppet that would demand protesters stay on the sidewalk and do nothing to actually threaten his regime—until a lone jester would lead a rebellion of serfs smashing and destroying the puppet.
\n\nUnfortunately, the threat of severe thunderstorms and tornado-strength winds in our region undermined this plan and at the last minute, people had to plan a more militant intervention.
\n\nAbout a dozen anarchists, punks, and other radicals gathered at the park on October 18 with the plan to take one or two lanes of the highway and then swing back to the park through the quiet residential streets nearby. According to subsequent reports, around 2000 people gathered at the park and lined the sidewalk down both sides of the highway. The energy and morale of the crowd was low. Despite being supposedly funded by billionaires, the liberals had brought no megaphones, were leading no chants, and had no music in their hearts. We began to march around the park, gathering a crowd of about forty people chanting and singing. People sang Bella Ciao as well as a local hymn made up for the last No King rally intervention that goes
\n\n“No Kings! No Masters! No old fascist bastards!
\nNo Kings! No Masters! No old fascist bastards!
\nNo Kings! No Masters! No old fascist bastards!
\nString’em up by their feet, let the buzzards eat
\nThat old fascist bastard!”
After a few laps around the park, we made the decisive breakout onto the highway with a banner from the time Donald Trump came to Southern Illinois in 2018. It reads “All Ways Closed to Fascism!”—a play on the city motto.
\n\nAbout forty people quickly took two lanes of traffic, tightly blocking both lanes. A police car followed us and very few people joined from the crowd, but many cheered us on. We made our way up the highway before swinging back onto residential streets where most people came out of their houses and cheered us on. As we made our approach back to the park to conclude the joyous and militant march, two geezers in high-visibility vests jumped out trying to block the march, filming us and alleging that we were ICE agents because we wore masks. One of the old men even grabbed the face of one of the banner holders. People shouted anti-fascist chants over them, drowning them out. The march returned safely to the park.
\n\nMany people came and thanked us for the chants, the music, and even “the excitement.” While the liberal organizers made themselves red in the face about our intervention, we went on our merry way.
\n\nWhile this may not be as exciting as militant inventions or actions in the big cities, we must push the movement as far as we can anywhere and everywhere. To sit home denouncing and decrying would have been a mistake. Many good people who have no other idea how to fight went to this event. Hopefully, our act meant something to people, and the people we met there will feel more capable of rising to the occasion when things escalate.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/10/20/3.jpg\")
\nWhy did you attend the No Kings rally?
\n\nWhen people gather in public to express dissent, that’s a space worth occupying and radicalizing. Showing up means making sure the message of total liberation is not erased by liberal talking points.
\n\nMy comrades and I figured that there would be a lot of people using the No Kings march to confront ICE in our city. We were hoping that there would be enough chaos that cops would lose control of the situation and people would remember how we were in June and lose some of the pervasive fear that’s seems to have sunk in across the city.
\n\nBroadly speaking, I agreed with the CrimethInc. proposal. I think it’s important for us (anarchists and anti-authoritarians more broadly) to have a visible street presence again. We spent many years experimenting with various approaches to being more or less visible, and it seems clear to me now that we need to be recognizable without being targetable.
\n\nThe crew I’m part of mostly didn’t go to the rally, at least not as a bloc within the march. The No Kings rally that was called in downtown here was planned from 8 to 10 am—extremely early—but let out directly into an all-day-long multicultural festival “Tucson Meet Yourself” with thousands of people, food trucks, local advocacy orgs, and families. That’s where I showed up with a backpack of zines and a couple hundred leaflets pertinent to Anti-ICE mobilizing and anti-authoritarianism. A few of us wrote and risographed them yesterday.
\n\nI attended the No Kings rally to distribute propaganda—both to challenge the more liberal narratives around how it is appropriate to respond to the current moment and to invite people with similar political goals into conversation with our movement. I also brought the goal of bringing a conflictual edge to the demo.
\n\n\nNo Kings, 50501, and the Indivisible movement espouse liberal politics. They work with police and the Democratic Party. How did you reconcile yourself with that?
\n\nI didn’t go to endorse their politics, I went to confront the limits of their politics. Anarchists don’t need to wait for perfect conditions or perfect comrades to act. Being present in liberal spaces can open up moments in which people start to see that the state and its enforcers won’t save them. I see this as engagement, not alignment.
\n\nWe went there as autonomous individuals to engage with a mass movement against fascism, not to argue with the liberal organizers who told everyone to stay on the sidewalk. Many of the people showing up to these protests are not ideologically committed to legalism or pacifism; they just see those as the only game in town. I believe it’s our job to agitate among the rank and file for real resistance. Just because twelve people with a logo and a social media account claim the authority to tell everyone else at an event what to do doesn’t mean we have to listen. I don’t think there’s any contradiction to reconcile. We show up, we stand by our values, we try to get other people to join us, and we make these orgs irrelevant.
\n\nI’m pretty comfortable using liberal events to create splinter actions. It’s a tried-and-true tactic and this felt no different. Large rallies draw out a lot of comrades who are looking for something more radical, so it’s good to be there to find them. It seems that we’re in a holding pattern in which the fascists are slowly rolling out martial law and people are too afraid to do anything because they think that could make it worse. But I think it’s important to heighten the contradictions and draw the state to overreach in order to spark the sort of widespread rage capable of genuinely confronting the state.
\n\nThese boomers just want someone to talk to. We avoided the organizers and went where the most people would be.
\n\nThere were lots of empty stations at the folklife festival where vendors had closed early or never arrived. We tried to set up in a booth for the “Pima County Association of Governments” to be funny, but the guy who was running it showed up, so we just moved to another empty booth and made a sign that said “Anarchist Polemical Writing for a LOW PRICE.” The stuff was all free.
\n\n\nSome online commenters have described it as “dangerous” to attend public rallies. What do you think the risks were?
\n\nThere’s always risk when you challenge power… cops, surveillance, reactionaries, or doxxing. But hiding doesn’t make us safer. We can minimize harm through mutual support, good security culture, and situational awareness, but risk is part of the reality of resistance.
\n\nI’m not sure it felt that risky to me. Los Angeles maybe has a different landscape than red states for this, but I knew we’d be facing LAPD, not ICE and possible federal charges (which are riskier, though in Los Angeles they are generally not as risky as many think). With thousands of liberals around to provide cover, this felt like one of the safer actions going on in Los Angeles at the moment. Definitely safer than confronting ICE during a raid.
\n\nWhat the hell are people talking about it being “dangerous” for anarchists to be at No Kings? It’s dangerous for us NOT to be there.
\n\nOf course it’s dangerous. The regime is clearly stating its desire to crush our movement and jail, kill, or deport anyone who stands in their way. Taking action against the regime in any way, even symbolically, entails an increased risk of surveillance, police violence, and repression. However, my belief is that the risks of not participating right now are even greater. The only barrier to how far the fascists are willing to go is our resistance, and if we lose, they intend to kill us. We need to get out of the mindset of seeing danger as something that we can choose and recognize that, whether we like it or not, we are locked in a struggle for our survival.
\n\nPshh, that’s just social anxiety. I expected that we would get kicked out for stealing a booth, but we were allowed to stay all day. In the case that we were kicked out, we planned to just move to another part of the festival, take another booth, or distribute zines on foot.
\n\nLots of people want to talk about revolutionary anti-state politics right now. It felt good to show up as “ourselves,” explicitly putting anarchist ideas in front of people and seeing who is willing to engage.
\n\nIn this case, being in a city that already has had attempted federal troop deployment and is swarming with the human garbage that work for ICE, I personally felt extremely apprehensive. Mass surveillance is real and it is bad. Given the context, however, I felt like basic security practices like masking were sufficient. Time will tell if that is true. The people I was with were mostly using this as an opportunity to be visible. No one planned on doing anything beyond being a part of the march, which informed our decisions. Some people didn’t mask, some people were in full bloc, some people somewhere in between.
\n\nI knew that attending the rally meant the unlikely risk of arrest or brutalization at the hands of the police or violence from the far right. But the biggest risk actually was not in regards to my personal safety, but that we would be unsuccessful in having an impact on the crowd or at reaching other people who are disgruntled with the Trump administration and the liberal responses to it.
\n\n\nWhat do you think you accomplished?
\n\nI had a lot of good conversations with people who were sympathetic to what we were doing, but I think the most promising thing was just how many people joined us in the streets once we demonstrated that it was possible. Even some of the peace police were cheering from the sidewalks! One older woman from the suburbs fell while marching in the street, and when we helped her up and asked if she wanted us to help her back to the sidewalk she refused. “I marched in the streets against the war in Vietnam, and I want to be in the streets now.” I also spoke with some young people after the fact who were super energized by the experience and looking for various ways to stay involved. The usual line adopted by many authoritarian protest orgs (both liberal and Leninist) is that unpermitted street protests are too dangerous for elders or children, that they inherently alienate “the masses” who aren’t ready for such big revolutionary steps as walking in the street without permission. It was good to experience a reminder of how completely false that is.
\n\nOther activists and advocacy groups were open to us being there. Surprisingly, that included “Humane Borders”—the absent humanitarian group whose booth we had taken over. At one point, one of their members stopped by our table to ask who we were. We were transparent with her that we just wanted to distribute free anarchist literature there, since this table wasn’t getting used otherwise. “Since Humane Borders didn’t show up, we’re here for No Borders!!! And we all hate ICE!” At first, she seemed confused by our antics, but she came around later to say that her group was happy we were using their table!
\n\nI found it promising that there are clearly people oriented towards militant street action that are unknown to us. I’m particularly thinking of the crews of kids bloc’ed up with Mexican flags.
\n\nWhat felt most promising to me was seeing fifty or so rowdy people, many of whom were total strangers, continue gathering defiantly in the street after the marshals repeatedly told them to go home. They clearly felt unsatisfied by the liberals leading the march and were visibly energized by what the anarchists had to say and the energy they were bringing to the demonstration, even when it became clear that we were attracting the ire of both the organizers and the police alike. We saw people inspired by and attracted to revolutionary messaging.
\n\nSome comrades were able to draw a large crowd of around a thousand people from the No Kings rally at City Hall to the detention center with a loud mobile speaker and some yellow protest marshal vests. The crowd at MDC was really energized by that, and there were some skirmishes with the cops, though nothing too ambitious. Everyone was very fuck the police, and people asked to hear Boosie’s “Fuck the Police” about seven times. At one point, about a hundred people were line-dancing to Payaso de Rodeo, which was really fun, and there was a whole dance-off to a Monterrey tribal set. I think the cops could tell they were losing control of the situation, because right after the line dancing, they brought out the horses and got really aggressive about clearing the intersection.
\n\nWe set up a number of tables laden with hundreds of zines, posters, and stickers. One of the event volunteers approached us, a little wary, and asked what we were up to. I told her we were just a few individuals trying to share ideas and open conversation. Her energy shifted from skeptical to genuinely curious. By the end, she was smiling, asking questions, and walking away with a handful of zines.
\n\n\nWhat do you wish you had seen at No Kings that, in retrospect, you could have helped to contribute yourself?
\n\nMore autonomous presence, more banners, skill shares, art, spontaneous chants not run through the “approved” mic. Spaces where people could talk freely without a stage telling them what “safe” activism looks like.
\n\nOur propaganda encourages direct action and political experimentation. The flyers all have a QR code for an “announcements” signal thread that posts upcoming antiauthoritarian events, our own marches, and the like. But we don’t have a specific upcoming event on our calendar this month which invites public participation, for example, we haven’t made a call for the formation of a citywide assembly. Those kind of things are yet to be organized.
\n\nI would have liked for us to be able to do a more coordinated distribution of propaganda so we could have had more conversations with people. There aren’t very many of us, which makes it tough to have people move together. I think that being slightly more targeted in our outreach rather than simply giving fliers and zines to whoever will take them would probably benefit us in the future.
\n\nI wish I had seen more spectacular presentations of our political messaging—whether banner drops, wheatpasting, flags or effigies on fire, or something else. In hindsight, it is clear that the march was simply a massive spectacle that was a “fun afternoon” for many liberals. Putting an anarchist twist on this to make our presence as visible as possible to others could have been somewhat promising for us and motivating for others there, if done at the right moments in the right contexts. Additionally, at many different points, anarchists could have made an effort to be at the front of the march with large, reinforced banners and a megaphone to challenge the organizers’ messaging and image, and potentially even start a breakaway march at or near the end of the route with those who did not feel finished marching or were looking for other avenues to express their political frustrations.
\n\nI wish we had prepared more ways for folks to follow up after the fact. We distributed fliers for a future Anti-ICE event widely, but a lot of folks wanted more direct ways to plug in, and we didn’t really have a way to do that beyond sharing Signal user names, which isn’t ideal. In the future, we hope to get a local Events Calendar up and running that will allow folks to plug in to less high risk events, and maybe a link to a telegram channel or admins-only Signal thread would be good as well.
\n\nPrimarily, I feel that if there had been another crew of people doing splinter marches, they could have snaked through downtown or onto a freeway, and that would have split the cops’ forces and the detention center site probably would have really gone off, which would have been a huge win for the anti-ICE movement right now.
\n\nI have been thinking about what it means that we wait for these big lib orgs to organize mass actions so we can hijack them, and how much we lose by being dependent on them for that. At the same time, doing that work ourselves takes a ton of energy and coalition building that draws away from tenant union work and base-building organizing, so it never seems like the best use of time. But still, I’m wondering if there’s a way to change that dynamic.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2025/09/22/nepali-anarchists-on-the-toppling-of-the-government-an-interview-with-black-book-distro", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2025/09/22/nepali-anarchists-on-the-toppling-of-the-government-an-interview-with-black-book-distro", "title": "Nepali Anarchists on the Toppling of the Government : An Interview with Black Book Distro", "summary": "An interview with Black Book Distro on the background of the Nepali insurrection and the dynamics within it.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/09/22/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/09/22/header.jpg", "date_published": "2025-09-22T22:10:05Z", "date_modified": "2025-11-04T15:14:41Z", "tags": [ "nepal", "insurrection", "revolution" ], "content_html": "In Nepal, a protest movement in early September 2025 escalated into a spontaneous insurrection in response to police violence, culminating with the burning of the parliament and an array of government offices, police stations, party headquarters, and politicians’ mansions. Within a day and a half, Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli had fled and the government collapsed. But toppling a government is only the first stage of a much longer struggle; within this unrest, monarchists, neoliberals, and radicals are competing to determine the future of Nepal. To get a clearer understanding of the background of the insurrection and the dynamics within it, we interviewed Black Book Distro, an anarchist collective and library in Kathmandu.
\n\nThe insurrection in Nepal is part of a series of uprisings that have swept Asia over the past few years. We can trace the trail of sparks from the toppling of the president of Sri Lanka in 2022 to the 2024 uprising in Bangladesh and the uprising in Indonesia in August 2025, not to mention the ongoing civil war in Myanmar. Since the fall of the Nepali government, fierce protests have broken out in the Philippines as well. All of these are responding to widespread economic hardship and the failure of politicians’ promises.
\n\nThe complicity of institutional communist parties in the massacre that catalyzed the uprising should remind all aspiring revolutionaries that it is impossible to solve the problems of capitalism simply by wielding the violence of the state—even if you have “communist” in the name of your party. The challenges that capitalism is creating for people demand more radical changes than can be achieved with police weaponry and policy proposals within the halls of power.
\n\nLikewise, this insurrection should give pause to politicians and police all around the world who imagine that they can pillage and terrorize with impunity. Today, the money they obtain may insulate them from the consequences of their actions—but tomorrow, all bets are off.
\n\nNone of these revolts have yet achieved all of their aims, but as people around the world struggle with oligarchy and state repression, each of them offers lessons.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/09/22/7.jpg\")
As one commenter on social media put it, “Just a young man wearing the skin of the enemy.”
\nIntroduce your project. Who are you and what are you doing?
\n\nWe are Black Book Distro, an anarchist collective and library based in Kathmandu, Nepal, dedicated to radicalization through education on leftist history as well as active engagement in popular struggles and movements that we feel align with our goals (the Gen Z protest, the Meter Byaj movement,1 Guthi movement2). We speak to you as an anarchist movement under the suppression of a failed and corrupt communist regime and Congress.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/09/22/1.jpg\")
Black Book Distro displaying some English-language materials during the Anarchist Zine Fest in Nepal.
\nGive us a short overview of social movements and struggles in Nepal over the past decade or two. What have been the major concerns driving popular unrest?
\n\nFollowing the Maoist revolution,3 Nepal has experienced waves of social, economic, geographic, and political upheaval. Key issues include rampant caste discrimination, a deadly epidemic of migrant worker trafficking fueled by lack of opportunity at home, routine border conflicts with our nuclear-armed neighbors, and political corruption so brazen that it has allowed pro-monarchy sentiments in the country to make a terrifyingly powerful comeback.
\n\nPopular movements for change have included the Madhesh struggle for rights and dignity,4 protests against COVID-era corruption under the “Enough Is Enough” banner, nationalistic disputes over border areas like Lipulekh,5 doctor KC’s hunger strikes for improved health infrastructure,6 resistance to predatory mortgage interests, and defense of communal lands belonging to the Newar people. These struggles are driven by a complex social fabric still shaped by patriarchy, caste, and religion, amid constitutional efforts toward representation, freedom of expression, economic liberty, and federalism.
\n\nThe major political organizations are the Congress, Maoist, Marxist-Leninist parties, as well as royalist factions. Below these are independent youth groups, leftist spaces, and Indigenous community groups. Historically speaking, most protests have been led or influenced by the major political parties, though spontaneous youth and grassroots initiatives have increasingly acted independently (including the recent “Gen Z” uprising).
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/09/22/5.jpg\")
“Live rounds were used on civilians, including children, today. We were in front line. Saw many people shot dead.”
\nHow do you understand the goals of the grassroots participants in this uprising? Are there multiple currents with different or conflicting goals?
\n\nThe current “Gen Z” movement has its roots in the 2019 youth-led “Enough Is Enough” movement, which focused on social justice and environmental issues amid revenue mismanagement during the COVID-19 crisis. This initial uprising consisted of multiple independent youth groups supported by ordinary citizens, liberals, and far-left spaces, without a central leadership. Since then, the government has continually intensified its online surveillance and totalitarian crackdowns on the youth, fueling the movement to become what it is today. Their chief demands are freedom of expression, anti-corruption measures, and full government accountability, with no involvement from established political parties. The tragic shooting of peaceful protestors, including students inspired by the philosophy of the anime series “One Piece,” ignited widespread outrage.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/09/22/6.jpg\")
A demonstrator in Nepal displaying a “one piece” pirate flag, which has become a symbol of the rebellion in Indonesia.
\nThe insurrection was decentralized and spontaneous, culminating in the burning of parliament and most government offices, politicians’ houses, police stations, and party headquarters, causing the government to be toppled in less than 35 hours. Diverse currents exist within the movement: monarchists seeking to restore the king to the throne, centrists aiming to gain influence within a new neoliberal government, and far-left radicals pushing for genuine federalism, secularism, and the inclusive participation of marginalized communities. This multiplicity of goals reflects the complex aspirations and tensions within the movement.
\n\nAs we understand it here from very far away, communists in Nepal conducted a resistance movement for many years before gaining state power in 2006. We have the impression that internal conflicts within the revolutionary movement as a whole resulted in a series of compromises between the communists and the Nepalese ruling class. How have these compromises affected Nepalese society, specifically including the radical grassroots movements that participated in the popular struggle, as well as labor unions and other groups?
\n\nThe Maoist insurgency’s success relied on its opposition to the remnants of the “Panchayat” system, a feudal agricultural structure of oppression by upper-caste elites allied with the monarchy over the common folk, which had been officially ended in 1990. However, once in power, many Maoist leaders compromised their revolutionary goals to maintain control, gradually adopting capitalist practices that mirror the same Panchayat system of oppression they claim to have destroyed. These compromises have undermined their credibility with the masses, and the Maoists are now widely viewed as corrupt politicians rather than revolutionaries.
\n\nMeanwhile, human rights abuses by military and police forces have been widespread, and justice remains elusive for victims on all sides. The tarnished image of leftist politics has given space to the Monarchist movement; even the recent Gen-Z movement has intentionally barred political parties and unions from participating, due to fears that these entities would impose self-serving agendas. Though this shielded the movement’s integrity, it has made it harder for genuine leftist radicals seeking change to organize. Fortunately, the anarchist movement is emerging quietly, with growing acceptance, despite some misconceptions equating anarchism with chaos.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/09/22/4.jpg\")
A burnt car belonging to Nepali police in front of Patan Durbar square on September 9, 2025.
\nHow did the ruling coalition emerge? How do you understand the difference between the two communist parties, and what is the role of the Congress Party in the ruling coalition?
\n\nThe ruling coalition emerged to secure a parliamentary majority amid a fragmented multiparty system after the war. Both communist parties have embraced corruption and capitalist practices, with the UML [the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist–Leninist)] currently being the more organized of the two. Because of their misuse of communist ideologies and corrupt histories, the communist movement is rapidly losing ground, and party members are often mocked when they claim communist identities. The Congress Party, with its historical role in “officially” ending the Rana regime and Panchayat system, remains the leading neoliberal force in the government. In 2008, Maoists and Marxist-Leninists allied to outvote the Congress Party, and in 2024, Congress and Marxist-Leninists allied to outvote Maoists. While ideological differences once divided them, these distinctions have all but completely faded in the eyes of the people.
\n\nBoth India and China belong to the powerful industrial and trade bloc known as BRICS. How does this affect ordinary people in Nepal? Which groups aspire to capitalize on the overthrow of the Nepalese government?
\n\nThe impact of BRICS membership on ordinary Nepalese is not yet clear, with political and intellectual circles divided. Some view BRICS as a means to reduce US hegemony, while others see it as extending Chinese authoritarian influence. The Nepali government has been cautiously monitoring the evolution of the India-China relationship and has yet to decide on whether to participate in BRICS.
\n\nIt remains uncertain which groups will ultimately benefit from the toppling of the government, but no political decision in Nepal is made without the involvement of the Indian intelligence agency RAW [Research and Analysis Wing]. The CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] also likely plays a role, consistent with its history in global revolutions. Major dangers include royalist factions potentially gaining power with Indian backing, driven by extremist Hindu nationalist politics, and the resurgence of old political elites without substantive change. While a military coup was a real threat, thankfully it did not occur.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/09/22/3.jpg\")
The parliament of Nepal was burned on September 9, 2025.
\nNepal being a landlocked country with social and economic dependency on India has seen some shift in Chinese investments, with connecting highways being opened through Nepal. While China and India sharpen their rivalry, Nepal, unlike other nations sharing the border with the geographical giants, becomes an arena of control and balance…
\n\nBoth powers have thus far avoided open conflict, turning Nepal into an arena of geopolitical balancing between India and China. Nepal, geographically trapped between these two nuclear giants, has limited options to resist their unending tug of war. India’s fuel blockade after the 2015 earthquake was clearly a power move linked to the Madhesi movement, which India unofficially supported. China exerts influence by urging the Nepalese government to control protests related to Tibet. Cultural ties and open borders make India’s influence more pronounced, whereas Chinese investments, such as highway projects under the Belt and Road Initiative, are broadly welcomed by the population as opportunities for economic independence from India.
\n\nMany Western leftists look at the relationship of Nepal to China and India—both of which are trading partners of the US and Israel, though China is perceived as a geopolitical antagonist of the US—and conclude that the insurrections in Nepal and Indonesia must be CIA-backed color revolutions designed to install Western-aligned dictatorships. What do you think about this?
\n\nWhile foreign influence from India, China, and the US is undeniable, reducing the uprising to a CIA-backed color revolution dismisses the genuine anger and sacrifices of Nepali people. Millions mobilized to burn down parliament buildings, government offices, and political leaders’ homes—not because foreign or domestic organizations told them to, but because of decades of government failure and corruption. Labeling this movement as a color revolution undermines our solidarity with similar grassroots movements across the globe. Activists from Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka celebrate each other’s struggles without dismissing them as foreign plots. This is a people’s uprising born from experienced injustice. If these uprisings are color revolutions, then powerful global movements like the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter would be as well. It’s time for Western observers to support these struggles rather than delegitimize them.
\n\nWhat connections do you see, if any, between the uprising in Nepal and the preceding uprisings in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Indonesia? In what ways did those inform the popular imagination that helped to produce this revolt? What are the differences between the Nepalese context and those other contexts?
\n\nThe uprisings share clear commonalities including widespread corruption, exclusion, entrenched power held by nepotistic families, government censorship, and heavy foreign interference. Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Nepal each have histories of communist movements and their eventual failures. An interesting connection between Nepal and Indonesia is the presence of active anarchist movements and the cultural influence of the anime “One Piece,” which symbolizes for the youth in both countries their fight against authoritarianism.
\n\nThe key difference is that Nepal’s communist movement successfully came to power but subsequently became corrupt and abandoned its promises, fueling popular disillusionment, whereas in Indonesia and Sri Lanka, the communist government failed to come to power.
\n\nOn the basis of your recent experience in Nepal, do you have any advice for people who are participating in grassroots resistance in other parts of the world?
\n\nEffective resistance must combine organized education, agitation, and readiness for spontaneous mass insurrection. Preparing people to push societal movements in the right direction is critical, especially to manage the power vacuums created when a government collapses, which are often seized by capitalist forces aiming to restore the old order. Old elites will try to reclaim power, but the revolutionary population in Nepal has demonstrated a fierce refusal, destroying infrastructure and physically confronting leaders.
\n\nHowever, this uprising was not fully prepared for what happens next. Until now, our efforts have focused mainly on education and protests, without envisioning post-collapse structures. Our advice to comrades worldwide is to prepare not only for revolt but for non-hierarchical structures and societal rebuilding once regimes fall.
\n\nWhat are anarchists and anti-authoritarian groups doing in Nepal? What concrete things can we do to support anarchist and broadly anti-authoritarian efforts in Nepal?
\n\nAnarchist and anti-authoritarian groups in Nepal are conducting workshops, talks, screenings, exhibitions, music events, as well as direct actions in the street. The majority of our anarchist collectives believe in organization without hierarchy, fostering open conversations even with communist radicals who genuinely seek egalitarian societies. We believe solidarity within the leftist movement is essential, so we judge by actions rather than ideology alone. To support these efforts, we urge spreading awareness about ongoing human rights violations, including the deaths of at least 72 protestors, many of them youths, killed for demanding an end to corruption and totalitarianism. Those responsible must be held accountable and justice pursued without delay.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/09/22/2.jpg\")
A message from September 13, 2025: “Those who are collaborating with the police. You are forgetting that they have killed our children. Those who are saying the vandalism, the burning, the looting is wrong. You are forgetting that it’s the result of the collective anger that was there against this regime for more than 40 years. That it’s the result of the capitalist hell where normal civilians never can afford things that they are bombarded with through advertisements. Do you think the Kathmandu elite were there looting in Bhatbhatani [Nepal’s largest retail chain]? No, those were working class people and middle class. Do you think Bhatbhatani has suffered that big of a loss? They have insurance. Hilton hotel has insurance. Do the parents of the dead children have insurance of millions of rupees?”
\nMeter-byaj is a form of lending with exorbitant interest rates. A protest movement has gathered momentum against this over the past few years. ↩
\nIn June 2019, thousands took to the streets to protest against a bill that would nationalize centuries-old community and religious trusts. Known as “guthi,” this system for maintaining temples and traditional public spaces and organizing festivals is rooted in the Newar community indigenous to Kathmandu Valley. ↩
\nThe civil war that concluded in 2006. ↩
\nA movement for the rights of Madhesis Tharus, Muslims, and Janjati groups in Nepal, with waves of activity in 2007, 2008, and 2015. ↩
\nLipulekh is a Himalayan pass on the border between India and Chinese-ruled Tibet. The Nepalese government has made claims to the southern side of the pass, which has been under Indian administration since British colonial rule. ↩
\nSurgeon and healthcare activist Dr. Govinda KC has carried out 23 hunger strikes demanding reform. ↩
\nIn the following reflections, participants in the Seattle Solidarity Network share what they have learned in the course of seventeen years of experimenting with tactics via which workers and tenants can act together against bosses and landlords.
\n\nFor an action-obsessed group like the Seattle Solidarity Network (SeaSol), pausing for reflection is a rare thing. Upon receiving the invitation to prepare this text, we embarked on a collective process that included written interviews with more than a dozen participants with different levels of involvement over the years—exactly the sort of inefficient endeavor that we work so hard to keep out of our regular organizing activities. It was a little embarrassing how high emotions were for people at times, but that also shows just how much SeaSol means to all of us, whether we were in it for a long or even a short period of time. What follows is our best effort to share with you who we are and what we’ve learned over the past seventeen years.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/16.jpg\")
\nThere’s a twinge of nervous energy down your neck and a pinch of hunger in your stomach as you walk towards your first Seattle Solidarity Network action. It’s right before dinner time. Weather-wise, it’s the sort of gray, overcast late afternoon that is so typical of this region. You’ve brought yourself to some northern suburb. You’re venturing across a stretch of sprawl that looks like countless others. Even though you can’t recall ever being on this specific block before, the setting feels so familiar. The street signs and pavement remind you of the block where you live.
\n\nYou know from the mobilization email that there’s a restaurant nearby. It’s at an intersection, next to a gas station, across the street from a strip mall. You also know the restaurant’s owners are petty, entitled, and completely obnoxious. They fired somebody from the kitchen for bogus reasons and now they’re refusing to hand over that person’s final paycheck. It’s not much for the bosses—a few hundred dollars—but it’s devastating for the person fired, who has rent and other bills to pay. They’re still looking for their next job. And you can relate. You’ve worked at places like this, for people like this, and they took advantage of you like this. Again, there’s the feeling of familiarity.
\n\nThen the recognizable hassle of bad jobs in dull neighborhoods gives way to a feeling of excitement in your chest and legs. This is a first for you. Having parked your car a block away, you walk along the sidewalk of an arterial road and approach the meetup spot. You see a small group huddled together with a dozen homemade picket signs. You join them. At the top of the hour, you go around in a circle introducing yourselves. You and one other person are new to this fight. Some others have been doing this sort of thing since the 2010s. The person who got fired is here, too. You get a little briefing on the action to take place: Today, you’re picketing. You grab a sign and march along to the sidewalk in front of the restaurant.
\n\nYou’re in a solidarity network now. You and this odd lot of sign holders, baristas, email writers, phone tree operators, dishwashers, canvassers, apartment dwellers, and leaflet writers. You’ve read about “solidarity” and today you are getting a clearer idea of what it might mean.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/4.jpg\")
\nWhat follows is a collection of reflections from current and former members of Seattle Solidarity Network (SeaSol) intended to inform current and future organizing efforts. We cover the “who,” “what,” and “why” of the organization, including the principles under which we operate and the lessons we’ve learned. While some of the text is a synthesis collectively written by an ad hoc committee, we’ve tried to center the voices of individual members to show the breadth of experience with the organization and to let productive critique of the organization come through.
\n\nSeaSol was started with only the most essential anarchist ideological positions. The point wasn’t to create an elaborate organization and set forth a detailed analysis; the point was to attack landlords and bosses, to be combative and effective. To explore the “how,” read SeaSol’s 2011 guide) to building a solidarity network.
\n\nSeaSol is a mutual support organization. We use collective direct action to fight for workers’ and tenants’ specific demands. These demands typically address stolen wages, stolen deposits, unsafe working conditions, landlords refusing to make repairs, and discrimination. Unlike service organizations, the expectation is that those who take on a fight will join the organization and show up at other people’s fights as they are able.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/3.jpg\")
\nSome members of the Seattle branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) founded SeaSol in late 2007. They wanted to find a way to build a revolutionary proletarian social movement by winning tangible victories despite having only a small number of supporters.
\n\nAt the time, the IWW in Seattle only had one organized workplace. Most of the IWW members were students or other young people with marginal employment—only staying in a given job for a few months at a time. Organizing unions in an era of precarious employment seemed like a stretch. While the IWW (and most radical unions) would focus on one workplace and try to win over a critical mass of workers in that workplace, SeaSol tried to develop more of a class-based organizing approach. Their class politics prompted them to view tenants’ and workers’ issues as inextricably linked and they hoped that by engaging with both tenants and workers they would be able to ensure a broader level of activity for their new organization.
\n\nNonetheless, they did take some lessons from the IWW and others. For example, they learned about demand deliveries and workplace mapping from the IWW. Workplace mapping means analyzing who is ready to join a fight, who is loyal to the boss or landlord, and who is on the fence. Early SeaSol was inspired by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), which did a lot of direct action. They also followed the example set by a courageous friend. Their friend had applied to a restaurant in Chicago. She worked there for one day, which the manager called an unpaid “training day.” Then was told not to come back because she wasn’t hired. She came back the next day with ten friends and demanded to be paid for the day’s work.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/17.jpg\")
A diagram plotting “How much can we hurt them?” against “How hard is it for them to give in?” in order to identify which fights are winnable.
\nHere, some of the early SeaSolers reflect on the network’s origins.
\n\nMickey: SeaSol started out of a series of conversations among comrades at a time when the anti-globalization and anti-war movements were on their last legs. Many of us had been politicized in the anti-war movement or immediately before that during the anti-glob summit protests. We shared a common critique of the ineffectiveness of the activist culture that these two movements were organized around. We felt that this activist culture was alienating to proletarians by design, ineffective at bringing anarchism to the masses, and ineffective at winning struggles against capitalists. To address these problems, we wanted to build a worker-focused project that made anarchism practical and pragmatic to proletarians. We were motivated by historical expressions of anarchism in the old workers movement as well as more recent iterations of anti-state proletarian activity.
\n\nWe had seen how difficult it was for other groups to start anarchist tenant unions or workplace unions from scratch with few or no resources. We had also been languishing in the Seattle IWW for about a year prior to SeaSol’s start, trying to build the branch through organizing campaigns and not having much success. For these reasons, we settled on a direct action casework model pioneered by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP for short). We also took some inspiration from Vancouver’s Anti-poverty Committee. We initially conceived of SeaSol as a temporary platform to get to a place where we could take on larger tenant and workplace organizing campaigns, i.e., to form an autonomous tenants’ union or industrial union.
