![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/10/3.jpg\")
\nIn order to keep Donald Trump’s voter base entertained with spectacles of predatory violence, recruiters are offering bribes of up to $50,000 to seduce gullible individuals into hiring themselves out to United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). While Trump’s henchmen falsely claim that ICE is targeting “criminals,” the real wrongdoers are those who are willing to do harm to their neighbors in return for a bribe.
\n\nYou can learn about eight simple things you can do to resist ICE here. You can learn about rapid response strategies for countering ICE here, and explore innovations in the rapid response approach here.
\n\nIn cooperation with subMedia and the Coordinadora Anarquista Tejiendo Libertad, we have prepared a video and poster campaign to counter ICE recruitment. Please help us circulate these everywhere that people are at risk.
\n\nThere is nothing more despicable and dangerous than a mercenary. When you join ICE, you become a threat to your community and a traitor to humanity. Once people see you with ICE, you’re going to have to wear that mask every day for the rest of your life.
\n\nThis leaflet covers the basic steps you can take to prevent ICE from terrorizing your community. You can learn more about how to defend against ICE here.
\n\nHere are two poster designs, suitable for printing and wheatpasting on vertical surfaces everywhere:
\n\n\nOn January 7, 2026, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis. This is just one in a long series of killings carried out by ICE. Targeting immigrants is just their cover story—the true purpose of ICE is to serve as a secret police force in order to impose a totalitarian regime.
\n\nThere is nothing more despicable than a person who is willing to kidnap and even murder his neighbors in return for a bribe. Mercenaries who are prepared to serve tyranny represent the most dangerous element in society. Those who hire themselves out to ICE are traitors to humanity.
\n\nBy standing up to ICE, we open up the path to a better future, a world in which no one has to live in fear of militarized bounty hunters. No politician or political party will do this for us. Stop them before they kill again.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/10/2-en.jpg\")
\nWe are told that dangerous people are loose in our communities. Parasites feeding on our resources. People who are not like us.
\n\nBut who is dangerous, if not those who will kidnap their neighbors in return for a bribe? If anyone is a parasite, it is the ones who monopolize public resources to profit on violence. If anyone is an outsider, it is the ones who sell their capacity to inflict harm to the highest bidder: the mercenaries who hire themselves out to ICE.
\n\nThey are not protecting our communities—they are trying to destroy them. By persecuting the vulnerable, they aim to wear down our ability to identify with each other, our ability to feel compassion. If they succeed, all of us will be in danger. They are also threatening your safety, your freedom. Once they are finished rounding up immigrants, they will need new scapegoats.
\n\nThose who know the history of fascism know how this story goes. They begin by locking undocumented children in cages—and end by locking your children in cages.
\n\nTogether, we can create a world in which no one has to live in fear of mercenaries. No politician or political party will do this for us. It’s up to us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/10/1-en.jpg\")
\nOn April 19, 2023, three anarchists were killed in battle near Bakhmut: an American named Cooper Andrews, an Irishman named Finbar Cafferkey, and a Russian named Dmitry Petrov, known to us until then as Ilya Leshy. People in our networks have shared undertakings with all three of these comrades over the years.
\n\nYou can read about Cooper’s motivations in his own words here and consult a eulogy from his comrades here. You can learn about Finbar’s lifelong activism here, read an interview with him here, and listen to a song of his here. In the following eulogy, we explore the life of Dmitry Petrov, who also went by the noms de guerre Ilya Leshy and Fil Kuznetsov. For background, you should start by reading the statements from his comrades in the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization, the Resistance Committee, and Solidarity Collectives, as well as Dmitry’s statement from beyond the grave, all of which are available here.
\n\nA few weeks before the war began, Dmitry participated in an interview that we included in our coverage of the unfolding situation. On the first day of the Russian invasion, under what must have been challenging conditions, Dmitry took time to speak with us about how anarchists were responding. Throughout our exchanges over the following year, we were impressed by his humility, the earnestness with which he approached his efforts, and his sincere desire for critique.1
\n\nWhen Dmitry was killed, his comrades revealed that he had been involved in some of the most significant anarchist initiatives in 21st-century Russia, including co-founding the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization. Here, we will provide an overview of his efforts as a snapshot of the past two decades of struggle in the post-Soviet world, concluding with translations of two of his texts, “To Be a Revolutionary” and “The Mission of Anarchism in the Modern World,” and another text about him from the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization.
\n\nNo one in our collective believes that state militarism can bring about the world we desire to live in. We are internally divided over the issue of anarchists participating in military resistance to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Some of us believe that serving in a state military formation can never advance the anarchist cause. Others believe that the decision to do so can only be understood in view of the brutal autocracy that prevails in Russia, in which committed anarchists like Dmitry had tried virtually every other approach. If we reject state militarism, it is an open question how else to respond to imperialist invasions—and we will be better equipped to approach that question if we understand the life trajectory of Russian anarchists like Dmitry. For a discussion of the complexities of formulating an anarchist anti-war strategy that does not effectively cede the field to state militarism, you could begin here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/05/03/2.jpg\")
Volodya Vagner writes, “I took this photo of Dmitry a spring day in 2018, as he showed me around the Moscow offices of the PKK’s representation in Russia. He’d been spending time there since the battle of Kobanê in 2014, studying Kurmanji and organizing events about the revolution in Rojava… he struck me as kind and modest, a sharp thinker committed to putting his convictions into action.”
\nOne of our contacts in the Russian anarchist movement recalls that Dmitry was an active participant in anarchist activities in Moscow starting when he was a teenager, as early as 2004. According to a eulogy in Novaya Gazeta, Dmitry
\n\n\n\n\nbecame interested in anarchism at school. Together with comrades, they published the anarchist newspaper “Heretic.”
\n\nAs a child, he was strongly influenced by his father’s stories about the Makhnovist movement during the civil war in Russia. For the first time, his father brought him to the Falanster store (the oldest independent bookstore in Moscow), where Dmitry discovered the [Russian anarchist] magazine Avtonom. “My first acquaintance with the movement was participation in the Bespartshkol, a rather interesting circle of lectures and discussions that took place many years ago in the Moscow Jerry Rubin Club.” From the age of fifteen, he began to actively interact with the organization of “revolutionary anarcho-syndicalists” and to “write articles for their samizdat.”
\n
Dmitry became known to other comrades as Ekolog (“ecologist”) on account of his environmentalism, organizing against the construction of incinerators and for the defense of Bitsevski Park in Moscow. He also participated in Food Not Bombs, the anarchist MPST union (“Interprofessional Workers’ Union”), and a variety of other initiatives. You can read about his activities during this period here.
\n\nLike many Russian anarchists, he participated in the anti-fascist movement, fighting Nazis on the streets of Moscow and defending concerts and lectures against Nazi attacks. According to the Novaya Gazeta eulogy, Dmitry was a member of the affinity group of Ivan “Kostolom” Khutorsky, a well-known anti-fascist who was later murdered in his stairwell by a member of a neo-Nazi gang.
\n\nIndeed, while Dmitri was becoming more active in the anarchist movement, fascists and police were escalating their violence against it. They had begun maiming and killing activists and journalists and even their lawyers; Fedor Filatov, Ilya Borodayenko, Timur Kacharava, and Anna Politkovskaya were only a few of the many casualties. In January 2009, the lawyer Stanislav Markelov and the journalist and anarchist eco-activist Anastasia Baburova were murdered in downtown Moscow. The previous summer, Dmitry had fought alongside Anastasia Baburova to defend Georgian refugees from Abkhazia who were staying in Yasnyi proezd in Moscow.
\n\nThe following month, Dmitry took part in a clandestine action claimed under the name People’s Retribution. According to one account, this was a landmark event in Russia:
\n\n\n\n\nThe first anti-cop arson of a new generation of anarchist rebels took place on the night of February 19-20, 2009. The next day, a video was published on the internet on behalf of the group People’s Retribution, showing anonymous people throwing Molotov cocktails at police cars. “People’s Retribution” announced the destruction of two cars and called on “every self-respecting person… to stand up against the arbitrariness and despotism of the police, secret services, and bureaucracy.”
\n
Afterwards, Dmitry participated in establishing an anonymous platform for reporting such clandestine actions, the Black Blog, which began publishing in May 2010. When the anonymous editors announced the end of the Black Blog in March 2019, they alluded to the burning of the police cars on February 19, 2009: “More than ten years have passed since we threw our first Molotov cocktail at the police.”
\n\nOne of the flashpoints of conflict around Moscow at that time was the Khimki forest, which anarchists and ecological activists were defending against corrupt officials and loggers and the fascists in their employ. On July 28, 2010, the fight over Khimki came to a head when hundreds of anarchists and anti-fascists marched on the local municipal offices in response to a fascist attack. We don’t know what Dmitry’s precise involvement in these events was. The anonymous report we received from Russian anarchists seems to bear the work of a familiar hand; but in an interview, an anonymous representative of Black Blog denied that they had participated in the demonstration at the municipal offices.
\n\nAccording to the Novaya Gazeta eulogy, Dmitry distinguished himself as a particularly considerate comrade in the course of his participation in ecological sabotage around this time.
\n\n\n\n\n“Once, we wandered through the autumn forest at night, disabling construction equipment,” recalled Svyatoslav Rechkalov, a political refugee in the case of the anarchist organization Narodnaya Self-Defense. “And one girl lost her sneaker. She just stepped on the ground and it swallowed her leg. She pulled her leg out, but the shoe remained somewhere underground. Well, Dima took off his shoes, gave her his sneakers, put bags on his feet, and went on like that.
\n\n“People asked him, are you not cold? Do you want to change eventually? He said: if it becomes unbearable, then we will change. But he ended up walking around in the bags all night. That’s who he was.”