\nMatt: SeaSol was created in reaction to many of the perceived deficiencies of the anarchist movement and activist left… Basically, we wanted to do something that required struggle at the level of people’s everyday lives, not struggles against some powerful, abstract, distant force that we were doomed to lose, such as the movement against the Iraq War (from 2003 onward). We also felt disgust with the symbolic protest aspects of anti-war and anti-globalization stuff. The anti-globalization movement was great fun. It was empowering to me and mobilized and radicalized a lot of people, but its ephemerality was evident. When I moved to Seattle from the UK, I was disturbed by the weakness of the anti-war movement. It was clear that many projects and direct action groups that existed for a few years around the time of the 1999 WTO protests had already disappeared, while others, such as Indymedia, were fading away rapidly. SeaSol was founded because we thought we should try to win actual victories, even if small ones, instead playing into the martyrdom of the great but impossible cause and the self-righteousness of “at least we’re doing something” symbolic protests. We also felt frustration that the majority of anarchist projects were not conflict-based. They were infoshops, bookshops, food distribution projects, newspapers, websites—all good stuff, but all auxiliary to the engine of the movement and the school of socialism, class struggle. We believed in collective class struggle through direct action and building a social base.
\n\nAlso, we had had no luck in various unionization attempts with the IWW and were fed up with how specific organizations such as NAF [Northwest Anarchist Federation] were putting the ideological cart before the horse of having a common strategy and plan of action…
\n\nAs an attempt to avoid these problems, we discussed more promising movements: the “direct action casework” of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and Canadian inter-union solidarity “flying squads” seemed to be appealing forms to imitate. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a great amount of detail on how those groups operated, so we looked at our own experiences. A friend in Chicago had worked at a restaurant for one day, only to be told it was a “training day” and she wouldn’t be paid. She resolved this problem by walking into the restaurant with a large group of friends and refusing to leave until the issue was settled. We were looking to create something that was the opposite of the flaws we perceived in the movements we had emerged from: a focus on the immediate issues caused by capitalism in daily life as experienced by the general population of Seattle and ourselves, not as activists—specialists in social change—but workers in precarious employment or living conditions; a focus on effective strategy rather than moral force; realistic opposition to targets we could actually overcome; and an approach that placed us in direct conflict with the powerful interests in society rather than one that sought to create an alternative but coexisting culture. SeaSol is itself partially a product of the crisis—without the low pay, unstable jobs, landlords trying to cut corners, and high unemployment, perhaps the group would not have generated the interest and momentum to keep going.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/12.jpg\")
\n For a more comprehensive description of SeaSol’s organizational model and tactics, see the SeaSol manual. In short, SeaSol’s tactics involve a series of escalating actions that make it easier or cheaper for the boss or landlord to give in than to refuse. The approach varies depending on the person or company on the other side. The first priority is to win the fight against them.
\n\nPete: All the time I spent with SeaSol organizers creatively discussing effective tactics, looking for leverage in fights, and focusing our energies on winning has deeply ingrained a knowledge and attitude toward organizing that I take everywhere. I should add that what attracted me to SeaSol in the first place, which I credit with truly radicalizing me, was that the meetings were focused and concise, fully dedicated to getting shit done. These are the same principles I use in labor organizing, which has had the effect of motivating the people I work with.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/13.jpg\")
\n The second priority of SeaSol is to build capacity. From the outset, the organization had both defensive and productive aspects. On the one hand, it defended a community from exploitation at work, scuzzy landlords, and other predatory behavior. At the same time, through this defensive process—through the demand deliveries, pickets, parties, and even through the tedious meetings—the participants could experience moments of social transformation, of solidarity, winning small fights in order to gain strength, experience, and reputation so that they could take on bigger fights.
\n\nDC: SeaSol did two things. One: it directly addressed the practical problems of wage theft and tenant issues. Two: it served an educational and agitational function. Its momentum came from normal people democratically organizing themselves. It played a role in building capacity and consciousness that intermediaries like nonprofits and law firms—and most unions—couldn’t. In the context of precarious employment, alienation, and cultural amnesia, SeaSol was a transformation of the anti-capitalist energy that had, in an earlier era, been directed into the formal workers’ movement and left-wing political parties. It was a way to take action where we were, a hopeful starting point for something bigger.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/14.jpg\")
\n Capacity building includes spreading our model and training organizers who can go on to organize and take action in other places.
\n\nLlama: As direct action mutual aid, I think it works pretty well. Sure, we are not disrupting the system as a whole, but we are absolutely creating a community and network… I think what SeaSol builds for people includes:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/15.jpg\")
\n Let’s look at the tactic of the demand delivery. As the authors of the SeaSol manual point out, it might be quicker and easier to send a demand delivery by mail or email. But the purpose of the demand delivery is not only to communicate a written message to the boss or landlord. The purpose is to empower the participants in the action. When the demand is met, they will know it is because they were there taking a risk and defending someone in their community.
\n\nHere, we reflect on how our tactics relate to our strategic vision for the organization.
\n\nDolly: SeaSol is not a social service… the workers and tenants at the centers of our fights are not provided with a service, but take on equal roles in organizing their own campaigns. Those who are not members of SeaSol when they come to us are required to become members and are expected to show up for others’ fights in the future as far as they can. In a perfect world, it would work out this way every time SeaSol took on a fight. It hasn’t always, though. […]
\n\nDoing work with SeaSol provides a way better working-class political education than any book. Lots of people come into the organization as some kind of liberal or democratic socialist and leave, or stay, as anarchists. People learn how landlordism works from doing secretary duty (answering phone calls and emails from people who contact us with their problems) and fighting landlords. People learn that the nonprofit-industrial complex is parasitic and unhelpful to the working poor when it comes to affordable housing, because they see examples of how these organizations fail real people week after week. SeaSolers have front-row seats, in real time and in real life, to how governments and legal systems work to keep landlords and bosses in power, and to the fucked up things that they do with that power. These are things that SeaSolers understand on a visceral level from hard experience, not just intellectually. The knowledge you get from reading about some stranger’s experience on Reddit, or a philosopher’s opinion in a book, is very different. SeaSol learning is not just an idea you entertain, but something you confidently know and are ready to convince others of.
\nDC: SeaSol was not about providing services. It was about building solidarity, about theorizing our response to the disunity of capitalist life, and about acting collectively. Actions are open to everyone. Solidarity brings the group together, not the arbitrary circumstances of one’s social situation. One advantage of this approach is that it doesn’t limit activity within one sphere of one’s life—the job, the apartment, the circle of friends. So participants in the solidarity network relate to each other in many different ways. Mostly, we’re just “comrades.” The common cause of people who join campaign after campaign is more than just challenging the individual power of this or that boss or landlord; it is opposition to all the brutality of the everyday indignities of capitalism. […]
\n\nI first attended a SeaSol action around 2010. I was visiting Seattle from out of town and an old IWW contact told me to come out and see what SeaSol was doing. I had experienced some wage theft and other employment issues from working in food service, but I hadn’t seen an organized group of people addressing those sorts of issues. For most people—even most people in the IWW!—workers’ militant direct action is merely theoretical or historical, provided they think about it at all. Opportunities for that sort of unionization are just vanishingly slim. Even when unionization opportunities are present, we often lack the skill, consciousness, and group cohesion to take advantage of them.
\n\nSeaSol’s model overcame some of the limitations of the IWW approach. Whereas the IWW focused on union organizing campaigns at discrete workplaces, SeaSol built campaigns for the whole class of workers and renters. At the same time, SeaSol’s actions had a narrower focus and were appropriate to our circumstances; instead of the years-long efforts to organize unions (typically at workplaces where turnover outpaced the campaign), SeaSol made demands that could be articulated simply and met promptly. […]
\n\nSeaSol prioritized the effectiveness of actions above anything else. I don’t think Jane McAlevey2 was a conscious influence on the group, but “organizing to win” is the ethos of SeaSol. In the earlier years, social retreats and parties helped promote group cohesion. These were the high points, though it’s hard to say whether, and to what extent, the solid sense of group cohesion was the cause or effect of successful actions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/7.jpg\")
\n Four-Fingered Fisherman: It felt like a meaningful disengagement from appealing to electoral politics for me. The previous mass movements I had been a part of could not escape the recuperative energies of that kind of appeal. Like those movements, the solidarity network model focused on the individual acting in concert with others as the engine of change, but it changed the target. It exposed the various nexuses of power that are, most importantly, within striking distance and enabled communities to take immediate and impactful action against them in a way that the mass movements I had been a part of were largely missing. […]
\n\nThere was also always an acute focus on the model, following the chain of escalation, etc. I think it would be fair to characterize the model and the effectiveness of actions as one of the topmost priorities for SeaSol. This can be a double-edged sword, because any form of dogmatic adherence to something can create the kind of structural rigidity that ultimately ossifies and kills a project. SeaSol mitigated that particular risk by placing an emphasis on debriefing after every action and acting on issues identified in those spaces. […]
\n\nAs I came to learn the solidarity network model and begin working to help implement it, I felt for the first time that I was participating in something that had a high potential for creating transformative spaces for people. After participating in two moments of great social rupture that inevitably simmered back down to the status quo, it felt like the next logical step to take the energy that I had for those and put it towards developing something specifically to the benefit of the people around me rather than acting in the abstract. […]
\n\nDespite the fact that I am no longer currently organizing with SeaSol, my time working on the project represents some of the most foundational and important political activity that I have ever been a part of. It created space for me to grow personally, to expand my organizing capabilities while doing the same for all of the people we took on fights alongside. It secured meaningful, material victories for people, showing them that those could be achieved by direct action. It did all of this while intentionally avoiding getting sucked into electoralism even while Seattle had a self-identified socialist sitting on the city council. Perhaps most importantly, it did this in a way that kept many people engaged with the project for years, parents included, in a setting that tends to lack the cultivation and maintenance of intergenerational relationships.
\nJavabean: There is often a tendency for leftist organizations to see themselves as institutions of political theory that view struggle as secondary to politics, dedicating an excessive amount of time to discussing theory in groups in an attempt to create a singular, cohesive political identity.
\n\nSeaSol does not prescribe its members’ politics, it doesn’t try to guide its organizers’ understanding of theory. If a meeting starts to veer too far into broad discussion of theory and political identity in general, we will put effort into refocusing on the relevant topics, which are never theoretical. Someone needs their paycheck, someone needs their apartment keys, etc.
\n\nThe politics of SeaSol are the collective politics of its members, and what keeps that state of political being from spinning off is very much a social model of organizational structure: people with toxic politics will find SeaSol an unpleasant place to be, and eventually be shown the door. It’s not a perfect system, but I’ve never seen a perfect system, and at least we spend our time fighting fights.
\nLilly: I’m not sure anyone actually presented it this way to me, but when I joined (in 2009), I remember thinking SeaSol was designed to make every person at the center of a fight into a traditional organizer with SeaSol. This would turn out to be a narrow view of organic organizing; it played out seldomly in SeaSol. What happened more often was a ripple effect or branching: an activated person in a community or social group could motivate four or five fights while being at the center of just one of them. Most people who had fights continued to come out to actions for years, and in some cases, forever.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/11.jpg\")
\n SeaSol has been around through many waves of struggle and organization—the antiwar movement, the 2008 financial crisis, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the pandemic, and the Palestine solidarity movement. Over the past seventeen years, SeaSol has taken on around sixty fights. So far, we have registered a full or partial victory in roughly nine out of every ten of the fights we have completed. We estimate that around 2000 people have engaged with SeaSol in one way or another. Around 400 have become members of the network.
\n\nLilly: Once, we were fighting a developer who sat on the board of an environmental NGO. We hoped to get a flyer detailing his racist employment behavior into the hands of as many people attending this NGO board event as possible. They held their event at a restaurant that had limited public sidewalk and a private parking lot, which made it tricky to distribute the flyers. Another organizer and I dressed in our fanciest clothing, hoping the attendees would infer that we had a relationship to the event venue. They did, and every single car stopped to roll down their window and take our flyer.
\n\nOn a picket line outside of an apartment building, a property manager came out to the line to explain how she was “just doing her job,” claiming that she was “trying to help and really cared for” the person at the center of the fight, whose deposit was being stolen. The property management company had actually produced pictures that were verifiably not from the SeaSol member’s apartment. We were coming out of a solidarity network conference and had other solidarity network organizers in town. Perhaps because they were backing us up, or because it was a rowdy action, or because I have been a renter the entirety of my childhood and much of my adult life and have visceral memories of scrubbing apartment walls in hopes of getting a deposit back, something in me just gave way.
\n\nI verbally tore into the property manager. She knew this was not right, she knew she was stealing $350 dollars from a family that needed it to put down at another apartment—and for what? For a company that routinely steals deposits, knowing people won’t normally advocate for their return. If she cared about the person at the center of the fight, she would advocate to her bosses for the return of the deposit. If she couldn’t do that, she’d better not come out to the line trying to tell us shit. It must have registered, because I remember looking at her face as it broke and she just started crying before running inside. I’m not usually the schadenfreude type, but that knowing she heard and at least momentarily understood the pain she was causing others in this world meant a lot to me.
\nDolly: The Admiral Pub fight was one of my all-time favorites as far as what it showed SeaSol can achieve. Lucio, who was a cook at the Admiral Pub in West Seattle, was arrested by ICE and detained. The owner of the business, Eric Galanti, stole his paycheck. Lucio had family members still in Seattle who joined SeaSol and fought and organized on Lucio’s behalf while he was incarcerated and subsequently deported to Mexico.
\n\nLucio’s nephew, Luis, was active in the fight. We did a lot of pickets for several months at the Admiral Pub, and then at Bourbon Jack’s, another bar Galanti owned in the neighboring town of Kent, Washington. During that picket, the Kent police approached us to ask Luis to talk to Galanti with them.
\n\nWe all sat down, and Luis faced his uncle’s boss. The boss was flanked by cops. Luis was flanked by SeaSolers. Vuvuzelas could be heard blasting down the street. The normal power dynamic in this group had shifted, and I could see and feel it. The power was with Luis and the rabble of protest kids! The rich business owner was powerless, and the cops were decorative but useless. Galanti cut Luis a check for the full amount of wages he had stolen from Lucio . We walked away victorious. We walked away with a powerful experience that showed how direct collective action can shift the power dynamics in unjust situations to win demands for the working class.
\nThe Four Fingered Fisherman: Hands-down the most impactful moment in my time with SeaSol was our fight against a regional hotel chain called Silver Cloud, which fired a long-time dishwasher named Prospero for a no call no show the day after he suffered a massive heart attack while working in their dishpit. Prospero waited for months while we wrapped up another fight, showing up to every SeaSol meeting and supporting that other campaign before we could begin with his.
\n\nOnce we initiated his campaign, he fought for what was owed to him with a joy, determination, and consideration for his friends who still worked there that was almost unbelievable. We fought those bastards alongside him for months and finally won after confronting the multi-millionaire owner of the hotel chain at his lakefront home several times, just blocks from where Jeff Bezos was then living. The day that Prospero received the check from them in the mail, he treated himself to a film at the theater and quietly passed away without having cashed the check.
\n\nFortunately, we were able to assist in ensuring that his family was able to cash the check so that he could return to them one final time. Prospero’s indomitable spirit enabled him to hang on to life just long enough to put the bastards who wronged him in their place, in hopes that it would prevent them from doing the same thing to the rest of his friends there. That memory will stick with me until the day that I join him in the great unknown.
\nDC: [My favorite memory of SeaSol is] Making friends. Oh, and this one time I ran into a friend’s boyfriend at a taco truck we were picketing. He was a young guy, but he literally worked at Goldman Sachs. When he asked me why I was there, I explained the wage theft thing to him. He was so excited that we were doing direct action. He joined us for a bit and was yelling at the truck owner about how he’s never coming back there to eat. The next day, I saw his girlfriend. Apparently, he had told her all about the fun he had picketing. She half-jokingly told me to stay away from her boyfriend. She didn’t want me to give him any radical ideas. She wanted him to keep on the straight and narrow path to bourgeois wealth. She was sweating.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/10.jpg\")
\n Our theory was that SeaSol might start with ideologically-committed anarchists, but it would grow to include people from outside “the scene.” We hoped that by winning small but meaningful victories, SeaSol’s direct action casework would attract increasing numbers of people to engage in demonstrations and organizing. The organizing work was supposed to serve both educational and practical ends, deepening and extending the working-class movement against exploitation.
\n\nWe saw some success in this. In Walter Winslow’s 2011 interviews with SeaSol members, every respondent
\n\n\n\n\n“who did not initially get involved with SeaSol for any sort of ideological reasons, reported that they wanted to see SeaSol continue to grow to successfully take on larger and more significant problems in society.”
\n
One organizer put it poetically:
\n\n\n\n\n“the basic motif of SeaSol that I know is we do what we can today so we can do what we want to tomorrow.”
\n
SeaSol has measured its success by the fights it has won, but also by its capacity to grow. After seventeen years, how have we fared according to those standards?
\n\nOf course, the history of working-class movements includes plenty of failures. Capitalism is still here, structuring our lives and our ability to resist its dynamic push and pull. SeaSol is hardly unique as an organization that has failed to overthrow it. We’ve seen solidarity networks based on SeaSol’s model start in several other cities, but to our knowledge, none of those are still around today. This speaks to SeaSol’s success as the organization that has lasted the longest—we have to be doing something right!—but it also suggests some possible problems in the SeaSol model.
\n\nFundamentally, we must question the degree to which our project has helped develop class consciousness, taught us about the limits of our power, increased the scope of our demands, and prefigured the social relations and dynamics we desire. Could there be problems with our theories and our model? Certainly, it hasn’t been particularly easy to adapt them to other conditions. The problems we’ve observed relate to some familiar themes: lacking a critical mass; lacking committed organizers; challenges recruiting and integrating new people; burnout and retention; drama and interpersonal conflicts. The critical commentary on solidarity networks (such as this article) suggests some important questions:
\n\nThe following reflections relate to some of the lessons we’ve learned in trying to address these issues.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/1.jpg\")
\nEmily S.: I was sixteen when I joined SeaSol in 2010 and nineteen when I began to gradually break away from the group. (I was already aware of some basic tenets of anarchism and came to a meeting after seeing the words “solidarity,” “mutual aid” and “direct action” on a poster.) I don’t think I became an independently effective organizer during that time, but I learned a great deal and participated in parallel political moments, like Occupy/Decolonize Seattle and the 2011 port shutdown, alongside other SeaSolers. The parts of the group that immediately appealed to me were the focus on winning and the framework for choosing and carrying out fights. My criticisms of it eventually arose around issues of racial dynamics between organizers and between organizers and people coming to us with fights. (Patriarchal dynamics that affected white women were mostly eventually addressed.)
\n\nOne incident I remember, the straw that broke the camel’s back for my involvement, was at a meeting after we had voted to take on a fight with a certain monetary demand. Two longtime organizers had apparently been talking with each other and had decided that for whatever reason, the demand was unrealistic and proposed it should be replaced with a lower amount of money to be more “winnable.” They had not talked about this with the people bringing the fight, who were Latino restaurant workers, and the latter had no input until it was brought up formally at the meeting. While everyone has equal ability to participate in meetings (though as I recall these two workers communicated via a volunteer interpreter, so inevitably more friction was involved), I did not feel that everyone involved was on equal footing and I thought it was disrespectful given that no additional information had been discovered in the interim that would have justified reopening the topic. (I spoke my mind at the meeting, to no avail.)
\n\nI do not recall which fight this was, and for all I know it went on to be successful, but I know from what I was told afterwards that the workers were not happy with how things went down at that meeting. While I had always felt respected and appreciated in Seasol, I did not feel like I had the social skills or clout to intervene in a way that would be satisfying in the long term, and mostly stopped going to meetings. In my view, this was an example of the concept of winnability being taken too far: toning down a demand for no concrete reason and at a cost to those workers.
\n\nAnother incident was a much more serious mistake. Before the first picket of Boracchini’s, one of the founding members of SeaSol had gone on a local right-wing talk radio show to speak about it, without asking approval from the rest of the group. This led to the presence of many counter-protesters, and one of our members was seriously hurt at this picket. The violence would not have happened if the action hadn’t been publicized to all the wrong people. It was a major blunder, and an inexplicable one given the generally democratic nature of the group.
\n\nSeaSol provided me with many formative relationships and experiences as a young adult in a way that’s hard to sum up today. The main takeaways I have are the experience of militancy, the willingness to break all the normal social rules and get in the bosses’ faces; the general principles of planning an escalation campaign; and how to use mobilizing lists for actions (something that I later realized is surprisingly rare). While I’ve never been involved in another group with the dedication with which I was involved in SeaSol, it gave me a solid and practical education in core aspects of organizing that are almost universally applicable.
\nJavabean: My realistic critique of that as an overall organizational strategy is that it’s not always easy to recognize when it’s necessary to shift focus to building capacity. I think that we tend to put so much focus on maintaining a fight that outreach and organization building can look like additional work for an already exhausted organizer, which can lead to a diminished organization, and member burnout.
\n\nThere’s no straightforward answer of when to build an organization and when to fight fights. I think the only real answer is to keep the focus on output. If your organization doesn’t create material results, figure out why. It might be that you’re focusing on “recruitment” when you should be focusing on action; it might be the reverse. It might be something else entirely. At the end of the day, SeaSol is more interested in what we can do than in how many people come to meetings. […]
\n\nTo be honest, I think that this question [about what happens when struggles are at a low point] gets right to SeaSol’s biggest weakness, and it can seem existential. When an organization is built on people’s ability to connect and form collective action over material struggle, and it judges its efficacy on its ability to engage and win on that level, then its primary source of energy is those fights.
\n\nWhen there isn’t a fight, people get bored, lose interest, and capacity falters. SeaSol has been fortunate to have had members that have the energy to keep things going in those times. As much as I wonder how long SeaSol could survive without a fight, my immediate response to that thought is, “If SeaSol doesn’t have fights, what’s the point of it even existing?”
\n\nI haven’t been around for a serious existential lull, but I think that historically, the answer is that there’s enough struggle out there to go around, and so we actively look for fights, and that re-energizes the organization. […]
\n\nJust to get this out of the way, SeaSol can’t be specifically “substitutionist” in any way that I would understand it, because it’s not a political party. SeaSol has no collective revolutionary agenda beyond (arguably) the likelihood that most of its members would hope that the existence of solidarity networks might generally raise class consciousness, contribute in some way to aspirational goals in a way that could be described in terms of base building, or create pathways that might assist in community organizing that is antithetical to capitalist hierarchies.
\n\nThe thing about that is: SeaSol doesn’t actually do any of that. We fight fights that we can win. We’ve literally never talked about revolution or political goals in a meeting beyond those directly relevant to what’s in front of us. [In fact, revolution and political goals have been discussed in meetings that this member may not have attended.] If we were to co-opt a fight, it would be for an agenda that doesn’t exist. There isn’t really a definition of “substitutionism” that I could see being realistically applied to SeaSol in any serious way.”
\nMickey: SeaSol took off and was far more successful than I think any of us initially imagined it would be. Some of the challenges presented by activist culture that we had critiqued in the anti-glob and anti-war movements followed us into SeaSol, such as voluntarism. But we were able to address other challenges successfully through this new hybrid form of class struggle unionism. For example, we were able to recruit workers from a variety of backgrounds to our network, introducing them to a functional and pragmatic anarchism.
\n\nThe success of the model also made jumping to other forms of struggle very difficult. Expanding our fights between single tenants or workers into larger collective fights that could form the nucleus of future unions continued to be a persistent issue. Our fights often stayed between isolated tenants or workers. We found out that it was fairly difficult to use the solidarity network model to build a tenant or workers union. […]
\n\nIntegrating into any anarchist/left-wing project is difficult and turnover/attrition is inevitable. That said, this is one of the things SeaSol did well. There was a formal system for bringing new people in and making sure they were engaged. SeaSol also offered childcare at meetings and sometimes organized meetings or materials in Spanish, since some members were Spanish-speaking. While there was plenty of turnover, we recruited and integrated many long-term members into our organizing committee. The theoretical and strategic framework was largely syndicalist and somewhat reductionist on purpose. This framework was perpetuated via regular and consistent organizer trainings. There were attempts to organize political education in SeaSol, but I’m not sure how successful they were.
\nDolly: Revolutionizing the global labor movement and toppling capitalism is a tall order for any single organization or idea. In my twenty-something mind, this was possible for SeaSol. If we fought enough of them, the solidarity network model would spread, and bosses and landlords wouldn’t be able to exploit us anymore. Capitalism would surely fall. For a couple of years there, it seemed like it was happening! Honestly, as I approach my forties and SeaSol similarly enters a slower, more measured and reflective phase, I still believe this model holds key components to the liberation of the working class. We operate using the principles of cooperative self-governance and decision-making. We rely on direct action tactics. We have no paid staff or hierarchy or membership dues. We can definitely improve, but there is a lot about SeaSol that is… perfect. […]
\n\nOur toolbox of tactics has evolved. We’re really creative, passionate, smart people. What we will do for a $99 fight we believe in is unhinged. We have fought international corporations like Greystar in coordination with other solidarity networks and won. We’ve organized strikes and beaten enormous corporations like Chase Bank that traditional unions wouldn’t dream of touching. SeaSol has also cultivated a tight-knit, positive anarchist community whose members have built lifelong friendships. SeaSolers have strong cross-generational relationships built on real class struggle. Our community fights bosses and landlords together, yes, but we’re also a community of people who care for one another outside of that context. […]
\n\nAlong with attracting top-notch organizers, our organization tends to attract people who see an opportunity to take advantage of a place that doesn’t have any membership dues or barriers to membership and seem to delight in being the center of drama and interpersonal strife. The group has a big problem with being helpless in the face of abusive behavior by such people—it’s a pattern that has repeated itself a handful of times since I joined and I wish I knew how to solve it. Many people have “gotten tired of dealing with [person x]” and left before the group got up the courage to vote [person x] out. We don’t have a great process for doing this, and one solid organizer left over the process itself. […]
\n\nGroup cohesion is generally easy when we have fights and we only intentionally work on this when problems arise. Occasionally, groups of female-identifying SeaSolers (affectionately calling ourselves “SheSol”) have gotten together to address problematic or threatening behavior specifically directed at us. We then brought issues to the group with proposals about how to resolve them, which were approved each time. There have been personality problems over the years, with people doing various things—seemingly intentionally—to disrupt the harmony of the group and manipulate and abuse others emotionally. This has been awful, but we’ve found ways to deal with it each time, by eventually voting the member(s) in question out after a certain amount of damage has been inflicted. There has been talk of establishing a process for dealing with this, but no clear proposals have been made. It’s messy.
\nIke: I’d say a majority of people who find out about SeaSol don’t end up taking on any role—even something as small as note-taking.
\n\nMy impression is that SeaSol’s default mode of transmitting knowledge is person-to-person, and we could probably make better use of written material and organize it better. For example, anyone can volunteer to be a secretary / facilitator, and new people who have been around for a few weeks are encouraged to do so, but the actual knowledge of how to do it properly is conveyed either through shadowing someone or through SeaSol school, which runs sessions on this topic maybe one or two times per year. I’ve been trying to document the things I was confused about when I joined and I think it’s been helpful.
\n\nAlso, our niche seems to be people who already know they’re leftists and are familiar with the way “orgs” tend to talk. I haven’t seen much success in converting “normal” people to organizing or much repeat engagement with SeaSol from people we helped with their own fights in the last two years. I do know that some organizers had prior SeaSol fights, so that may be a short time span.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/6.jpg\")
\n Jane: On the side of “lessons learned,” we have learned that doing this work does not magically transform people into anarchists or other flavors of lefties. It seems to me that it took a preexisting lefty ideological commitment to motivate people to stick around long term as organizers. But as for a list of people who might show up if we asked them about a compelling fight, that list grew and is pretty large now…
\n\nIn terms of my personal desire to have more influence over my organizing work, I definitely achieved that goal as one of the people putting my heart and tons of hours into the work. But I feel like we were in crisis mode for many years, perennially overstretched, and so not really taking the time to develop or mentor people who maybe wanted to be more involved but hadn’t already developed those skills in other parts of their lives. So it’s possible that people felt that same inner circle / outer circle dynamic that I had felt in my union work, again totally unintentionally. There’s only so many hours in the day and we were trying to win those fights. And organizing work is often tedious and more people want to have opinions about it than want to actually do the work.
\n\nRegarding unexpected outcomes, it’s the friends you make along the way, right? Actually, I’m still super tight with a bunch of SeaSol folks and it’s been fun seeing how they’re using the skills that we all developed together in other organizing projects, in their jobs, and so on. I think fighting gross misconduct in employers and landlords will never go out of style.
\n\nAs (mostly) anarchists, we were pretty helpless in the face of basic social dysfunction. We’re so inclusive and want to be nice. But people who would have just gotten fired from actual jobs were allowed to stick around for far too long and to be a psychic and emotional drain on the group. When we actually managed to eject one or two, it nearly broke us. If anyone has managed to crack the code on that problem, I’d love to hear it.
\nDC: Of course, SeaSol’s model has its own limits. The tangible returns of even successful campaigns—a $500 paycheck here, a $1000 deposit there—aren’t great compared to the energy and time put into the campaign. (Although I’d argue that the intangible results are more important!) Obviously, SeaSol hasn’t generalized any of its individual campaigns into some bigger revolution. Many people are burnt out from the time, dedication, and courage required. We keep bumping our heads up against the limits of coordination, communication, and alienation. […]
\n\nSeaSol also isn’t always prepared for a legal counter-attack. We’re vulnerable when an employer uses the courts (lawfare) to harass and intimidate us.
\nLilly: Regarding failure, almost ten years after I left the organizing team I would still prefer to say “I didn’t give it my best effort,” rather than the truth, which is that I totally did and I still feel I failed. I think I learn more everyday about why it didn’t work “better”—and how flawed and grandiose it is to think “I failed” at social revolution. At one point during organizing, it became almost physically painful when people uninvolved in the daily struggle would ask why it wasn’t “scaling” or picking up speed. And honestly? It wasn’t scaling because of the sheer weight of that metaphorical boulder representing an entire economic system, and the innumerable divisions between us in society.
\n\nCriticism flowed constantly: why didn’t SeaSol create more community? Why didn’t it scale? Why was it focused on single-worker or tenant fights? Well, it did do all those things and aspired for more, but the reality of constant, concerted oppression was more extreme than I previously understood. Existing under capitalism—let alone resisting under it—is exhausting, demoralizing, and traumatic. Solidarity Networks are a great method to get elbow-deep into resistance, for pushing that boulder around for a few moments, letting someone else under it breathe before it rolls back on top of all of us. I think that is the type of community and resistance building we need, repeatedly, even if it’s barely manageable. If we keep gaining momentum on this boulder, if we keep organizing and shifting it around, we will eventually keep up the momentum to push it off of us for longer and longer periods; I have no doubt that if more people participated in SolNets, we’d see increased community capacity over time. […]
\n\nDuring my time, one organizer quit by basically telling everybody how much he hated each of them and especially the relationships that organizers formed. It can’t be reduced to this because there was so much going on at the time, but one point he made was that SeaSol organizing was not really sustainable with a working-class lifestyle. He was kind of right. Doing something that hard and doing it extremely well took a handful of people making SeaSol their entire lives. Now, many of those people were working class, but still. It took a lot. I hope that anyone engaging in solidarity networks realizes that balance is really difficult, but not impossible. The frustration around ease of participation is valid; solidarity networks should try to be as inclusive as possible. And it is not fellow organizers or members who dictate the difficulty of participation so much as the conditions from which all fights originate: capitalism.
\nThe Four Fingered Fisherman: I think it is inarguable that the social context has changed; the Trump years, the George Floyd Rebellion, climate catastrophe, and the genocide in Palestine, among other things, have all pulled us in a million different directions, often in reactive way. Moments such as those are always going to shift some of the energy away from a geographically-focused, long-term project like SeaSol.
\n\nHowever, I would posit that a serious and strategic assessment of the limitations of these moments, which we continually find ourselves running up against, points us back toward the keystone elements of the solidarity network model and what has made it so successful for SeaSol. In this regard, the most important elements of the solidarity network model that I have taken away from it as it can be applied to the current social context are having a geographically-restrictive focus (even when tied to a broader mass social movement), being regenerative in their capacity, and using direct action to target relevant local manifestations of power. […]
\n\nWhile SeaSol was generally pretty intentional about reserving use of its mobilization list and organizing energies for its own demand-specific campaigns, there were moments in my time with the organization when we directly organized to support broader goals. The largest single SeaSol mobilization that I participated in was when we hit our entire mobilization list to bring people out into the streets to face off against the Northwest Hammerskins4 on an attempted so-called “Martyr’s Day” march they were planning in 2015. SeaSol mobilized over 70 people from our list and offered a contingent at the action for our supporters in a context that might otherwise have felt prohibitively dangerous . Beyond using the project itself as a space to participate in broader social movements, however, I have always felt that SeaSol is one of the primary points of entry here in Seattle for new, politically-activated people to come in and quickly develop skills and experience that they can then apply in other spaces.
\n\nThat was certainly my personal experience, and I have seen that play out for many others as well in my time here.
\nMatt: We were also inspired by the positive reception we got from anarchist and communist groups around the world.
\n\nAmong other unintended positive effects, it increased the credibility of the anarchist movement around the time of Occupy. We could point to some tangible and practical victories we had achieved. This helped to put us in a position to win the battle of ideas (and organization) against liberal collaborationists.
\n\nThe big problem was scale. It’s great to win a few thousand dollars back in lost wages for a few dozen members, and to help families avoid eviction and so on, but that is a tiny drop in the ocean, so I believed that the model had to grow exponentially to even keep up with capitalist society. That is why I favored speaking tours to spread the model and encourage growth of new groups. This was quite successful in the short term, but most of those groups folded after only a few months to a year. (Perhaps in our enthusiasm, we made it sound too easy.)
\n\nAnother impasse was about what to do with the local Seattle group in order to achieve constantly increasing growth—should we form specialized groups focusing on tenant committees and workplaces, or should we split into smaller regional groups for different parts of the area?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/5.jpg\")
\n We won’t shy away from it: We want you to start a solidarity network, or at least to borrow heavily from the idea. The solidarity network narratives and critiques that we have shared here attest that manifesting a community of solidarity and resistance through sheer organizing energy is an experience worth the effort it takes to sustain. The responses describe applied, practical solidarity as an antidote to apathy and agony.
\n\nSolidarity networks are a way to blow life into the working class. We want you to play a part in this resuscitation, to pound on the chest until you hear the ribs crack if you need to. Give this your best effort. Because it works. Even if it’s completely exhausting. And despite everything—anxiety and ruined relationships and failed fights, extreme edges of human behavior and fraught moments when it feels like it may actually be impossible—solidarity networks may still be one of the best forms of organizing on offer.
\n\nDolly: Fascists are becoming bolder, which has increased the relevance of the solidarity network model and increased the importance of security culture within SeaSol. Bosses and landlords have been gaining power and traditional business unions are weakening, all of which increases our relevance for obvious reasons. The climate crisis and racial injustice are shifting within our social context. Both are caused by capitalism, and people active in SeaSol and similar organizing care deeply about both of these things.
\n\nSeaSol, over the years, has also made me increasingly doubtful of the effectiveness of governments and legal systems for making any kind of meaningful gains for the working class. I’ve seen people turn to legal fights rather than SeaSol fights, and seen those just drain them of time and resources until they peter out into nothingness. I can see that the bosses and landlords who write the laws of our land also benefit from them. I see that wage theft is the most common type of theft, and that wage theft laws are not enforced. That is a design feature, not a bug, because the employing class writes these laws and enforces them, not the working class. They have ensured that the working class will never overthrow them within the systems that they have set up.
\n\nI had a lot more faith in things like electoral politics when I first joined SeaSol. I’m a lot more critical of those systems now. I consider myself an anarcho-syndicalist. My education didn’t come from reading theory so much as through watching people’s situations play out in the context of organizing.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/8.jpg\")
\n The picket wraps up and your solidarity network crew does a group go-around, each person recounts a favorite moment from the last two hours. One person—you think they’re the barista, they might have authored the leaflet—says they loved it when the boss stepped out to yell at the picket line. They can’t imagine the vein on the boss’s forehead can handle another picket like this one.
\n\nAnother member—the other person brand new to the fight—proudly shares the moment they were able to turn a customer away, leaflet in one hand and picket sign in the other. Two solidarity network members who had stepped over to the side to talk to the police when they arrived report to the group that the boss was the one who called the police to the picket yet again. The person at the center of the fight goes last and thanks everyone for coming out.
\n\nIt’s now dusk. The street lights are flickering on. You are still in the middle of a stretch of suburban nowhere, at an intersection next to a gas station across the street from a strip mall. But you’re feeling different. You and the dishwashers, phone tree operators, leaflet authors, apartment dwellers, and the barista return your picket signs to the back of the truck that transported them there. The concept behind this group is sinking in. Solidarity.
\n\n“It really is so simple,” you think to yourself. “When we stand up for one another, the rest of the petty, entitled, obnoxious bosses will probably buckle just like today’s did.” You head back home to think about the next action. Maybe you will finally check out one of the planning meetings, too.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/9.jpg\")
\nAn Owie to One Is an Owie to All: A Six-Step Plan for Helping Your Parent-Friends Remain Activists
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/07/10/2.jpg\")
\n Agitate, Educate, Inoculate, Organize, UNION is an IWW organizing strategy. ↩
\nJane McAlevy was a community and labor organizer who guided many successful campaigns by inspiring workers to organize for power in their own unions and communities by taking militant, collective action in overwhelming numbers. ↩
\nSubstitutionism is a term in Marxist theory referring to a situation or analysis in which the activity of the revolutionary party is supposed to substitute for the activity of the working class. This was a question from outside of SeaSol; many of us were unfamiliar with the term. ↩
\nNorthwest Hammerskins is an affiliate of Hammerskin Nation, a white supremacist, fascist, antisemitic and homophobic neo-Nazi “skinhead” group in the United States. ↩
\nFrom February 28 to March 2, hundreds of abolitionists and anarchists from across the country converged in Gainesville for the first Florida Abolitionist Gathering (FAG). Across a passionate weekend of workshops, films, food, debate, ritual, and protest, the contours of a robust regional resistance movement came into focus. The intergenerational, heavily queer and trans, and strongly multi-issue and anarchist group of abolitionists that converged in Florida articulated an expansive vision of liberation anchored in the urgent need to dismantle the prison-industrial complex in all its manifestations. The gathering showed that even as liberals wring their hands about the death of democracy, scrappy groups of organizers continue to fight back—and sometimes win—deep within the belly of the beast.
\n\nEven within the darkening landscape of hyper-policing, anti-immigrant crackdowns, racist backlash, and transphobia spreading across the US, Florida poses a particularly chilling context. Despite his conflicts with Donald Trump, popular conservative governor Ron DeSantis has led a vicious campaign against activists in the state for years, prefiguring the national MAGA obsession with pushing back against all things “woke.” The notorious 2021 HB1 law passed in the aftermath of the Justice for George Floyd uprisings dramatically expanded the definition of a “riot” and the charges that can be levied against protesters, made toppling statues a felony, and limited the liability of anyone who injures or kills protesters, among other appalling provisions. The power of developers continues to surge, resulting in rollbacks of environmental protections and further reductions in affordable housing, while punitive policies criminalizing homelessness have led to sweeps of parks. As poverty and harsh laws sweep more and more people into jails and prisons, the conditions inside have worsened. New policies have ended physical mail delivery in most facilities and nearly succeeded in eliminating in-person visits, while DeSantis has called in the National Guard to staff prisons.
\n\nSuffice it to say: in Florida, abolitionists face an uphill battle.
\n\nYet the state also features a robust array of resistance movements, including a strong anarchist presence, which have long pushed back against environmental destruction, gentrification, xenophobia, and mass incarceration. The Earth First! Journal was based in Lake Worth, Florida for some years, and active EF! chapters along with groups such as Fight Toxic Prisons have fought campaigns against ecocidal developers and prison profiteers. Protesters have targeted the headquarters of the GEO Group, a major private prison company; the Lake Worth-based Prison Legal News collects and circulates a wide range of information on prisoner rights.
\n\nIn 2020, outside organizers concerned about the horrifying conditions facing prisoners during the COVID pandemic launched the Community Hotline for Incarcerated People in South Florida, documenting abuses and offering support to hundreds through legal referrals, advocacy, and protest. A mass demonstration in Tallahassee memorialized people who died in Florida prisons in the pandemic, featuring the testimony of a person whose father died from COVID-19 in prison and the laying of body bags in front of the state capitol building.
\n\nGainesville in particular has been the site of powerful abolitionist activism in recent years. Campaigns by Florida Prisoner Solidarity successfully forced the termination of prison labor contracts with the city and county in 2018, effectively closing the Gainesville Work Camp facility; in 2023, in response to activist pressure, the Alachua County Jail became the first in the South to offer free unlimited phone calls to prisoners.
\n\nLast year, local organizers agreed that something needed to happen to mobilize against rising fascism in the state and nationally. They proposed a gathering that would bring together abolitionists and anarchists to network and share strategies. While many solidarity groups and campaigns operate in Florida, the geography of the state is so spread out that organizers from different regions may rarely have the chance to connect and collaborate. This gathering offered a chance to bring these far-flung radicals together while keeping the spotlight on prison solidarity organizing, which can often be ignored in broader progressive activist spaces.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/15/1.jpg\")
Tabling materials at the 2025 Florida Abolitionist Gathering.
\nThe Civic Media Center (CMC) served as the home base for the 2025 Florida Abolitionist Gathering. One of the longest-lasting radical community spaces still operating in the US, the CMC emerged from the global justice and Indymedia movements of a previous anarchist generation. Since its founding in 1993, the space has offered an alternative library, reading room, and infoshop, hosted events in support of grassroots activism, and featured do-it-yourself music and cultural events. In addition to the CMC, organizers partnered with other local art spaces and the public library to ensure that they could accommodate a wide range of workshops and activities. It’s a good thing they did, because over two hundred participants thronged the gathering over the course of the weekend, filling most event spaces to capacity and spilling out into countless discussions in the CMC’s outside courtyard, in a nearby park, and elsewhere across the city.
\n\nThe gathering’s provocative acronym reflected the centrality of queer/trans organizers, participants, and topics. As we’ve observed on an international level, newer generations drawn to anarchist activity are disproportionately gender/sexual outlaws as well as political radicals; that pattern was very much in evidence in Gainesville.
\n\nTablers such as the Pansy Collective and Queers for Climate Justice offered queer/trans merch and perspectives. Sessions took place over the weekend on producing hormones for do-it-yourself HRT and herbal transition options, a prison book luncheon hosted by the Tranzmission Prison Project on strategizing to get queer content into prisons, a participatory poetry workshop on “writing the queer/trans body,” and a presentation on “Radical Queer Histories of Faggotry, Abolition, and Anarchy.” The Alyssa Rodriguez Center for Gender Justice, an organization dedicated to strengthening movements for gender justice across prison walls, fighting gender-based violence, and eliminating barriers to political participation for incarcerated survivors and other grassroots advocates, presented on the experiences of trans people in Florida DOC facilities and spoke about coalition organizing around reproductive justice and bodily autonomy within and beyond prisons. At a time of intensifying gender fascism, as the right increasingly demonizes trans people, restricts access to abortion, and excuses male sexual violence, it was encouraging to see abolitionist organizers foregrounding struggles for gender self-determination in the movement to end prisons.
\n\nThis intersectional logic informed a wide range of activities at the gathering. Presenters emphasized connections between varied struggles in workshops on Palestinian political prisoners, immigrant solidarity and anti-deportation efforts, and the environmental impact of jails and prisons. The final event on the program involved the screening of Can’t Stop Change, a new documentary film connecting stories from “LGBTQ2S+ artists, organizers, and educators across Florida (and the new Florida diaspora) into an intersectional climate justice narrative.”
\n\nThe weekend showed that today’s abolitionists see prisoner support and prison abolition movements as inseparably linked to a wide range of liberation struggles and can confidently articulate the links between them as they build solidarity.
\n\nThe specific context of Florida and the Southeast informed many presentations. The workshops included a teach-in on the oppression of Haiti and Haitian migrants, and its role within US empire; perspectives on Appalachian anti-capitalist and abolitionist organizing from the mine wars to mountaintop removal; the bail fund and hurricane relief mutual aid efforts in Asheville, North Carolina; and campaigns against new prison construction across the region by Fight Toxic Prisons. One especially interesting presentation by Root Legal, a South Florida nonprofit public interest law firm and community organizing project oriented towards addressing root causes of harm, shared their efforts to forge an abolitionist strategy working with “crime victims” to reject pressure from prosecutors to pursue criminal punishment.
\n\nAn innovative cultural project launched by the South Florida Community Hotline for Incarcerated People (CHIP) has produced “Bending the Bars”, a full album of original hip-hop written and recorded entirely by musicians inside the jails and prisons of Broward County, Florida. Despite a complete ban on in-person visits and severe restrictions on costly phone calls, outside supporters collaborated with a wide range of incarcerated rappers to produce a powerful musical effort that defies the state’s efforts to isolate and silence prisoners. This was one of many examples on offer of how ferocious, creative, and effective abolitionist organizing can thrive in unexpected places.
\n\nWhile local and regional efforts remained in the spotlight, on Saturday evening, attendees took inspiration from struggles in other territories. Many participants were relieved at the recent release of Leonard Peltier after nearly fifty years incarcerated on charges stemming from his participation in the American Indian Movement’s struggle for Indigenous self-determination. A longtime Florida supporter of political prisoners offered an emotional presentation on the significance of his case to prison movements; some older organizers recalled being radicalized by Peltier’s case decades ago, and despairing of ever seeing him freed in their lifetimes. After viewing a short video of Leonard addressing a crowd of supporters near his home in so-called North Dakota, the assembled abolitionists recorded a wildly enthusiastic cheer and message of support and solidarity, which was sent to Peltier through his supporters.
\n\nAfterwards, a large group viewed the recent CrimethInc. documentary Fell in Love With Fire, an anarchist account of the revolutionary uprising that swept through Chile from October 2019 to March 2020. Amid a weekend of sharing strategies for fighting back against an array of miserable conditions, it was electrifying to hear the stories of the Chilean revolt as a reminder that revolutionary possibilities exist in the here and now, that courageous mass defiance can dramatically alter the social consensus in a short period of time, and that the future is unwritten.
\n\nParticipants at the gathering showed a passionate interest not only in supporting prisoners and dismantling existing carceral facilities but also in critically rethinking the alternative ways our communities respond to harm. An evocative image appearing on stickers and t-shirts insisted, “Abolish All Carceral Logics,” illustrating the grip that our prison society can exert on our minds and hearts as well as our bodies.
\n\nOne of the weekend’s most widely discussed workshops was titled “Against Me Too: Against Survivor Politics,” which waded into the waters of controversy around efforts to respond to harm within radical communities via community accountability processes. The conversation proved so generative that when the session ended, participants agreed to convene a second time on Sunday to continue the dialogues that had begun. At a time when liberals commonly repurpose the MAGA chant “Lock Them/Him Up!” at spaces ranging from the Democratic National Convention to a rally to defend trans history at Stonewall, it is critical that those of us fighting for total freedom reject the creep of carceral logic into our own approaches to social transformation.
\n\nAnarchists have long critically reflected on our small-scale efforts to redress harm outside of criminal legal processes. The many discussions that unspooled within and beyond these workshops confirmed that a new generation of anarchists and abolitionists continue to debate how to dismantle patriarchy and keep each other safe outside of the ineffective and punitive approaches put forward by the state.
\n\nOn the last afternoon of the gathering, a well-attended caucus of non-white attendees met and shared experiences of navigating the gathering and broader organizing spaces. In the collective debrief session following, caucus participants shared a range of feedback about their experiences, critiquing the predominant whiteness of the gathering and asserting the importance of more autonomous spaces for non-white organizers to connect. While participants diverged in their perspectives of the weekend, many agreed that both the caucus space and the public debrief circle at the close of the gatherings schedule were key features that other gatherings should reproduce. In both autonomous organizing and critical participation in majority white efforts, Black, brown, and Indigenous attendees made clear that their perspectives are integral to effective movements for abolition and liberation. Other suggestions offered toward future gatherings included increased intergenerational spaces, sessions rooting us into the place we gather in and its local context, and expanding the variety of modalities for learning, sharing, and action.
\n\nFriday evening’s grief ritual offered one of the weekend’s most moving moments. The assembled participants shared a painfully long list of names of fellow organizers and loved ones who had died in recent years, adding them to a board that would eventually be composted, symbolizing their return to the earth to continue nourishing and fertilizing a new generation of resistance. One participant sung a song to honor Tortuguita, an anarchist murdered by police while defending the Weelaunee Forest in the movement to Stop Cop City in Atlanta.
\n\nAt the ritual and in several workshops across the weekend, participants honored the memory of Karen Smith, a prolific outside organizer who has been mourned by her comrades on both sides of the walls since her tragic death in a car accident in 2020. As a recently incarcerated organizer recalled, “She gave her heart, her mind, and her life to this movement.” Despite the intense grief and demoralization so many radicals feel amid personal losses and political defeats, the ritual showed the capacity of our radical movements to rebuild our resilience by honoring our departed comrades and sharing deeply with each other.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/15/6.jpg\")
The altar created by FAG 2025 participants during the grief ritual commemorating our departed comrades.
\nIn one of the weekend’s most powerful sessions, two Florida outside abolitionists joined Julius, one of the lead incarcerated organizers of the 2016 national prison strike in Florida, to discuss inside/outside resistance to the Florida Department of Corrections to a packed room of 75 attendees at the public library. After spending over seventeen years in Florida prisons since being sentenced as a teenager, Julius had just been released the previous month. In a particularly moving moment, a south Florida anarchist organizer arrived and approached Julius at the table; as it turned out, the two had been corresponding and organizing together for years, but had never before been able to meet in person. Their emotional embrace with tears in their eyes showed concretely the powerful bonds that can be forged through solidarity across prison walls.
\n\nJulius shared his perspectives on how becoming involved in inside/outside solidarity organizing since 2016 transformed his life. He traced his political development over his years inside, acknowledging the shame he felt about his past actions of stealing from other poor people from his own community and misogynistic behavior. While accepting responsibility for harm he caused, he explained that his sentence involved “no recognition of what I’ve been through, or the context that shaped me.” Receiving mail from outside organizers helped him reinterpret his experiences through a political lens, and as momentum built toward the national prison strike, he decided to go all in. He used his own scarce commissary funds to photocopy and circulate materials about the strike, and built relationships with prisoners who were widely respected whose influence could help ensure wider participation. His efforts paid off: at his facility, 90% of the prisoners participated in hunger strikes or sit-down work strikes. Florida prisons kicked off the strike nationally, launching in a dozen facilities two days before the scheduled date and startling Florida Deportment of Corrections officials.
\n\nLike other vocal strikers, Julius was targeted by the prison administration with made-up infractions and arbitrary transfers to other facilities in an attempt to hamper his organizing. Yet their strategy backfired. Although the authorities bounced him around to five different facilities in retaliation, Julius gleefully recounted, “I could reach five times as many people with the message as I could have if they’d just left me there.” But outside pressure proved instrumental to offsetting the consequences prison officials can inflict on inside organizers with near impunity. “That’s why your voices are so important,” Julius explained, “because they can’t tell you to shut the fuck up, pepper spray you, and throw you in a cell.”
\n\nJulius reiterated a lesson that incarcerated organizers have long emphasized: receiving mail, phone calls, visits, and commissary donations from outside supporters demonstrates to both prison officials and fellow prisoners that an inside organizer has support and cannot be subjected to abuse or isolation without consequences. Achieving a critical mass of both participation inside and support outside provides the only way to win victories and protect organizers, he explained: “They might catch us individually, but they can’t beat all of us.”
\n\nPrison was a harrowing experience, and adjusting to life on the outside for the first time in nearly two decades hasn’t been easy, Julius acknowledged. Small things could trigger his PTSD, from the jangle of keys (signifying the approach of guards) to the squeak of shoes on a basketball court (the soundscape of a fight or stabbing). But the organizing that changed his life inside has also transformed his notion of what could be possible in his life outside. The positive thing he’s taken from his seventeen years in Florida’s hellish prisons is the network he formed with other abolitionists—“It’s you comrades who are the inspiration.”
\n\nAlongside Julius’s powerful in-person testimony, panelists shared audio recordings of messages from two additional inside organizers who are still currently incarcerated. Their testimony—interrupted by the mechanical voice intoning “you have one minute remaining” that is so familiar to organizers—reminded attendees of the absence of the countless thousands of comrades who remain held captive behind the walls.
\n\nIn a poignant moment, Julius explained that across nearly two decades behind the walls, his biggest fear was “dying alone in prison without my voice ever being heard.” The panel showed how organizers can amplify those voices, strengthening movements for solidarity and abolition and overcoming the state’s efforts to bury people alive.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/15/4.jpg\")
Materials for participants at the gathering to write to prisoners.
\nAt the panel discussion, Julius had explained the powerful impact that noise demonstrations outside prisons and jails can have: “That gets their attention, I promise you!” So it was appropriate that the weekend concluded with a demonstration outside the Gainesville Work Camp, a prison focused on extracting prisoner labor that has recently reopened after activists successfully shut it down several years before. About twenty-five participants from the gathering held a spirited rally, making noise and chanting to let officials know that the exploitation of local prisoners did not go unnoticed.
\n\nA particularly feisty child of perhaps ten years old who had attended much of the gathering provided a highlight, getting on the bullhorn and chanting, “Oink oink, piggy piggy / We’re gonna make your lives shitty!”
\n\nAs the demonstration concluded with a chant of “We love you, we see you / We won’t be free without you,” a group of incarcerated workers could be seen waving. One organizer described it as the best part of the gathering: “After a weekend of talking about solidarity, then being in it.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/15/3.jpg\")
The demonstration at the Work Farm prison in Gainesville.
\nIn addition to the demonstration, the weekend’s cultural events raised a significant sum of money for a variety of solidarity projects. A show one evening benefited Florida Prisoner Solidarity’s support efforts, while proceeds from a rave helped the Gainesville Books to Prisoners program and mutual aid efforts in Gaza and Sudan. In particular, money raised throughout the FAG weekend successfully funded a water well in Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, which is now supplying 300-400 families, enabling them to resist Israeli colonial forces seeking to displace them. The relationships of solidarity that were strengthened this weekend transcended apartheid walls and national borders as well as prison walls.
\n\nThe Florida Abolitionist Gathering showed the outlines of a fierce and broad movement against prisons and the world that creates them, anchored in an anarchist vision of total liberation. In the difficult times ahead, we can find strength in remembering that prisoners in the most horrific conditions have sustained their determination through the power of solidarity—and that every one of us can play a role in fighting back as we build towards a world free of prisons and all forms of exploitation and oppression.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/15/2.jpg\")
\nTo learn more or get involved:
\n\nOrganizations:
\n\nFilms:
\n\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2025/02/24/the-only-immigrant-trying-to-steal-my-job-is-elon-musk-a-bus-drivers-account-of-life-in-the-trump-era", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2025/02/24/the-only-immigrant-trying-to-steal-my-job-is-elon-musk-a-bus-drivers-account-of-life-in-the-trump-era", "title": "\"The Only Immigrant Trying to Steal My Job Is Elon Musk\" : A Bus Driver's Perspective on Elon Musk's Austerity Measures", "summary": "A bus driver speaks about what Elon Musk's austerity measures mean to ordinary public transit workers.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/02/23/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/02/23/header.jpg", "date_published": "2025-02-24T13:23:25Z", "date_modified": "2025-06-11T17:25:23Z", "tags": [ "elon musk", "donald trump", "austerity", "public transit", "fascism" ], "content_html": "In the following narrative, a bus driver describes how the cuts that Elon Musk is carrying out in the federal government are affecting ordinary public transit workers.
\n\nThere is a poetic opposition between the figure of the anonymous bus driver and Elon Musk, the billionaire car mogul. The bus driver and the automobile profiteer represent different modes of transportation—public and private—that imply different models for society. On the one hand, a vision of collectivity emerging from common resources and public service; on the other, an unbridled profit motive justifying privatization, isolation, and immiseration. Everyone riding together—or the lone plutocrat speeding away from a betrayed community. Why else market the “Cybertruck” as bulletproof?
\n\nElon Musk made much of his fortune from taxpayer-funded subsidies; now he is trying to delete all of the functions of the government except the ones that benefit him personally. The irony of a man who made his fortune selling cars implying that impoverished bus drivers are parasites on the public should not be lost on anyone. As much as Elon Musk pretends to be an enemy of big government, billionaires like him need the state more than anyone else does. It is easy enough to imagine public transit without the state—all it would take would be to abolish the mechanisms (such as property rights) that impose artificial scarcity, so that those who enjoy doing things for others’ benefit could do so without fear of going hungry. But it is not possible to imagine Elon Musk without a government forcefully extracting hundreds of billions of dollars of taxes with which to protect him from those he exploits and oppresses.
\n\nPeople around the country have begun expressing their displeasure against Elon Musk by demonstrating at Tesla dealerships. Another round of demonstrations is scheduled for March 1, this Saturday. Without further ado, the bus driver’s story.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/02/23/6.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the flier.
\n“Did you see that Facebook post about the budget cuts?” my co-worker asks. “What the fuck, no,” I reply. She hands me her phone. I see a headline announcing that, due to the push to slash basic services coming from Elon Musk and Donald Trump, 20% of our funding for local public transportation is now threatened. Lawyers are fighting it out in the courts, but if these cuts go through, it will mean less service, possible layoffs, and lots of people not having access to a system that is one of the few lifelines for poor people in our area. People depend on these buses to get to their jobs, to medical appointments, to programs for special needs adults, to court dates.
\n\nI sit back down, staring out the window at the cold, grey parking lot. I am waiting for a member of the morning shift to come in with a bus so I can take it out. A few buses dot the bus yard. They’re sitting idle because the parts on order haven’t come in for months—even years, in some cases—and because the city refuses to hire enough mechanics to keep up with daily maintenance. This means that drivers on night shift, like me, sometimes have to wait hours for a bus to arrive. Our transit agency, which contracts out to a huge multi-national corporation, is already dramatically underfunded. The new cuts will only compound our existing problems.
\n\n“Fucking Musk, man,” I say with a sigh. Another co-worker on the night shift agrees with me. He’s in his mid-70s, but he’s still working full time because he recently burned through all his savings burying his parents. I launch into a long rant about how both Musk and Trump hate labor unions and workers and want to replace us all with artificial intelligence. A third co-worker, presumably a Trump supporter, grumbles about how “they” just want to blame the cuts threatening our jobs on the “administration.”
\n\nWho else would you blame it on?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/02/23/2.jpg\")
\nIt’s pitch-dark when I enter the trailer park, passing a metal gate, I drive slowly through the ever-growing rows of manufactured homes. Some of them have signs reading “For sale.”
\n\n“Lots of people moving out?” I ask my only passenger.
\n\n“Yeah, no one can afford to live here anymore,” she replies. As I turn the corner, she launches into a long tirade about the corporation who owns the trailer park and how they keep raising the cost of “space rent,” the monthly fee that mobile home owners pay to trailer park owners. “Every year the rent here goes up. New people move in from out of town and they can pay more, and that’s pushing us out,” she says, as I unhook her walker inside the cold, dark bus cab. “I don’t know why the landlords are so greedy. Do they just want everything?” I lower her and her walker down onto the pavement outside her trailer.
\n\nAs the electronic ramp whirls its gears, I turn to my left. In her front window, there is a strange collage of images of Donald Trump. It is faded and worn from the sun. I shake my head and chuckle, resisting the temptation to point out the obvious. How can you complain about a corporate landlord ruining your life, but place all of your hopes in another landlord who is trying to become a dictator?
\n\nPerhaps she senses my disdain. “Trump is gonna fix it, you’ll see. Prices are going to go down once he starts drilling.”
\n\nMy eyes narrow. “Biden was drilling more oil than any president before him,” I reply.
\n\n“He needs to get his head drilled,” she retorts, making me laugh. Then she launches into another rant about DEI and how it ruined the schools she apparently taught at before she retired. As she hobbles inside, I cast one more glance over my shoulder. Trump’s smiling face leers back at me, ominous. The machine moans as the wheelchair lift cycles back into place.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/02/23/1.jpg\")
\nI meet all sorts of people like this at my job. One guy smells like piss so bad while I strap in his wheelchair that I have to turn my head so I don’t gag. The car in front of the house where I pick him up has a bumper sticker on it reading, “I Don’t Trust the Liberal Media.” I wonder if the conservative media is telling him his healthcare is about to be nuked from orbit.
\n\nAnother guy, as I load and unload his wheelchair, takes out his Trump hat, puts it on, and asks me what I think of it. I tell him Trump and Musk want to use the military to shoot protesters, destroy unions, and fire workers like me, so why would I give a fuck about them. He looks away, says, “Alright then,” and jets off on his electronic scooter. I wonder if he is looking forward to ICE deporting half of his neighbors.
\n\nOn election day, I lost it and got into a heated back and forth with a pro-Trump guy. He rested his case by proclaiming that we need to make it easier on rich people so that the wealth will trickle down to the rest of us. I want to grab these people and shake them.
\n\nTrump represents the triumph of the nihilism of our age. The foreclosure of the idea that the working-class can take and shape its own destiny. Instead, apparently, we should throw ourselves at the mercy of a reality TV star who shits in a gold toilet, eats breakfast with billionaire pedophiles, and has dinner with neo-Nazis between rounds of golf. In the absence of the kind of social movements that could connect people and enable them to grow and change, Trump has built a mass parasocial spectacle that makes these isolated people feel like they are part of something greater than themselves even as all of our lives become smaller and smaller, more and more impoverished and alienated.
\n\nThere’s an old saying that society get the villains it deserves. Perhaps our age is getting the fascists it deserves, too.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/02/23/3.jpg\")
\nI shuffle into the union hall, past the placards reading “ON STRIKE” and faded signs several decades old. Almost fifteen years ago, during Occupy, I attended a meeting in this same room. I wonder what’s changed since then. I find a seat and one of our union shop stewards slides a packet across the table to me. I open it up and start paging through it, looking at the spreadsheets and graphs.
\n\nWe start to discuss the ins and outs of the proposed contract that our elected union representatives and corporate lawyers have been going over during recent meetings. One of the much-hated top corporate bosses was recently fired for corruption, much to the delight of the entire workforce. As one of my co-workers said, “Really tells you a lot about a place when motherfuckers are walking around singing, ‘Ding-dong, the witch is dead!’ and morale has never been higher!”
\n\nWe go through the contract. Despite a few small improvements, things are mostly the same. “What about the pay?” I ask, fingers crossed. The shop steward cocks her head to the side and turns a page, pointing with her pen to a graph showing a dollar increase. She explains that the contract will be for five years, during which time we’ll only be getting a few cents more each year. “This is literally what I was making ten years ago,” I sigh, “and this contract will be valid for five years?”
\n\nI already can’t save money. Imagine what things will be like in five years.
\n\nShe shrugs. “We’re encouraging you to vote “Yes,”’ she says, and hands me a piece of paper on which to mark an “X” signifying yes or no.
\n\nIf enough workers vote the contract through, the company will ratify it and it will govern my life for the next five years—presuming that I don’t get downsized. Any strike or protest activity will be illegal, as per our “No Strike” agreement. If enough people vote no, it goes back to the union bargaining team, and they will continue to bargain for more changes in closed door meetings.
\n\nI head into another room, mark an X by “NO,” and drop the piece of paper into a wooden box. I wave to a few co-workers on my way out. As I leave, I pass a portrait of Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters union. You smug bastard, I say to myself. I remember his glasses and bald head on stage of the Republican National Convention last year, when he called Donald Trump a “Tough son of a bitch.” What a dipshit.
\n\nI used to have a poster in my room many years ago, proclaiming, “The past doesn’t pass.” Next to the slogan was a photo of striking Teamster bus drivers—bus drivers, just like me—beating police officers with baseball bats during the general strike of 1934 in Minneapolis. That was one of the decisive labor battles that forced the ruling class to accept the New Deal in order to cool down the class war that was brewing on the streets.
\n\nThe past doesn’t pass, but the future can leave you behind.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/02/23/4.jpg\")
\nAt home, I look over a letter announcing that people in my neighborhood shouldn’t drink the tap water because the levels of uranium in the river are too high. Sometimes I wonder what I would say to my children about this moment in history—if I could afford to have children. Probably the same things my parents say to me now: they’re sorry we are inheriting this world. Sorry they didn’t fix it. Sorry they didn’t build strong enough movements to turn the tide against these monsters.
\n\nAt work, as I drive, I begin to notice that there are fewer Trump flags and signs out. Resentment is rising. A joke by a cashier here about being replaced by AI, a comment there about Trump cutting programs. I walk into the break room and someone is shaking their head angrily while watching a video of Musk on their phone. They mutter something about tariffs and rising prices.
\n\nThe tension in the air is palpable. It is similar to how things felt at the start of the economic crisis in 2008, when many of the homes in my neighborhood were foreclosed on and many people lost their jobs. It also reminds me of the start of the pandemic—how at first, I thought it wouldn’t be so bad, only to watch in horror as our family members and friends succumbed to the virus.
\n\nIn 2008, many people thought that crowds would flood the streets immediately when the administration bailed out the banks while leaving the rest of us high and dry. That didn’t happen. It took years for resistance to grow. In Chicago, workers occupied their factory when they were terminated without pay. In Wisconsin, workers occupied the capitol building against government attacks on collective bargaining. In California, students occupied universities to protest budget cuts. The Occupy movement began in the fall of 2011 and rapidly built to massive occupations of city squares across the US, coordinated port shut downs, and a general strike in Oakland, California. With Joe Biden as vice president, the federal government helped to coordinate violent raids targeting the movement in order to break it apart.
\n\nIn 2020, on the other hand, things didn’t fester—they exploded like a bomb. Millions of people across the country mobilized in response to the pandemic, providing mutual aid in the face of government inaction and right-wing disinformation, and then hit the streets in the George Floyd uprising.
\n\nWho knows how things will evolve this time. It will probably be different from both of those scenarios, but it could be similar in some ways. What is clear is that things are not as people expected them to be. Many people on the left thought—or at least hoped—that Trump would govern the way he did the first time, constrained by mass protest, the courts, and his own party. Many who voted for him honestly did not expect him to follow through on many of the policies he explicitly promised to carry out. Those who were not paying attention are surprised that suddenly, jobs are disappearing and services are being cut while prices only continue to rise.
\n\nThe material conditions are forcing people to reckon with the fact that the state is attempting to reshape our lives for the sake of an authoritarian project. As we speak, thousands of people are flooding town halls across the United States, screaming at their so-called representatives about the plan to gut programs like Medicaid—only to hear the bureaucrats repeat a slew of MAGA talking points. Anger is brewing. Hopefully the MAGA strategy of “flooding the zone” with shit will produce diminishing returns as people turn towards their neighbors and co-workers and away from their phones and YouTube.
\n\nThis is an opportunity for us to call out the authoritarian project of the Trump administration, the techno-dystopian fantasies of billionaires like Musk, and the complicity of the Democrats who helped make all of this possible. Beyond naming the systems that we are up against, we also need to be clear about our position as workers and how the billionaires running the country want both to hurt us and to weaponize our anger, turning us against each other through propaganda and fearmongering. This is why it’s important to stand in solidarity with everyone attacked by the Trump administration, whether trans folks, migrants, prisoners, or beyond. We can’t leave anyone behind. The only immigrant trying to steal my job is Elon Musk. It’s time to be clear that our interests are not theirs; we must develop and promote our own vision of a better world in total opposition to the ruling class, the billionaires, and their fascist puppets.
\n\nMoreover, it’s time for action. We need to give expression to these antagonisms while revealing the poverty of the institutional forms currently at our disposal—the Democratic party, the ever-shrinking union bureaucracy, the non-profits. We can show examples of past struggles and resistance from the mass wildcat strikes by teachers in West Virginia and the fierce anti-fascist mobilizations against the alt-right to the airport shutdowns following the Muslim Ban. We can support and expand the existing fronts that are already breaking out around us: protests against Musk outside of Tesla, rallies to demand that hospitals continue to treat trans people, community defense and rapid response networks to address ICE attacks, bashing back against the violence of the far right. We can demonstrate the utility of tactics and strategies that others can take up and expand on as all of us figure out how to fight in the new reality.
\n\nIt’s hard to look at the news without imagining tanks on the streets or scenes out of V for Vendetta. But the scenario I worry about most is that this will simply become the new normal. That we will accept this just as we accepted the last round of attacks. As we accepted the genocide in Gaza. As we accepted the ecological gun to our heads that is climate change.
\n\nWhile people are angry and energized, we have a chance to push in a new direction. Let’s use this moment to foster broad and popular networks of resistance that improve our lives, strengthen our communities, and enable us to meet our needs directly. At this point, we don’t have much of a choice.
\n\nLike it or not, this is life now—and it is coming for all of us.
\n\n\nStarting in 2021, drug overdoses have killed more than 100,000 people in the United States every year. While politicians used the crack and heroin epidemics of the late twentieth century as a pretext to introduce mass incarceration, mandatory minimum sentencing, three-strikes laws, and racial profiling, all of which disproportionately targeted Black and brown people, so many white people have died of overdoses over the past decade that the rhetoric around the opioid epidemic has changed dramatically. Today, even racist conservatives acknowledge the opioid epidemic as a social crisis—but how to address it remains an open question.