\n
Over the months following the march on the municipal offices of Khimki, the authorities detained and tortured over 500 anarchists and anti-fascists. Several were forced to flee the country. Nonetheless, this was not enough to suppress what was at that time a powerful movement. According to the aforementioned account of the movement of that time,
\n\n\n\n\n“2009-2012 was the peak of anarchist resistance in the history of the post-Soviet region of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. Something happened almost every day, especially in the Moscow region, day and night.”
\n
By summer 2012, over a hundred arson attacks had taken place targeting police stations and vehicles, military enlistment offices, cars belonging to state officials, and construction equipment intended to destroy forests. The Black Blog reported many of these actions, including some claimed by additional groups that Dmitry reportedly participated in, such as Anti-Nashist Action (countering the pro-Putin youth group, Nashi) and ZaNurgaliyeva (likely an ironic reference to then-Minister of Interior Rashid Nurgaliyev, a former KGB functionary).
\n\nOn June 7, 2011, for example, an improvised device exploded beside a traffic police post at kilometer 22 of the Moscow Ring Road. The Anarchist Guerilla group claimed responsibility with a video of the explosion on the Black Blog. According to the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization, Dmitry participated in this action.
\n\nIn a subsequent interview, pseudonymous participants in the burning of the police post described the action in detail. Here is an excerpt:
\n\n\n\n\nDENIS: We are descending from the crossing over the Moscow Ring Road. It’s almost light now. Some pensioner is already here walking his dog. I must say, according to our experience of night outings, this category of citizens is one of the very first to appear on the city streets in the morning. They say that in old age people sleep very little. Although our faces are covered, I still feel anxiety—after all, a witness can remember something. Of course, this is complete madness—to return to a failed bomb, and even in the light, in full view of the whole neighborhood. But so much effort has been expended—it is impossible to leave with nothing.
\n\nLet’s return to the post. Everything is the same as we left: a basin with coal and a cylinder stands between the fence and the booth. Alexei goes to the edge of the concrete ditch, lights a phosphorus match, and throws it into the basin. Nothing happens. Has the gasoline burned away? Discouraged, we slowly walk back to the bridge. “Listen, did you definitely see the match fall into the basin?” I ask Alexei. “Yeah, it looked like it.” “But you can’t say for sure?” “No, I’m not sure.”
\n\nLast try. We return, I climb over the ditch, approach the fence, light a match, throw it right into the basin and… a bluish flame spreads over the coal. It happened! Now we are running, our hearts are beating—what if the explosion catches us in a conspicuous place? But the joy of success drowns out the anxiety.
\n\nBORIS: It was starting to get light. I noticed an incomprehensible movement behind the booth. I looked closely, I realized that it was the reflection of fire on the trees. It was burning!
\n\nBut suddenly a car quickly drove into the parking lot, illuminating the booth with its headlights. A traffic cop ran out of the car, took out a fire extinguisher, and began to put out the flames. Unsuccessfully. On the contrary, it seemed that the fire flared up more and more. The traffic cop ran into the post and came out with another fire extinguisher, a larger one. Again, failure—the flame only blazed more and more. Apparently, having decided not to risk it, the traffic cop returned to his post. The flame, meanwhile, rose above the booth—but there was still no explosion. The camera I was using stopped recording for the second time; I pressed “record” again. Police cars began to arrive at the post.
\n\nAnd then there was an explosion.
\n\nEverything was lit up by a flash, a bright orange flame shot up about fifteen meters. We continued filming. Cars began to drive away from the traffic police post, and just then our comrades returned. Alexei nervously shouted: “What are you doing, they are coming after us!”
\n
According to a post by the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization, the one who returned to try again with one more match—the one called Denis in the above account, if it is to be credited—was Dmitry.
\n\nThe account concluded with an admonition characteristic of Dmitry’s later writing:
\n\n\n\n\nYou cannot seize power and impose anarchy on people from above. You cannot make a revolution for them and force them to live in a new society. Anarchist ideals will win only when people realize their strength, taking responsibility for their own lives and each other’s. Therefore, the main thing is to restore people’s faith in their own strength.
\n
The same social tensions expressed in these clandestine actions eventually came to a boil in mass participatory events. Across Russia, hundreds of thousands of people participated in the opposition movement of 2011-2012. On May 6, 2012, the “March of Millions” ended in clashes with the police in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square. Once again, according to the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization, Dmitry Petrov participated in the events in Bolotnaya Square, alongside the anarchist Alexei Polikhovich and others who were subsequently imprisoned for attempting to defend demonstrators from armored riot police.
\n\nThat was arguably the high-water mark of political possibility in Russia. Over the years that followed, Putin’s government managed to establish a stranglehold on the country, systematically destroying or assimilating all forms of opposition. When we interviewed the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization last August, they traced the beginning of the process that eventually led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the defeat of that movement:
\n\n\n\n\nPerhaps, 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
After the clashes on Bolotnaya Square, Dmitry continued to participate in both clandestine action and public organizing. As the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization related to us in the aforementioned interview,
\n\n\n\n\n“We are aware of examples in which some comrades have managed to balance between public activity and the underground for quite a long time, and to be quite active in both.”
\n
In 2013, a protest movement broke out against the pro-Putin government of Ukraine, culminating in the Ukrainian Revolution of February 2014. Although nationalists elbowed out anarchists and other anti-authoritarians to take a prominent place in these events, that outcome was not foreordained; things might have turned out differently if anarchists had been more numerous and better prepared. The Yellow Vest movement of 2018-2019 in France offers an example of a social movement in which nationalists initially had an advantage, but anarchists and anti-fascists managed to outflank them.
\n\nWhile the outcome of the Ukrainian uprising was still up in the air, Dmitry Petrov traveled to Kyiv to participate in the struggle on the Maidan, the central square of Ukraine’s capital city. According to Vladimir Platonenko,
\n\n\n\n\nIn February 2014, Ekolog [Dmitry] spent about ten days on the Maidan, having come to Ukraine specifically for this. He took part in the arrangement of Ukrdom [the “Ukrainian house,” a staging point for anarchists and anti-fascists during the uprising, which was burned on February 18], delivering food to positions, and even in the battle on February 18. But at the same time, he constantly tried to develop an anarchist component in the general popular, complex, and heterogeneous Maidan protest movement. He participated in an attempt to create the “Left Hundred,” created an “anarchist regiment” (with anarchist literature) in the library of the Ukrdom, told the Maidan participants about the protests in favor of the uprising that had taken place in Moscow and about the reasons for the defeat of the protesters. He did not go with the flow; rather, he participated in determining the flow of events to the best of his ability.
\n
In his reports from the Maidan protests, Dmitry describes his dismay about the militarization of the movement and the introduction of reactionary structures:
\n\n\n\n\nI can’t help but appreciate that everything is organized so seriously. However, this situation also has a drawback, perhaps more significant than its advantages. The presence of professional (or quasi-professional) military men inevitably means the collapse of any kind of democracy in the movement, since, by decision of their commanders, these people can impose this or that order on everyone else in an organized way by force. In addition, according to my subjective feelings, these people are unlike those who came here at the call of the idea, and even if I am wrong, their values and goals most likely have little in common with mine. A thick atmosphere of the right of force, the power of a man with a gun (or club) hung there. This is a problem that requires reflection and solution. The contradiction, the conflict between the “military” and “civilian” Maidan, is very clear.
\n
In his last report, Dmitry described in detail his part in the battle of February 18, when many people were killed or severely injured:
\n\n\n\n\nLet’s try without great poetics, but in essence. This may be useful when you happen to be in a similar situation, dear reader. It is important to use your fear: so that it helps you to avoid getting into certain troubles, but does not flow into panic and flight. Personally, I had an incessant fear that a bullet or a grenade would hit me. I have long known that I am far from being a daredevil, and I say that without a hint of coquetry. Now, for the first time, I became interested in the essence of such a feeling as courage. What is it, anyway? Fear forced me to stay closer to people, not to stick out too much, not to run out in front of the crowd. There was a petty feeling: there are a great number of us here, the chance that they will shoot at me is small. There was a childish feeling: “Wow, I saw it on TV during the riots…” But that was the least of it. Next to fear, there was a feeling similar to emptiness—a silent obligation to stay and act. It is almost never formulated verbally. It just is. Maybe courage is just about that? Further, it is important to begin to act meaningfully, and not just to stand or stupidly rush back and forth. Here, the first stones are flying, the first bullets of the cops and flash-bang grenades…
\n
The situation in Ukraine was never simple. In the final entry on the Black Blog, dated February 2015, the editors describe the debates among themselves regarding whether the arsons in Ukraine that were reported to their platform represented genuine anti-state activity or pro-Putin authoritarian activity. Rather than present a facile or sanitized narrative, the authors summarized both views so that readers could draw their own conclusions—but that was the last update to the Black Blog. This debate foreshadowed the later controversies about how anarchists should position themselves in the war between the Russian and Ukrainian governments.
\n\nIn the years following his participation in the Ukrainian uprising, Dmitry maintained an online journal chronicling his travels to sites of natural beauty and historical interest, including parks, forests, and museums around Russia. In 2016, he obtained a PhD in history; his dissertation was titled “Sacred geography of the eastern parts of the Arkhangelsk region.” He engaged in anthropological studies as a researcher at the Center for Civilizational and Regional Studies of the African Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
\n\nInspired initially by an article written by David Graeber, Dmitry went to Rojava while the war against the Islamic State was at its fiercest. He spent six months there. Afterwards, in 2017, he discussed his experiences in this interview and participated in the research project Hevale: Revolution in Kurdistan, which published multiple books.
\n\nLater, he contributed articles to the Ukrainian leftist site Commons about the impact of COVID-19 in Rojava and the conflict between confederal and imperial models in Kurdistan.