\n\nAnarchists fight against the conditions that give rise to drug addiction, the ways that the authorities take advantage of addiction to inflict additional damage on communities, and also against addiction itself. In the following reflection, Angustia Celeste revisits harm reduction strategies through the lens of personal tragedy and grief.
\n\nArt by Rena Yehuda Newman.
\n\nWhen my best friend died of a fentanyl overdose seven years ago, it was not an unexpected death. It was the statistically probable outcome of her seventeen-year-long struggle with addiction, given the increasingly fatal turn of the opioid crisis.
\n\nIn our youth, she and I imagined ourselves living outside of societal norms, but with her death, she landed solidly in the middle of the bell curve.
\n\nThe fact that I had anticipated this did not soften the grief. There are recriminations and shortcomings that you only add up in hindsight. Once I finished considering what actions I might have taken to try to shift the course of events, or at least to take advantage of our time together—something that, in our youth, I had imagined to be infinite—I began to reflect on what the collective “we” did and did not do. I eventually arrived at the truth that my loss was not just an individual one: it was generational, determined by forces greater than those I initially considered in my despair.
\n\nI have a certain familiarity with death, both personally and professionally. Someone I care about has died every few years since I was thirteen. Yet grief is something that gets harder with each turn, not easier. This loss cuts back decades into my foundling years, as my friend played a significant role in crafting my worldview when we were teenagers.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/14/4.jpg\")
\nBefore I was politicized, she helped me find comfort in the existentialists and the artistic nihilism/hedonism of the Beat generation. Jettisoning the certainty of a higher power for the unknown abyss of human potential made sense to me. With no predetermined destiny, we were to live out our lives in trajectories of our own design. Success, failure, and how we realized our potential were not determined by any deity, but by the opportunities and oppression of our society. This was a different kind of social determinism. It was freeing because of my own privilege, and terrifying because it did not offer the comforting certainty of any specific outcome.
\n\nAt her memorial, her father put out an archival display of her journals. With horror, I watched our friends and family read very private things about our adolescence. The discomfort was my own—I think she probably would have approved. Her family, to their great credit, had been forthright and honest about her death. Her obituary began poetically with the words, “Succumbed to addiction at 35.”
\n\nHer father, clearly still struggling with the loss, pulled me aside and asked me for the origin story of her addiction.
\n\nI told him what I could about when we started using heroin, but I did not touch upon why. He wanted to know about the why. Why had we felt so untouchable? Why hadn’t we known it was dangerous? There is a certain cruelty to such questions asked decades after the fact.
\n\nI know that we started something that became a bleak mythos and, eventually, a death cult. It began when I was thirteen, she was fifteen, and it was all theoretical: the dark literary proclivities, romanticizing the edges of human experience, the search for the profane and the ecstatic. It was initially a joyous endeavor, an exploration of the unknown, not a doubling down on pain—not at first.
\n\nI was struck by two things at her father’s question. First, I was all of nineteen when we began using heroin, and there were many things I had not known about addiction. Second, I had known that I didn’t want to feel anything, and narcotics were a method available to me to achieve episodic negation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/14/1.jpg\")
\nAs to why I didn’t want to feel anything, without delving into traumatic experiences, I think the ways that we are taught to avoid pain in Western society are deeply damaging. The antidepressants and antipsychotics are intended to achieve a dampening of both the dark and the light, the highs and the lows—evening out life’s extremes to an acceptable middle ground.
\n\nPut on medication at thirteen, I learned to seek balance by using a cocktail of neurochemical inputs to manage my internal emotional life. Homeostasis wasn’t something you created by intentional practice in the external world; it was something chemically concocted from within. These drugs did quiet my mind for a few years. They also taught me that the way to deal with pain was to seek a state of hazy indifference. The things happening to me didn’t matter if I didn’t feel their full impact.
\n\nHeroin was a reasonable transition between psychotropic drugs and the more varied coping mechanisms I would learn in my mid-twenties. It is a method of dealing with pain that creates more harm, but also provides some emotional reprieve if you are in a very dark place. I don’t regret my use, but I was insulated from the worst consequences of it by class and race privilege. Conversations about drug use must include bodily autonomy, while also addressing the failings of negation as a long-term redress for trauma.
\n\nI quit using heroin at twenty-one after I became politicized and was able to contextualize my pain within a larger societal framework. I discovered perspective. Movement work made me feel less alone, and I found reasons to live beyond myself. Organizing helped me develop coping mechanisms and skill sets I had not had as a teenager.
\n\nAdmittedly, I drew the long straw. I was lucky. This fortune was something that became increasingly apparent to me as I began to work at the needle exchange. If I didn’t know the dangers at nineteen, I had certainly discovered them by twenty-one. When I grew tired of being party to the extreme harm I was facilitating for the friends I used with, I stopped injecting.
\n\nAt that same time, her father used to drive into the city to get suboxone that I had purchased off the black market to help her taper her use. Thus began the next period of trial and error, of bearing witness, the next decade of harm reduction. She never quit for very long, but I won’t say that we failed. We achieved something together—we lengthened her life. Only she could define the meaning of that.
\n\nBut I understand now, in a way I didn’t before, the limitations of our approach.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/14/7.jpg\")
\nIn the early 2000s, we wanted to propagate the idea that IV drug use didn’t have to be a death sentence if you used clean needles, if someone showed you how to administer Narcan and you kept some at hand. We thought that if you met people where they were at, if you provided a space to discuss addiction that didn’t require abstinence, you could provide people with an eventual exit. If you got lucky, if your source was pure and your practices rigorous, you might be allotted the time you needed to really get clean one day.
\n\nIt’s not that people didn’t overdose back then—they did. We had friends that died, but not at anywhere near the current rates.
\n\nNot everything had fucking fentanyl in it. Xylazine had not yet made an appearance. It was possible to pretend that in a few years, one might not need today’s crutch. Time provided us with tentative hope that with compassionate services, understanding friends, and a bit of breathing room it could be possible to figure out how to move past mere survival.
\n\nI eventually quit social work for sex work, and then, after a decade, I left that for the medical field. These various professions share a common labor: taking on other’s suffering. I have been party to many confessions and come to understand the myriad ways people try to survive our bleak consumer culture.
\n\nTo maintain trauma stewardship, you have to cultivate a certain emotional distance, and this distance is perceptible in the dynamics that emerge within even the most horizontal solidarity model. Distance is all good and fine when the support you are offering is solely material—but what happens when the support people need is emotional?
\n\nDon’t get me wrong, material support is important. Thankfully, there are still needle exchanges, there are now fentanyl/xylazine test strips, there is suboxone to manage your use, and if you are fortunate, you might live somewhere where there is a monitored safe injection site. If you are especially lucky, you might even live somewhere that offers legal “safer supply.” Methadone treatment is one of the better ways to manage opioid use nowadays (though recent formulary changes have left many who rely on it struggling with relapse, as highlighted in the podcast Crackdown.)
\n\nI support all these interventions. But I also have to say that—if the goal is living and not just surviving—they don’t really get to the heart of the matter.
\n\nHarm reduction begs a question that it often does not address. Why do so many people feel indifferent about being alive? Meeting people where they’re at doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to discuss and change their emotional and spiritual position, if you can. Discussing the insanity of negation is not being judgmental, it’s just being honest.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/14/8.jpg\")
\nThere is a cult of death that revolves around the hopeless cycle of addiction—and that spiraling trajectory is not as long as it used to be. Statistically, if you are using, even with test strips, even with clean needles, even with Narcan, even with management of use via suboxone, you are courting death. It is this drive to oblivion that I want to discuss.
\n\nIn the other kinds of solidarity work I do, the desire to survive is very strong. It compels people to cross continents, to leave everything they know just to find a safer place to be. It is not as difficult to reach out in solidarity to people who desperately want to live. However, it is difficult to do so across the river Lethe, the river in Hades that the dead drink from to forget.
\n\nI am the way into the city of woe
\nI am the way to a forsaken people
\nI am the way into eternal sorrow
One of us wrote those words in a letter during a second period class at some point in the mid-1990s when we didn’t yet know how lost we would become and the ways we would abandon one another along the way.
\n\nI am touched both by how melodramatic we were, writing derivations of Dante’s Inferno to each other, and how deeply we felt, already, the suffering of the world. She did not dismiss the fundamental questions and ethical qualms I felt about human nature and the darkness of society. She was the first person, outside of my immediate family, to take my internal emotional life seriously and cultivate my intellectual proclivities.
\n\nWhen I really pause to consider that, it takes my breath away. That intimacy was hard to maintain through the years because it is hard to reach out to those mired in addiction, the trajectory of the illness is ever inward. In my early thirties I hit an emotional wall; I could no longer meet her where she was at anymore. I had tried, and it hadn’t worked.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/14/5.jpg\")
\nI remember the day our friendship ended. She probably didn’t realize it at the time, or perhaps ever, but that day was our last chance to renew that bond, to strengthen ties, to find a reason to be in one another’s lives in a meaningful way. We were in the same city for once and made plans to meet up for lunch. I took time off between seeing high-end clients downtown and sat in that diner for two and a half hours waiting. I figured she was using again, although she didn’t say. I figured she was trying to cop, and it was taking longer than expected, but she didn’t let me know why she was running late or if she was coming at all.
\n\nI couldn’t linger any longer over coffee wondering about the state of our friendship. As far as I could tell from our correspondence, she didn’t remember anything about my life anymore, where I lived, how things were with my kids and chosen family, what I was working on politically. She wasn’t present. She was wrapped up in mythos about heroin, art, literature, and aestheticism, and there was a level of self-involvement and dis-ease that had become bleakly narcissistic.
\n\nI left the café. When I got to the train platform, I saw that she had finally texted. She had arrived three hours late. That was my moment, my opportunity to forgive, reach out and make amends for all the things we hadn’t said to one another, all the things we hadn’t done. But I was angry, angry about the last couple years, about the shambles of our connection, about how selfish her addiction had made her. I was exhausted by cumulative losses and I couldn’t continue to invest in people in my life who didn’t reciprocate. I didn’t text back.
\n\nI still saw her father, mother, and brother on occasion, because I coparent with her cousin. I continued to get news of her life, but we never saw each other or spoke again. Five years later, she died, without our ever speaking about what had ended our friendship. Death became the final arbiter of our conflict. I was left to argue with myself about the rightness of the choices I had made.
\n\nI was being protective of my time, my energy, and my heart. But I was wrong. The continuation of our friendship probably wouldn’t have changed the outcome, but I missed those last five years. I never got to hear her version of things. We didn’t correspond, we didn’t share stories about our lovers, travels, writing, or artistic endeavors. Knowing I would lose her and she couldn’t be present, I gave nothing more and I got even less. It didn’t soften the loss when she died—it only made the grief worse. I couldn’t say I had done everything I could have, because I hadn’t.
\n\nI guess I imagined, until the day I got that phone call, that we would reconnect one day when she figured out how to get clean without me. That was the ultimate failure of my harm reduction practice, my empathy and my earthly obligation. I took the symptoms of her addiction personally, let them drain me dry, estrange us. Someone I loved had been in pain, and I had turned away.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/14/9.jpg\")
\nIt is said that no one gets clean until they themselves are ready. But this saying leaves out something essential. Love, family, friends, and social connections all provide a positive impetus towards the desire to be present, to live life, to bear the cost of trauma. These tendrils connected to our heart and soul make suffering worth it. These are the things people find reasons to live for.
\n\nShe died alone, on her knees in the bathroom of her apartment in New Orleans, kit in hand, after breaking out of the DIY arrangements she had made to be locked alone in a client’s apartment to get sober. She died, like so many, trying to get clean and relapsing. The drugs she got that day were stronger than her tolerance allowed for. There was no poetic gesture, no allegorical final words. Examining the record she left behind, it seems that her last twenty-four hours were scary, haggard, hallucinatory, and dark, filled with suffering, a desire for a reprieve, and one final go at numbness.
\n\nA few years later, her partner also fatally overdosed. When I heard about his passing, it seemed to me that soon there would be no one left to remember their life together. I thought I had come to terms with the brevity of our time upon this earth, but I hadn’t.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/14/3.jpg\")
\nA few times a month, when I worked the ER, I would cut someone’s homemade tourniquet off, rouse them from unconsciousness with Narcan, and wait. Wait for them to come around, wait for them to wake up, pensive and sorrowful or angry and resentful. Wait for them to inevitably tear out their IV and leave against medical advice. Or, even more depressing, they would try to leave with it in, which we didn’t accommodate. I always tried to talk people into staying to get IV antibiotics if they had abscesses, so that those won’t become septic. I would try to talk people into chatting with a social worker to see if we could connect them with rehabilitation services.
\n\nEvery shift, I encountered people who had been conditioned to treat all kinds of suffering with opioids and now found that their doctors were unwilling to renew their pain medication. The rehab facilities only had so many spaces, the pain clinics even fewer. The pendulum has swung back and there is an entirely new generation of providers who don’t consider the consequences of the flawed treatment modalities of the last twenty years to be their responsibility.
\n\nThe Department of Health and Human Services has had to release best practice guidelines for tapering high-dose chronic pain patients because doctors, fearing professional sanction from licensing boards, are cutting people off in unsafe ways. I try to remind providers of the historical trajectory that got us here, pointing out that commodifying suffering in this particular manner reaped fiscal rewards for those in power and that this has been the cost. Richard Sackler of Purdue Pharma, who brought us OxyContin, has now been given approval for a patent for a new form of suboxone to be used for the treatment of opioid addiction. His family is expected to pay roughly $6 billion dollars in a bankruptcy settlement in exchange for immunity from future opioid lawsuits. Slickly marketed nasal spray Narcan sells over the counter for $45 a dose, despite research showing that Narcan costs less than 5 cents to manufacture and exposing unethical profiteering. They’ve found a way to profit on both the illness and the cure—on both the living and the dead.
\n\nMany of my critical care colleagues don’t acknowledge these larger trends. When I have to, I reprimand them for their tendency to blame people for their own suffering. It is an uphill battle. We do not create spaces that are free of judgment—the emergency room is full of judgment. What is the point of saving people’s lives only to continue to burden them with stigma? Stigma still kills.
\n\nI’ve since quit the ER, after witnessing too much death during the pandemic, and now I run a community-based free clinic that embraces harm reduction. So, it seems, harm reduction still has a place in my life. I don’t want to abandon it, I just want to change its cadence.
\n\nThe treatment landscapes haven’t changed all that much. I always used to wonder what the point of having an accepting users’ group at the exchange, when all of the rehab programs we referred people to were rigid and abstinence-only. We need a way to articulate sobriety as a good goal without being moralizing or punitive about it.
\n\nIf trauma is the gateway drug to addiction, then treatment modalities that deal with the body’s inherent sympathetic and parasympathetic response to trauma should be part of treatment. I don’t have a clear vision of a way forward, but I recommend somatic therapies over talk therapy because treatment based on trauma response and physical recalibration makes sense to me.
\n\nI want us to talk more openly about death. Not in a harsh or insensitive way, not to shock or judge or scare people. We must not spiritually anchor our labors in darkness. But we also can’t take a neutral approach to the kinds of addiction that are a passive form of suicidal ideation, statistically speaking.
\n\nHow do you qualify a death wish? Given the changing molecular structure of what you can purchase on the streets these days, can we agree that the opioids now in circulation will generally not give their user enough time to shift course? Expanding services for suboxone scripts is offering some hope to buy more time, to help people safely manage their use. But I still maintain that IV drug use is not a choice we should easily accommodate without other services. The ultimate destination for all our labors should be health—better health and a life you can show up for. Why stigmatize the symptoms and not address the real issues at hand? Housing, dignified work, social connections, a relationship to the earth—these should be the aspirations of our practice.
\n\nIt is not enough to use clean needles, it is not enough to offer fentanyl/xylazine test strips, it is not enough to help manage use with suboxone, it’s not enough to provide medical supervision for maladaptive coping. Ultimately, if we don’t address the profound alienation at the heart of the capitalist system, we will be hard-pressed to convince those we love that life is indeed worth living, and worth being present for.
\n\nI remind myself every morning now, even on those mornings I would rather not wake up, that we make our amends through our actions. We reach for our highest aspirations by examining our failures. I do not think I could have brought her more clean needles; she knew where to get them. I do not think I could have bought her more suboxone, suggested a better rehab, or coordinated a plan for intervention more clearly with those who also struggled for her. We attempted some combination of all those things, however imperfectly. But there were conversations we didn’t have.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/14/2.jpg\")
\nI think our mistake came years before, in the way we tried to delineate our feelings of difference. A life lived in defiance of norms once seemed holy to me, but somewhere in the process of jettisoning conventions and differentiating our path we ventured so far off track that we got lost. Whatever the punk gods of our youth told us, self-destruction isn’t disruptive to the social fabric—it has been co-opted. We’ve been sold. There are many things about this carceral society worth resisting, but numbing the pain keeps us far from that struggle. My friend never made it to any place of social conflict because she lost the battle with herself years before.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/14/6.jpg\")
\nI forgive my thirteen-year-old self for my romantic delusions. I forgive my nineteen-year-old self for my destructive habits. I forgive my twenty-one-year-old self for my naïve belief in harm reduction practices that never got us closer to health, that just kept us treading water. The only thing I do not forgive myself for is walking away.
\n\nI should not have stepped off the platform and onto that train. I should have turned around, gone back to the café and told her that I wanted her in my life. I should have told her that I loved her, not the easy comforting kind of love, but the kind you suffer for, the kind that makes living worthwhile. Then, even if I had lost her later anyway, I wouldn’t have lost so much of myself.
\n\nYou can reach Angustia Celeste here.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2022/08/22/russia-the-anarcho-communist-combat-organization-an-interview-with-a-clandestine-anarchist-group", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2022/08/22/russia-the-anarcho-communist-combat-organization-an-interview-with-a-clandestine-anarchist-group", "title": "Russia: The Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization : An Interview with a Clandestine Anarchist Group", "summary": "An interview with a clandestine anarchist group active in Russia that publicizes direct action and maintains a fund to support anti-war sabotage.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/22/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/22/header.jpg", "date_published": "2022-08-22T19:13:52Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:55Z", "tags": [ "Russia", "underground", "direct action", "sabotage", "Ukraine", "war" ], "content_html": "When the Russian military invaded Ukraine at the end of February 2022, anarchists and other anti-war demonstrators defied draconian anti-protest measures to take the streets to express opposition. Over the months since those protests were crushed, resistance to the invasion has assumed new forms. Clandestine attacks across Russia have targeted railroads, military recruiting centers, vehicles belonging to pro-war zealots, and Russian state propaganda messaging in favor of the war.
\n\nOne of the groups promoting these attacks is known as the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization. In the following interview, they speak about how they see their predecessors in the regional history of anarchist movements, how the political situation in Russia deteriorated to such an extent that it was possible to suppress social movements and invade Ukraine, and what kind of organizing is possible under the prevailing conditions. We also asked them to go into detail about some of their operational protocol, in case this is ever useful for anarchists elsewhere who may be compelled to adopt similar strategies as state repression intensifies around the world.
\n\nWe, not the author(s), have added the hyperlinks and the notes between brackets that appear below for the purpose of assisting the reader.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/22/8.jpg\")
“We, the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization, sabotaged the railway tracks (coordinates: 56 16’44”N 38 12’40.5”E) leading to the 12th Chief Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation—unscrewed a several bolts and dragged the rails apart…”
\nAs we understand it, the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization maintains various social media pages, maintains a fund to support groups carrying out clandestine direct action, and helps publicize direct action reports and information about prisoners captured in the course of struggle. Tell us how you see your publishing work, as that is the chief way many people encounter your efforts.
\n\nFrom some comrades, we have encountered critiques regarding social media activity as such: that it is an endless stream of short messages, which does not leave any impact in the readers’ minds.
\n\nWe consider our social media efforts to be an important part of our media work, understood in the sense of our efforts to propagate our ideas. Our preferred platform for that purpose is Telegram, as it is less censored and it offers a somewhat more intellectual and politicized environment.
\n\nAt the same time, we understand that the owners of any social media platforms, not to mention service providers, can cooperate with the repressive apparatus of any state. Therefore, is an important principle for us to ensure anonymity in our media work. We use an operating system based on Linux, which provides connection to the Internet exclusively through TOR. That goes for Telegram as well—we use it only this way. To register needed accounts for our activity, we use anonymous and virtual numbers and email at riseup.net, which is the project in the field of Internet technology that we trust most. We also consider it important to erase the metadata of media files—images, video, and texts. Some operating systems based on Linux allow you to do this within two clicks; with others, you need to install particular programs. In any case, it is always accessible and essential.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/22/7.jpg\")
\nOne of your roles is to report direct actions and the like in Russia. How do you confirm reports and news items that reach you before sharing them?
\n\nRegarding news items that we encounter online or which are sent to us—if the news is sent to us directly, we start by evaluating how plausible it is based on our own experience. We factor in the authenticity and clarity of the communiqué text (usually those who try to fake a communiqué are quite bad at pretending to be anarchists); the legibility of photo or video footage; and the precise coordinates regarding the place, date, and target of an attack. If the information we have received can be trusted according to these criteria, we consider it to be true and publish it. If the event is also reported on in mass media, including corporate media, that can serve as an additional confirmation that the event in question actually happened.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/22/6.jpg\")
\nWhat process do you use to decide who to support with your action fund when there is no way to make direct contact?
\n\nDeciding who to support from the fund we have started is not easy, especially considering that it is rather small-scale. At first, we sent minor amounts to all who requested assistance. Soon, we discovered that in most cases, we did not receive in return any sort of confirmation that any real action was taken by these people. For this reason, we have now started to provide support from the fund post factum, when there is evidence that actions have taken place.
\n\nThe transfers take place between BTC cryptowallets. With that, we send the recipients instructions regarding how to anonymize the cryptocurrency when buying fiat money for it.
\n\nWe want to make one important recommendation to all future participants in partisan resistance: conduct preliminary tests of all the means of combat that you plan to use in your actions. Whether you are using Molotov cocktail or more advanced means, this will enable you to avoid unfortunate mistakes and problems in the moment of direct action.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/22/5.jpg\")
\nLooking back at the history of Russia and the surrounding regions, what organizations and struggles do you consider to be your predecessors?
\n\nWe see ourselves within the revolutionary anarchist tradition in Eastern Europe. We see the militant anarchist groups of the beginning of the last century as our predecessors: Chernoe Znamia [“Black Banner,” a federation of cadres founded in Białystok in 1903], “Beznachaliye” [“Without Authority,” the principal anarchist circle in Petersburg at the opening of the 20th century], and the “Southern Russian Anarchist-Syndicalist Group.” What inspires us in these organizations is their commitment to resolute militant activity and their desire to involve the broad masses of the people in combat work, to unite the political and economic struggle into a single struggle for social revolution. We also consider ourselves to be the successors of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine (RPAU) [the forces associated with Nestor Makhno, also known as the Black Army] and the anarchists of the underground who, during the Civil War, opposed the reactionary and Bolshevik dictatorship with arms in their hands.
\n\nIn regards to more recent times, our partisan anarchism brings creative approach to ideas and practice of New Revolutionary Alternative from the 1990s [a Russian insurrectionary anarchist group that carried out a series of attacks on government targets during the Chechen war] and groups organized around «Black Blog» around the end of the 2000s and the beginning of the 2010s. Besides that, we are inspired by heroic self-sacrifice of Mikhail Zhlobitsky, who bombed the FSB headquarters in Arkhangelsk on October 31, 2018, and we admire what he did.
\n\nLooking back on the experience and example of our predecessors, we conclude that successful revolutionary work requires a disciplined organization composed of determined, selfless, and dedicated comrades.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/22/13.jpg\")
“When the anarchist movement revives, it will regularly face tactical and strategic tasks that can only be solved by armed means. You have to be ready for this.” -An article by Anarchist Combatant about the history of Russian anarcho-syndicalism.
\nOver the years of your activity, you have seen Putin’s government become more and more repressive. When the government tightens repression, the anarchist movement faces a dilemma: should we become more public, taking more risks, in order to try to prevent a backlash in society? Or should we go underground to prepare for repression? Is it possible to do both? How do we balance the need for community organization with the need to keep our projects secure?
\n\nWe are aware of examples in which some comrades have managed to balance between publicity and the underground for quite a long time, and to be quite active in both. However, this is the exception to the rule. A certain division into “above-ground” and “underground” wings is inevitable. The experience of many revolutionary movements of the twentieth century attests to this.
\n\nIt is important for both wings to exist and to be strong. At the same time, we insist that there must be ties between them, including the possibility for militants to transfer from one wing to the other. In the past, we sometimes heard an opinion that for “security reasons” the public and underground wings should be completely isolated from each other. In our experience, there are always transitional links and channels of communication of some kind.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/22/3.jpg\")
\nWhat advice can you give to anarchists in other parts of the world who are not currently organized in underground structures, but who may have to organize them? What steps should they take now that might be more difficult in the future?
\n\nIt is very difficult to answer this without being intimately familiar with the specific realities of the parts of the world that we are talking about. Consequently, we can only emphasize the most general points.
\n\nFirst of all, comrades need to agitate within the anarchist movement itself for the creation of underground armed structures—as far as we know, the anarchists in most countries have no understanding of the need for this at all.
\n\nThen, the primary organizations of such structures need to be created, and more broadly, a network of reliable contacts in different regions of the country—of course, taking all the necessary security measures.
\n\nAt the same time, comrades need to organize training and drills in various military fields.
\n\nIt is never too early to start saving up money, weapons, and equipment. And to prepare fully secure frameworks for both public and non-public information and media activity, as well as non-cash money transfers. These seem to be the basics.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/22/2.jpg\")
A Russian military conscription office burns in spring 2022.
\nLooking back at the last fifteen years in Russia, could any sort of international solidarity and support have enabled anarchists in Russia to prevent Putin from gaining enough control over Russian society to be able to invade Ukraine?
\n\nPerhaps it makes sense to look back at an even earlier period—back to 1993 and 1996, when Yeltsin and the oligarchs consolidated power and crushed their political rivals. As unlikable as those rivals may have been, it now seems that the path to building an authoritarian state that could suppress any political alternative was already mapped out at that point. Putin only followed this logic, and he already faced fewer obstacles than Yeltsin. Then came the apolitical (or “satiated,” as people call them) 2000s, when there was hardly any possibility of rocking the boat. Perhaps, in theory, the political crisis of 2011-2012 could have ended Putin’s rule, if all the opposition forces had acted more cohesively and radically. The anarchists tried to radicalize the protest, but our forces were not enough, and the authorities decided to launch the first serious waves of repression.
\n\nIt is hard for us to say what sort of international support could have made our movement stronger back then. The seizure of Crimea and the outbreak of war against Ukraine in 2014 caused a great upsurge of reactionary sentiments in Russia, and the country went straight to the current disaster.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/22/1.jpg\")
\nIn the US, some “anti-imperialists” (including a small number of alleged anarchists) believe that everyone who supports Ukrainian anarchists involved in military resistance to the invasion is fighting “side by side” with Ukrainian fascists, supporting the Zelensky government, and advancing the interests of NATO. Please explain your own position regarding how you think Russian and Ukrainian anarchists should act in this situation and what anarchists in other parts of the world should do in solidarity.
\n\nThe defeat of Ukraine will bring about the triumph of the most reactionary forces in Russia—finalizing its transformation into a neo-Stalinist concentration camp, with unlimited power concentrated in the FSB [the Federal Security Service, successor to the KGB] and a totalitarian Orthodox imperial ideology. In occupied Ukraine, every sprout of civil society and political freedom will be destroyed and the very existence of Ukrainian culture will be called into question. On the other hand, if Russia is defeated, there will inevitably be a crisis for Putin’s power and a prospect of revolution. For anarchists, the choice between these alternatives seems clear.
\n\nIn any case, we here in Eastern Europe see all this as much more urgent and real than the arguments (which people can have without committing to anything) about the geopolitical games of the United States and NATO, which we prefer to leave to Putin’s propagandists. So, solidarity with us means solidarity with Ukraine, with its victory.
\n\nYou have had over half a year to evaluate the various anarchist strategies in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine in response to the invasion. What did you expect and what surprised you? For example, what do you think was the outcome of the public anti-war protests in February and March 2022? Can you share any thoughts on the effectiveness of Operation Solidarity, the Resistance Committee, the Feminist Anti-War Resistance, the Autonomous Action, or other organizations on both sides of the border that tried to respond to the invasion?
\n\nTo be honest, in six months it is still unclear which combination of strategies is most effective. All the actions of the comrades have been of great importance, and still we cannot yet say that the anarchist movement in Russia/Belarus or Ukraine is on the rise, although in Ukraine we see an inspiring mobilization.
\n\nWe support the decision of the anarchists in Ukraine to take up arms and join the military confrontation with imperialism. Any revolutionary political movement must be combative, must demonstrate its fighting ability in times of war and participate with society at large in its struggle. We are pleasantly surprised at the level of logistical success, the collection of material aid and necessary items, and the media resonance that the “civil wing” of the libertarian movement in Ukraine has managed to achieve.
\n\nHowever, we would like to see more organization and structure among anarchists on the Ukrainian side, as well as a more clearly and actively expressed political position. The manifesto of the Resistance Committee alone is insufficient for this.
\n\nAs for Russia, we think that all actions—peaceful, violent, symbolic, and informational—are very important. Anything that can touch the minds and souls of people in our society. At the same time, we are supporters of partisan methods: sabotage, direct action, partisan war against the fascist regime. In our opinion, these will produce the greatest resonance and have the greatest political and revolutionary potential under the present conditions.
\n\nDo you think that people outside of Russia could have done something to make the first stage of the Russian anti-war movement go differently?
\n\nIt must be said that although few believed that a full-scale invasion would take place, a huge international solidarity movement emerged within the first hours of the war. Anti-authoritarians who joined the armed resistance to Putinism in Ukraine were quickly provided and equipped with most of the necessary items. Volunteers, including members of anarchist initiatives, also helped Ukrainian refugees. There were solidarity actions, meetings, and discussions. A lot of work was done, and here we can only thank the comrades.
\n\nBut there is almost always more we can do in the sphere of solidarity actions or fundraising for the libertarian movements in Ukraine and in Russia. We often hear that people in the West are gradually “getting tired of the topic of war,” and we don’t see the same consensus on the question of the international isolation of Putin’s regime that used to exist. What is important now is to maintain a “tone of solidarity,” to maintain a high level of awareness and activity.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/22/4.jpg\")
\nEver since Bakunin left Russia in 1840, and possibly before that, generation after generation of Russian radicals have had to flee Russia and organize outside of it. Can you share any thoughts on the problems of organizing movements that include political émigrés in exile? For example, how do you maintain connections between people inside and outside Russia? How do you balance between the influence of Russian comrades who “represent” the movement as émigrés in Western Europe and the perspectives of those who are still inside the country and are exposed to more risk as a result?
\n\nAs far as we can see, one of the important problems in emigration is remaining politically active, maintaining a radical perspective, and finding a balance between integrating into a new community and staying connected to the realities and the movement back home.
\n\nThe current community of exiles from Russia is, as far as we can see, quite dispersed. However, there are several groups of Russian anarchists abroad. This is a very positive thing, which needs to be developed.
\n\nIn our view, we can only talk about “representation” if we are speaking of an organization with branches both in Russia and abroad. Otherwise, we are not talking about representation, but only about the opinions and perspectives of particular groups and individuals.
\n\nAs for connections between emigrants and those who are active inside Russia—they do exist. The Internet and the means of anonymous communication contribute greatly to their existence. Here again, it would be appropriate to say that we need more organization in order for these connections to become systematic and politically significant, rather than sporadic individual communication. There are moves in the right direction, but we cannot reveal the details.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/22/9.jpg\")
Upon close inspection, the viewer can see that someone has scratched the letters “BOAK,” for “Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization,” into the side of the sabotaged rail.
\nThe split in Operation Solidarity has raised questions about conflict resolution and how people in the movement can cooperate with each other under intense pressure. How do the values and ideologies of the ruling order—such as capitalism, patriarchy and liberal individualism—manifest themselves in the activities and behavior of revolutionaries in the former Soviet republics?
\n\nIt is difficult for us to judge the split we have not witnessed. However, we can share a common vision of the “culture of splits,” which flourishes not only in the anarchist movement, but in contemporary society in general.
\n\nSometimes we hear from comrades: “Splits are good; if people have contradictions between each other, they should part their ways.” You can’t build a strong movement with that kind of logic. By experience, we can say that behind “ideological splits” there are always not only theoretical and practical differences, but also conflicts of ambition, a struggle for power and resources, and egoism. This is typical not only for novices who just have joined the movement, but also for old and seasoned revolutionaries who have been involved for many years.
\n\nWe do not know of a surefire formula to prevent such splits. Unfortunately, every movement we know of has gone through dramatic conflicts, including some that were quite massive and successful. If anything probably serves to protect against splits, it is collective self-discipline—the understanding that the interests of the struggle are above individual desires and preferences, that collective decisions are not always what any particular individual would like, but that they are still important to keep the group together.
\n\nThis may sound naïve, but comradely love and warm relationships in the collective can also protect against splits. But we know for a fact that these won’t guarantee anything, that they cannot completely eliminate conflicts. However, even if splits cannot be avoided completely, we should strive to minimize them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/22/10.jpg\")
\nOutside of Russia, we get the impression that Putin is drawing recruits from small towns in order to minimize the effects of the war in Moscow and St. Petersburg. What can be done to disrupt a political strategy that is designed to contain the impact of the war? How, in the face of powerful repression, can anarchists convey something to those who have reason to be outraged by the war?
\n\nThis is a very correct impression, in our view. And here, the war itself, by its fatal inevitability, acts as the main agent of the regime’s overthrow. This role cannot be undone, cannot be rolled back, neither by the Russian government if it wanted to, nor by the opponents of the regime—no other factor will be able to overshadow this war.
\n\nAs to how we might bring our message to the people in these conditions of repression… we are trying to put our vision into action. Supporters of Putin’s policy and those who are indifferent need to be shown that the war may be very close to them. Opponents of war need to be shown effective ways to fight it.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/22/11.jpg\")
\nDo you think that the invasion of Ukraine is a sign of things to come around the world—a future in which war becomes more widespread, as capitalism enters a series of economic and environmental crises? What should people be doing now to prepare?
\n\nThis is a very likely scenario. Of course, the universal answer we can give is that we should make an anarchist revolution as soon as possible :)).