\n\nAccording to Ukrainian anti-fascists, “He studied the revolutionary experience of the Kurds deeply, and while he was critical, he respected it and sincerely tried to convey its most valuable lessons.” By his own account, Dmitry aimed “not only to tell the Russian left about the social revolution in Kurdistan, but also to share the anti-authoritarian worldview with the Kurds themselves.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/05/03/3.jpg\")
Dmitry served as a link between the Russian anarchist movement and the social experiment in Rojava.
\nIn 2018, Dmitry left Russia. By that time, Putin’s regime had tamed the violent fascist movement of the preceding decade and moved on to crushing all other social movements. It was becoming standard practice for the Russian Federal Security Service to round up suspected anarchists and anti-fascists and torture them via electrical shock and other horrific methods in order to force them to sign false confessions admitting to participating in invented “terror networks.”
\n\nAs Dmitry later told the news site Doxa,
\n\n\n\n\nI avoided leaving the country as long as I could, but I left when I learned that the security forces were interested in my modest person.
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He chose Ukraine as his point of destination, considering its government to be the least successfully authoritarian of the post-Soviet countries. In the Doxa interview, he described his activities upon arriving there:
\n\n\n\n\nIn Ukraine, we had initiatives among anarchist emigrants from Russia and Belarus, a kind of diaspora. And so it was a lot of different things: from the cinema club and discussions to street actions. But the main thing was to establish ties and an attempt to form systematically operating structures.
\n
As we have noted elsewhere, it is becoming more and more important to find ways to center the agency of refugees as wars, state repression, ecological catastrophes, and economic crises force millions into exile. Yet at the same time that he was getting situated in Ukraine, Dmitry continued organizing with anarchists in Russia from afar. The Telegram channel Anarchist Combatant appeared that same year, in 2018.
\n\nAccording to the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization,
\n\n\n\n\nDima [Dmitry] was a participant in all the processes of creating the BOAC [Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization]—its theoretical work, practical training, and the organization of training and combat actions. But his chief merit—and we think this will not surprise anyone who knew him—was his ability to establish ties with other people, with comrades both at home and abroad… He was always open to new people. He always believed in the best in them—he was mistaken more than once, but he continued to believe and seek.
\n
In 2019, the editors of Black Blog announced the conclusion of the project. It had been four years since the last post had appeared. They emphasized that they remained convinced of the value of the strategy they had embraced in 2009:
\n\n\n\n\nWe have sown our seeds and we are already seeing sprouts. Our enemies—the oppressors and their henchmen within the “power structures”—could not stop us, no matter how hard they tried.
\n\nWe do not do these things to feed our egos. Everything we do, we do not for personal ambition, but to advance the struggle for freedom and justice. We are convinced that we have succeeded. And now, ten years later, we declare to you, as we did before, that we believe that our anti-authoritarian ideas are correct and the radical path we have chosen is correct. The fight continues.
\n
On June 10, 2020, at the high point of the George Floyd uprising in the United States and in response to police violence in Ukraine, anarchists set fire to the Investigative Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Kyiv, sending a communiqué that appeared on the Anarchist Combatant website. This should address any lingering doubts about whether Dmitry sought to make peace with the Ukrainian authorities.
\n\nThat summer, when an uprising broke out in Belarus, Dmitry illegally crossed the border to participate. According to Belarusian anarchists,
\n\n\n\n\nDuring his stay in Minsk, he took part in dozens of marches, helped organize an anarchist bloc at demonstrations, and even managed to pelt cops with their own stun grenades. At night, when many Belarusians were resting, Leshy [Dmitry] and other comrades took to the streets of Minsk and destroyed the surveillance cameras that played an important role in the infrastructure of repression… In the fall of 2020, he prepared several materials for our website. If you’ve ever marched through Minsk beside an anarchist column, chances are that you’ve walked shoulder to shoulder with this incredible man.
\n
The uprising in Belarus was ultimately crushed; many of the anarchists who participated remain in prison today, underscoring the considerable risks of insurrectionary activity in the post-Soviet sphere. In September 2020, a blog post appeared from the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization: a communiqué from a clandestine partisan action in Belarus.
\n\nSurveying this trajectory, it is possible to interpret Dmitry’s path from the Black Blog through the uprisings of 2012, 2014, and 2020 to the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization as the continuous development of a single strategy. Blending public activity and clandestine organizing, he sought to create a model suited to the volatile and dangerous conditions of the post-Soviet countries, a model that could serve both to take advantage of moments of possibility and to survive periods of intense repression. As state violence and surveillance intensify, activists in other parts of the world may find that they need something similar.
\n\nStarting before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Dmitry joined Ukrainian and Belarusian anarchists in attempting to put together an explicitly anarchist and anti-authoritarian military unit. One function of such a unit was to ensure that the participants would not have to fight side by side with fascists, who are indeed present in the Ukrainian military. In addition, Dmitry saw participating in the defense of Ukraine as an opportunity to gain credibility for anarchist ideas in the eyes of the general public in Ukraine, and to continue his own longstanding fight against Putin’s regime.
\n\nDuring the first phase of the Russian invasion, Dmitry and his comrades participated in the territorial defense of the region around Kyiv, becoming integrated as an independent unit in the Territorial Defense Forces. After this, their “anti-authoritarian platoon” became mired in military bureaucracy, putting the status of the non-Ukrainian members in limbo and keeping the entire unit away from the fighting.
\n\nIn July 2022, Dmitry wrote an analysis of the first four months of the “anti-authoritarian platoon,” discussing its internal structure and evaluating its successes and failures. This is an important historical document for those who are curious about the extent to which the military model developed in Rojava can be reproduced in other circumstances. It will be instructive for anyone who wants to discuss anarchist involvement in military affairs, whether they seek to improve on it or to critique it.
\n\nDmitry and others in the platoon were eager to get to the front. Eventually, the platoon disbanded, and they succeeded in going to the front in a different formation. When last we heard from him, he told us that he was about to leave that unit, in hopes of trying once more to establish some kind of explicitly anti-authoritarian unit.
\n\nWe will leave it to others to debate whether Dmitry’s persistent attempts to establish an anarchist military unit represent the honorable continuation of his lifelong anarchist project, a misguided departure from it, an error arising from some preexisting flaw within it, or a courageous attempt to grapple with an almost impossible situation. Those who wish to hear his own thoughts on the matter may choose from an array of interviews. It must not be forgotten that in addition to fighting in Ukraine, he continued to support sabotage and other forms of subversive activity in Russia through the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization, and he continued to emphasize the importance of autonomy, horizontality, and direct action to the anarchist struggle.
\n\nThe sincerity of his effort, in any case, is beyond question.
\n\n\n\n\nMy dear friends, comrades and relatives, I apologize to all those I hurt with my leaving. I appreciate your warmth very much. However, I firmly believe that the struggle for justice, against oppression and injustice is one of the most worthy meanings that humans can fill their life with. And this struggle requires sacrifices, up to the complete self-sacrifice.
\n\nThe best memory for me is if you continue actively struggle, overcoming personal ambitions and unnecessary harmful strife. If you continue to fight actively to achieve a free society based on equality and solidarity. For you and for me and for all our comrades. Risk, deprivation and sacrifice on this path are our constant companions. But be sure – they are not in vain.
\n\n-Dmitri Petrov’s final statement
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![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/05/03/5.jpg\")
Dmitry Petrov (left), in Moscow at the presentation of the book Life Without a State: Revolution in Kurdistan, the second book he helped publish on the topic.
\nIn an interview published in December 2017, Dmitry said “In general, almost everything that is created by human hands is the fruit of the labor of countless people.” In that spirit, we do not seek to hold Dmitry up as an exemplary figure. Rather, his life affords us a glimpse into the lives of many Russian anarchists, illuminating their courage and the challenges they have faced.
\n\nAbove all, Dmitry’s life is a testament to how much is possible even in the most difficult conditions. Under a brutal dictatorship, faced with mounting adversity, he repeatedly found ways to continue organizing and fighting for the future he desired.
\n\nNone of this is intended to glorify death in battle. As the 21st century progresses, life is becoming increasingly cheap—witness how the Wagner Group has intentionally used prisoners as cannon fodder. Anarchists should be in no special hurry to risk our lives—soon enough, there will be chances aplenty to die in the service of a variety of causes, or for no cause whatsoever. Rather than seeking to prove our commitment by our deaths, let’s express our passion for freedom in the way we live every moment of our lives.
\n\nYet as authoritarianism rises around the world and war spreads from Syria to Ukraine, from Ukraine to Sudan, we too may have to answer the questions that Dmitry confronted when Russia invaded the country to which he had fled. If we are to be prepared for that situation—especially if we want to propose other answers to those questions—we need to study what has taken place in Russia. It may be that there is still time for things to turn out differently in other parts of the world, if we act boldly enough—but time is growing tight.
\n\nWhen an anarchist dies, it is up to those of us who survive to put that comrade’s experiences at the disposal of future generations. We can’t know for sure which perspectives those who come after us will need most. Seeking to do our part, we have translated the following two articles by Dmitry, and another article about him.
\n\nThis article appeared on the Anarchist Combatant website on May 29, 2018.
\n\nBeing an anarchist is not at all as easy as it might seem. It is significant that among those who consider themselves anarchists, not everyone will call himself or herself a revolutionary, and even fewer anarchists seriously consider what it means to be a revolutionary. But it’s impossible to be an anarchist and not to be a revolutionary. We are talking about deep convictions, and not superficial sympathies and passion.
\n\nA revolutionary is a person whose desire for fundamental social change is embodied in the corresponding life path—revolutionary struggle. A serious approach to this struggle requires the development of a number of personal qualities. What are the characteristics of a revolutionary?
\n\nPerhaps this is where it all starts. In order to engage in any activity successfully, it is necessary to believe that it can result in success. Otherwise, a person simply has no reason to make a proper effort. Lack of faith in one’s ultimate success is tantamount to alienation from one’s activity.