\n\nThe more “realistic” advice should still refer to the strengthening of democratic control of the broad popular masses over the authorities—the more effective such control will be, the more problems can be avoided in the future. But this is still a relatively optimistic scenario—it is likely that society will not be strong enough, and the elites will bring their peoples to disaster. What remains to be done here is probably to try as hard as possible to develop comprehensive horizontal ties, including among the ideologically motivated members of the anarchist movement, so that these connections are not confined to activism, but work in the economic sphere as well. Such groups based in trust can help greatly to survive difficult times, and people from outside, from the atomized social chaos, can gather around them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/22/12.jpg\")
\nFinally, please explain how you think people outside the region can best support anarchists in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.
\n\nParticipate in initiatives that support the revolutionaries of Eastern Europe materially and in the field of information. In particular, we encourage you to donate to our Revolutionary Anarchist Fund—this helps tremendously when it comes to to carrying out the struggle and covering its costs.
\n\nIt is important that the anarchist revolutionary strategy is not limited to one country or region. The state and capitalism must be attacked all over the world.
\n\nYou can follow the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization on Telegram at BOAK and Anarchist Combatant.
\n\nAdaptation, a punk band from Kazakhstan, playing their song, “Stop the War.”
\nIn Atlanta, Georgia, the city government intends to destroy large swaths of what remains of the South River Forest—also known by the Muskogee name for the river, Weelaunee. In place of one stretch of woods, they aim to build a police training compound; they have sold the neighboring part to Blackhall Studios executive Ryan Millsap, who intends to build a giant soundstage. Yet for more than a year now, activists have protected the forest against their plans. In a previous article, we chronicled how this campaign got started and the strategies that have driven it; in the following collection of narratives, participants in the movement describe their experiences and explain what makes this fight meaningful to them.
\n\nThe fight to defend the forest brings together locals whose neighborhood will be gentrified by the developments, environmentalists who recognize the importance of the forest in mitigating the impact of climate change, forest defenders who have been occupying the trees for months, abolitionists who oppose the expansion of racist policing in Atlanta, and young people who desperately need a free space to build community outside the high prices and profit imperatives of Atlanta corporate nightlife. These are not discrete issues, but aspects of a coherent whole.
\n\nThe destruction of the tree canopy and the gentrification of neighborhoods are stages in the same process: the former paves the way for the latter. Forcibly displacing Indigenous peoples, carving up the natural world into private property, burying the fertile earth under concrete, and terrorizing the inhabitants with police violence are all expressions of the same logic. Catastrophic climate change is the large-scale consequence of a series of smaller steps that are no less catastrophic in the lives of individual human beings.
\n\nThe defense of the forest in Atlanta is only one of many such struggles over land and housing across the continent, including People’s Park in Berkeley, Echo Park in Los Angeles, and the camp defending the UC Townhomes in Philadelphia. As investment capital floods the real estate market, it has become increasingly difficult for to afford housing, let alone maintain collective space in which to experiment and build a common context. These movements have responded by defending a shared space of life and struggle.
\n\nMost of the following accounts describe the events of the week of action at the end of July 2022, when people from around Atlanta and other parts of the United States gathered for a week of discussions, protests, and concerts. The week of action culminated with a festival during which DJs, bands, and speakers performed, showing how the forest serves as an autonomous zone beyond the constraints of the capitalist economy.
\n\nThe forest is not just a particular concentration of trees; we can also understand it as a network of relationships between living creatures of all species. Life flourishes when it is liberated from control. This was palpable in the festival at the conclusion of the week of action. In a club, a breakdown or a breakbeat functions as a kind of lubricant to grease the gears of exploitation, bringing in business and (at best) advancing the career of a particular DJ or band. In a liberated zone, the collective experience of music can signify shared power, the joyous realization of potential, showing how each person’s creativity can contribute to the liberation of all.
\n\nThe South River Forest is not an old-growth forest. If anything, this makes the movement to defend it more inspiring. This land was already brutalized—yet, given a few years of peace, it became a wilderland capable of sustaining spaces of freedom. Any patch of flowers growing out of the cracks in the concrete could become a forest if we defend it. The possibility of freedom awaits all around and within us, even in the most repressive environments.
\n\nThe forest—which is to say, the web of life—extends beyond the bounds of any designated park, into each of our bodies. This web is what sustains our lives, not the extraction industries that are currently destroying the basis of existence for countless species.
\n\nTwo decades ago, the authors of Fighting for Our Lives suggested that “The best reason to be a revolutionary is that it is simply a better way to live.” As state violence accelerates the catastrophes resulting from capitalist industrialism, it may turn out that it is also the only way to live.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/09/1.jpg\")
\nThe forest is a breathing barricade. Like any breathing mechanism, the boundaries continuously undo themselves. Inputs and outputs collide—between the city and the woods, the feral and the tame, the safe and the dangerous. What qualifies as violence becomes murky in the woods. Violence as negation manifests itself in the form of the state, helicopters flying overhead and cops on the edge of the barricade to arrest the forest dwellers, sometimes they dare to enter, with their machines and their armor. Violence as creation manifests in the destruction of this negation: playful sabotage and joyful tricks. Anarchic violence becomes a productive flux of becoming. For the police, the inputs and outputs are far clearer and qualifications are far more rigid: the forest is a dangerous place, unknown territory understood in opposition to their cosmopolitan terrain.
\n\nFor us, the forest is a haven. The threat of the state is different than the peril of the woods. Stumbling upon a decaying coyote carcass feels like a blessing—to witness a transformation of flesh into soil in the soft fallen pine leaves is nothing like stumbling upon a clear cut where the limbs of trees lie severed, their torsos hacked up into discarded bits. The severing of trees is the precondition for the construction of the dystopian simulators through which the apparatuses of power will perpetuate their orgiastic fantasies of violence and capital. But this will not happen, because the forest is an ungovernable, indestructible, breathing barricade.
\n\nIn the forest, the boundaries lapse between the content of space, how things were constructed—by machine or by hand or, often, a combination of the two—and to what degree things become consumed and consumable. But there are also lapses between different kinds of time. The time it takes to walk from one patch of woods to another may take minutes or hours. It’s easy to get lost under the trees, to lose yourself in movement and return to the slimier flows of collective being within the barricade. To lose yourself intentionally or try to make yourself unlocatable—from the helicopters overhead and what lies beyond the barricade.
\n\nYet the barricade does not delineate a concrete edge. The edges of the forest do not indicate an end. The forest is indestructible because it is ever-expanding and constantly transforming. The forest here is a node that connects to many nodes and has many nodes within—including our bodies. The boundary of the body slowly erodes here. A viral outbreak reminds us we are perforated bags of water within perforated bags of water, including the forest.
\n\nFind ticks burrowed in your skin and you slowly become a deer. In our camouflaged garb we cosplay trees. It is something erotic to live in trees and to dress like them. We multiply ourselves through pseudonyms and costumes. We multiply ourselves by becoming deer, becoming tree, becoming decaying matter and waste. Eventually, in our deterioration and deterritorialization, movement and occupation, gathering and dispersal, taking up of space, and place taking us up, we become forest. We become barricade. Forever ungovernable and infinitely becoming.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/09/8.jpg\")
\nThe forest is a portal. The concrete blocks spread wide, allowing entry into the graffiti-filled lot. Anarchist sprites and other mischievous spirits have painted, scratched, stapled, pasted, singed signs everywhere conveying our welcome, our allegiance to this new world that calls to the depth and courage of our hearts. As I walk the liberated path, purple swirls form messages that guide me like breadcrumbs. My fae kin appear around me in gauze, denim, and metal, resplendently eschewing gender. Entering the wild, I return to my stirring self: this intimate green.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/09/11.jpg\")
\nThis letter originally appeared here.
\n\nI’ve been preparing myself for what feels like the inevitable: a raid, an attempted extraction—or will they choose to siege?
\n\nI’ve become attached to my treehouse, thinking of it almost as an extension of myself. I found myself questioning this, questioning the connection I feel to a temporary structure. But I realized that what I was feeling was beyond that. From my feet high above the canopy to the roots buried deep in the ground, I could feel it. I wondered if this energy was spiteful, a land so scarred and blood-stained, never given a moment to heal. Was I here because of spite? Yes. But the spite I feel toward the police is also born of love: love for the land and all of my friends here and beyond. This forest is not something I am going to give up without a fight.
\n\nEvery delay opens up more possibilities. Every contractor that backs away brings us closer to victory. Each of our moves keeps them guessing. Whether or not they choose to destroy our homes, I’ll be here keeping up the struggle. I’ll be here for as long as I can, for as long as it takes. They can try to evict us, but they will never be able to make us stop fighting.
\n\nThere’s joy in our fight. This spirit, this forest, will never be able to be contained. Everywhere you look, the police are trying to shrink our worlds, shrink our lives. But we have chosen to say no. Our fight extends beyond the borders of this forest—it extends through our expressions of collective and individual joy, incomprehensible to the narrow imaginations of the police and the ruling class that they protect. We laugh harder than them, we feel more pleasure even in the midst of their assaults. Falling in love with these woods has meant falling in love with one another and with the possibilities of this world—a love that the police will never understand, and therefore cannot crush.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/09/13.jpg\")
\nWhen the concrete barriers went up at the park at the behest of a local real estate baron, it felt so banal. What—another space in the city enclosed, forbidden, made concrete? Long before this struggle began—a struggle for my neighborhood park, my local forest—I could trace my life through a string of interactions with police in public parks, or a string of neighborhood parks and natural spaces closed, contaminated, forbidden. I could trace a line through this life: if you want to be outside, you have to pay or you have to trespass.
\n\nThe concrete road barriers were standard issue, but the real punch was when I saw that they took the sign and replaced it with a much smaller one, a generic one reading “Park Closed.” As if the public park, the forest, our entitlement to the land could be made or unmade with a sign. As if we would abide by the sign, something so “neutral,” produced to justify the land grab as official. It might as well say Forget being outdoors, catch the forest on Netflix.
\n\nLike me, my neighbors didn’t stop when they saw the barriers. If they noticed that the park sign was gone, it didn’t turn anyone around. The stream of cyclists, trail explorers, and dog walkers continued, pushing through the small opening that immediately appeared between the barriers. Soon enough, just as I expected, the barriers were pushed open all the way, the parking lot effectively re-opened. People make the spaces they need. I smiled when I saw them opened up: a sign of complete indifference to the roadblocks in our way. A disregard for property lines.
\n\nA week has passed since the barriers went up. Today is the first Saturday of the fourth week of action. Hundreds of people stream into the forest to enjoy a free concert, a barbecue, the company of others in the movement.
\n\nAs the day cools down, a crowd gathers around the front of the barriers. I notice that people are hoisting a new sign, painted with a new name. They welcome me in through the barriers. I help hold the sign, heavy in my hands, as it is affixed to the old sign stand. We drape a sheet over it. A few moments later, a Dekalb County police SUV slow-rolls by, but a crowd has already started to amass at the barrier entrance. Some shouts of mocking harassment from a crew of masked people send the cop down the road. “He won’t be back.” Maybe he will, but with a different kind of calculus.
\n\nThe crowd murmurs, carrying plates of grilled chicken and vegan hot dogs to come perch on the barriers. Someone has strung a fancy red ribbon across the barriers, tied in a bow. It feels like we are saying: this forest is ours, and these barriers are a gift. We call to others in the lot to come watch the sign unveiling unfold. Some make speeches, reclaiming the park. Excitement in the air, true feelings of power, laughter at the exaggerated speeches.
\n\nNow the sheet is finally pulled off, revealing the sign: “South River Forest Park” reads one side; “Weelaunee People’s Park” reads the other. Within seconds, I hear loud pops and champagne sprays, covering us all, showering a 20-foot radius. Cheers rise from the people gathered, then a chant: “People’s Park! People’s Park!”
\n\nWith a dramatic flourish, R— cuts the red ribbon, and everyone is yelling, celebrating, a burst of joy. Spontaneously, now we are running. Running past the new sign through the barriers, as if for the first time, as if something has been unveiled to us: a gift we’ve given ourselves.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/09/12.jpg\")
\nAt daybreak, the birds turn on as the music turns off. I’ve been dancing for almost twelve hours. It’s early Sunday morning, the end of my birthday. I feel blessed to have spent it in the forest with my friends and many strangers. This was the last day and night of the three-day Defend the Atlanta Forest music festival, an explosive culmination to the fourth week of action. We spent whole days and nights dancing, grooving, moshing to the rhythms of the free forest. My body is filled with an energy that I know doesn’t come from it, from the food or water or sleep that sustains it. It comes from a more diffuse and mystical power. A power that only emerges in the connection between many bodies engaged in freely creating a shared world.
\n\nThe festival began with a friend speaking about the movement to the growing assembly of people standing under and around the massive tarp and stage that has been constructed here. It serves as a temporary venue, no less historic, for shelter, gathering, rage, expression, joy, communing. As she explained that this is a decentralized and autonomous movement, inviting everyone to repeat back those two fundamental words, I felt a buzz of excitement.
\n\nThis is an almost 800 acre autonomous forest within the city of Atlanta. It was abandoned, then reclaimed, then sold, swapped, and again abandoned by the city. Now it is used and cared for by us—the people, the public.
\n\nWhen my friend wrapped up her welcome speech, another friend caught my attention through the crowd and asked me to lead some newcomers to the forest on a tour to a treehouse. I made an announcement and a couple dozen people followed me along a path through the trees.
\n\nI made stops along the way to point out where the kitchen is and the additional do-it-yourself kitchen where there are always snacks and sometimes people cooking special additional meals. I pointed out the sweat lodge that a Lakota comrade built during the last week of action. I told the story of how this movement became one of the many embers that were scattered when the boot of the state violently stomped out the sacred fire that was Standing Rock. I led them up the hill and encouraged everyone to look up. High above us, we saw a large platform in the tree covered by a domed tarp. There was a hanging potted plant with flowers; someone said, “Ooh, look, they are making it cute, like a home.” I answered, “That is her home.” Others asked, How do they get up there? How did people get everything up there? Everyone looked up at their childhood dreams come true.
\n\nAt dusk, the sky glows out from the negative space, forming shapes between the thin pine trees. The sun is lighting up the the world from below. People roam around the Living Room, our name for the part of the forest where pine straw provides a clean ground for public gatherings, meals, meetings, events, music, and art happenings. Everyone is standing or sitting in circles, eating, chatting, scheming, encountering or reencountering each other; dogs run around us playing and chasing with abandon. It is dinner time. All the hard work of carrying boxes of produce, jug after jug of water, chopping vegetables, stirring massive pots, washing the dishes from lunch, carrying them and the fresh hot food from the kitchen (in the woods) to the serving area in the living room has paid off. Everything we do here, we do voluntarily—a labor expressing faith in abundance, creating a free meal, a free show, a free experience. This simple fact is more significant than I know how to explain.
\n\nOne of the highlights for me, this week, has been seeing some coworkers from the restaurant I work at come out into the forest. At work, I’m always bringing fliers, putting up posters, begging my coworkers to come. The way we normally relate is always mediated by work—how miserable but resigned we are to be there, doing what we are doing, day after day, cleaning the bottles and floors just so we can clean them again when we close the next night. Out here in the forest, they ask me, Do you live out here? Did you put this all together? I say, Sometimes, I say, Yes, we all did.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/09/9.jpg\")
\nWhen the first can of Dr. Priestley’s Seltzer Water flew through the air and exploded against the windshield of the excavator, temporarily blocking the view of its operator and complicating his attempt to destroy the parking lot gazebo at the newly opened Weelaunee Peoples’ Park, it felt to me like a small but important milestone had been reached—another indication that the movement to defend the Atlanta forest continues to grow and to outgrow its limits.
\n\nThe sudden ubiquity of the cans of seltzer water themselves, cases of them sitting around the forest free for the drinking, felt like one such milestone in its own right. When an occupation reaches a certain level of power and prominence, resources begin to flow and strange abundances appear. I remember boxes of thousands of loose cigarettes arriving at Standing Rock and a small pious circle of chain-smokers forming to package them for distribution to the wider camp. Nobody knew where they came from. As far as I know, the seltzer water came to the Weelaunee Forest from the warehouse of a failed startup somewhere and quickly became the unofficial beverage of the week of action.
\n\nThe confrontation with the excavator ended with its operator, a neighbor and henchman of Hollywood billionaire Ryan Millsap, fleeing along with the off-duty police working security for him. They left behind Millsap’s truck, a 2020 Dodge Ram 5500, which was soon set ablaze. This ended Milsap’s second attempt to close down Intrenchment Creek Park and establish his private ownership over it. His first attempt had occurred over a week before, when he sent workers to remove the official park sign, close the parking lot with concrete barricades, and put signs up around the area declaring it “private property.” Our response had been to paint the barricades vibrant colors, keeping them in place but open them enough to allow vehicles through, and to declare the opening of a Peoples’ Park.
\n\nThe park feels different now. Millsap attempted to forcibly impose his private ownership but instead shattered it, and now the burnt-out husk of his $80,000 truck serves as visual proof of how easily such illusions can be dispelled. Instead of scaring away regular park-goers, the burned truck has become an attraction. People come just to look at it and take pictures of it. Something about it brings them joy; they leave visibly elated by what they’ve seen.
\n\nIt’s also clear that nobody misses the police, who no longer feel comfortable circling the parking lot or coming at night to harass “suspicious looking individuals” despite the old park being open 24 hours a day. Unlike a public park, which is defined by a list of things you’re not allowed to do, the peoples’ park invites your participation on all levels. You can drive on the bike path. You can dig up the grass and plant a garden. You can put up signs asking people to drive slower on the bike path. You can get a piano on Craigslist and bring it to the woods and play it at 3 am. You can park your car and sleep here because it’s safer than the Walmart parking lot and the communal kitchen is cooking a meal every day. You can throw a huge dance party under the canopy and the stars and fall asleep on the soft pine straw.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/09/10.jpg\")
\nWhen it started raining on the third night, I wondered how I would make it back to my tent. I also wondered what that truck looked like in the parking lot, soot washing off its charred remains, perhaps mixing with the paint and chalk that redecorated the iron frame. In the madness of the night, the status of the music was the only thing I did not question. One of my friends spun in circles, shoeless, in the downpour. I saw people kissing in the mud. The large blue tarp overhead, which just an hour earlier had almost come crashing down on our heads as reckless punks used it to facilitate stage dives and other antics, now shielded hundreds of people from the storm.
\n\nI was standing on the side, beneath a smaller tarp, next to the makeshift bar. The pulsing of the dance music wasn’t quite so loud that you couldn’t talk, but with the sound of the rain on top of it, I had to yell to be heard. My friend and I were discussing the morning. We had woken up with a start some 18 hours earlier to the sound of yelling: [self-described owner of the forest] Ryan Millsap had brought police to the parking lot and they were threatening to tow cars. Although we had only slept in our tent for a few hours, my friend and I pulled on our shoes and jackets and rushed through the forest to defend the newly christened Weelaunee People’s Park. In the parking lot, people were throwing stones and cans of sparkling water at the police. Elsewhere, someone was anxiously hiding the sound equipment in case a raid was imminent.
\n\nI still can’t believe we managed to pull this off. I shouldn’t be so surprised, but it’s hard to overstate the magic of what took place. There we were, perhaps 500 punks, dancers, anarchists, artists, partiers, rappers, indie rockers, forest defenders: if the police couldn’t stop us, if the developers couldn’t disperse us, the rain certainly wouldn’t. How many people had come over the previous days? There’s really no telling. The only thing certain is that on this final night, all of them walked through the cement barriers past the smoldering truck, deep into the forest, deep into the future.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/09/5.jpg\")
\nRocking with the pines, air thick with cicadas, the first night, the night of my arrival. The breeze shakes the treetops, rustles their needles together, cradles me in the sway of this forest.
\n\nI miss my friends back home already. I wish they could be here with me, looking up at the cloud-mottled night—my last sight before shut-eye, giving myself over to the charming clicks of bugsong. A hammock can be a lonely place to sleep, but less so when you find that people you once knew in a past life are suddenly your neighbors once more, stepping through the portals of their tents and raising their arms to the sun.
\n\nAs camo-clad demonstrators beat that truck mercilessly with a shovel, ripped its doors from their hinges, emptied its cab, I told the Rolling Stone reporter that what we were doing was building a new world. The music of these woods shows how we can find beauty in the scraps we’ve been handed, the cut cleared and replanted like the weeds growing from the old prison farm. Punk asks for no more than three chords, a rave no more than bass and bodies to populate the dance floor. In this world, we sway unbound by the weight of debt that is intrinsic to the success and poverty of city life. In this world, I find I can stretch my sleeplessness a few hours longer, waking life more nourishing than slumber. At night, our generations constellate with the stars.
\n\nAlong the glowing trails, I find faces new to these woods. I see kids ten years my junior showing up bright-eyed and ready to mosh under the dusty rain tarp. I see friends that I have known for the past decade carrying guitars and speakers, noting that we have come to be the elders of this scene. We are weathering life’s seasons in this world that we are building. Spring and summer happen simultaneously; slowly, we are bringing fall and winter back into the fold.
\n\nBy the time you get the notifications, it’s already too late. The forest has been sealed off by police or barricaded by protesters. You’re left pacing the hardwood floors of your apartment, wondering how you can help from afar. In the world we’re building, you just have to be there. News of the forest isn’t digested over breakfast, it’s made before a drop of coffee hits your lips. When morning comes and the cops raid, or defenders reduce construction equipment to rubble and ash, you’re either in the woods or you’re at your table. This time, we were in the forest.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/09/2.jpg\")
\nAll week the sun is beaming, sweaty bodies rustling through the woods, minds wondering what will come next, what will I need to do next? The threat of downpour loomed all week; it finally blessed us briefly on Saturday when the full rinse came. The darkening yellow sky, lightning pulses, damp pine starkly reminds me of early memories of Atlanta sunshine unveiling after afternoon showers. I worry how today will go after the downpour.
\n\nThe tarp bowl quickly fills up as the day continues and the pines dry. Suddenly, it feels like a music festival. There are pockets of people laying down on blankets, dancing, moshing, talking, and looking at zines.
\n\nAs it gets darker and darker, I start hearing ”When are you DJing?” I’m the last to play to close out the Fourth Week of Action and the music festival. I’ve DJed in the Weelaunee forest before, but, this felt different. As I stepped to the stage, I stepped into the hips of the woods. Swaying, Jungle-infused pop and locking, and Techno bouncing between the bones of the forest. The bowl flowed into late-night freaks, dancing to the hard bass, fuzzy mids, and ethereal highs. An all-consumption by the woods, by the energy bouncing off the pine, by my love for dancing and grimey hardcore sounds. Two hours to release anger, anxiety about what will come in the next few days, weeks, months, years to the forest, to my friends, to my life in Atlanta.
\n\nThe Weelaunee Forest is a land of resistance. The lineage of the land of Muscogee people, their forced removal, enslaved West Africans, incarcerated people in the Atlanta Prison Farm, and the fight to resist the state and colonialism continues in Weelaunee every day. DJing is an extension of my everyday acts of resistance, feeling true to the roots of Techno and Jungle that grew out of Black curiosity to find a place. DJing in a constructed money-maker will never compare to DJing in the fight for open spaces. My place is nuzzled between the pocket of trees.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/09/7.jpg\")
\nScrappin slop and tarps, frockling among carcass and debris, screaming songs of moto exhaust and white throated swallows, here among the Weelaunee.
\n\nMudtracks of ATVs lead us to wheelbarrows, tarps, abandoned clothing, slashed and trashed camps. Above, glorious clouds threatening us with a humid breath. That same rain that, we fear, will revolt in the strength of the kudzu and multiplying mold spores is also the rain that we crave to feed our gardens and creeks. A humidity that encourages the vining reach capable of overpowering the forgotten billboard, tagged with evidence of an incredible feat. So high, we both reach. Palpating canopies alive with green lichen, expanding arms for a choking embrace. Waterlogged tarps fastened into a caved dome, slugs fling in every direction as we snip the paracord that held this forgotten structure in place. Spiders emerge from the folds, where mosquitoes breed in stagnant puddles. Not so long ago, this sweat lodge was sanctuary for the ritual of gathering—of celebrating this forest—this land that haunts us with tragic horrors of nightmares past and the future that may emerge without our presence. We break down and repurpose our leftovers, we dismantle sites of abandon and create through decay. With the speed of acceleration, the drops that were once tender, hit like pellets, blinding my ability to admire the canvas of lightning against the dank green horizon.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/09/3.jpg\")
\nThe first night of the music festival I had an affective epiphany. I was humbled by the glowing social atmosphere of everyone around me. Yet when standing still, I realized I felt out of place. When in movement, when busying myself with tasks, I felt necessary, like I was a part of something, but I found myself unable to relax, unable to dance with friends and strangers.
\n\nThe second night, I examined the faces around me—so many unknown youth, people who are just coming into the Atlanta music scene or who have been occupying a different section of it. For a moment, the nostalgia for people and places long gone overtook me. My surroundings, my home, friends, were foreign. I started ignoring people, walking alone. An old friend who had performed the night before came up to me. He said he was looking for a familiar face. I felt massive roots pulling me back down to earth, to the moment.
\n\nSaturday morning, Ryan Millsap’s truck drove an excavator into the ICP parking lot. The driver slammed the excavator into the roof of the gazebo where people were standing. He dug a random hole in the path. He screamed profanities at people and threatened more violence. People fought back. They destroyed his excavator, chased him and the police out of the park, scavenged the good bits from the truck and burned the rest.
\n\nEncouraged by the exuberance of the morning’s win, my band played later that night. As a band, we are situated in realistic grief for our apocalyptic era, but we know that we can still fight for a freer future. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more grounded than when I took the stage that night. My goal was to portray the desperate reality: that to defend the forest, everyone has to fight. We can no longer be idle spectators of the state’s capitalist war on our bodies and our futures. Watching everyone move together in front of the stage, I felt a release of hopelessness. I felt the creative force of bodies moving and breathing together. There, we shaped a brief temporality, an energy that will live forever in us and in the forest as long as it stands.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/09/6.jpg\")
\nDuring our set, I read this excerpt from Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters:
\n\n[…]
\n\nhey man, let’s make a revolution, let’s
\nturn off the power, turn on the
\nstars at night, put metal
\nback in the earth, or at least not take it out
\nanymore, make lots of guitars and flutes, teach the chicks
\nhow to heal with herbs, let’s learn
\nto live with each other in a smaller space, and build
\nhogans, and domes and teepees all over the place
\nBLOW UP THE PETROLEUM LINES, make the cars
\ninto flower pots or sculptures or live
\nin the bigger ones, why not?
rise up, my
\nbrothers, do not
\nbow your heads any longer, or pray
\nexcept to the spirit you waken, the
\nspirit you bring to birth, it
\nnever was on earth, rise up, do not
\ndroop, smoking hash or opium, dreaming sweetness, perhaps
\nthere will be time for that, on the long beaches
\nlying in love with the few of us who are left, but now
\nthe earth cries out for aid, our brothers
\nand sisters set aside their childhoods, prepare
\nto fight, what choice have we but join them, in their hands
\nrests the survival of the very planet, the health
\nof the solar system, for we are one
\nwith the stars, and the spirit we forge
\nthey wait for, Christ, Buddha, Krishna
\nParacelsus, had but a taste, we must reclaim
\nthe planet, re-occupy
\nthis ground
\nthe peace we seek was never seen before, the earth
\nBELONGS, at last, TO THE LIVING
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/09/14.jpg\")
\nThe following text was distributed on a flier during the fourth week of action in the Atlanta Forest.
\n\n…because we are not here as consumers or as mere spectators. This is not another photo op, another “networking opportunity.” We are here because our need for a free forest, culture, and existence can’t be crushed by the police, nor can it be sold back to us as an image in an uninspired Hollywood rip-off.
\n\nIn a cave called Divje Babe, located in present-day Slovenia, archeologists have recently discovered a 60,000 year old flute. The human need for music has been with us since the very beginning. We are here to affirm that this deep and timeless desire, which has survived an Ice Age, the rise of empires and states, the advent of borders; slavery, war, famine, and Holocausts, is an important part of the current struggle.
\n\nThis movement is not just about a piece of land. It is not being fought between the police and their goons on one hand and some activists and their friends on the other. We are witnessing the collision of two competing ideas of life and the future.
\n\nIf they win, they will pollute all of the rivers, destroy all of the forests, pave over everything beautiful, and they will use the police to assure unlimited profits as our civilization chokes out its dying breaths.
\n\nIf we win: human needs will be measured against the imagination, against our collective ambitions and dreams, not held hostage by a system of artificial scarcity and waste. Our communities will not be held together by their ability to kill and maim enemies or heretics. They will be held together by music, and the ability to generate common luxuries.
\n\nSo let’s not say, “Oh, THEY don’t really care about the struggle, they are only here for the party,” or, “This is not about music and festivals and all of that crap, this is about serious politics and organizing.” Instead, let’s say the truth; this is only a glimpse of what we could give one another if we manage to outlive the oil-based economics of the current world system. The emancipation of the senses, the free development of the imagination and the passions: this is precisely what we are fighting for.
\n\nNo cop city, no Hollywood dystopia!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/09/4.jpg\")
\nSince 2001, the collectively-run website Antijob.net has provided a “blacklist of employers,” offering a space for laborers in Russia to report on their negative experiences at work. As Russian media and labor organizing have come under increasing pressure, Antijob continues to provide a crucial resource for ordinary employees, even in an extremely repressive environment. Russian corporations and government agencies have repeatedly attempted to bribe the publishers or suppress the site, without success. The so-called “Great Resignation” and a popular Antiwork Reddit site have recently made waves in the United States; we conducted the following interview with Antijob to learn what anti-work agitation looks like in Russia.
\n\nAntijob has also played a role in supporting protests against the invasion of Ukraine, informing Russian workers of their legal rights on the job if they arrested while protesting.
\n\nAs appendixes, we’ve included the Antijob manifesto, the Antijob statement against the invasion of Ukraine, and some examples of the reports workers publish on the site.
\n\n\n\n\n“Remember and tell others: your interests are opposed to the interests of the employer. This is a struggle that has been going on for centuries. The struggle between those who are trying to make a living and those who want to buy a new yacht.”
\n\n-Antijob, “No loyalty to the employer!”
\n
\n\n\nEmployers always write about Antijob. They say this and that—they slander, they claim that they were slandered, they talk about the intrigues of their competitors. Come on, they say, remove the story about the next LLC “Lepyoshki and Matryoshki,” otherwise we will sue you. Or, on the contrary, they offer money for us to remove the material…
\n\nTo be honest, we don’t really want to make employers better. Conflict between employers and workers, whether acute or dormant, is an integral part of capitalism. It will be fully overcome only with the rejection of the wage labor system as such.
\n\n-Antijob, “The presumption of class guilt”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/2.jpg\")
“No loyalty to the employer!”
\nFirst, explain what Antijob.net is and what it does.
\n\nTechnically, we are a feedback web page where workers can leave negative feedback about their jobs. Also, we are a micro-media platform about work and labor.
\n\nPolitically, we are an anarchist project highlighting the problem of wage labor, calling for workers to organize to fight for better working conditions and, of course, against capital and the state.
\n\nWhat inspires you to maintain Antijob?
\n\nProbably the main reason for the continuation of the project and its constant regeneration (as most of the original team has changed) is the tangible result that we can feel from it. We know how many users use our server and we know that it helps put pressure on employers at a relatively low cost of effort from us. We give employees a pressure tool and they use it effectively. As far as we’re concerned, it’s a success.
\n\nTell us a bit about how the project has changed over time.
\n\nAntijob emerged in the early 2000s as a response to the emergence of job aggregators that targeted young people, who made up a large portion of Internet users at that time. These services romanticized the “careers” they promised, and then their users learned the hard way that these careers consisted of working temporary jobs for miserable wages, followed by being firing and cheated. That was the target of our criticism; the method was formed by direct statements from employees. Over time, the Internet expanded, but the problems remained the same. The audience of job search sites increased—and so did ours.
\n\nThe original version of the web page and message was more aggressive; now we are somewhat less radical. But we have not descended into orthodox Marxism, which is usually typical of groups dealing with the subject of the labor movement in Russia.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/9.jpg\")
“Blacklist of employers—Antijob.net. Add yours.”
\nWhat impact has Antijob had among workers in Russia? How has the political environment changed since you got started?
\n\nYou could say that our web page has been a pioneer in the field of job reviews in Russia. Employers realized that opinions on the Internet could be a threat to their businesses, and the field of “reputation work” emerged, which has itself become a kind of business.
\n\nFor the authorities, we do not seem to be an obvious threat. There are lawsuits against us and the authorities even block the web site, but these problems were initiated by employers.
\n\nOf course, the situation has become worse as control over the Internet has increased. The political situation has gotten worse, too. The authorities and the police have started to write to us more often, and we are sure that sooner or later we will be blocked for good, the way it is in Belarus and Kazakhstan.
\n\nHow do you moderate submissions? Do you have a fact-checking process? How do you make decisions about what you publish?
\n\nAll the materials are moderated manually. We have several levels of validation; the highest level is given to those reviews in which proof of working for the company has been attached, such as correspondence or documents. Then there are reviews that are confirmed by the person leaving their email address; these are the majority.
\n\nWe filter out any positive reviews because they are not objective in principle. It is almost impossible to check the validity of a positive review.
\n\nWe also have an automatic review checker that alerts us to suspicious activity and allows us to identify people who are trying to misuse our web page.
\n\nWe don’t do detailed fact checking. It is technically impossible with 150+ reviews coming in every week. In any case, we are not trying to claim total objectivity. For us, there is an obvious disproportion of power in the relationship between the employee and the employer—so we trust the employee more, by default.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/5.jpg\")
“Labor against work.”
\nWe understand that there have been attempts to suppress Antijob.
\n\nThey often try to hack us, and from time to time, we experience brute force DDoS attacks on our web page. These attacks are organized by employers: they are either getting revenge for the reviews posted, or they are trying to remove the reviews or find out who the author is. We do not remove reviews for money, so an angry employer chooses between spending money on legal fees or hiring hackers.
\n\nThe second type of attack is from what we can call “competitors” in the field of commerce. They create copies of our site, buy similar domains, and try to hijack traffic in order to make money from skimming reviews. Recently, they began to act in a more sophisticated way and attack the behavioral factors of the site using bots, which reduce the average time of visits to the site and the rate of denials in order to reduce the visibility of our site in search engines.
\n\nA separate topic is the courts and RosComNadzor (the Russian digital control authority). Some companies go to court to claim that reviews about them are slanderous. If their effort in court is successful, then after a while we get a request from RosComNadzor to remove the information. If we do not remove it, we are blocked. This has happened several times.
\n\nNow we remove reviews at the request of the RCN, attaching an invoice and a link to the court decision, which often contains the text of the review. If we do not remove the feedback, we get blocked, the website traffic decreases by 70%, and search engine rankings drop, which accordingly makes the attack on the reputation of employers less effective. We are constantly looking for ways to circumvent this threat. Recently, we managed to change it so that the blocked reviews are hidden only for Russian IPs, while all others (including VPN/TOR users) can easily view them.