\n\nI want to remind all pessimists that there are no “objective” reasons for considering the social revolution and the triumph of anti-authoritarian ideas to be reserved for an indefinitely distant future. The speed and unpredictability of social change in the modern world teaches us one important lesson: everything is possible. Including freedom and justice.
\n\nIt is normal to have doubts. All thinking people doubt. And yet, lest doubts prevail in the end, resurrect in your soul the strength that your convictions were originally filled with. Feel the tremendous scale and significance of your goal, feel the dignity and fullness of the meaning of your chosen path—the path of the revolutionary. We are sure that faith will show the way to escape from the darkness of any doubt. And let’s go further. We talked more about faith in victory in the text “Make a Revolution!”
\n\nRevolutionary struggle is such a gigantic task that all who consider themselves to be a part of the revolutionary movement should perceive the fight as the chief occupation of their lives, their foremost task and vocation, whatever hardships and lures might pull them away from it.
\n\nBy discipline, we mean the readiness to take on tasks related to the pursuit of the struggle, and more importantly, the capacity to meticulously fulfill the tasks one commits to. Discipline begins with small things: do not be late for meetings, and fulfill the decisions made at those meetings according to the proposed timeframe. In fact, it begins even a bit earlier—it begins inside oneself, with the internal desire to work systematically and without sloppiness in order to develop the movement and the struggle.
\n\nDiscipline is a very broad concept, intersecting with many different aspects of our lives. For example, it intersects with psychological restraint. The ability to remain calm in crucial moments while confronting the risk of repression, arrest, or physical confrontation with a political enemy or while participating in direct action is a manifestation of discipline.
\n\nIt is also associated with ethics. Discipline is the understanding that “everything personal is political,” that each of us is the face of the movement we participate in. This, in addition to pure ethics, is an additional reason not to violate anarchist principles in your daily life. This is a discipline of life conduct.
\n\nFinally, discipline is manifested in devoting due time and energy to self-development, both individual and collective: acquiring knowledge and cultivating practical skills, physical training, thinking, and analysis.
\n\nWe know that the word discipline is not always welcome in the anarchist community. And yet, we hope there are only few who will brand the understanding of discipline that we describe here as “authoritarian.”
\n\nParticipating in the fight against the oppressors draws the ire of the state machine, the capitalists, and their servants. Revolutionary activity involves problems and hardships. This is nothing new: it always happened thus for all who have fought against evil. We discussed self-sacrifice in the article “Giving One’s Life: What Did Zhlobitsky Remind Us?” —I don’t want to repeat myself. We can summarize that anarchists will most likely have to pay a price for their worldview and life choices—some less, some more.
\n\nAnd we should be ready to.
\n\nOne of the most important qualities that is often forgotten by current participants in the movement is loyalty, which could also be called devotion. Devotion to your comrades, to your affinity group, to your obligations, to your chosen path of struggle.
\n\nToday, in the anarchist milieu, one can often see how people easily change priorities and positions (and the reference to the “ideological search,” as a rule, is only a mask for changing superficial hobbies). Such activists don’t want to solve the problems that arise with colleagues, and prefer to make scandals in order to waive their obligations.
\n\nThis behavior is often presented as part of an anarchist understanding of freedom, as if affection and loyalty are attributes of possessiveness. However, this is not the case. Inconstancy is a manifestation of the liberal ideology and liberal lifestyle of the era of consumer capitalism (in which people and ideas are beginning to be treated as disposable goods). Impermanence and lack of devotion correlate with egoism and the inability to feel or to deeply love the comrades and the cause one once identified with.
\n\nThe anarchist understanding of freedom is different: anarchist freedom does not exist without brotherhood and sisterhood. Therefore, anarchist freedom cannot be the freedom to renounce your own comrades. Anarchist freedom involves the responsibility to make an active contribution to the common cause, to maintain equality, including within the collective, neither to submit nor to subjugate, and also not to abandon.
\n\nFinally, in a revolutionary struggle (and all my life experience confirms this), it is very important to be able to rely on a comrade, on the immutability of his or her basic values and life priorities and the readiness to make common cause. Without constancy and devotion, one cannot rely on anyone, just as one cannot fully trust anyone. As a result, without trust, it is impossible to fight. Consequently, freedom understood in a liberal way as the right to constant inconsistency makes resistance to the monster of the state and to capitalism impossible.
\n\nEven when discord and conflict arise with comrades, and you think that they are seriously mistaken or do not want to overcome their weaknesses, it is your duty as a comrade to make all possible efforts to help them by your criticism and, ultimately, to come to an agreement or at least to a compromise.
\n\nHere, it is appropriate to recall the lines of Alexander Nepomnyashchy:
\n\n\n\n\nAnd we’ll remain goats,
\n\n
\nBroken on the doorstep
\nOf our faithful home
\nOf May’s peaceful silence,If we don’t understand and don’t endure
\n
\nThe endless roads
\nFrom monstrous freedom
\nTo saving love.
And also, Oleg Medvedev:
\n\n\n\n\nIf you’ve chosen the ground, stand on it.
\n
\nDon’t change colors if there’s no luck.
\nLet those who follow you change their place…
It is sad to see people who have devoted dozens of years to stewing in a political subculture by performing ritual actions that imitate a political struggle (for example, internal scandals or “dialogue with the masses” via leaflets and publications written in a language that the latter obviously cannot understand).
\n\nA true revolutionary, as a person who sincerely wants to achieve victory over the system of injustice, always evaluates the results of his or her own actions, subjecting his or her tactics and strategy to sharp critique, constantly rethinking and correcting them without falling into inertia.
\n\nAfter carrying out a direct action, study how people react and how widely the information spreads. This will help you to evaluate the effectiveness of your action and what could have been done better. If you stay in a narrow circle for years, look for new ways to recruit people, make new connections with other groups and initiatives. These are specific examples of how to assess the results on your path towards making the revolution a reality.
\n\nThe principle of monitoring results also applies to learning useful skills. Too often, we stop halfway, without having mastered a skill thoroughly. For example, sometimes we are ready to be satisfied with a hundred readers for our site, when a simple set of promotional activities could bring us a thousand. This attitude is deeply mistaken and too unambitious for a revolutionary. You need to master the technique of promotion and strive for greater success. This principle applies to every other area of anarchist activity.
\n\nA convinced revolutionary is bound to elicit a response in the hearts of those around him or her. This is because the convictions that have been hardened in the torments of doubt and searching fill the revolutionary personality and pour over the edge, outward.
\n\nPerhaps no one will agree with you at first. I’m sure many will argue with you. But the ideas that you have expressed, the ideas you sincerely believe in, as well as your life example, will make people think what they have not thought before and feel what they’ve never felt before. To be the spark that ignites a flame—this is truly a magical ability. If you have not experienced such a feeling yet, it undoubtedly awaits you ahead. This property is the revolutionary’s reward for enduring hardships that cannot be avoided.
\n\nWe have described only some of the features that seem fundamental to the personality of our revolutionary comrade-in-arms. Of course, it is impossible to create step-by-step instructions regarding “how to become a perfect anarchist.” That requires a creative approach. Still, in this text, we have touched on problems that we all face.
\n\nComrade, you can no longer live like cattle. A revolution cannot be an imitation, it cannot be a game of make-believe. The qualities of a revolutionary are not given to anyone at birth. They are fostered by like-minded people in themselves and in each other.
\n\nOur day has already come. Our duty is to achieve our declared goals in full. The road appears under the feet of those who walk.
\n\nPhil Kuznetsov [Dmitry Petrov]
\nAnarchist Combatant
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/05/03/1.jpg\")
Dmitry Petrov—or someone close to him—originally chose to illustrate this article with this classic drawing from a record by the Danish anarchist punk band Paragraf 119, which we colorized in 2021.
\nPublished on June 17, 2020 via the Anarchist Combatant Telegram channel.
\n\nIt is not a new idea that today the great projects of rebuilding the world are in decline. In the twentieth century, mighty movements mobilized millions of people to storm the heavens, politically speaking, and carry out “great constructions” [in the sense of Soviet-era projects aimed at reinventing society]. But over the course of the last century, one after another, they went bankrupt both ethically and practically and soon lost relevance. Here, first of all, fascism and communism of the Leninist variety come to mind. Even the seemingly triumphant liberal project, in fact, simply dissolved into the global capitalist system and geopolitical game, in which the mechanics are hardly liberal.
\n\nOf the ambitious ideocrats who dare to rebuild the world in accordance with their convictions, perhaps the voice of the jihadists is the only one that rings out loudly today. Yet Islamic fundamentalism is obviously not the sort of project that a person with an anarchist worldview can get behind.
\n\nIll-fated global plans at the end of the twentieth century gave rise to deep pessimism and paralysis in regards to the idea of transformation. However, the first decades of the new century have clearly shown that the “end of history” is cancelled. Growing instability, rebelliousness, and ungovernability have manifested themselves. The number of anti-government demonstrations under a variety of slogans and flags has increased by several orders of magnitude compared to the previous era.
\n\nAt the same time, there is an acute need for fundamental change on the widest possible territorial scale. We still need a new world, just as we did before. Almost everything that exists in society is unacceptable and cannot serve as a framework for the present or the future.
\n\nBut what will the transformed reality be like? There are unpromising prophecies of a “brave new world” ruled entirely by elites of post-humanity, or, conversely, of a new feudalism and a great schism accompanied by a surge of brutal cruelty. These pictures are accompanied by the prospect of a global ecological catastrophe. But in parallel with these varieties of gloom, a different trend is becoming more and more apparent: the desire for direct democracy, for egalitarian collectivity, for the eradication of inequality and oppression, for a harmonious coexistence with nature. This trend is still “sprinkled” across many different social currents, which have not yet formed into a united stream. Nevertheless, it brings the relevance of anarchism back to life.