\n\nSometimes the police and other authorities write to us demanding that we provide the data of the authors. To these requests, we answer by sending the data of disposable emails and the IP of a TOR node. It is an incredible coincidence that everyone that the police are looking for is using TOR and utilizing a high level of digital security, isn’t it =). The police are not very eager to find out what’s up.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/3.jpg\")
“No salary—eat the bosses.”
\nCan you give advice to people who might try to start something similar elsewhere?
\n\nIt must be said that starting such projects from scratch can be difficult. The weapon of our web page is its high visibility in search engines and the fame it has accumulated. Those who want to start should be prepared to work for free, but at a higher level than commercial companies. The reputation market appeared long ago and there are a lot of people who want to make a profit in it and are ready to invest resources. For example, we have to contend with commercial feedback pages, competitors intercepting users by advertising, bot attacks on the web page, etc.
\n\nWe are inconvenient for our competitors and for employers because of our adherence to the principle of not removing reviews for money. However, if you have a team or a powerful movement, you need comrades who have technical knowledge in web development, who understand the basics of SEO [Search Engine Optimization] and security in the Internet, as companies are quite willing to pay hackers if you do not agree to withdraw feedback.
\n\nYou have to be prepared to regularly spend time on moderation and on communicating with users, as well as confrontations with the state and the courts. In the Western countries, problems with the law may be even heavier than in Russia and the CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States].
\n\nAt the first stage, what is most important is not super-functionality, but publicity. In terms of distribution, stickers helped us a lot. This is a trivial method, and it often did not work well in other projects, but our stickers usually hang for a very long time. Shitty work is a very understandable problem for people of any political conviction. While the anarchist movement in Russia has been active, we have accumulated enough users from big cities thanks to stickers.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/4.jpg\")
“Antijob.net—blacklist of employers.” These stickers have been essential to promoting the Antijob site as a resource.
\nHow do you see the connection between different forms of labor resistance such as labor unions, stealing from your workplace, public pressure campaigns, etc.? Which of these tactics are viable in Russia?
\n\nFor us, all methods are interconnected, and each has its pros and cons, as well as regional characteristics. Unions are a good organizational structure, but in Russia they can exist only in industries with large companies and are often overgrown with bureaucracy. Stealing is a good tactic for individual sabotage, but is not looked at well in the society and is unlikely to change the global problem of wage labor. Public pressure is effective on a big enough scale, but mobilizing people to fight thousands of small daily violations of rights involving hundreds of companies is impossible. Solidarity networks as an example of distributed pressure are good, but they require resources from regional activist groups (it is unlikely that anyone will initiate something like this in Russia except these kind of groups), and so far, we have not seen examples of such groups becoming sustainable.
\n\nAll of these tactics require mobilization and a degree of political freedom, which are both lacking in Russia, perhaps apart from passive sabotage (such as refusing to work effectively) or active sabotage (stealing and intentional damage), and perhaps hacktivism as well. In our opinion, the future lies in tactics that do not fall under the scrutiny of repressive structures and cannot be clearly attacked by the bosses, but which are capable of inflicting tangible targeted damage. Sooner or later, the political situation will change and the road will open up for the other tactics.
\n\nHow do you see the connections between labor resistance and other forms of political activity? Over the past 40 years, we have seen labor movements, unions, and workplace struggles grow weaker in the United States, while other fields of conflict (such as anti-police rioting) have intensified. Do you have an analysis about the ways that the terrain of labor struggles is changing and how workplace struggles can remain connected to other struggles?
\n\nWe see work as a central concept that will be zealously defended on all levels, from direct attacks by the police to conceptual criticism by right-wing intellectuals. Unions have been the answer before, but the neoliberal turn has provided a broad toolkit for fighting them. Struggles against police violence, like some other mass protests, are younger and more mobile in their choice of tactics that the state does not have an effective response to yet. In addition, unfortunately, in many ways, peaceful forms of resistance do not pose a concrete threat until they develop into occupations. An organized labor movement is not just about occasional rallies, but about the state having to spend money on social programs and businesses having to shell out on decent wages and offer guarantees to workers under the constant threat of strikes. This is probably more expensive than maintaining a few riot police units.
\n\nBut the labor movement is often very conservative, trade unions have their own structural problems, and new practices (like solidarity networks) have not yet become an effective instrument of struggle.
\n\nIt seems only natural for us that the problem of work remains relevant. The people who suffer the most from police brutality, racism, environmental crises, and other problems are rarely businessmen. They work—officially or illegally—and they suffer the toxicity of the market system. The only question is to what extent we (who are essentially part of the same workforce) can make this agenda relevant.
\n\nIn the United States, there has been a lot of news coverage of the so-called “Great Resignation,” discussing all the workers who have been quitting their jobs since the beginning of the pandemic. Has anything like this happened in Russia? Is quitting a job a form of resistance?
\n\nRussia has also had great resignations—even though these weren’t really resignations, it was more like businesses firing people to cut costs. Without benefits or any guarantees. The first lockdown made the atmosphere so tense that there were no more lockdowns afterwards. People were out of work, and since most Russians had no savings but did have credit debts, everything escalated. The state limited itself to a few cash handouts. If people were not allowed to go out to work and earn their bread, an uprising driven by hunger would have been unavoidable.
\n\nIn Russia, quitting a job as resistance is relevant only for those spheres where there is a shortage of personnel and a sense of their value. Mass resignations are very unlikely because there is no broad self-organization; the resignations of a few employees do not cause any damage. People often work unofficially, so they will receive no compensation, and the benefits to the unemployed are very small. More often, a visible form of struggle will be the continuation or sabotage of work as an individual practice. We are not seeing the opportunity for mass organized action just yet.
\n\nOne of several video shorts by Antijob.
\nHave you seen the Antiwork reddit page from the United States? How is it similar to your project, and how is it different?
\n\nNot only have we seen it, but we also have covered it, including a similar movement in China. In terms of its radical message, the movement is similar to the early Antijob, and we hope that at some point this will become more relevant in our country as well. For us, we see anti-work as a fatigue with the neoliberal work ethic (in the United States) and the pseudo-communist work ethic (in China). It seems that in our country, this ethic has not yet reached the peak after which a radical rejection of work will be perceived seriously.
\n\nAnother problem with this framework is our audience. Some of them work for something like $300-400 per month, while living with children and credit debts. It would be somewhat awkward to urge them to refuse to work.
\n\nWhat can you say about the invasion of Ukraine from where you are positioned?
\n\nBefore the war started, some of us doubted that such a turn of events was really possible. However, it did happen. We issued a statement condemning Russian aggression. Russia’s imperial policy is obvious to us. As usual, it is disguised as “security interests.” We have received several insults from patriotic users trying to prove to us that the war is being fought against “Nazis who spread LGBT propaganda,” but this is different from the patriotic frenzy of 2014 [when the Russian military seized Crimea from Ukraine].
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/10.jpg\")
“No salary—eat the bosses.” The sticker is in Ukrainian.
\nHow is the invasion of Ukraine affecting Russian workers? How are the sanctions affecting workers in Russia, and how do you think they will impact the working class in Russia in the future?
\n\nThere are definitely people in Russia who approve of the war, and there are quite a few of them. Many workers live in the information bubble of the state’s “fortress under siege” narrative. From their screens, they see the message “Everyone is against us.” This mobilizes them to support the invasion, shifting the focus to the idea that this is being done for the security of Russia.
\n\nPropaganda platforms use the international sanctions and condemnation to reinforce this narrative in order to draw support even among those who hesitated at first.
\n\nThis mobilization will not continue indefinitely, of course. In a few months, everyone will feel the economic consequences, and if the war is lost, the reputation of the government will be damaged. This will not necessarily lead to an uprising, but we can hope that the social agenda will be more successful in mobilizing for the overthrow of the regime.
\n\nWe plan to be ready for such a turn of events and, as a project directly related to labor issues, to support this process.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/1.jpg\")
\nFinally, is there anything people can do to support your project?
\n\nThe easiest way is to support us financially. The development of a project like this always needs resources with which to pay for hosting, or someone else’s work on the project. In addition to this, you can help spread awareness of the project. This is especially important in the CIS countries. Also, we always need people with experience in penetration testing to help find and fix vulnerabilities, and SEO experts to advise us on promotion in different regions in order to increase pressure on employers.
\n\nAnd on the macro-level, you could create an analogue of our project in your area and contact us to create a network of services like ours in collaboration.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/6.jpg\")
Antijob participated in publishing this book, “‘Work Sets You Free’—Stories about Workers and Employers.”
\nThis manifesto, which appeared on the Antijob site a decade ago, spells out their basic analysis and goals.
\n\nA significant part of life, we have to give work. Our capacity, time, ideas, successes and failures are reduced to rubles, dollars, and euros—empty bank notes that can never fulfill our desires and needs. Usually this work is accompanied by delays in paychecks, the machinations of employers, nervousness and humiliation from ridiculous rules and idiotic bosses.
\n\nWe do not believe that the existing system of “commodity-capital” relations, which put the exploitation and destruction of people and the planet on the conveyor, can somehow be reformed “from above.” Real change can only come about if people recognize their plight and begin to seek better conditions for their lives on their own—without begging for anything from party bureaucrats or crooks from the bureaucracy.
\n\nHistory shows many examples of rebellious people sweeping away exploiters and thieves overnight, administering true justice and distributing public goods fairly among those who need them most. In this sense, we are closest to the libertarian (anarchist) philosophy and principles of direct action. You can read more about this in the “Library” section of our website.
\n\nWe have no paid employees and no hierarchy. We focus on the use of a wide range of methods of struggle in labor conflicts. We deal with problems related to working conditions and payment, as well as problems that women, young people, and national, sexual, and religious minorities face at work.
\n\nThrough our actions and propaganda, we are trying to develop class consciousness among employees and an understanding that, as a class, we have an interest in social revolution, the victory of which will offer us the opportunity to control our lives.
\n\nWe see our site not only as a place where there is a black list of employers (and where you can leave feedback about employers), but also as a place for coordinating forces in the class struggle, promoting “direct action” in resolving labor conflicts—as opposed to the bureaucratic judicial system, which actually operates in the interests of our class enemies.
\n\nThis site was created over sixteen years ago by several members of the organization Autonomous Action and has been actively developing all this time. This year, Solidarity Networks were created in various cities of Russia, which have already helped people to reclaim stolen wages (Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, St. Petersburg). Thanks to antijob.net, more than a dozen employees received a salary after publishing a review on the site, because many employers are afraid to be included in such lists—and even more so on our site.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/7.jpg\")
“Labor against work.”
\nThis war is provoked by the stifled ambitions of the Russian elites. They try to disguise this by talking about the “national interest.” But the working people do not and cannot have any interests in the oppression of the people in Ukraine and the Donbas. Our interests are peace and decent work, not war with the Ukrainians.
\n\nThis is military aggression initiated from the top of the Russian Federation. Yet we will be the ones who bear the consequences of this decision. The oligarchs and the president will not bear the brunt of military spending. Their children will not go to the front, their salaries will not be eaten up by inflation and currency depreciation. You and I have been set up.
\n\nThe Putin regime is now taking revenge on the Ukrainian people for not wanting to live under the boot of the Russian Chekist [i.e., the Cheka, the Soviet secret police agency from 1917-1922, and its descendants, the NKVD, the KGB, and today, the FSB]. Tears and coffins await our mothers, too, but bombs will fall on the heads of our brothers and sisters, workers in Ukraine. We allowed this, but now our task is to stop it as soon as possible.
\n\nToday at 7 pm, anti-war actions will take place in Russian cities. Our antijob.net team calls on you to join them and demand an end to military aggression.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/8.jpg\")
Antijob helped to publish a Russian translation of our book about capitalism, Work. Tragically, the artist who designed it took his own life this week in response to the dehumanizing experience of seeking asylum—first in Ukraine, then in Poland.
\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1505616538749050884\n\n\n
\n\n\nJSC RTK is the official retail chain of MTS. Why should it be blacklisted?
\n\n1) Management style: Feudalism with authoritarian and totalitarian methods of influence. That is: all retail is divided into divisions, regions, and sectors, at the head of each such division is a person who most often feels like the absolute ruler of the territory entrusted to him and thinks that he has the right to humiliate his subordinates, put strong psychological pressure on them, force his subordinates to deceive customers, without their consent, or assuring them that “It is mandatory” to add items to purchase receipts that: a) are very marginal, b) are absolutely useless for the client. All this is done under the fear of disciplinary action, fines, demotion, or dismissal.
\n\n2) Liability. Every month, inventories are carried out by the store and every three months—with the auditor. All employees must be present at these inventories, regardless of whether they have a work shift that day. Returning to work on the day of the inventory is paid only for those who have a scheduled shift. In case there is a shortage, the re-sorting most often does not overlap; in this case, the surplus is put on the balance, and the shortage is withheld from employees. The shortage is retained in full, and not at cost, as required by the labor code…
\n\n \n
\n\n\nAt work, they held a meeting at which they announced that the entire team was being transferred to minimum wage due to problems in the company… Naturally, I wrote a letter of resignation, but it turned out that none of the employees was going to quit anymore, everyone continued working as usual. While I was working for two weeks before my dismissal, I found a vacancy on hh.ru [headhunter, a popular job search site] for my own workplace, at the previous salary, and I was very surprised. Some time after my departure, the former director called me for a conversation and offered to let me return on the condition that I stop going to political pickets and covering my actions on social networks. Allegedly, there were complaints from my clients that I was against Putin. That was the reason for my removal. In fact, it turned out that no one’s salary had been reduced, everyone was quickly returned to their previous working conditions, but they decided not to inform me about this, so that I would quit of my own free will without scandal. And this whole performance was carried out in order to deceive me, one person, and force me to quit.
\n\n \n
This surprising story was confirmed with a photograph of the contract, which is available on the post on the Antijob site.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2022/03/17/every-storm-begins-with-a-single-raindrop-in-memory-of-two-who-fell-in-rojava", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2022/03/17/every-storm-begins-with-a-single-raindrop-in-memory-of-two-who-fell-in-rojava", "title": "Every Storm Begins with a Single Raindrop : In Memory of Two Who Fell in Rojava", "summary": "A eulogy honoring the lives of Lorenzo Orsetti and Ahmed Hebeb, who were killed fighting against the Islamic State in March 2019.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/17/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/17/header.jpg", "date_published": "2022-03-17T15:55:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:53Z", "tags": [ "eulogy", "Rojava", "Syria" ], "content_html": "This eulogy honors the lives of Lorenzo Orsetti and Ahmed Hebeb, who were killed during the last days of the fighting against the Islamic State in March 2019. For more background on the conflict, read this article and this interview with Tekoşîna Anarşîst.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/17/10.jpg\")
Lorenzo Orsetti and Ahmed Hebeb in the vicinity of Baghuz in March 2019; the last known photograph of either of them.
\nThree years ago, on March 18, 2019, my friend Lorenzo Orsetti was killed in action during the battle of Baghuz Fawqani. He was fighting with the Syrian Democratic Forces against the last bastion of the Islamic State in Syria. Before any more time passes, I would like to say a few words in his memory.
\n\nLorenzo was an anarchist from Florence, Italy. At the time of his death, he and I were members of Tekoşîna Anarşîst, a group of anarchist internationals participating in the ongoing revolution in northeastern Syria, otherwise known as Rojava.
\n\nI met Lorenzo on my first day in Syria and I was with him nearly every day of the last six months of his life. Until he died, I never knew his real name, nor where exactly he was from. To me, he was Tekoşer Piling—that was his nom de guerre. It means “Struggle Tiger” in Kurmanji Kurdish.
\n\nIn some ways, Lorenzo and I knew very little about each other. In all the time we spent together, we rarely discussed our feelings, the future, or our past lives back home. Nevertheless, we were comrades in arms. We served in the same unit, slept in the same room, trained and exercised together every morning, alternated shifts on guard duty every night, shared hundreds of meals and thousands of cups of tea, rotated chores, cleaned up after each other, and deployed to the front line together twice, where we survived several firefights and various close brushes with death. I trusted Lorenzo with my life, and he never let me down.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/17/1.jpg\")
Lorenzo Orsetti with the flag of Tekoşîna Anarşîst. “In this picture, he was being self-deprecating by being as over the top as possible.”
\nWhat can I say to do justice to Heval Tekoşer?
\n\nFirst and foremost, I will say that Lorenzo was a revolutionary in action and conviction, and that he was very brave. He did not come to Rojava to make money, to live off of the largesse of the movement, or to get famous on the internet. He took his duty as an internationalist seriously. For the year and a half that he served in Syria, he volunteered for every single assignment possible, from Afrin to Deir Ezzor, from one end of the liberated territory to the other. At various times and places, he fought with the predominately Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), the Turkish communist organization TIKKO, Arab units of the Syrian Democratic Forces, Anti-Fascist Forces in Afrin, and Tekoşîna Anarşîst. He wasn’t messing around. By the time he died, he was a seasoned and widely respected veteran, well known as the first in the line of fire and the last to leave. I had begun to believe that Lorenzo was bulletproof—until he wasn’t.
\n\nThat said, Lorenzo was by no means a one-dimensional soldier of fortune. He did not love war for its own sake. He read and wrote constantly. He studied history, politics, language, theory, tactics and strategy. His Kurmanji was decent and he was learning Arabic. He knew what he was fighting for, and he truly believed in the principles of autonomy, ecology, and women’s liberation that we saw being put into practice in Rojava, however imperfectly. He lived by his principles and he died for them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/17/2.jpg\")
Lorenzo Orsetti at the front in the desert outside of Hajjin in Deir Ezzor at the end of 2018.
\nIn addition to his considerable prowess as a freedom fighter, Lorenzo was an all-around remarkable human being. A chef by trade, he would regularly conjure up delicious meals from basic rations. On birthdays and special occasions, he would track down better ingredients and spend hours making gnocchi and delectable sauces from scratch. He spoke English well, if not exactly fluently, peppering it with fabulous malapropisms, Italian idioms, and peculiar turns of phrase. He could get his point across in a meeting with brutal precision, using half as many words as a native English speaker would. He was quick to anger and quick to forgive, capable of firing off a volley of hair-raising insults when provoked and of completely forgetting the incident within minutes. Lorenzo loved dogs and was especially kind to puppies. He had a thing for odd techno, jihadi nasheeds, and the song “Live By The Gun” by Waka Flocka Flame. He was short and stocky, covered in tattoos, and a ranked world-class master of the video game “Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III.” If there was ever a moment where there was nothing more important that he had to do, he could be quite content to wrap himself up in a blanket, stretch out on the floor, break out his phone, and do battle with the orks of Tartarus, a practice that—for reasons quite beyond me—he would refer to as “pumping my cannon.” He was a real one.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/17/9.jpg\")
Lorenzo Orsetti in Rojava in 2018.
\nA lot of my most vivid memories of Lorenzo, and of Rojava in general, revolve around sleep and the lack thereof.1 In my mind, he is the tiny glowing ember of a cigarette emerging out of the darkness, long awaited, coming to relieve me of my position and to tell me that I can finally rest. Şev baş, heval.
\n\nLorenzo was killed on March 18, 2019, on the last day of the last battle of the last major engagement of the territorial war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. I had just returned from the front at Baghuz Fawqani. He left for the front there the night I got back from it. We said serkeftin, embraced, and that was that. Within a few days, Baghuz had fallen and Lorenzo was a legend and a martyr.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/17/3.jpg\")
Lorenzo Orsetti with the red and black anarchist flag.
\nThree years have passed now. I go about my life in obscurity, surrounded by my loved ones. I wish that Lorenzo had made it home from Syria, as I did. I wish that I had his number in my phone and that I could hear his voice again. Nonetheless, I do believe that there are things in this life that are worth dying for. From the perspective of the civil society of Rojava, I do not think that there was anything to be done about ISIS except to defeat them by military means. Somebody had to do it. Lorenzo did his part.2
\n\nTo his loved ones in Florence, I would like to say that I too cared for Lorenzo in my way. As my friends and I said in our first statement following his death: “A part of us died with him, and a part of him lives on with us.” We hope that you are proud of him, and that you can understand the choices that he made. I will leave the reader with Lorenzo’s last words, translated for posterity by his friends gathered around a bare table somewhere in northern Syria on March 18, 2019. Rest well, heval.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/17/4.jpg\")
Lorenzo Orsetti in January 2019: “Just after we returned from the front in Deir Ezzor.”
\n\n\n\nHello.
\n\nIf you are reading this message, then it means that I am no longer of this world. Don’t be too sad, though, I’m OK with it; I don’t have any regrets and I died doing what I thought was right, defending the weak and staying true to my ideals of justice, equality, and liberty.
\n\nSo in spite of my premature departure, my life has been a success, and I’m almost certain that I went with a smile on my face. I couldn’t have asked for more.
\n\nI wish all of you all the best in the world and I hope that one day, you too will decide to give your life for others (if you haven’t already) because that is the only way to change the world.
\n\nOnly by combatting the individualism and egoism in each of us can we make a difference. These are difficult times, I know, but don’t give in to despair, don’t ever abandon hope, never! Not even for a second.
\n\nEven when all seems lost, when the evils that plague the earth and humanity seem insurmountable, you must find strength, you must inspire strength in your comrades.
\n\nIt is in the darkest moments that we have greatest need of your light.
\n\nAnd remember always that “every storm begins with a single raindrop.” You must be that raindrop.
\n\nI love you all, I hope you will treasure these words for time to come.
\n\nSerkeftin!
\n\nⒶ︎
\n\nOrso,
\n\nTekoşer,
\n\nLorenzo.”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/17/8.jpg\")
Tekoşer’s şehid letter. Every fighter in Rojava writes a letter like this for release in the event that they do not make it home.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/17/7.jpg\")
“And remember always that ‘every storm begins with a single raindrop.’ You must be that raindrop. I love you all, I hope you will treasure these words for time to come.”
\nLorenzo Orsetti fell in battle side by side with an Arab fighter named Ahmed Hebeb. Those of us from Tekoşîna Anarşîst knew him as Rafiq Şamî. It was not a coincidence that they were together that day. Lorenzo and Ahmed knew each other well from Lorenzo’s previous four rotations to Deir Ezzor. During one of these occasions, Ahmed stripped down to his boxers, counting out for us from head to toe twenty-seven separate wounds that he had received while fighting ISIS over the years. Lorenzo wanted to be where the action was, and Ahmed always knew where to find it. They died together, in a hail of bullets with both guns blazing, providing covering fire to a group of their comrades who were retreating in the face of a desperate ISIS counter-attack. Ahmed was beheaded. For whatever reason, Lorenzo was not.
\n\nAt Ahmed’s şehid ceremony, my friends and I helped carry his casket. His friends and family were at first confused as to why a group of foreigners had materialized at their loved one’s memorial. My Arabic is atrocious, but I pulled up pictures on my phone of Ahmed, Lorenzo, and I together in the desert of Deir Ezzor. “Şamî!” I said. “Tekoşer! Heval! Rafiq! Şehid!”
\n\nThe revolution in Rojava and the war against ISIS in that part of the world have often been portrayed in the West in Orientalist and Islamophobic terms—especially by reactionaries, but also by some leftists and anarchists. Kurdish people have been fetishized and romanticized—they are portrayed as a bloc, as “the only sane people over there,” while Arabic people are dehumanized and portrayed as crazed terrorist sympathizers.3 This is especially galling to me because—while I cannot speak for other times and places during the war—the reality of what I saw in Deir Ezzor in the winter of 2018 to 2019 was that the overwhelming majority of the soldiers doing the worst of the suffering and dying to wipe ISIS off of the map were Sunni Arabs like Ahmed. Bigots and fools can say what they will about Arabs and people from Islamic societies in general, but what I saw was that when some of the most malicious jihadis in the entire world converged on northeastern Syria to pursue a program of rape and genocide, a great many Sunni Arabs including Ahmed Hebeb took up arms to stop them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/17/6.jpg\")
Ahmed Hebeb and Lorenzo Orsetti at the front outside of Hajjin in Deir Ezzor, December 2018.
\nAhmed gave his life engaged in combat with people who war had turned mad, people who had chosen to make themselves into enemies of humanity at large. Many of these people were Ahmed’s own countrymen, people who spoke the same language and worshipped the same God. Today, the conditions that sent Syria spinning into war appear to be generalizing across the entire world. The defenders of the neoliberal status quo are showing themselves to be bereft of both vision and answers. As those of us in the so-called West reckon with our own versions of ISIS in this age of ascendant ethno-nationalism, only time will tell how many people of good conscience in Christian societies will be ready to do as Rafiq Şamî did.
\n\nOn behalf of Tekoşîna Anarşîst, I would like to say to Ahmed and the countless Middle Eastern men and women like him: we have not forgotten you nor the lessons that you taught us.
\n\nIn the spirit of Ahmed and Lorenzo,
\n\nAn anarchist.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/17/5.jpg\")
Ahmed Hebeb and Lorenzo Orsetti at the front in Deir Ezzor, in the vicinity of Baghuz, March 2019, not long before their deaths.
\nLorenzo had to be woken up in a very particular way, a process that I eventually came to master. You see, some comrades will trick you when it comes time to wake them for guard duty, especially when they have been coping with chronic sleep deprivation for months. They will sit up and have a whole conversation with you. But they are not truly awake. As soon as you leave them, they will lie back down and fall asleep, extending your watch indefinitely and eating into your priceless sleep time. So you must insist, you must prod them until they are standing, until they are fully geared up, until they are actually walking with you in the direction of their post. Woe betide the person who attempted to wake up Lorenzo in this way.
\n\nQuite the opposite, as soon as you spoke a single word to Lorenzo, he would be fully awake. He would not move a muscle, but he would grunt one time. With this grunt, you could be certain that he would be at his post precisely ten minutes later, without fail. However, it was vitally important to him that he have this ten minutes to lie perfectly still, smoking a cigarette in silence and acclimating his mind to the horrible fact that he was not only awake but that he was going to have to get up. As I would come to learn, if you made the mistake of prodding him any further during this time, you would soon find yourself face to face with an enraged and frightfully profane Italian.
\n\nAnd yet, at any time of day or night, whenever anything legitimately alarming would happen, such as incoming fire, weird lights, the whir of a drone, or unvouched-for explosions, he could wake up out of a dead sleep and get into position with the speed of a cheetah. You could count on it. ↩
\nThis does not mean that the military defeat of ISIS in Iraq and Syria has resolved any of the issues that gave birth to ISIS in the first place. It has not. Abdullah Öcalan himself once wrote that “military victories cannot bring freedom; they bring slavery.” In my observation, he was correct. ↩
\nIn fact, the revolution in Rojava is not an ethno-nationalist project, but an ideological one, as practically everyone involved in the Kurdish liberation movement that I personally know there would agree. None of the ethnic or religious groups are monolithic. There are Kurds who bitterly oppose the movement and Arabs, Assyrians, Armenians, Turks, and others who participate in it. ↩
\nWe received the following report from the group that produced the French version of To Change Everything, Pour Tout Changer. They describe the situation in Paris before and after the attacks of November 13: the intensification of xenophobic discourse, the repression of homeless refugees, the declaration of a “state of emergency” as a way to clamp down on dissent, the preparations for the COP 21 summit at which demonstrations are now banned, and what people are doing to counter all this. It offers an eyewitness account from the front lines of the struggle against the opportunists who hope to use the tragedy of November 13 to advance their agenda of racism and autocracy. With demonstrations forbidden and the COP 21 summit around the corner, what happens in Paris will set an important precedent for whether governments can use the specter of terrorism to suppress efforts to change the disastrous course on which they are steering us.
\n\nThe attacks that took place in Paris several days ago, tragic as they are, are unfortunately not an isolated event. The capital city of France was simply another target in a string of bombings in Suruç, Ankara, and Beirut; it represents the continuation and expansion of the strategy ISIS initiated in the Middle East.
\n\nIn France, these attacks exacerbate a political context that was already fraught. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the participation of the far-right party Front National in the second round of the 2002 presidential election, the political discourse has taken an increasingly conservative tone. For example, Nicolas Sarkozy, as Ministre de l’Intérieur from 2002 to 2007 and President from 2007 to 2012, openly adopted some arguments, topics, and symbols that were previously only used by the Front National. These discourses of “identity” and “security” have especially stigmatized Arabic and Muslim communities. In 2010, for example, a law was passed stipulating that it was forbidden to cover your face in public places in France. While not explicitly directed at those wearing a niqab or hijab, it resulted in more controls targeting Muslim women.
\n\nDuring this same time period, law enforcement groups were given new equipment such as Flash-balls (supposedly non-lethal anti-riot weapons) and Taser guns. The national DNA file, used since 1998 to collect the DNA of sexual offenders and abusers, has been extended to every person convicted of an offense. The “Plan Vigipirate,” a governmental anti-terrorism security plan established in 1995 after several bombing attacks in France, was also updated three times between 2002 and 2006, and more recently in 2014 under current President François Hollande.
\n\nFor years, refugees have been fleeing their countries to escape death, military conflicts, and constant political instability. Until last summer, the French government and its European counterparts didn’t care about the refugee issue—witness the countless tragic deaths of people trying to cross the Mediterranean sea. In Paris, several groups of refugees have been living on the streets in precarious conditions for months.
\n\nNevertheless, due to accelerating waves of immigration, the French government started to change its policy, taking part in the European political initiative “Welcome Refugees.” This was more of a political move than an expression of solidarity. During this period, refugees and migrants, left alone by authorities, began to create their own camps in several locations in Paris. They received some assistance from NGOs, collectives, activists, and others concerned about their difficult situation.
\n\nHowever, refugees faced aggressive state repression, as they still do. They are regularly harassed by police who intimidate, beat, evict, and arrest them or destroy their camps. In June 2015, the fascist group Génération Identitaire (Identity Generation) attacked a refugee camp in Austerlitz with stones and bottles. The Austerlitz camps were removed by the authorities in September.
\n\nAt the end of July, another group of refugees and migrants decided to squat an old and abandoned high school in the 19th district of Paris: the Lycée Jean Quarré. Collectives and activists came to offer help; together, they began organizing demonstrations to defend refugees’ rights. On the morning of October 23, police evicted the squat. Some of the migrants who occupied it have been relocated to centers or shelters in the suburbs or even further outside Paris. Others remained without a place to sleep, so they camped in front of the Hotel de Ville, the City Hall of Paris.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/2b.jpg\")
Police officers and migrants at the squatted Lycée Jean Quarré.
\nThe day after the eviction, demonstrations were planned at the same time in England and in France under the slogan of “Freedom for the three migrants imprisoned in England—Papers and housing for all—Freedom of movement, no borders.” At the end of the demonstration, some refugees were determined to block the streets until the Mayor found a solution to relocate everyone. They occupied a major intersection for approximately 45 minutes. Then, as usual, police showed up in riot gear. After discussing the possible consequences, the participants shifted to occupying a nearby theater. As they were forcing the doors, the police charged in a surprisingly disorganized and chaotic manner. Some demonstrators continued to confront the police as they were pushed back to a main street.
\n\nA few hours after the demo, some refugees and migrants, still without a place to sleep for the night, occupied the Place de la République, one of the major squares in downtown Paris. Since that day, they have been evicted several times and their camps and personal belongings have been destroyed and seized by the police. Several gatherings took place to help refugees and defend the square against eviction. The tension was always high during those actions and police forces were numerous. A few weeks ago, at one such gathering, an Afghan refugee explained to us that he and some of his friends have finally received housing for at least six months. Nevertheless, he also told us that newer refugees who had just arrived from Germany would sleep outside in the camp that night. On Friday, November 13, the police evicted the camp again just a few hours before the ISIS attacks took place in the same district.
\n\nAt the same time, the authorities have been directing increasing surveillance towards anarchists and their spaces. Several anarchists have recently been arrested in the Paris area, demonstrating the European common political agenda of increasing repression against anarchists—as we have seen recently, on a larger scale, in Greece, Spain, and even Czech Republic. Members of La Discordia, a new anarchist library in the 19th district of Paris that opened in spring 2015, published an article in October showing that the police were monitoring and recording their activities. A device was found hidden in a room at the school facing the library, as its director had agreed to assist the police in their surveillance.
\n\nMeanwhile, the COP 21 was coming up. From November 28 to December 12, politicians from around the world will gather in Paris to pretend to discuss environmental issues; several demonstrations and events were planned by worldwide organizations to oppose this international masquerade. An appeal to participate to the anti-COP 21 in Paris has appeared in several languages and Paris is expecting an international mobilization.
\n\nThe French government took steps to control and contain popular opposition even before the November 13 attacks. First, they decided to close the borders: contrary to ordinary Shengen practice, France will enforce border controls and refuse some people entry. The government has also refused visas to foreign activists and members of organizations. Furthermore, the police administration sent a message to all their employees at a national level asking them not to take vacations during the COP 21 in case they need to mobilize everyone against activists and “black blocks” (French media and politicians still misunderstand black blocs to be a distinct organization, not a reproducible tactic). In other words, the authorities fear that this international meeting will occasion fierce resistance.
\n\nAs soon as the attacks took place, and especially when people were taken hostage at the Bataclan, a major venue, Paris became an “urban warfare” zone: police forces were on alert everywhere along with special forces and tactical groups, while soldiers, emergency personnel, and firemen blocked all the streets around the sites of the attacks. Everyone in these areas was searched, had their IDs checked, and told to leave the streets and go home. Those who were at bars were forced to stay inside for hours before police ordered them to leave, some with their hands on their heads. In the moment, the violence of the images and events let us speechless, confused, and scared—not only about the attacks but even more so about what would come next.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/3b.jpg\")
Paris the night of the attacks: the army takes the streets.
\nShortly afterwards, President François Hollande made an official statement on television saying that France was now at war against the terrorists, against ISIS. Hollande used the same rhetoric and vocabulary George W. Bush did in his speech after September 11, 2001. Hollande also explained that France was now increasing its emergency alert level to just below the ultimate level of war within the French territory. In the name of the “state of emergency” and in order to reinforce and maintain national “security,” Hollande asked to deploy about 10,000 soldiers to help police officers carry out surveillance and control.
\n\nThe “state of emergency” is a peculiar law passed on April 3, 1955 that provides civil authorities of a specific geographical area with exceptional police powers to regulate people’s movement and residence, close public places, and requisition weapons. It enables the authorities to take all the decisions they want and to drastically reduce liberties and freedom. This law was created and used primarily during the war against Algeria. Between 1955 and 1961, the “state of emergency” was imposed several times on the Franco-Algerian territory. Later, it was used in New Caledonia in 1984-1985. Finally, and for the first time in the French metropolis, the state of emergency was imposed in 2005 after the uprisings that took place in our suburbs.