\n\nAt a time when all other missionaries have shown themselves to be deceivers or maniacs, the time has come for anarchists to remember their mission and reassert their global project. What might its common features be?
\n\nModern mass society is crowded into gigantic urban agglomerations. The lion’s share of human life is controlled and directed by the laws of states, as well as by capitalist relations in the sphere of production, exchange, and consumption. As a result, modern man finds himself in the position of an object manipulated by gigantic machine-like forces. At the same time, we are immersed in constant turmoil. The modern world is characterized by the sleep of reason and the suppression of deep feelings, replaced by momentary, externally controlled desires. This state is repugnant to human nature; it causes dissatisfaction, followed by a longing for something different.
\n\nBut the monstrous scale of the state fills us with fear and doubt: could we ever get out from under its iron heel? The endless buying and selling that fills our daily lives along a million different vectors aggravates our dependence and, even worse, corrupts and twists us as if from within.
\n\nYet the very course of life pushes a person to rebel—and a wealth of historical evidence shows that even the most seemingly omnipotent social systems eventually collapse like a house of cards, sometimes quite unexpectedly. These are the starting points of our struggle against the prevailing order. To crush and dismantle the megamachine is the ambitious task before the anarchist movement.
\n\nToday we see a progressive atomization and weakening of collective ties. Neighbors know less and less about each other, and sometimes they completely avoid each other. Noisy family gatherings are becoming rarer and more forced.
\n\nThe causes of this are complex and it is not easy to single out the main ones. There is the growing sphere of individual entertainment, the general trend towards individual comfort, which is always threatened by “excessive” intimacy, and the notorious egoism, organic to capitalist market society, which transforms any relationship into a temporary interaction between two consumers for mutual benefit. The word “partner” is becoming more and more conventional; in Russian, it suggests alienation, functioning as a kind of antonym to terms like beloved, friend, comrade…
\n\nWe consider the crisis of collectivity, of the joint existence of people, to be one of the most catastrophic consequences of capitalism and state power. In addition to moralizing of a purely ethical nature, the anarchist revolution also has concrete institutional instruments for creating what we might call a “new communality.” These include popular assemblies, gatherings, collective self-governing bodies, and economic entities. When the parasite of the system, which has penetrated deep into the social fabric and separated us from each other, is ripped away from the body of society, we will be faced with the necessity to restore warm horizontal bonds and connect together in bonds of solidarity.
\n\nThe collective creation of social life will stand in stark contrast to contemporary social practices. Just look at the current initiative of the Russian authorities to organize voting by mail—now even the imitation of choice will not draw together a crowd of strangers at the ballot box.
\n\nYes, we plan to get together to make decisions, to prepare food in crowded and noisy kitchens instead of receiving it in sterile delivery bags, to introduce our children to their peers on the street instead of just sitting them down to watch a cartoon alone… The degradation of humanity that is unfolding before our eyes can stop. It must be stopped.
\n\nManaging people for the purpose of personal gain, perceiving everything in the world—both living and inanimate—as raw material with which to make a profit, the pathological luxury of a tiny minority at the expense of the deprivation of the vast majority: these are just a few of the most striking illustrations that characterize the modern economic model. Its essence is diametrically opposed to what we consider just and right. All the reasons to reject capitalism can be boiled down to two main theses: 1) This economic system is unethical, unjust, and degrading; 2) It fails to provide a decent standard of living for all.
\n\nCash and commodity relations, wage labor, investments, bank loans, and interest rates are so deeply rooted in our everyday life that sometimes it seems as if it would be impossible to get rid of them—as if without them, there would be immediate famine and decline.
\n\nBut we do have something to oppose to them: it is the human labor force (many thousands of people today waste their labor on useless work, doing what are called “shit jobs”); it is the labor experience of workers, which will enable them to maintain a boss-free economy; it is technology, which will enable society to regulate its production and distribution system according to its needs and values… This should be enough to transfer the economy from the hands of the elite to the control of society as a whole, to ensure the equitable management of production by laboring people and realize the principle “From each according to ability, to each according to need.”
\n\nThe mission of the anarchist movement is to root in society, by word, deed and example, an understanding of the principles of economic justice and, having overthrown the state and the capitalists, to “clear a space”—to create the social and political conditions for its realization.
\n\nModern society is filled with discrimination on a variety of grounds. People experience discrimination on the basis of a wide range of attributes and characteristics. The reasons for this include prejudice, whether centuries-old or new; the principle of collective responsibility; and the way that people are alienated from each other in a world permeated by capitalist relations.
\n\nPrejudice and collective responsibility are skillfully manipulated by unscrupulous politicians.
\n\nGender oppression is one of the oldest and most harmful forms of discrimination. Although in Eastern Europe, as well as the “Western World,” the situation has changed significantly compared to the openly patriarchal past, women remain oppressed. This is confirmed by data regarding domestic, sexual, and gender-based violence and by the difference in average incomes. Practices and patterns of behavior that denigrate woman retain their force. Take, for example, the attitude that “Politics is not a woman’s business.” There are many such invisible cultural obstacles in our social reality that obstruct women from exploring their full potential.
\n\nAnd there is another detail that often goes unnoticed, although it is one of the most important. Relationships between all people in general are poisoned by gender stereotypes and the mutual consumer attitude and selfishness rooted in them. Because of this, even the most seemingly intimate connections cause people pain and unhappiness. The capitalist and authoritarian worldview prevents true intimacy from emerging.
\n\nThe mission of anarchism is to achieve genuine sisterhood/fraternity between people over and above any group identity. We have a variety of tools at our disposal to pursue this:
\n\n1) the collaborative practice of building and managing society, which requires equal cooperation and mutual warmth among all participants in the process;
\n\n2) a revolutionary political culture, which requires the conscious active involvement of representatives of all oppressed groups in social effort together;
\n\n3) finally, a program of education and developing literacy, which helps people to leave prejudice behind.
\n\nThus, the ambition of the anarchist project is, in eliminating discrimination, to improve interpersonal relations and, however naïve this may sound, to bring the love of the neighbor back into our lives. Capitalism and authoritarianism stand in the way of this, but they are not insurmountable obstacles.
\n\nSince time immemorial, human society has been shaken and terrorized by violent confrontations motivated by ethnic or national cultural differences. Additional criteria have been invented and added alongside those, including religious and racial differences. Inter-national and inter-ethnic conflicts reached a new intensity in the era of nation-states, which remain the chief form of political organization to this day. With their emergence, the question of which nation has legitimate right to rule a particular state began to be raised with extreme urgency. Which land “rightfully belongs” to which national group? The result has been the immeasurable suffering of millions of innocent people: forced assimilation, mass deportations and, finally, brutal acts of mass murder. Yet after all this, national conflicts still flare up all over the world.
\n\nHardly any other imaginary contradictions in the history of mankind have had as horrific consequences as ethnic conflict. National conflicts are often based on the interests of national political and economic elites and state bureaucracies, as well as the most ignorant prejudices and distorted ideas about their own neighbors—the Other, representatives of other national groups.
\n\nAt the root of the idea of national conflict lies the question, “Us or them?” Anarchism offers an alternative: “Both we and they, together and as equals.” By rejecting the nation-state, which is nothing more than an instrument of oppression and injustice, anarchists open the way to confederation: the equal cooperation of peoples in all territories. The same land can be both Serbian and Albanian, Armenian and Azerbaijani… the list is endless. Equality and self-government, the social pillars of anarchism, are the indispensable conditions for fruitful and mutually beneficial dialogue between cultures. The need for this dialogue has not diminished—on the contrary, it has intensified in the twenty-first century.
\n\nIt has long been a commonplace that capitalism in particular and the ever-expanding economy and consumption in general have an extremely destructive effect on nature. Likewise the understanding that this vector of development threatens to destroy humanity and the planet we call home.
\n\nWe would like to take a deeper look at the problem. The anthropocentric worldview that dominates today and the way of life conditioned by it is a particular case of a hierarchical attitude to the world and toward being as a whole. Nature is “the workshop of Man”… This view is not natural, ethical, or acceptable. The true emancipation of humanity cannot take place unless we overcome our alienation from nature and finding harmony with it.
\n\nWhat ecological measures can anarchism offer? Modern technology should be reoriented from maximizing profit to conserving and restoring nature, as well as providing decent material living conditions for all. Ideally, we should put an end to the extensive expansion of human destructive influence on nature. The knowledge and capabilities humanity has accumulated should make it possible to fulfill this task, or at least to advance toward its fulfillment.
\n\nIt is of utmost importance to reorganize living space, getting rid of the monstrous megalopolis as a form of human dwelling. The settlement must be proportionate to the person, no matter how subjective this may sound. The lifeless anthropogenic landscape, which cuts people off from natural processes, must give way to the harmonious inclusion of the settlement in the natural landscape, the intertwining of the natural and the human.
\n\nThe intolerable state of our present situation… and the outlines of a renewed world, like prophetic dreams, stir our minds and hearts. These are the points of mobilization that keep us from giving up and accepting. That is why we are ready to make efforts, to take risks, to make sacrifices in order to create a new society. An organized revolutionary struggle is the path by which we will reach the goal outlined in this text. Victory is possible—and therefore, we must win.
\n\nPhil Kuznetsov [Dmitry Petrov]
\nAnarchist Combatant
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/05/03/4.jpg\")
A book Dmitry Petrov participated in publishing about the experiment in Rojava.
\nOn May 8, 2023, after we published the above memorial, the following statement appeared on the Telegram channel of the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization. We have translated it in full because it offers additional valuable context, especially on Dmitry’s youth.