\n\nOnce applied, this state of emergency can take several forms. The President and prefects can use it to impose curfews on their population. Car traffic can be forbidden in certain districts or zones at specific hours. Prefects can determine where people are permitted to go, establishing restricted areas and safety zones and even forbidding someone from going to or living in a specific zone if that person is considered a threat. Indeed, every person considered “dangerous” can be forced to stay at home without any option of going out, or only allowed to go out within extremely precise conditions such as being monitored by an electronic bracelet. Movie theaters, venues, or any other place where people gather like bars and restaurants can be forced to close. Police officers can stop and check you without a specific reason—something they already do anyway—and any opposition can be considered a threat. Demonstrations, marches, and gatherings can be forbidden; searches and house raids can be made day and night without warrants; every single person who contests this situation can be punished with financial charges or prison according to stipulations built into the “state of emergency” legislation.
\n\nDuring the three days of national mourning imposed by François Hollande, the government made their first decisions responding to the attacks. First, they decided to increase their military strikes on ISIS positions in Syria; they are trying now to form a coalition with the US, Great Britain, Germany, and Russia to wage a total war against “terrorism.” Then our Assemblée Nationale, the official building where our deputies discuss and make laws, voted almost unanimously (551 pros vs. 6 cons) to extend the “state of emergency.” Now it will last three months, until February 26, 2016. Of course, it could be extended again after that.
\n\nMoreover, the government decided to keep the COP 21 in Paris—at least its official meeting and discussions—but forbade the demonstrations and activities organized by anti-COP activists. This can be seen as an attempt to muzzle the people taking part in the social movement to counter these meaningless meetings and political negotiations. It is also interesting to note, considering the three-month extension of the state of emergency, that in 2016, the construction of the new airport at Notre Dame des Landes is scheduled to resume—the airport that has thus far been blocked by the occupation known internationally as la ZAD. The authorities might try to control the opponents of the airport under this supposedly “exceptional” law.
\n\nDuring the past few days, the authorities have made some other major decisions: starting now, our police officers are allowed to keep their weapons with them even after working hours in the name of national safety. The government has also asserted a closer surveillance of online activity. In addition, President François Hollande is trying to add new elements to the law governing the state of emergency, including policies such as stripping French citizenship from people recognized as a threat to national security, or closing mosques preaching a conservative interpretation of Islam.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/4b.jpg\")
People gathering at the Place de la République after the attacks.
\nIn the aftermath of the Paris’ attacks, we are sure to face even darker days than before between the increasing power of the government, the crushing of our liberties, and intensifying xenophobic and racist discourses among politicians and part of the population. Indeed, only a few hours had passed after the attacks before the first racist attacks took place in several towns around France. For example, on Saturday, November 14 in Pontivy, Brittany, while taking part in a demonstration, members of “Adsav,” a fascist group defending Breton identity, beat an Arabic man. The weekend following the attacks in Paris, mosques were tagged with red Christian crosses and racist sentences; some Halal butcheries have also been targeted. In Marseilles, a Jewish professor and a woman wearing a headscarf were assaulted.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/5b.jpg\")
Adsav demonstrating in Pontivy on Saturday, November 14.
\nThe attacks also reinforced French nationalism. The “Marseillaise,” the French national anthem, has been sung during many gatherings since the attacks; the national flag has been ubiquitous, even on social media profile pictures. All this nationalist momentum produced a spike in applications to join the French military, as some recruiters explained to journalists. All these events offer a great opportunity for the Front National to increase its influence once more across the French political spectrum, and to gain more electors during the municipal elections in December.
\n\nIt is alarming how readily the majority of the French population accepts the policies of the “state of emergency” and the restriction of their movement and liberties. For anarchists and activists, these emergency measures raise several questions: What will happen if we violate the state of emergency by demonstrating? How will the police forces react? Will the government end up using this “exceptional law” to repress anarchists and other radical activists and carry out mass arrests? One thing is certain: since the attacks of the past January in Paris, most of the police forces haven’t been able to take vacations due to a lack of personnel. Some high-ranking members of the police explain that their troops are exhausted and on edge, which means that the tension during future actions including the COP 21 protests will be extremely high.
\n\nNevertheless, it is important to remember that nothing is ever written in advance. As individuals, we have the capacity to make choices that could change the current inertia of the world.
\n\nOn Sunday, November 22, several hundred people gathered in the Place de la Bastille to express solidarity with refugees and to contest the “state of emergency” declared by the government, despite the gathering having been prohibited following the attacks. When we arrived, police forces were present but were standing back from the increasing group of activists. We took this opportunity and started walking in the middle of the road, determined to demonstrate no matter what. Police forces ran after us, faced us in a line, and tried to turn us away from our principal objective of taking a major boulevard to reach Place de la République. Their first attempt failed, as some activists got around the police line and kept walking on the boulevard, chanting “Solidarity with all refugees!” There followed a chase between police and activists. At one time, they succeeded splitting us in two groups, and clashes broke out as people tried to break through their lines of separation. They answered with tear gas and truncheon blows. Nevertheless, their attacks didn’t stop us. In the end, we succeeded in breaking their lines, and once again we were demonstrating together, heading to our objective. Finally, after approximately 30 minutes marked by clashes with the police, we arrived at the Place de la République, which was full of people who had come on that Sunday afternoon to lay flowers and pay homage to the victims of the attacks.
\n\nThe protests of November 22 in Paris.
\nThe success of this spontaneous demonstration in defying the “state of emergency” shows that we can still act on our own strength, refusing to surrender to the general state of fear and to the new laws imposed in the name of national security. More than ever, we must help and take care of each other, we must keep organizing, we must stay focused and continue defying authority. This is what we should keep in mind as the COP 21 will start in few days in Paris. The struggle continues.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/6b.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/7b.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/8b.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/9b.jpg\")
Confronting the “state of emergency” on November 22.
\nWhile Putin tries to change the subject from insurrection to war (perhaps in fear that the contagion of unrest will spread inside Russian borders), we believe it is especially important for anarchists and others with a stake in social movements to learn from the revolution in Ukraine. Specifically, we want to study how nationalist and fascist elements were able to take the initiative, and how to minimize the likelihood of this occurring elsewhere in the future.
\n\nTo that purpose, we present an interview here with a member of the Autonomous Workers’ Union in Kiev, who discusses why groups like Svoboda and Pravy Sector were positioned to take advantage of the social movement, and evaluates the effectiveness of the various strategies anarchists and anti-fascists adopted in this unfavorable context.
\n\nShortly, we will present our preliminary hypotheses about what anarchists elsewhere around the world can learn the Ukrainian example, along with a reading list of primary source materials available in English.
\n\n\n\n\nHow were nationalists able to establish themselves so visibly within the movement? Was it because they were there first? Was it because they had more resources? Or was it something about the issues and demands of the movement itself?
\n
There were several reasons. First of all, nationalism is not rejected by the vast majority of protesters. Even people with liberal views haven’t said much against the party “Svoboda” (Freedom) and other nationalistic organizations. Most of them prefer to turn a blind eye to the aggressive actions of nationalists, imagining that nationalists will not follow their ideology. Surely, this is a delusion.
\n\nSecondly, nationalists from the Svoboda party started to infiltrate almost any social protest long ago. They have numerous activists while other parties don’t. These activists did a lot of organizing work during protests. During the clashes with police, boneheads’ support became even more valuable. This concerns also the “Pravy Sector” (Right Sector) group. On the other hand, Svoboda lost some support on account of aggressively infiltrating others’ activist space and brutal fights with other protesters.
\n\nThirdly, other opposition parties need Svoboda votes in the parliament. Even though quite a large number of people still weren’t very happy about Svoboda (as well as some European politicians, who would prefer not to cooperate with nationalists openly), Svoboda was appreciated as a legitimate part of the protests because of their resources.
\n\nHanging white supremacist flags in the occupied Parliament in Ukraine
\n\n\n\nWhy were anarchists and antifascists not able to establish a similar presence? Would it have been possible if they had acted differently?
\n
There are not so many anarchists and antifascists in Ukraine compared to nationalists. Also, a lot of anarchists were skeptical about the protest when it was all about Euro-integration, they partly joined in when “Maidan” changed mainly into a protest against police brutality. Nevertheless, it was quite dangerous to agitate about any social issue, as the far right could attack at any time.
\n\nAnother reason for this was that anarchists and antifascists in Ukraine are divided because of several principal issues. Quite many “anarchists” and antifascists are rather manarchists, reject feminism and pro-choice movements as “bourgeois,” and cooperate with national-anarchists from “Avtonomy Opir” (Autonomous Resistance).
\n\n\n\n\nCan you imagine anything anarchists and antifascists could have done in the previous years that would have prepared them better for this situation?
\n
In fact, the whole situation was quite unexpected for everyone—even for the Opposition leaders. It was the government who provoked the protest to grow larger with brutal violence of riot police squads.
\n\nAlso, there are not so many anarchists in Ukraine. For example, the 1st of May demonstration in Kiev gathered about 300-350 anarchists and antifascists in 2012, and their number decreased to about 200-250 the following year. Other cities have much smaller anarchist and antifascist scenes. A lot of people changed their views from anarchism to social democracy or national-anarchism. I think that the main reason was that we had very few workshops, discussions, book publishing, etc. Now the main issue is to increase the number of activists again and concentrate on workshops about theory.
\n\n\n\n\nWhat strategies have different anarchist groups pursued for engaging with this situation? What conclusions can you draw from the results?
\n
When the “Euromaidan” had just started, different leftist and feminist groups, including the syndicalist student union “Priama Diya” (Direct Action), tried to infiltrate the protest in different ways with social and feminist slogans, criticizing the idea of Euro-integration at the same time. They were pushed out of the protest by the boneheads; activists of the communist party “Borotba” were even beaten very harshly. Some activists continued to infiltrate the protest in different ways, but not so openly—for example, organizing different workshops among protesters—but there ware almost no results.
\n\nAntifascist football fans of “Arsenal-Kiev” decided to join the protest against police brutality. They declared the “truce” with Nazis and joined the fights against the police. Also “Arsenal-Kiev” fans made a call for all anarchists and antifascists to join their struggle, while they were cooperating with national-anarchists from “Avtonomny Opir.” After anarchists spoke some criticism about such alliance, football fans threatened everyone criticizing them with violence. Of course, this proclamation made a reverse effect, as even more people turned their backs to football fans.
\n\nAfter extreme police brutality in January, different leftists, and anarchists in particular, initiated “Hospital Guard”—a group of people that was trying to prevent police brutality against injured people in hospitals. “Hospital Guard” was quite effective, and a quite lot of protesters with moderate views joined it. Now, after fights against the police are over, “Hospital Guard” activists are thinking about changing it into an initiative that would fight against neoliberal medical reform. Only time will tell how effective it was.
\n\n\n\n\nWhich aspects of anarchist rhetoric and approach have nationalists appropriated? What can we do to prevent this?
\n
Nazis from “Pravy Sector” and the Svoboda party have no need to appropriate anarchist ideas—they still stand for the strong state and have support with this idea. During the Maidan protests, they changed their rhetoric to be more democratic than before in order to get more sympathizers, but it still is very authoritarian and has no sign of anarchist influence.
\n\nThe only fascist group that appropriated anarchist ideas was “Avtonomny Opir,” the former National Labor Party of Ukraine. Their ideology is a mix of anarchism, nationalism, and the Third Way. Some of leftists were quite happy to see that former fascists had started to change their views, but in fact this evolution stopped on that ideological mix. The evolution of “Avtonomny Opir” also had another effect—some antifascists and anarchists started to cooperate with them and appropriated their ideas. So now groups like “Narody Nabat” (People’s Bell) and “Socialny Opir” as well as Arsenal-Kiev football fans have basically the same views, including pro-life and rejection of feminism.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2014/02/12/2b2.jpg\")
Svoboda’s Oleh Tyahnybok doing their party salute upon re-election to head of the party.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2014/02/12/3b.jpg\")
Members of Right Sector on the front lines.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2014/02/12/4a2.jpg\")
Narody Nabat (“People’s Bell”), a group that describes itself as “social anarchists,” is reportedly cooperating with autonomous nationalists.
\nLast weekend, a CrimethInc. operative participated in the first Anarchist Book and Propaganda Fair in Lima, Peru. Here follows his detailed report, including photographs and a few comments on the situation of anarchists in Peru.
\n\nDisclaimer: I claim—no, I exclaim!—that this account is incomplete and erroneous. It is brought to you through the lens of a North American traveler with a less than skillful mastery of the Spanish language. Nonetheless, this is how I experienced the First Anarchist Book and Propaganda Fair in Lima, Peru.
\n\nIt’s been almost ten years since I came to Peru. The country was about to inaugurate a new president, only the second president to take office since the Fujimori dictatorship of the 1990s. Although “democracy” had arrived and the Shining Path had largely disintegrated, the country wasn’t in good shape. An incomplete 20-year-old monorail system loomed over the city, casting shadows of past leaders’ empty promises. The center of counterculture was a graffitied, three-block street called Jiron Quilca. It housed an anarcho-punk infoshop, Asko Social, a couple of anti-capitalist cultural centers, as well as bookstores and little shops with bootleg metal and rock paraphernalia. On Jiron Quilca, I was lucky enough to attend a celebration of the 70-year anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2014/02/08/3b.jpg\")
\nToday, Jiron Quilca still has much of the same commerce, but its status as a countercultural hub has evaporated. Many of the bookstores, music bootleggers, and graffiti are still there, but Asko Social and the other anti-capitalist spots are gone, and with them much of the street life. A nearby church that owns much of the property has run these establishments out, hoping to cash in on the gentrifying downtown. While Jiron Quilca seems like a ghost town, the long delayed metro-rail project has been completed, and a speedy metro-bus system has been introduced. The neighborhood where Abimael Guzman, the leader of the Shining Path guerrillas, was finally arrested—a reputation that you might think would drive down property value—is now one of the fastest gentrifying parts of the city, with new luxury apartment buildings and a gigantic mall. This was not the city I had seen almost a decade ago.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2014/02/08/4b.jpg\")
\nBut the anarchist movement has changed too. There is new blood—young blood—and there are new ideas as well.
\n\nOne of these new ideas was to host Lima`s first-ever Anarchist Book and Propaganda Fair. The fair took place the weekend of February 1-2, 2014. It was hosted in the union hall of the Federation of Bakers, Star of Peru (Federacion Obreros Panaderos Estrella del Peru), a union with anarcho-syndicalist roots founded in 1887.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2014/02/08/5b.jpg\")
\nThe day before the book fair, in exchange for use of the space, local anarchists and visitors helped repair furniture, fix the bathroom, sweep, and dust the space, and one gringo even gave the tall, decaying face of the building a new (albeit mediocre) paint job via an incredibly dangerous ladder! The day of the book fair, the space was transformed with beautiful, large posters expressing solidarity, impromptu art exhibitions, and red and black flags.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2014/02/08/7b.jpg\")
\nOver twenty different publishers and projects tabled. These included radical media projects, a DIY feminist craft collective, regularly published anarchist periodicals, authors with their own books on anarchist history, an anarchist hip hop journal, and plenty of anarcho-punk distributors. Our CrimethInc. cell was a proud participant, albeit with a meager selection of translations. However, many other distributors had translated CrimethInc. texts on their tables as well. If you want to help translate more material, please get in touch!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2014/02/08/6b.jpg\")
\nOne of the most popular items on our table was a Spanish version of the Gender Subversion poster. An older, conspicuously non-punk woman insisted on paying one of the neighboring tablers for the poster even though the ex-worker staffing the table was not present. When this ex-worker returned, the neighbor recounted this woman’s enthusiasm and background. She grew up in a shantytown of Lima known for an especially high level of self-organization. The women of this area self-organized public kitchens, education committees, and sewage and electricity projects. In what became one of the highest-profile murders of the era, a socialist woman who led these efforts was eventually assassinated by Maoist Shining Path rebels who were suspicious of anyone organizing outside their authority. This book fair attendee had a granddaughter who raps and skateboards, who is criticized for not acting girly enough. The grandmother was excited to give her granddaughter the poster and to continue the tradition of strong, self-determined women that she grew up around during the Shining Path conflict.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2014/02/08/2b.jpg\")
\nThree kinds of presentations took place during the weekend: Talleres, which were more or less skillshares; Foros, forums for discussions of ideas and action; and presentations on current projects or newly published anarchist material. Many of the workshops and foros were also accompanied by newly published zines on their respective topics. The workshops included capoeira, wood and linoleum printmaking, and anarchist poetry. There were forums on intra-movement work and cooperation, anarcho-syndicalism, anarcho-primitivism, free love, revolutionary violence vs. terrorism, the anti-mining conflicts in Cajamarca, and anarchist internationalism in regards to the legacy of the war of the Pacific that pitted Chile against Peru and Bolivia.
\n\nAuthors presented on a book about the history of Chilean anarchism between 1890 and 1990 and herbal healing and medical self-determination. There was also a brief but well-received presentation about the Ex-Worker podcast.
\n\nThe space was drug and alcohol free, something anarchists in Lima seem to be experimenting with recently. This is a change from the Spanish Civil War anniversary during my last visit, at which many audience members had beer in their hands. To illustrate this trend, one local show space has been successfully hosting drug and alcohol free punk shows. One of the reasons for this is to avoid provoking repression, but many of the punks who live there have young children as well. This might also explain why the book fair had an enthusiastically attended childcare space with mats to play on, art projects, books, and fantastic volunteers.
\n\nIn the middle of the first day, time was set aside in the tabling area for tablers to present their projects, explain why they were there, and express what they hoped to get out of the book fair. This turned out to be intimate and beautiful; perhaps book fairs in the US could try it. One presenter made a humble and touching speech: “I believe every anarchist is a propagandist, whether we are talking to people on the street, our family, or our friends. Just because I am behind a table with books and you are in front of it doesn’t mean you know anything less about anarchism than I do. We all have something to learn from each other.”
\n\nIn an interview carried out by the ex-worker, one of the book fair organizers explained the idea behind holding this book fair: “We consider it very important to resist the whole set of distortions, defamations, and falsifications that are perpetrated by the means of power. This includes the press and even the realm of academia, which many times has attempted to silence, or make us forget, the history of anarchism, which has had a very important presence in Peru´s history. And also, to show that anarchists are involved in lots of different kinds of things. We’re hosting this book fair to promote the idea that people can assemble their own texts, edit their own texts, and disseminate them in spaces like this. Anarchists aren’t just involved in confrontations at demonstrations—I mean, they are doing that, but we’re doing other things too. So, we’re resisting this narrow view of anarchism and hopefully making people realize that anarchism is an alternative, one that can be fulfilled. Hopefully even more people can participate in the next book fair, and I believe were getting there, little by little.”
\n\nAnother participant explained her enthusiasm for the event: “Many times when we have been in different conversations we have said ‘Well, we see the same faces’ and what we would really like is for other people, like young people like we see that are here, for them to be here, for them to be with us, sharing a different environment, a different type of thing that they don’t get to see in school, that they don’t get to see in the streets, that they don’t get to see in the TV or on the radio, nowhere. That’s the most important thing, for people that are not in these places to actually get to connect with these types events, these types of conversations, these types of talks, these types of relationships. Because the type of relationships we have is very much different from the type of relationship you see outside, which is mainly a type of mercantile relationship, an exchange, you talk to that person because you`re going to buy something or you talk to that person because you work with them. It’s all because of a capitalist relationship. What we’re harvesting here, in these places, is another type of relationship, a relationship of a different type of society that is not on a basis of money or exploitation or anything like that. And the thing is finding out how…”
\n\nAt the end of the last day, a very old man from the Bakers’ Federation, the union who shared their union hall for the book fair, shared some words. He spoke for five minutes, and concluded, “This is a space that serves every comrade. It doesn’t belong only to our union, it belongs to anarchism… It animates me to see so many young people here. In you, the young, I put my faith that you will use this meeting as a step to reignite a revolutionary struggle. This is not the first anarchist meeting to take place here, and we hope it will not be the last. I can see that the libertarian vein runs through your bodies.”
\n\nAfter a loud round of applause and cheering, the book fair spontaneously transformed into an unstructured assembly for people to share their experiences, news about recent repression, and ideas for the future. Then someone took out a cajòn, guitar, and kazoo, and people sang, danced, and rapped until it was time to leave.
\n\nWhile cleaning up, my Peruvian hosts and I discussed the book fair. Overall, people left energized and inspired. They said that their only real complaint was that there were not more people from Lima who attended. As an outsider but also as a comrade who has attended my share of anarchist book fairs, I hope that I impressed upon them what a success their event was, and that they worked together spectacularly. From South America to North America, a la mierda la autoritad!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2014/02/08/8b.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2014/02/08/9b.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2014/02/08/10b.jpg\")
\nThis morning, environmental activist Daniel McGowan was taken back to jail despite his exemplary parole record, presumably in retaliation for his recent article on the secretive Communications Management Units the US prison system uses to silence political prisoners.
\n\nDaniel’s article cites court documents confirming that, during his incarceration for environmentally motivated direct action, Daniel was moved to a CMU to punish him for expressing his political views. Despite first facing the threat of a life sentence, and then serving years in the CMU with very little contact with the outside world, Daniel has never cooperated with efforts to incriminate other activists, nor ceased to speak his mind. The US government is determined to make an example of Daniel for this. We too might hold him up as an example, showing that no amount of threats and coercion can break the spirit of a person determined to stand up to oppression.
\n\nThere are two and a half million people in prison in the US, more than there were in the gulags at the height of Stalin’s reign in the Soviet Union. As in the Soviet Union, the authorities do everything they can to keep this population invisible: to prevent them from communicating with the rest of society so most people never learn how much violence and coercion are necessary to maintain this social order.
\n\nWe should respond to attempts to silence Daniel and others like him by listening to what they have to say about what is going on in America’s prisons–and by doing our part to make it impossible for the authorities to silence anyone.
\n\nBackground
\n\nDaniel’s original article from within the CMU, “Tales from Inside the US Gitmo”
\n\nOur overview of Operation Backfire, in which Daniel was arrested, “Green Scared?”
\n\nUpdate
\n\nDaniel’s attorneys at the Center for Constitutional Rights just released this statement:
\n\nDaniel McGowan has been released from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn where he was taken into custody yesterday and is back at the halfway house where he has been residing since his release from prison in December. Yesterday, Daniel was given an “incident report” indicating that his Huffington Post blog post, “Court Documents Prove I Was Sent to Communication Management Units (CMU) for My Political Speech,” violated a BOP regulation prohibiting inmates from “publishing under a byline.” The BOP regulation in question was declared unconstitutional by a federal court in 2007, and eliminated by the BOP in 2010. After we brought this to the BOP’s attention, the incident report was expunged.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2012/08/16/crimethinc-to-debate-chris-hedges-in-nyc", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2012/08/16/crimethinc-to-debate-chris-hedges-in-nyc", "title": "CrimethInc. to Debate Chris Hedges in NYC", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2012-08-16T10:25:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:28Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "Immediately before the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, we will meet Chris Hedges in New York City for a public debate about diversity of tactics. This debate will be free and open to the public, and livestreamed for those who can’t attend.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2012/08/16/1b.jpg\")
\nViolence and Legitimacy in the Occupy Movement and Beyond: A Debate between Chris Hedges and the CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective on Tactics & Strategy, Reform & Revolution
\n\nWednesday, September 12, 2012, 7:00 pm Free admission
\n\nProshansky Auditorium Lower level, CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue (@ 34th street) New York City, NY 10016
\n\nNot in NYC? A free livestream of the event will be available online. Link TBA.
\n\nWhy a debate?
\n\nSince Occupy Wall Street took Zuccotti Park in September 2011, there has been a resurgence of social movement activity in the United States. As momentum has increased, age-old questions over tactics, strategy, and goals have returned to the fore.
\n\nWhat is violence? Who gets to define it? Do illegal actions have a place in our movements? This discussion never takes place in a vacuum or on a level playing field; rather, it occurs within the context of a struggle that is already in progress, where every statement has immediate ramifications for the participants. Differing tactical approaches often reflect fundamental differences in strategy and goals.
\n\nAt the core of these issues is the question: What are we fighting for and how do we get there?
\n\nThis moderated debate will feature:
\n\nChris Hedges, Journalist Chris Hedges is an American journalist, author, and war correspondent, specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies. He will speak to the perspectives behind his controversial article “The Cancer in Occupy” regarding black bloc tactics and anarchist participation in the Occupy movement.
\n\nB. Traven, CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective B. Traven will support the case for a diversity of tactics in the Occupy movement and in broader anti-capitalist struggles worldwide, illustrating an anarchist critique of the status quo and a vision of social transformation. CrimethInc. has produced many books and articles, including “The Illegitimacy of Violence, the Violence of Legitimacy,” composed in part as a response to Hedges’ “The Cancer in Occupy.” Moderated by Sujatha Fernandes, CUNY Graduate Center Sujatha Fernandes is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of several books on urban politics and culture; the latest is “Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation” (Verso). She has written about the Occupy movement and recent global uprisings for The New York Times and The Huffington Post.
\n\nOpening remarks by Sarah Leonard, Dissent Magazine Sarah Leonard is an editor and writer living in Brooklyn, with particular interest in Left politics and the cultural effects of technology. She is an editor of The New Inquiry and N+1, Associate Editor at Dissent magazine, and a co-editor of Occupied!: Scenes from Occupied America.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/debate/2b.jpg\")
\nDownload posters and handbills promoting the event: Poster: Color : B&W
\nHandbill: Color : B&W
Co-sponsored by: CUNY Graduate Center, CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective, Aid & Abet, The Sparrow Project, Occupied Media, The Indypendent, PM Press, Bluestockings Bookstore
\n\nFor more information: crimethinc.com/occupytactics
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2012/07/23/every-prisoner-is-a-political-prisoner", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2012/07/23/every-prisoner-is-a-political-prisoner", "title": "Every Prisoner is a Political Prisoner", "summary": "", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2012/07/23/1b.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2012/07/23/1b.jpg", "date_published": "2012-07-23T17:24:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:28Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "On July 19, Kelly Rose Pflug-Back was sentenced to eleven more months in prison for her participation in the 2010 G20 protests in Toronto. She remains unapologetic about her role in the black bloc that caused so much disruption during the summit, demonstrating that the forces that impose capitalism and patriarchy are not invulnerable.
\n\nTo support Kelly and the millions like her who are imprisoned for the inconveniences they pose to the powerful, we are proud to present her eloquent and thought-provoking memoir of the time she spent incarcerated after her original arrest: “Every Prisoner is a Political Prisoner.” In this account, Kelly powerfully evokes the experience of captivity and the importance of understanding all captives of the state as political prisoners.
\n\nOur friends Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness are publishing a book of Kelly’s poetry as a fundraiser to benefit her during her incarceration. Walt Whitman argued that “to have great poets there must be great audiences,” but audiences is precisely the opposite of what there must be. To have great poetry, there must be people who are willing to act on their ideals rather than just watch from the sidelines. We are deeply grateful to Kelly for finding the courage to live her poetry as well as writing it.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/pflug/2b.jpg\")
\nInterview with Kelly Rose Pflug-Back
\n\nWrite to Kelly:
\n\nKelly Pflug-Back Vanier Centre for Women P.O. Box 1040 655 Martin Street Milton, Ontario L9T 5E6 Canada
\n\nJune 27, 2010, was uncharacteristically overcast for mid-summer Toronto. My head pounded from the humidity as I walked alone down Queen Street, through a cityscape teeming with riot police, and still dusted with shards of broken glass from the day before. Construction crews had already set to work repairing the trail of wreckage, attempting to get everything back to normal before anyone noticed.
\n\nWhen I reached Jimmie Simpson Park, where people were meeting for the day’s scheduled prison solidarity rally, I saw only a small crowd of friends standing under the drooping honey locust trees: some debriefing or consoling one another, others speaking with the reporters who swarmed like gnats around the gathering. This sparse group of about thirty was all that remained after the preemptive kidnappings and mass arrests. I can’t remember if I felt any particular sense of foreboding—any eerie apprehension of why I too hadn’t been taken away.
\n\nAs our diminished group walked from the park to the detention center where our friends were being held, I hoped to be able to find some news of what had happened to my partner, or to anyone for that matter.
\n\nThe gray sky sprinkled rain upon us, but we were happy and smiling. We chanted, sang, played instruments and shared whatever food we’d brought. Cops surrounded us, jostling the crowd to step farther away from the chain link fence surrounding the prison. I’d been there about half an hour when the unmarked van drove into the crowd. A group of men jumped out and forced their way toward me, yelling for people to move out of the way. One of them said my name, and within seconds they had dragged me into the van.
\n\nI can’t say I felt anything when my face hit the floor, but later in my cell I noticed a deep throbbing in my teeth and gums. The front ones were loose. My mouth tasted like blood.
\n\nOne of the cops who’d pulled me into the van asked me if I was on welfare. He leered at my bare legs and told me I needed a razor. Another tied my wrists with zip ties and proceeded to rifle through my purse.
\n\nInside, the building was a massive warehouse filled with wire cages, like some industrial chicken farm. The noise of other prisoners screaming protest songs and rattling the doors of their cages echoed off the concrete walls, making our numbers seem greater even than the 992 people occupying cells. They put me in a cage and locked the door. On the wall to my left I saw a guard scribble my name on a white board alongside the words “do not release.” I sat down on the concrete and anticipated the worst.
\n\nThe following day I was hospitalized after losing consciousness from low blood sugar. All we were given to eat was a cheese sandwich every 12 to 24 hours with no alternatives for those who were vegan or had an allergy. I was unable to walk to the medical trailer; the guards informed me that this constituted refusing medical attention. Another prisoner who overheard this screamed at a guard who was busy amusing himself doing tricks in an unused wheelchair, and they brought it to my cell shortly after.
\n\nA female guard snarled at me to “close my fucking legs” while I sat sprawled inside the medical trailer with an intravenous glucose drip in my arm. I’d been arrested in a short skirt and tank top, and they had refused me, numerous times, pants or a blanket. It was freezing inside the detention center. There was no way to get off the bare concrete. My teeth chattered constantly, and I never stopped shaking. It was too cold to sleep.
\n\nAfter they took me back to my cell, I could hear a man nearby screaming that he needed his medication. He screamed for hours before stopping abruptly; I pressed my face to the cage door and I could see him convulsing on the floor of his cell with his tongue hanging out of his mouth. “Get up,” the guards told him, repeatedly, before finally acknowledging his unconsciousness. Then they dragged him away.
\n\nCountless people were processed and released, many of them with bruises, cuts and abrasions on their arms and faces from being slammed into the concrete. A number of the guards passed the time by spewing racist, homophobic, classist, and sexist harassment at prisoners, or threatening them with further brutalization. A number of women were threatened with rape.
\n\nHours and hours passed, and it became increasingly clear that I would not be allowed to call my lawyer or let my family know where I was. As a matter of fact, I hadn’t yet been informed of my charges. I spent over two days in my cell, curled in a ball on the concrete or pacing the small vicinity of my cage, sometimes yelling to other prisoners or joining them in hysterical, sleep-deprived bouts of laughter.
\n\nI was unsurprised to see a few old friends from Toronto’s street community pass through the detention center. Were it not for the unfortunate situation, it would have been a welcome reunion. When an acquaintance of mine ended up in the cell beside me, we started talking about the circumstances that had brought us there. Only seventeen, he had spent the majority of his life being transferred from group home to group home. Since he had finally been appointed as his own legal guardian, his life had been plagued by poverty, class profiling, and prejudice in the court system. Although he didn’t consider himself an “activist,” he was obviously more steeped in the realities of social struggle than a large portion of the other detainees. We talked about our mutual experiences with police, shelters, group homes, and homelessness. We talked about how these experiences had politicized us, and how a person doesn’t need to understand party politics to be political. Every poor person is political, we agreed, just by nature of their experiences.
\n\nI realized at that point that I probably had more in common with him than I did with most of the other protesters. Unfortunate as it was, life had already acclimatized us to be treated like shit by the authorities. None of this surprised us. We were used to being beaten, having our rights stripped away.
\n\nAfter most of the detention center had been emptied, I was transferred to the general population at the women’s prison in Milton. While we waited to be processed in the holding cells, the other women and I laughed and joked, trading stories about how we’d ended up where we were. A lot of them were arrested and presumed guilty for unequivocal bullshit; for being homeless, poor, non-white, using drugs, working in the sex trade, or any combination of these factors. Others were arrested for crimes of necessity: for stealing food because they were hungry, or robbing a store to feed their young kids, for needing a way to pay rent. A few had been charged with assault after having fought back against abusive spouses. I told them my charges, and got a lot of hugs, high-fives, and congratulations. “Fucking right,” people said, slapping me on the back. “Fuck the rich bastards! Fuck the G20!”
\n\nSome people had been unclear as to what the summit had been all about, and we got into a long conversation about it. We all laughed, ranted, waited, and laughed some more. If these were the women with whom I’d be surrounded, I thought to myself, maybe prison won’t be all that bad.
\n\nMy first days inside were largely spent adjusting to the prison environment, and as time went on, my new setting reminded me increasingly of the years I spent living on the street when I was a teenager.
\n\nOn the streets, as in prison, you never get a decent night’s sleep or a meal that resembles real food. There are always a few arrogant people who think they run everything because they’ve been there the longest, and people in uniforms can do whatever they want to you and get away with it. In both situations, your status as a human being is revoked. Humanity is a privilege awarded to those who help perpetuate capitalism, and once you cease to do that, you’re a burden. You’re expected to express gratitude to the system that ghettoizes you, doling out a few table scraps and a thin blanket.
\n\nThe first range I was sent to was renowned for being the least hospitable. We were locked in our cells for most of the day. Each had one bed, though the high volume of prisoners meant that two people usually shared a cell. The only windows were thin slats of frosted glass too opaque to see through, and we were allowed outside only once a week. “Outside” was a small walled concrete enclosure with metal grating for a ceiling. Through a small crack underneath the heavy steel door, I could see grass. It depressed me to look at it. I tried not to.
\n\nThis was the range to which people were sent as punishment, for getting into fights, mouthing off to guards, being caught with contraband or generally failing to comply with prison regulations. If you were “good” you qualified for transfer to a medium-security unit, where you could go to a real outdoor exercise yard, have your own cell, and see visitors without a thick pane of Plexiglas separating you.
\n\nA lot of the women on maximum security had been on the same range for over a year. I met one woman who had been there for almost two; she’d never had a misconduct, but there was a note in her file stating that she would have to serve her entire sentence on maximum security. She came from a mafia family, she explained. Putting her on a medium security unit would have been an open invitation for any of her high-up friends to come break her out.