\n\nIt was his public activities which brought Dima to his first steps on the partisan path, when he was fighting against gentrification. In the process, he repeatedly ran into a situation in which the tenants were all trying to take the easy route of legalism (and there was no shortage of people calling on others to take this approach)—writing complaints to the administration that went directly to the trash cans. Tenants didn’t respond very enthusiastically to calls to block construction equipment and roads—and as a result, the police arrested the activists again and again while the construction continued.
\n\nHence the natural impulse to stop the construction physically. Destroy the construction equipment. Destroy the building materials. Damage the lighting wiring and fencing of the construction site. And, most importantly, to do it in such a way as to stay free and continue to help people.
\n\nThat’s where the partisan journey began.
\n\nHis first action, if we’re not mistaken, was an attack on the gentrifying housing construction on the site of the radioactive waste dump in southern Moscow (which we then returned to several times to carry out additional actions).
\n\nCompared to the other actions that followed, this was a pretty easy action, with some anti-construction propaganda graffiti on the fence, a flare pistol fired at a sign describing the site, and a film of the fence enclosing the construction site set on fire.
\n\nBut that morning, we were pleased to see some pictures of the fire extinguisher foam that was used to put out the fence. It was lying around like snow that had suddenly fallen in the warm time of the year.
\n\nThat was just the beginning.
\n\nAt first, we were inexperienced. Some recipes were suggested by other comrades; some we found on the Internet ourselves and tested on various construction sites that were contributing to gentrification.
\n\nAnd Dima always kept trying to expand our struggle—to bring in new people, to develop our methods and tactics.
\n\nThe killing of our comrades Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova in the center of Moscow by neo-Nazis was a turning point. We felt strongly that it was not just neo-Nazi aggression, but a direct attack by the state, which was fostering and supporting our enemies.
\n\nStarting then, we decided to move on to more serious targets.
\n\nThe first of these attacks was the attack on the police parking lot near the police security force building in the south of Moscow.
\n\nMore precisely, we planned to attack the building—I remember going with Dima on a reconnaissance mission, and it seemed that it was very close. But when in the end we climbed the garages (from which the Molotovs was thrown), it turned out that it wasn’t so easy to throw all the way and hit the building. We took responsibility for this action as a group called “People’s Retribution.”
\n\nDima came up with the idea of claiming different types of actions on behalf of different groups. For example, against the police—on behalf of the People’s Vengeance (and the group “ZaNurgalieva!”—referring to [Rashid] Nurgaliev’s statement, which became a meme, in which he said that people have the right to fight back if police officers break the law, so that the phrase “Nurgaliev allowed it!” became popular). Against pro-government movements—as “Anti-Nashist Action,” and so on. [Nashi was a state-backed pro-Putin youth organization somewhat reminiscent of the Hitler Youth.] The idea was that other groups should carry out actions under the same names to confuse the enemy.
\n\nAnd a lot of actions took place. Now, looking back, one can’t comprehend how we had time for everything. Literally, sometimes one or two weeks passed between actions—we did an attack, went on a reconnaissance trip, told our comrades about it, went to the next one.
\n\nOn the dates when the military draft started, we attacked military registration and enlistment offices. In response to the persecution of [Soviet dissident Alexander] Podrabinek [who was targeted by Nashi in 2009], we visited the Nashists. For the elections, we attacked the offices and administration buildings of United Russia [the ruling party of Russia]. And we lost count of how many times we burned the police—on March 8 (the attack on the reception room of the Interior Ministry in the center of Moscow), after the arrests of comrades in other cities, and so on. In response to the abuse by the traffic cops, we burned their facilities.
\n\nAnd all of this under a new group name every time, covered through new sites and blogs.
\n\nYet gradually, we concluded that it takes too much effort to disseminate the information on behalf of a new group every time. And other groups preferred to conduct actions under their own name instead using ours. Therefore, as the next step, the concept of the Black Blog was born. Not an organization, but an aggregator of actions carried out by all the anarchist partisan groups—including ours. Although with time, the Black Blog began to be seen precisely as the name of a group (and sometimes the subtitle of the site, “Anarchist Guerrilla news,” was used as such, and we began to be called the Anarchist Guerrilla group after it).
\n\nBy the way, the site address (as well as the name in English) was deliberately chosen as blackblocg.info—both a reference to Black Bloc and a reference to the fact that we have a blog chronicling the guerrilla struggle (for the same reason we chose the .info domain).
\n\nOnly some isolated, especially vivid episodes flash in memory. The arson of the reception room of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Moscow region—in response to [police officer Denis] Yevsyukov’s shooting of people in a supermarket.
\n\nHow the flames run beautifully through the car when the police cars caught fire near Ostankino and at that moment, from the loudspeaker in the parking lot, we heard a voice yelling “Fire! Fire!” (Later, we made a beautiful music video of the Electric Partisans’ song “R.A.F.” for this attack.)
\n\nHow after the arson of the police cars near the Chechulin street police station (the attack in which we’d first used an IED made from acetone peroxide with ammonal—Dima played the leading role, pouring the mixture and then throwing the grenade while sitting on the fence—and the explosion threw him right to the ground), a man who introduced himself as a police officer from that very station posted a comment to our site complaining that the chief of that station, lieutenant colonel Telelyuev, was very good—and now he was in trouble because of us. Dima immediately wrote a song in response:
\n\n“It’s cold and dark in the burnt office…
\nLieutenant Colonel Telelyuev is writing us a letter.”
How in honor of all partisan anarchists Vadim Kurylev (Electric Partisans) released the song “I am a Fighter of the Black Blog.” [See below.]
\n\nAnd, of course, the blowing up of a traffic police post on the Moscow Ring Road—organized as a protest against the numerous abuses of the law by the officers of that very agency.
\n\nWe told about that action in detail in the past. We will only add that the comrade who returned to the failed IED, risking his life and freedom to complete the action despite the problems, was Dima.
\n\nActions continued after that explosion, such as setting fire to the police department’s parking lot in Troitsk, attacks on [the political party] United Russia, and environmental actions like setting fire to the logging equipment in Khimki forest and to luxury cottage villages under construction near Yakhroma.
\n\nWe know hardly anybody doubts it—but there was practically not a single action in which Dima did not actively participate.
\n\nHowever, a situation gradually developed in which, on the one hand, we no longer had any objects to attack (at least, that we could target with a high level of security with only a small group)—and at the same time, we realized that the hope to bring a revolution via disconnected affinity group actions did not seem to be justified.
\n\nAnd it was time to rethink things on the basis of experience—both our own experience and those of other successful revolutionary groups, not only anarchist ones. Dima gave us the idea of organizing a discussion club in which we studied the works of [anarchist Peter] Kropotkin and [authoritarian communist Vladimir] Lenin, works on the psychology of the masses, the works of [French revolutionary syndicalist Georges] Sorel on myth and its role in revolution, and conducted an analysis of the revolutions of the Arab Spring and [“nonviolent” democrat] Gene Sharp.
\n\nAnd this work led us eventually to what Dima rightfully calls our brainchild, the creation of the Combat Organization of Anarcho-Communists.
\n\nThis, of course, was a long undertaking—and the story is just beginning. But we can’t help noting that Dima was a participant in all the processes of creating the BOAC [Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization]—its theoretical work, practical training, and the organization of training and combat actions. But his chief merit—and we think this will not surprise anyone who knew him—was his ability to establish ties with other people, with comrades both at home and abroad. Finding new people for the organization—and organizing field camps in the Moscow region for foreign comrades. He was always open to new people. He always believed in the best in them—he was mistaken more than once, but he continued to believe and seek.
\n\nAmong other things, this work took him to Kurdistan, where he participated in learning both the principles of a liberated society and in combat training.
\n\nAnd there’s another important detail about his character. Dima stayed in Northeast Syria for several long months, communicating with his family and us very irregularly and only by email.
\n\nBut when it was time to return—practically when he was already on his way home, a few days before his flight—we learned that the FSB was seriously interested in him.
\n\nAnd in this situation—missing his family and home, having a science career in Russia that was waiting for him—he decided (albeit not without the agony of choice) not to return home, but to go to Ukraine. He did this partly because he understood that if he returned and was arrested, not only he but other people as well would be at risk, along with his life’s work. So he chose the path of a professional revolutionary—denying his personal desires for the sake of the common cause, for the sake of the ideas he believed in.
\n\nEver since, Dima has been moving our common cause forward, developing our organization from abroad. And no distance has diminished his contribution and his assistance in this.
\n\n“Black Blog Fighter” by Electric Partisans.
\nRussian musician Vadim Kurylev wrote this song, “Black Blog Fighter,” for his band Electric Partisans in 2012. The lyrics are as follows.
\n\nTonight, when the city is quiet,
\nThere’ll be an explosion and flames will burst out
\nMy devices are flying through the broken window and the special forces are on alert
\nThey’re making a big fuss, the minister’s on the phone
\nBut I’m already gone in the city at night
\nI put up videos and links and fill new bottles with cocktails
I’ll let the cops’ lair burn, and let their souls be gnawed by anxiety,
\nNot to find a needle in the middle of a haystack,
\nNor in the city a Black Blog fighter
\nI have a lot of work to do here, let the honest citizenry not judge me harshly
\nI have my own way to the truth, I’m a Black Blog fighter.
It’s convenient for you to make me out to be a bully,
\nBut you’re pissed off, you’re living a life of deceit
\nI want you to learn this truth: you humiliate the people, you get a vendetta in return.
\nBetter go dig in the dusty archives,
\nAnd you’ll understand how often you’ve been defeated.
\nLet historians argue about the ways of society’s development,
\nBut my anarchism is stronger than your logic.
I’ll let the cops’ lair burn, and let their souls be gnawed by anxiety,
\nNot to find a needle in the middle of a haystack,
\nNor in the city a Black Blog fighter
\nI have a lot of work to do here, let the honest citizenry not judge me harshly
\nI have my own way to the truth, I’m a Black Blog fighter.
One of Dmitry’s virtues, at least in our communication with him, was that he retained a humble, open-minded approach to strategy while nonetheless acting decisively. This stands in stark contrast to the strident voices on every side of the debate about the Russia-Ukraine war who lecture each other from a position of absolute certitude without ever having set foot in either country. In the interview we published at the beginning of 2022, asked how he might answer those who charged that participating in the military defense of Ukraine would make anarchists into accomplices of the Ukrainian government, Dmitry responded, “First of all, I would answer them—thanks, this is a valuable critique. We really need to evaluate how to intervene so as not to just become a tool in some state’s hands.” In the last message we received from him, in March 2023, he concluded, “If you have any questions, if you have any advice, any thoughts, any analysis to share, I would be super happy to hear it, and super interested.” This is a remarkable thing for a person who is risking his life daily to say to people far away in conditions of relative safety. ↩
\nHere is a transcription of the fragment of Dmitry’s speech that appears in this footage: “Just a few days ago, we all learned that a police major, the head of the Tsaritsyno police department, was drunk and shot several people dead and wounded several more. All the television channels talked about it, but no one said anything about the fact that this was no accident. That the authority, which is given to law enforcement officers, which is given to many other people, corrupts them, that it makes them real maniacs. And that’s why the cops, being completely crazy, can allow themselves to get shitfaced and shoot someone with a gun. This is not the only case. Serious crimes involving police officers…” ↩
\nWe mourn the passing of Jen Angel, a tenacious anarchist organizer whose efforts spanned the better part of four decades. Below, we’ll review some of Jen’s many contributions over the years and share some memories from those who love her.
\n\nYou can donate to a memorial fund for Jen here. You can read a selection of her writing here. Justseeds has published another tribue to Jen here.
\n\nWe were fortunate to know Jen. Her generosity and exuberance inspired us and we worked together in a variety of ways.
\n\nLike many of us, Jen got her start in do-it-yourself print media and counterculture at an early age, before the internet brought digital connectivity to the average North American household. Her career extended from the high point of the do-it-yourself counterculture through the turn-of-the-century movement against capitalist globalization to the Occupy movement, the Trump era, and the George Floyd uprising.
\n\nJen had an ampersand tattooed on her wrist. You could say that this represented her approach to organizing, taking on responsibilities, and addressing differences and conflict in her community: “Yes, and.”
\n\nShe was a dependable friend, affectionate and curious, who brought an even keel and considerable stamina to her projects along with an unpretentious Midwestern demeanor. She dedicated herself to a wide range of collective undertakings, providing thankless behind-the-scenes work and offering the kind of warm-hearted hospitality that enables people to put down roots together.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/02/10/5.jpg\")
The penultimate issue of the zine Jen started as a teenager, Fucktooth.
\nIn high school, Jen started out as a classical musician. Although the punk scene was to play a central role in her life story, this was the closest she got to playing in a band.
\n\n\n\n\n“I played the bassoon. Nobody would let me in their punk band.”
\n\n \n
“I learned a lot from punk,” Jen later explained in an interview: “to assert myself, to express my opinion… those are all important things, things that are also inherent in independent media. Independent media outlets like Clamor allow regular, everyday people, not experts, to get their opinion out in the world.”
\n\nStarting in her mid-teens in 1991, Jen published the zine Fucktooth. Like many of us, she cut her teeth as an author and organizer by bringing out a publication of her own, learning by doing. This was how she developed the skills that she later put at the disposal of an array of social movements.
\n\nAs a teenager, Jen also explored non-monogamous relationship models, at a time when non-monogamy was unthinkable for many people of her generation, especially in the Midwest, where she grew up. She was at the cutting edge of a variety of experiments that later spread far and wide.
\n\nJen became involved with punk infrastructure where she lived in Columbus, Ohio, including the notorious Legion of Doom punk house and Columbus More Than Music Fest. In 1996, she participated in the Active Resistance gathering in Chicago, providing a counterpoint to the Democratic National Convention. Active Resistance was an important forerunner of subsequent anarchist convergences such as the mobilizations in Seattle during the protests against the 1999 World Trade Organization summit and, later, in response to the 2000, 2004, and 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions.
\n\nThat same year, Jen got involved with publishing the Zine Yearbook, drawing on her experience in do-it-yourself publishing to collect the best of the underground press. The Zine Yearbook appeared annually from 1996 until 2004.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/02/10/7.jpg\")
The third Zine Yearbook.
\nAt the invitation of Tim Yohannan—longtime editor of Maximum Rock’n’Roll, arguably the most influential do-it-yourself punk magazine—Jen moved to the Bay Area in 1997 to help coordinate MRR. At the time, the magazine had a monthly circulation of 14,000 copies. As Jen put it, “I’ve been doing zines for a really long time and Maximum is the biggest zine there is.”
\n\nYou can read a lively and entertaining interview with Tim and Jen here, and another interview with Jen from that era here.
\n\nDuring this stint in the Bay Area, Jen worked at Punks with Presses, another classic punk institution of that time. But Tim died of cancer in April 1998, and Jen was forced out of her position at Maximum Rock’n’Roll shortly thereafter.
\n\nJen published the 24th and final issue of her first zine, Fucktooth, in 1999. In the intervening years, the punk underground and the zine culture it helped sustain had developed into a massive global network interwoven with other movements worldwide. This culminated in riotous demonstrations against the 1999 summit of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, confirming the arrival of a new global era of protest. Jen moved back to Ohio, where her partner Jason Kucsma was attending Bowling Green State University, and the two founded a new magazine together, Clamor. The first issue appeared in early 2000, including—like every like-minded publication of that time—breathless accounts from the WTO demonstrations.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/02/10/3.jpg\")
Jen and Jason working on Clamor.
\nJen helped to organize the annual Underground Publishing Conference in Bowling Green, initially founded as the “Midwest Zine Conference” in 1999 and later rebranded as the Allied Media Conference, which continues to this day in Detroit. Jen and Jason moved to Toledo in 2002, where they continued working ceaselessly on Clamor.
\n\nUltimately, Jen and Jason published 38 issues of the magazine. When their distributor went under, Clamor collapsed; the last issue came out in fall 2006. Jen’s romantic relationship with Jason came to an end, as well, illustrating the risks for activists who afford themselves no breathing room between their relationships and their projects. You can read all the issues of Clamor on their website.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/02/10/4.jpg\")
Clamor magazine.
\nWith the end of Clamor, Jen shifted her attention to organizing publicity for authors. This developed into the collective Aid & Abet, through which she worked with David Graeber, Jacob Conroy of the SHAC 7 and Will Potter of Green Is the New Red, Margaret Killjoy, Frank López of SubMedia, scott crow of Common Ground, and many other authors, filmmakers, and organizers over the next several years.
\n\nJen moved back to the Bay Area in 2006, fostering a community through collective dinners and other traditional punk and Midwestern forms of conviviality. Though many radicals who experiment with alternative family structures withdraw to nuclear families later in life, Jen continued to invest her energy in living collectively and nourishing a dense network of polyamorous relationships; these remained important to Jen throughout her adulthood. At that time, the Bay Area was rapidly gentrifying, but it remained an epicenter of radical activity, including the movement responding to the murder of Oscar Grant in 2008 and Occupy Oakland in 2011.
\n\nIn addition to public organizing, Jen made her home into a space of encounter drawing together people of a variety of interests and walks of life. For example, when we published After the Crest, reflecting on the waning phase of the Occupy movement, dozens of the fiercest participants in the Oakland Commune crowded into her living room to discuss it. Years later, during the To Change Everything tour in the United States, participants in the tour got to inspect an early version of the game Bloc by Bloc at a salon Jen hosted.
\n\nRevolutionary potential blossoms when people give it space and resources the way that Jen did.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/02/10/9.jpg\")
\nJen became a core organizer of the Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair, the longest-running anarchist book fair in the United States. Behind the scenes, she helped several radical projects to balance their books, aiming to protect them from the fate that had befallen Clamor. From 2013-2014, she helped organize the Bay Area Radical History Project, a series of presentations focusing on Bay Area activism over the preceding three decades, seeking to connect the wave of people who became involved in radical politics through the Occupy movement with veteran activists from earlier movements.
\n\nIn October 2014, she joined Ryan Only in debuting Anarchist Agency, a project dedicated to interfacing between anarchists and mass media.
\n\n\n\n\nThe goal is to raise awareness of anarchism as a whole, and we are completely prepared to do promote diverse (and contradictory) parts of anarchism as long as the ideas, groups, and individuals we are working with identify publicly as anarchists and share our core beliefs…
\n\nThis is not an attempt to water down or make palatable the more militant parts of anarchism or of the community. Some anarchists run child-care programs and some anarchists smash windows and engage in sabotage. Sometimes the same individuals do both things.
\n\nHelping anarchists be more transparent about what they are doing and why, and with what goals, will make anarchist ideas more accessible in hopes of allowing more folks to understand that a different world is possible.
\n\n \n
With considerable support from the community that she cultivated around her, Jen also got her cupcake business off the ground and sustained it through a series of challenges. This ensured that she could make decisions in her activism on the basis of her values rather than financial pressures, even as life in the gentrifying Bay Area became nearly untenable.
\n\nOrganizing involves ceaseless challenges and, often, a tremendous amount of heartache. Despite decades of stress, disappointment, and grueling unpaid labor, Jen continued forward cheerfully. She helped to make the 2022 Bay Area Book Fair a success and was involved in the organizing for the 2023 Book Fair at the time of her passing.
\n\nReviewing Jen’s life, it’s easy to be reminded of Aragorn!, another Midwesterner who grew up making zines in the do-it-yourself punk scene, moved to the Bay Area, worked on Maximum Rock’n’Roll, and distinguished himself as a publisher and a fixture in the anarchist milieu. During Occupy Oakland and its aftermath, Jen and Aragorn! lived only a few blocks apart in Berkeley.