\n\nAfter visiting the classification office, I learned of a similar note in my file. “Apparently I’m a terrorist,” I shrugged, when people asked why I hadn’t been transferred yet.
\n\nI won’t say that I instantly got along with everyone on my range, or that I was the most popular prisoner. I didn’t pay attention to the hierarchies that existed between other prisoners, and some people had a problem with that. I wouldn’t join in when others ridiculed or ganged up on the less popular women. It was a total pecking order, and it reminded me too much of a schoolyard.
\n\nI became close friends with a woman named Rachel* whom I met in the common area during breakfast on a rare day when we weren’t on 24-hour lock down. She was violently ill from drug withdrawal, and the nurse hadn’t filled her methadone prescription. Apparently, her cellmate was a complete asshole, so we snuck her into my cell after the doors were buzzed open. The next guard that came by on her rounds started yelling at us, but we assured her that the other staff had transferred Rachel and forgotten to do the paperwork. I don’t think the guard believed us, but she didn’t seem to care enough to do anything about it.
\n\nWhen Rachel wasn’t too sick to make conversation, we passed the long hours of our confinement playing cards, singing tuneless renditions of R&B hits, washing our dirty uniforms in the sink and talking about life in general. She lived near Niagara with her partner, their four-year-old son, and their newborn daughter. She struggled with addiction, but still managed to keep her life together and be there for her kids. Her dad had been in and out of prison most of her life, and her mom had been drunk all the time. She’d spent her early teenage years working as a prostitute, and the crown attorney at her bail hearing had used this to argue that she was unfit to reenter society. It seems that when 13-year-old girls end up hooking on the streets it’s because they possess some moral defect, and not because life has given them no other choices.
\n\nOur cells looked out onto the common area, an oval-shaped concrete room. It contained five bolted-down tables, four showers at one end, a shelf with a few bad paperback romance novels, and three phones, only two of which functioned. When allowed into the common area, I went straight to waiting in line for the phones. Some women didn’t have anybody to call or only had relatives outside of the country; the phones only transmitted collect calls within North America. Other women gripped the phone receivers with white knuckles, trying to explain to their young children why mommy wasn’t coming home. Rachel said she had told her partner not to bring the kids when coming to visit her. “They’re just too young. They would only be confused by the Plexiglas in the visitor’s cubicle. Being able to see their mother, but not reach out and touch her.”
\n\nI thought of an article I’d read once about animal testing laboratories. One method the lab technicians used to create symptoms of stress and depression in mammals involved removing newborn babies from their mother, then placing the mother in isolation. I looked up at the florescent ceiling lights within their shatterproof wire cages. Soon, the nurse came and people lined up to receive their daily doses of sedatives and anti-psychotics—a precautionary measure, prescribed to virtually everyone, like cutting off the beaks of factory-farmed chickens to prevent them from pecking themselves, or each other, to death from the stress of confinement and isolation.
\n\nMy views of the prison system solidified: prisons are little more than warehouses for concentrating the poor. Rather than being populated by the people most harmful to society, they are crowded with those who have been the most harmed by society. Rather than being “correctional” facilities, they are a method of ridding the streets of those who act as living reminders of the crisis of poverty, the widening income gap, the future of hardship which may very well await many more in the coming years if something does not change. Prisons are a way of sweeping people under the rug. They are a way of pretending that nothing is wrong.
\n\nVery few of the women on my range had been imprisoned for any kind of violent crime, and most of those who did have violent charges had been defending themselves against abusive partners or assailants. Most of these women’s attackers had walked away without charges, free to roam the streets at their leisure.
\n\nThe small portion of women facing violent charges not involving self-defense were often the survivors of past traumas; a history rarely taken into consideration by the courts that sentenced them. Much like the homeless community, a large portion of the women with whom I spoke were survivors of the lifelong onslaught of abuse perpetrated against poor and disenfranchised women by our society, particularly women of color. Many had been arrested for not having full citizenship, while others had been in the process of applying for refugee status. A disturbingly high number also lived with (dis)abilities like Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, Fetal Narcotic Syndrome, Schizophrenia, and ADD/ADHD.
\n\nThese are women who have been bounced between abusive foster homes and youth detention facilities, graduating at 16 as wards of the Children’s Aid Society only to become wards of the State, criminalized for doing what it takes to survive the minefield of poverty.
\n\nAs the days turned into weeks, I began to erase from my mind the hope of being released. The health problems with which I’ve been living the last few years became increasingly severe, and I often found it difficult to stand up or walk around without fainting. My ribs stuck out. My stomach became concave. I became depressed.
\n\nWas it stress, overly-processed food, or a general lack of fresh air and exercise that made me unhealthy? Probably some combination of all these things. Without even examining me, the doctor put me on a liquid diet, which in jail consists largely of juice crystals, water, and MSG-filled soup powder. When I was finally sent to the examination room I was told that nothing seemed to be wrong with me, regardless of the fact that I’d lost close to 20 pounds, felt tired constantly, and was in serious pain and discomfort.
\n\nI talked to my partner on the phone, but his voice sounded distant and crackly through the receiver. He came to visit me, and we pressed our hands to the inch-thick Plexiglas between us. It was almost harder than not seeing him. My mom sounded stressed whenever I called her, and I could hear my dog howling in the background at the sound of my voice through the receiver.
\n\nI needed to talk to somebody, but the prospect of being force-fed Thorazine dissuaded me from applying to see the psychiatrist. So I went to the prison Chaplain, for the sheer novelty. He was a square-jawed man in a gray suit, with the bearing of a Televangelist. He told me I was in prison because I had sinned, and that I had to repent for these sins. I was in my current situation because the Devil had led me astray.
\n\n“But Jesus was a political prisoner!” I said. “The Devil didn’t tell me to do anything; I’m a political prisoner like Jesus!” He thought I was crazy.
\n\nI was released after about a month on conditions of strict house arrest and non-association with some of my closest friends. All I felt was numb. I walked into the parking lot with my family and my partner, squinting under the bright sunlight. We drove back to the house where I lived as a kid and I slept for days. At first I felt fine. I could leave the house, if I was with my parents, to take the dogs for walks in the last of summer’s warm weather. I drank coffee, read a lot. People I’d never met sent me stickers and zines and nice letters in the mail.
\n\nTwo months later I started having panic attacks, insomnia, and nervous breakdowns on an almost daily basis. When I did sleep, I had awful nightmares. It seemed as though every past instance of trauma and violence I’d seen or experienced had been consolidated into a heavy, poisonous lump, slowly turning my insides black and rotten. I felt like the world was just too ugly to live in. I was suffocating under the weight of clear-cut forests and floundering, tar-drowned shore birds. When I closed my eyes all I could see was torture and war, droughts and chemical spills, napalm.
\n\nAll I wanted was to move past the negative experiences I’d had and work towards piecing my life back together. But I realized that the pain I felt was trying to tell me something: I would not be able to forget and move on as though none of this had happened. In a way, I think the disgust and pain we feel when we see or experience something horrific can be the greatest catalyst for creating positive change. When we experience something firsthand we are better equipped to understand it—and with that understanding we can educate others and give real support to those who are also experiencing it. We can see its flaws and weak points, and we can use this knowledge to criticize, discredit, and eventually destroy it.
\n\nAlthough I never heard this said firsthand, others told me they overheard quite a few young people say they’d never go to another protest again after their experiences at the detention center. I felt not only disappointed that everyone hadn’t been able to see the ways to reclaim these experiences and use them as further motivation, but profoundly confused by this perspective. What we went through during the mass arrests at the G20 was only a small window into the everyday experiences of countless minorities in this country who suffer police profiling, brutality, and prejudice within the legal system on a horrifyingly regular basis. As hard as I try, I simply can’t understand the notion that anyone could propose to be an ally of any marginalized group, then give up and turn away when faced with a tiny microcosm of what that group puts up with everyday.
\n\nMy experience in prison and the women with whom I shared it have reminded me of the reasons I became politically active in the first place. They’ve reminded me of the sorrow, the desperation, the heartbreak, the trauma, the unlivable realities of poverty that first spurred me to get my life together and dedicate myself to helping others rather than accepting the conditions in which I lived. Being in prison reminded me of the core of my politics. At the bottom of it, we were all inside that prison for the exact same reason. We were dangerous only in the sense that our existence discredited Canada’s status as a place of liberty and equality. We were a glaring reminder that this country doesn’t offer equal status and opportunity to everyone.
\n\nSome political prisoners are arrested for staging public demonstrations that address poverty, and some are arrested for living in poverty. Some actively protest social inequality, while others turn to drugs or alcohol because they can no longer bear the brunt of this inequality. Some choose to publicly draw attention to injustice by their words and actions, while others are swept off the streets because their very presence is a public exposure of this injustice. Now is the time for everyone in our community to think about what it really means to say that every prisoner is a political prisoner. The next time we’re shocked and outraged by an experience of being targeted, harassed, or otherwise mistreated by law enforcement or society in general, we should stop to recognize how much respect we owe to the people all around us who face much more than that every day of their lives. Every prisoner is a political prisoner.
\n\n*All names have been changed to protect the identities of those mentioned.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2011/12/22/underground-reverie-benefit-release", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2011/12/22/underground-reverie-benefit-release", "title": "Underground Reverie Benefit Release", "summary": "", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2011/12/22/1b.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2011/12/22/1b.jpg", "date_published": "2011-12-22T19:24:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:27Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "We’re thrilled to present the four-song debut release from Underground Reverie, Seattle’s premier anarchist electronic ensemble:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/ur/2b.jpg\")
Underground Reverie “Out of Isolation and into the Fray” Four-Song Debut [27MB]
\nThe release is free, of course—but if you can, please show your appreciation by making a donation to the legal fund of those arrested in last month’s building occupation in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. To do so, go to the defendant support site and donate to the arrestees’ legal fund; further inquiries can be addressed to ‘defendoccupychapelhillarrestees@riseup.net’.
\n\nOne of these songs appeared in our video coverage of the aforementioned building occupation. Since this is the digital age, we can already offer a review of the release, courtesy of Seattle’s excellent Tides of Flame [PDF]:
\n\n“Underground Reverie’s debut album is throbbing, haunting, and completely amazing. Samples from helicopters, owlish flutes, various films (including Network), and eerie old songs flesh out a skeleton of delicate electronic beats. The music is as much about the horrors of civilization as it is about the raw beauty of struggle. In the liner notes, UR reflects on anarchist praxis and encourages us to keep fighting.”
\n\nContact Underground Reverie: undergroundreverie@riseup.net
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2011/12/06/three-years-since-the-greek-insurrection", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2011/12/06/three-years-since-the-greek-insurrection", "title": "Three Years since the Greek Insurrection", "summary": "", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2011/12/07/1b.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2011/12/07/1b.jpg", "date_published": "2011-12-06T07:48:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:27Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "Three years ago today, police in Athens, Greece murdered Alexis Grigoropoulos, a fifteen-year-old student. This touched off the first wave of unrest to follow the economic crisis of 2008, setting the scene for the upheavals that have followed since in North Africa, Spain, and elsewhere.
\n\nTo commemorate Alexis’s life and the efforts of all who set out to avenge his death, we’re offering selections from an interview we did with comrades in Greece the following year, when the riots were over but momentum was still fresh. The interview serves as a sort of historical snapshot, documenting the heady optimism of the time but also the realization of how vast the barriers to revolution still were. A great deal has changed since then; Greece has witnessed a series of new tragedies and clashes, while Greek anarchists have simultaneously seen their tactics embraced by broad sectors of the population and lost the initiative as the shortcomings of their strategies became apparent. Yet this interview is timelier than ever, as it grapples with the question of how to make the most of a high point of struggle. This may be relevant in North America sooner than anyone expects.
\n\n[Void Network interviewed in 2009]
\n\nHow much were the limits of the insurrection imposed from outside, by the power of the State?
\n\nThe government trapped in scandals, economical crisis, and inner conflicts is unable to learn from all the ways it was beaten. An elite that tries to behave like nothing happened can do nothing but forget.
\n\nDuring the insurrection in the countryside, the towns and small cities, the external influences were much stronger than in Athens and Thessaloniki. For example, in Patras and Larisa, both big cities that experienced riots that the police were unable to control for days, small but well-organized groups of neo-Nazis together with riot police were searching for the young people, street by street, and following groups of high school students from the riots to their houses, frightening them and their parents as well.
\n\nIn small cities and towns, undercover policemen were going from shop to shop to spread false rumors and to inform the owners that wild anarchists were on their way from the big cities to come destroy their shops in the same way the television was portraying an exaggerated destruction of small shops in Athens. So when young people, anarchists, and leftists came out onto the streets of their small towns with no intention to smash anything but banks, police stations, and government buildings, the shop owners treated them like vandals rather than their own children. However, in most small towns during the insurrection, the people generally had an attitude that these were “our own children” and the youth and comrades accomplished unbelievable actions on a local scale.
\n\nThe influence of conservativism was also much stronger in some right-wing towns. Conservatism, the power that keeps our life “as it was,” our mind “as we know it,” and our activities “as we’ve always done them,” was the strongest factor for sustaining normality before, during, and after the riots all over the country.
\n\nMany people opposed the insurrection and they had the power to express their disapproval much more openly and effectively in the countryside. In some of the towns the majority of the locals were obviously against the “tendencies” of the anarchists and the leftists. In these towns it was very difficult for the small number of isolated participants to sustain an insurrectionary enthusiasm for many days, even though in such places actions still took place day after day for weeks, proving that the passion for freedom doesn’t fear any authoritarian conservative majority.
\n\nThe power of the State existed mainly in radio interviews, TV programming, and riot police in the streets. The work of the State was to offer excuses and reinforce the conservative defenses of this society, to sustain normality even in the middle of chaos, and to express with certainty that nothing will change; also to suppress the total chaos without having another dead body on the streets. It was crucial that they do it without filling up the stadiums with thousands of detainees, in order not to create images of dictatorship within the spectacle of social life.
\n\nThe work of the mass media, as part of the regime, was to offer simplistic excuses for the “children’s revolt,” so as not to alienate their parents, to avoid speaking seriously about the specific reasons behind many targets of smashing and burning, to feed the worst fears of the conservative majority, and to portray the anarchists as irrelevant to the phenomenon. In this way they were building a separation between the good children and the bad anarchists, immigrants, radicals, extremists-criminals.
\n\nHow much did the limits come from the participants themselves?
\n\nIn big cities and especially in Athens and Thessaloniki, physical exhaustion had a strong influence after all those days of tear gas, running around the city center, hours of assemblies and all kinds of direct actions, creating and sustaining street barricades and liberated zones, smashing, burning, and fighting the riot police, the undercover police, and the neo-Nazis over vast areas of the city… day after day and through the nights. The boys and girls sleeping inside the occupied universities for many days showed heroic physical strength.
\n\nWhen the schools reopened the students had to go back to class. Three weeks after the start of the revolt the university students started to think it was possible to lose credit for the whole academic year if the occupation of the universities continued after Christmas. After three weeks the students took to the streets less and less. Satisfied by the amazing personal experience of revolt and revenge against the State, they were tired from the street fighting. And they were pushed by their parents to return to normality. The students and youth who were not politically organized began to lose the feeling of togetherness of the first weeks, and started to express skepticism again towards the attitude, decisions, initiatives, and political analysis of the anarchists. Many continued to participate in different actions, but they began to keep a distance from the central occupations and riots.
\n\nAnd the workers had their jobs waiting for them. Most of the participants had to work all day and then they participated in the actions in the afternoons and evenings, also expressing an amazing physical strength. The worst moment of the assembly for the occupation of the General Confederation of Greek Workers was when the insurgent workers started to speak out against spending a long time forming a deeper analysis because they had to go to sleep so they could work the next morning. Work was a limitation before, during, and after the insurrection.
\n\nAfter the third day of the uprising the immigrants, many of whom lacked papers, faced a very strong backlash from the police and in public opinion. Police continued searching for them for months and in the following summer they arrested thousands of so-called illegal immigrants.
\n\nIn the network of assemblies and conversations there began to reappear many different questions, debates, and the endless disagreements that characterize the Greek radical space. Many of these took the form of hostile dichotomies and enmities, like leftists vs. insurrectionists, anti-authoritarians vs. anarchists, artists vs. anti-artists, independent media journalists vs. anti-media activists, direct action vs. political messaging, naifs vs. extremists, hooliganism vs. anti-statism, anti-statism vs. criminality, anarcho-communism vs. post-anarchy, junkies vs. serious political revolutionaries, looting vs. burning… and so on. Many people felt this and made conscious efforts to combat it. But by the third week, many of the debates had become long and tedious distractions from the disappointment we felt when we saw that the whole society would not rise up, as many people hoped it would in the early days.
\n\nA major defeat came early when the syndicalist hierarchy decided to cancel the nationwide general strike scheduled for December 10. This strike had been announced long before the death of Alexis, but they cancelled it to avoid generalizing the insurrection. The historical meeting with the working class failed to happen once more. Never trust the workers. The “working class” followed their leaders, their political parties, their own syndicalist institutions, unions and organizations, their own idols and ghosts. The workers, the farmers, the petit-bourgeoisie did everything in their power to help the regime survive and bring everything back to normal.
\n\nSo you see, normality was also hiding inside of us, not only around us.
\n\nThe submission of the majority to the status quo and the habitual repetitive behavior of work and consumption kept millions of people off the streets. The inability of participants in the insurrection to explain politically the reasons for the actions and to expand this understanding on a scale that could address the problems of common people was a failure that kept the entire society from exploding, from taking up the revolt and continuing it with their own decisions and actions.
\n\nFor sure, people were not ready for social change, not even for a general confrontation with their own realities. The death of Alexis fell like a thunderclap, but most of them were unable to understand what caused their own children, their own friends, their own neighbors to revolt. The society could feel it, they could express empathy but they were not ready to translate it into a political confrontation with the regime.
\n\nIn an insurrectionary way of thinking, we can say that now, after the insurrection, the consciousness of millions of people has stepped forward and this is the main achievement of the revolt. The insurrection opens horizons. Many things that will happen in the future could never have happened before December.
\n\nAll the thousands of people who participated offered an invitation to the others, the silent majority. When this silence fills your ears, echoing off the streets of a crowded city that wants to return to normality after four weeks of endless riots and all kinds of actions, an inner voice forces you to pack up all the inspiration and experience you have won for yourself, to go back to your collective and continue the struggle from there.
\n\nEven with most of the markets destroyed, Greek society generated a strange need to reproduce a pseudo-celebratory Christmas. Even though all the walls of the city were painted with the slogan “Christmas Postponed, We Have Insurrection” and the smoke of the tear gas and the smell of burned banks and the ashes of luxury shops still hung in the air, and the death of Alexis filled everyone’s thoughts, Christmas happened on December 25 just like every other year. The fucking mayor announced during New Year’s Eve from Syntagma Square, next to the brand new Christmas tree, this one protected by riot police, that we were all one, we were all the same, and we were happy! Thousands of poor immigrants were clapping their hands below the stage, though many hardly understood a word. The three central occupations in Athens (Polytechnic, Nomiki, ASOEE) dissolved one or two days before Christmas.
\n\nAnd you walk in the city center with your friends, four o’clock on New Year’s morning, and there are no riots anymore, and you want to smash everything around you and start again from the beginning. And an inner instinct says to you that there is still a lot of work to do before this world will explode. And the insurrection continues travelling in space and time, but still you feel that something is missing, and there are a lot of things we have to take care of.
\n\nIn what ways were the limits of the insurrection determined by factors in place before it started, such as the infrastructure of anti-authoritarian groups and projects and the culture of resistance in Greece?
\n\nFor many decades, the uncompromising fight of anarchists against the State and capitalism has found its chief expression in confrontation with all the various bureaus and branches of police across the planet, for example in the clashes that occurred in Prague, Seattle, Genoa, Thessaloniki, Maastricht, Nice, Rostock, Berlin, Copenhagen, Paris, Cancun, Santiago, Buenos Aires, San Francisco, Mexico City, Hamburg, St. Paul, Turin, Johannesburg, Miami, Seoul, and many other places. Of course, as the State is not a castle, the police are not the major protector of the State. Social apathy, habit, acceptance of status, and fear of change are perhaps even stronger protectors of the State than the army, and comrades in Greece know this well. But during the “Days for Alexis,” the police were the primary target of the attack. The reasons were obvious this time even to the conservatives. The struggle was legitimate even for reformists. For once, anarchist common sense matched up with social common sense. Unfortunately, common sense is a great obstacle to wisdom.
\n\nThe target of the struggle itself, the police, was the greatest limitation to the expanding of the insurrection to a general social insurrection. For most of the common people, police brutality was the target of this struggle, and the anarchists, long experienced in fighting against the police, fought hardest alongside the people who wanted to express their rage against police brutality, together with them, sometimes even following them.
\n\nBut generally, they were unable to take the majority of the people with them in a total negation of the roots of the regime and against the real causes of this and all the other murders carried out by the State and capitalism. Most of the people were not ready yet to travel to the roots of their slavery. The society was not ready to face its own failures in the clear light of insurrection.
\n\nAnd the people in the struggle did not expand the dialogue as necessary to encompass all sides of everyday life. Of the hundreds of communiqués released, only a few could really offer an inspiring political explanation and a solid organizational solution. The affinity groups and the initiatives had the capability to offer high-quality analysis of the conditions and a hard critique of the regime, but they hadn’t enough experience to spread enthusiasm for a social victory—visions of a world that could appear from the ashes of the old world, practical escape routes from the dead-ends of neoliberalism in crisis, images from the future we are dreaming of, applicable plans for continuing the struggle once everything has been smashed and burned.
\n\nSo when the rage started to fade, there were no solid answers as to what should come next. Not even in our craziest dreams had any of us come so far. We walked for days and days like shadows inside our own struggles, wondering, through the smoke of the tear gas, about each next step.
\n\nWho has the proper answers, who can even narrate this story, who can offer solutions and answers about the way to general social insurrection? No one wanted to force society to go further, and anarchists always dislike this role. Four weeks after the assassination of Alexis, everyone knew that the uprising was not a revolution, so nobody gave specific answers for what we had to do in order to go further. What could we do to keep the riots from ending? Is the never-ending riot the way to social insurrection?
\n\nMost people that participated in the insurrection say that it didn’t end. We find great truth in this, as thousands of us participate and stay active in many projects, struggles, and assemblies that were created after December in all the cities and towns. For most people Alexis is still alive. In today’s struggles you can find him smiling behind actions, demonstrations, creative plans, and destructive visions.
\n\nWhat conflicts have developed after the uprising between groups that participated in it together? Are there bonds and connections that were possible to maintain during the uprising that have broken down since then? During the insurrection many old friends lost each other forever and people or groups that hated each other for decades worked in projects and actions together. Many old groups transformed into something completely different and many new affinity groups were created. As most of the Greek anarchists don’t like each other, and deep differences separate groups and people, no one can speak definitively about what is happening and nobody clearly understands what is prepared and by whom. This total fragmentation is very useful during periods of “social peace,” as it produces a vast variety of opinions, analysis, and initiatives. The police cannot infiltrate the movement, since such a thing does not exist. Hundreds upon hundreds of groups, people who’ve known each other for many years and share total trust and empathy, appear as if from nowhere and return to nowhere.
\n\nIn a way, all this fragmentation created the strange situation: all these people, who knew each other for years but would never talk to each other, were suddenly speaking, spending time together, and fighting side by side. December produced strong feelings of solidarity and common struggle.
\n\nIn the first months of 2009, huge assemblies, mostly staged in the university amphitheaters late in the afternoon, took place nearly every day. Sometimes people intending to join one assembly started to participate in the one taking place before it, as they waited for it to finish and for the next one to start. Some of them were gathering from 100 to 400 active people every week. To name a few:\n* The Assembly for Solidarity with Immigrants * The Assembly for Solidarity with December’s Prisoners * The Fight for Worker Konstantina Kuneva * The Assembly of the School and University Students * The Assembly of Insurgent Doctors and Nurses * The Assembly of Insurgent Artists, the Assembly of Unknown Artists * The Assembly of The Ones Here and Now and For All of Us * The Assembly of Workers and Unemployed * The Exarchia neighborhood Initiative Committee
\n\n…and many other committees in different neighborhoods, as well as assemblies happening in other cities all over the country. And to all these general insurrectionary assemblies, of course, we have to add all the separate meetings of collectives and groups that were participating in these general assemblies.
\n\nThroughout these months there was a poster on the walls of Athens with a wildly naïve Dadaist monster saying: “Obedience Ended! Life is Magical!”—and for most of us living this magical life meant jumping from assembly to assembly preparing unbelievable things and putting them into practice with all those people. Those assemblies brought to life all different kinds of actions and projects and visions, the crazy dreams you had from when you were fifteen years old or from last week’s late-night talk with friends or some secret plan you had with your lover and now was coming true.
\n\nMost of the initiatives and assemblies of artists, romantics, non-ideological people, and creative activists soon shrank, losing the enthusiasm of the first week and becoming smaller and more solid creative groups. Various reasons forced people from these assemblies to go back to their individual creativity, but many of these groups are still dedicated to their projects.
\n\nWeek after week, and as people were coming closer and closer, the old conflicts, the differences, the diverse political standpoints and the different needs, expectations, strategies, and methods started to appear again. This brought back to the surface the old separations and the old debates. It proved that the differences were not just ephemeral misunderstandings or personal distrust, but were based in deep analysis and long-term differences of practice and ways of thinking.
\n\nThe interesting thing was that even though most of these general assemblies split or started to attract fewer people and to have less power and influence, new ways of organizing appeared. After months of meetings, the whole political space took new directions. The general assemblies were not useful any more as new coalitions, new friendships, and new contacts appeared. Different squats, social centers, and initiatives started to form after the end of the general assemblies. People and groups that had met during the insurrection and the period of open creativity and massive open meetings that followed December now had experience with each other—they knew where they agreed and disagreed, they knew what the directions and strategies of each group were—and so new projects, plans, and decisions took place. In this way, the anarchists and other insurrectionists and radical activists avoided conflicts. The melting pot of general assemblies broke into much more effective meetings, laboratories of creative chaos, squats, and direct actions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/3years/2b.jpg\")
\nHow effective has government repression been in weakening the movements that started the uprising? What have been the most effective ways to resist this repression?
\n\nA basic characteristic of the Greek anarchist space is that through the influence of insurrectionary practices it refuses to see itself as a homogenous “movement” and especially as a movement of “resistance” or “direct action.” The idea of direct attack is much more influential. The momentum of the attack is controlled by the groups and the initiatives and not by any collective central decision-making process.
\n\nOf course, in periods of social mobilization, such as the demonstrations against the privatization of education or of health and public insurance, or in big events like the European Union Summit or the G8, there is coordination and communication between the groups. But even under these circumstances, the initiative for the direct attack is taken autonomously by groups and individuals. This makes things very complicated for the state—and also for the people. No one can decide what will happen, no one knows what will actually transpire until it has already happened.
\n\nThe anarchist space has the ability to appear very powerful and then disappear completely from the stage of confrontation for short periods of recovery. These short periods without riots hypnotize the government into believing it has other more important things to care about. In these periods of calm, the eye of authority is not focused on anarchists. Meanwhile, the arson groups commit unstoppable attacks against all kinds of targets. During these periods, hundreds of assemblies, events, public talks, film shows, free festivals, parties, lectures, workshops, and public non-confrontational demonstrations assure the visibility of anarchists, autonomists, and anarcho-libertarians. These political and cultural processes are also responsible for the never-ending arrival of new people, the replacement of burnt-out people with fresh ones, and the preparation of a new cycle of intense confrontation.
\n\nIt is like a wave. When it’s up, you can see it in the news, on TV, in the streets, everywhere. When its down, you don’t see it but you feel it. You meet with the wave because it is coming to you and moving unstoppably through the initiatives of thousands of different people.
\n\nWhat are some of the way that people have had to “recover” from the uprising? Legal troubles? Emotional trauma? Exhaustion?
\n\nThere was not any emotional trauma from December. The use of molotov cocktails heals a crowds’ panic and fear and takes back control of the streets from the police. Molotovs used as a defensive tool can keep the riot police away long enough for everyone to run safely away and recover from the tear gas or avoid arrest. When molotovs are used as offensive weapons together with hundreds of stones from broken pavement, they give courage to the crowds and spread a feeling of power and the belief that they can accomplish amazing things.
\n\nAs a slogan from December put it: “Action replaces tears.”
\n\nMany people participated in the solidarity movement for the sixty-five that were arrested, who stayed in custody for two to eight months. Now all of them are free. The solidarity movement that took over the streets with massive demonstrations and counter-information, that held massive fundraising concerts and organized movement lawyers, has made clear to Greek anarchists that in the years to come solidarity must be one of the main methodologies of any movement that wants to participate in a serious confrontation with the regime.
\n\nThere was no need for “recovering” after December. We also have to clarify that there was no end to the insurrection and especially no ending caused by legal troubles, emotional troubles, exhaustion, or repression. Rather, the anarchist space, in an instinctual and intelligent way, chose to disappear from the central highways and put into practice many other low-tension initiatives that enrich the struggle. This wise, self-preserving urban guerilla strategy also finds its expressions in the appearance of many different projects that started after December and now help the “movement” to deepen its roots in the society and in the local communities.
\n\nHow has the government used the uprising strategically to strengthen its position, since December? Could this have been avoided?
\n\nThe government didn’t find ways to use the insurrection to strengthen its position. It was difficult to do such a thing as the insurrection was spread among all social classes and backgrounds. Only the immigrants were brought into a worse position as they faced a backlash and the police pogrom against those without papers, which occurred in June. The solidarity shown toward immigrants was strong but unable to protect them. A lot of effort is going into bringing the immigrants closer to the anarchist space, but this task is not easy at all. The immigrants have their own interests, their own fears and wishes. Many of them they have a very difficult life and very different cultural and political or non-political backgrounds.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/3years/3b.jpg\")
\nIn what ways has the uprising put anarchists in a stronger position? In what ways has it used up energy without putting anarchists in a stronger position? Are there any ways it has put anarchists in a weaker position?
\n\nThe anarchist movement in Greece underwent a lot of methodological changes over the last years in its efforts to come closer to society, to hear the problems of the people, to avoid an anti-social attitude without falling into reformism, and to try to find ways to participate in and radicalize the social movements of our times. All these efforts bore fruit during December.
\n\nThe social centers that opened in all the major cities of Greece during the last years, rented or squatted, offered the best preparation for the creation of strong, active circles of fighters and assemblies able to produce and spread analysis and propaganda everywhere.
\n\nAnarchist participation in the social struggles of the students and workers during the last years was also very important, and it utilized two main strategies, changing according to the circumstances:
\n\n1) Separate, visible anarchist blocs, with flags, banners, posters, and pamphlets.
\n\n2) Radical direct action, smashings, attacks on the police with molotovs, sticks, and stones.
\n\nIn this way the Black Bloc spread throughout the whole body of these mass demonstrations, even if only a minority were participating. The adoption of these two strategies by all anarchists according to the tension of the social struggle and the available momentum produced a common ground for different comrades and eliminated inner conflicts. And anarchist participation empowered those social struggles, gained respect from other political organizations, produced common ground with many different social subjects, and attracted many new people to anarchy.
\n\nThe defence of Exarchia and other areas like it in Greece as autonomous public zones, including street corners and an everyday presence in “our own” cafés and bars, offered a constant meeting point that empowered the relations, the connections, and the coordination of actions. The creation of anarchists squats, social centers, occupied rooms in universities, concerts, events, film showings, and assemblies offered a sustainable ground for the cultivation of anarchist ideas and practices.
\n\nAll these conditions are much more powerful now after December and it doesn’t seem that there is any way to put ourselves in a weaker position. As long as we maintain the ability to listen to the heart and understand the mind of the society the state cannot defeat the anarchists.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/3years/4b.jpg\")
\nWhat new tools and strategies do people have since December?
\n\nThe most important characteristics are:
\n\nSome important struggles and strategies, as examples:
\n\nThe creation of hundreds of blogs offered a digital space for the direct expression of the motivations and theory behind each struggle, attracting thousands of readers and participants. The blogs have broken the authority and monopoly of mainstream mass media.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/3years/5b.jpg\")
\n We have seen immigrants closed in concentration camps, we saw the revenge of normality expressed in threatening laws, we saw conservatism acting as the guardian and protector of the worst side of humanity, we saw greed and exploitation destroying our most beautiful dreams together with the forests, beaches, parks, squares, and hospitals. We saw apathy imprison our lives in fortress-like cities of commerce and mass stupidity…
\n\nMaybe now we are closer to the point of no return. To reach this point, perhaps we all should have resigned from our jobs last year in December… perhaps the unemployed should have replaced the uncertainty of “personal failure” with the pride of an insurgent collective risk. Maybe the students should have left school for at least a year of holidays, rediscovering the meaning of public education.
\n\nWe have to live collectively again, redefining contemporary political philosophy and revolutionary art. Perhaps the affinity groups, occupied parks, squats, and social centers can become points for bringing all those dreams to life. We lost so much in the selfishness of our small, insignificant, individual illusions. We may have to fight against many fears, traps, deeply-rooted lies, psychological complexes, and insecurities. And then we will link our daily lives with the most magical secret desires to transform the streets of the metropolis in precious moments of freedom and happiness.
\n\nThe insurrection never ends. The insurrection will never end.
\n\nMaybe we need to start thinking about how the world we would like to live in looks. We must use moments and images of our present life that we want to expand and activate in all their significance. We don’t need any science-fiction plan for our future—we have everything here and now. We have to liberate it all from the State and the market and share it.
\n\nRevolution is when all society takes life in its hands and everything that now is merchandise becomes a gift once more. Revolution is One Thousand Insurrections, nothing more, nothing less. Insurrections open paths, liberate space and time, reprogram Daily Life, change relations, invent new words, break hierarchies, and smash taboos and fears and limitations, achieving the highest possible public participation in projects and infrastructure that give us the chance to expand ourselves and share our abilities without limits. Insurrections are a never-ending fight, a constant struggle between desperation and self-restraint, apathy and action, fear and decisiveness, needs and passions, obligations and desires, obstacles and breakouts. Is it even possible to imagine such a thing? The experience of the 2008 insurrection showed us that those wild dreams we were too embarrassed to admit could actually become reality.
\n\n-Void Network [theory, utopia, empathy, ephemeral arts]
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/3years/6b.jpg\")
\nInflamed Appendix
\n\nFor entertainment and context, here follows a list of groups that took credit for militant direct action in Greece in 2009. Possibly apocryphal and certainly incomplete, it still hints at the charming ingenuity of participants in the unrest that followed the riots of December 2008.
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