\n\nIt has been almost exactly three years now since Aragorn!’s untimely passing—three years that have seen such a spate of tragedies that it’s hard not to feel desensitized. But the losses of Aragorn! and Jen are linked, for both erode our access to the generation of anarchists who emerged from the crucible of the 1990s.
\n\nIn attitude and approach, the two could not be more different. While Aragorn! pursued confrontational critique almost as an end in itself, Jen focused on logistics nearly to the exclusion of ideology. Coming out of the motley crowds of the punk scene and the heady optimism of the Seattle WTO protests, Jen took for granted that theoretical cohesion was not as important as openness and inclusivity. While Aragorn! wrongly interpreted Jen as an appendage of his perceived rivals at AK and PM Press, Jen couldn’t see what there was to gain from sectarian debate—even when there were real strategic differences at stake.
\n\nThe important thing to understand is that Jen’s and Aragorn!’s approaches to anarchism evolved in continuous response to each other over a period of decades. Each sought to correct the shortcomings of the other’s strategy. Consequently, although neither would acknowledge it—or rather, precisely for that reason—their efforts add up to a complementary whole. Those who wish to learn from one of them must also understand the other.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/02/10/8.jpg\")
The credits for the June 1997 issue of Maximum Rock’n’Roll, listing the names of both Aragorn! and Jen Angel—but as far apart as possible.
\n\n\n\n“There’s this misconception that anarchism means chaos. But the term means ‘without rulers.’ We don’t expect people to organize for us. We organize for ourselves.”
\n\n \n
Jen’s untimely passing is a senseless tragedy. She lost her life as the consequence of an apparent robbery attempt. As her loved ones emphasized, she would be furious if anyone were to use this as an excuse to justify more police violence:
\n\n\n\n\nJen’s family and friends ask that stories referencing Jen’s life do not use her legacy of care and community to further inflame narratives of fear, hatred, and vengeance. We do not support putting public resources into policing, incarceration, or other state violence that perpetuates the cycle of violence that resulted in this tragedy.
\n
Anyone who has spent time in the Bay Area over the past decade knows that one of the primary forces driving violence in the East Bay is the skyrocketing cost of living. The real estate profiteers who have heartlessly filled the streets of Oakland with desperate evictees and the politicians who have funneled money into the pockets of the police with no concern for the processes that are immiserating millions bear the lion’s share of responsibility for the risks that Bay Area residents face today.
\n\nJen spent her life working to create a world in which everyone would have access to the food, shelter, medical care, and community that they need—a world in which there would be no incentives for anyone to do harm to others for the sake of material gain. No amount of violence from police, courts, or prisons could bring us an inch closer to such a world. We owe it to her to continue her efforts to abolish capitalism, the state, patriarchy, white supremacy, and all the other forms of hierarchy that contribute to violence and precarity in our communities. To the extent to which we make progress towards those goals, the world will be a safer place for everyone.
\n\nNothing we can do will bring Jen back, but we can honor her life and her unflagging commitment to social change by taking up the torch she passed to us.
\n\n\n\n\n“The core tenets of anarchism are autonomy, mutual aid, voluntary association, and direct action. These are all positive things.”
\n\n \n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/02/10/2.jpg\")
Jen and Jason in the Clamor days.
\nI’m a teenager at our local infoshop. I overhear two of the volunteers debating the value of a new magazine, Clamor.
\n\n“I think it’s trying to be too accessible,” says one.
\n\n“Yeah, but it’s Jen Angel’s magazine. You know why she has that name right? Because she really is an angel.”
\n\nAccessible is a four-letter word to me, because I like punk rock. But, somehow, because I like punk rock, I’m also drawn to four-letter words and to that which is disparaged. Plus the magazine is for sale at our infoshop, and our infoshop is cool. So I pick up a copy. OK, I think to myself, it’s not dripping with sweat and slobber the way Slug and Lettuce or Profane Existence are, but the articles are provocative.
\n\nIt’s good. Because when Jen did things, she did them well.
\n\nI’m in my twenties. My best friend from that infoshop invites me to launch an anarchist communications collective with him and Jen Angel. I remember that name.
\n\n“Clamor, right?”
\n\n“Yeah, she’s got her shit together.”
\n\nShe did. They both did, but I didn’t. After a few years, I fell out of the project, but I remained friends with Jen.
\n\nI’m in the Bay Area and I need somewhere to crash for a couple nights. Last time Jen was in my town, on a speaking tour with a recently released political prisoner, she offered “Next time you’re in the Bay and need somewhere to crash…”
\n\nI hit her up and I get to sleep in a padded and mirrored room next to hers. She has always been kind to me, grounded, has had her shit together. But this is the trip we really become friends.
\n\nHer house is beautiful. You can tell how much intention and collectivity goes into how the house functions. Especially the kitchen.
\n\nI can’t believe it when she tells me that she was an editor at Maximum Rock’n’Roll—having been passed the torch from none other than Tim Yohannan. We had been friends for a few years at this point, but I had no idea.
\n\n“Maximum Rock’n’Roll?!”
\n\n“Yeah.”
\n\n“You’re punk as fuck!”
\n\n“I guess.”
\n\nWhat an angel. We spend an evening around the dinner table swapping dumb punk stories about stupid bands. My jaw dropped at the Maximum Rock’n’Roll reveal, but it completely detaches when I learn that she founded the punk house where I experienced my first kiss with the first girl I fell in love with: The Legion of Doom. She was the one who gave it that name.
\n\nThe next day, I pick my jaw up from the floor so I can munch on one of Jen’s cupcakes. It’s good, like really good. Because when Jen did things, she did them well.
\n\nI’m at the San Francisco anarchist bookfair. There has been hella online drama for the weeks leading up to it because the bookfair is huge—thanks, in part, to Jen’s role in the organizing collective—and the best venue they could find is a former armory belonging to a high-profile pornography company. Some threatened to boycott, others threatened worse.
\n\nThe day of the bookfair comes and I catch Jen for a second. She’s busy, I know it, but she barely seems it. “How are you doing with all the chatter?”
\n\n“Oh, it’s going fine. I put together a discussion later to talk about the decision-making that led to us choosing this venue, but frankly, we just needed more space, and they were happy to have us.”
\n\nShe’s grounded, relaxed, and seems to be enjoying the event—not burdened by responsibility, just happy to be in the company of so many comrades sharing, communing, participating. I see friends from far away and long ago. I meet Gee Vaucher and Penny Rimbaud from Crass. I take my mom’s new boyfriend to a performance put on by some of my friends and collective-mates, and he’s wowed by it. It’s everything an anarchist bookfair should be. When Jen did things, she did them well.
\n\nI’m at Point Reyes, walking along the beach with Jen on her birthday. Her new boyfriend sees a pod of dolphins, strips down, and runs into the water to swim with them. We’re both like, “Whoa,” but I welcome it, because the dude is kind of, um, enthusiastic, and now we can really talk.
\n\nShe just seems happy. Another birthday, life is going well, she’s busy and entertained and fulfilled. I don’t remember her fretting or worrying about her life much in all the times we talked. She was never distracted when we talked, and she was purposeful in the projects she put her effort into.
\n\nJen Angel had a good life, because when she did things, she did them well.
\n\nI’ll miss you, Jen.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/02/10/1.jpg\")
\n\n\n\nI met Jen before I knew I was an anarchist. I already was one at the time, and on some level, probably always had been, but I didn’t have the words or even know it was an option until shortly before meeting her.
\n\nI remember her asking me what made me think I WASN’T an anarchist, and when I said that I didn’t agree with some of the things that a lot of other anarchists thought and did, she laughed and told me that disagreeing with other anarchists is probably the one thing all anarchists agree on.
\n\nShe helped me understand that agreement isn’t what makes us anarchists, so much as how we go about disagreeing, and whether we respect that other people are still free to do as they will even when we don’t agree with it.
\n\nIt still took me a while before I was ready to consider myself an anarchist, but I don’t know if I’d ever have gotten there without those early conversations with Jen.
\n\nJen and I worked together for a long time, but I’m struggling to find anything to say about those years because no matter how much of herself she poured into the bakery, she was bigger than the business she built to survive under capitalism.
\n\nJen wanted to live in a world where we could bake cupcakes and lovingly share them with our community because we wanted to, not because we need to sell them to earn a living.
\n\n-Elle Armageddon
\n
\n\n\nJen wasn’t usually the loudest person in the room or the center of attention in Bay Area anarchist and activist spaces. But she was almost always working behind the scenes to build, sustain, and promote the crucial infrastructure that we all relied on (and sometimes took for granted). She rarely let sectarian infighting distract her from her ongoing work or undermine her long-term vision.
\n\nJen was always a champion of the projects her friends and comrades pursued, a constant source of encouragement and sage advice. She was an early supporter of Bloc by Bloc (the board game inspired by social insurrection that I designed) and organized some of the first playtests of the game at her house in 2015. Jen’s optimism, perseverance, and consistency should be an inspiration to us all. She will be missed.
\n\n-T.L. Simons
\n
\n\n\nJen’s legacy to political hardcore punk started as a Midwest emo kid who made it OK to be emotional and passionate and political, but most of all, smart. She gave the best hugs. She was a writer’s writer, someone you could sit with discussing which word fit best here or there. She gave workshops in the 1990s at the Columbus More Than Music Fests and Chicago Active Resistance, drawing people in and explaining the most difficult things in everyday language. Perhaps her biggest impact came through publishing indy-media, anarchist and political punk zines and magazines, from the photocopied Fucktooth to the glossy hardbound Zine Yearbook and Clamor. Tim Yohannan even chose her to take over publishing Maximum Rock’n’Roll before he died. She used words to connect us and ideas as sinews for our community. For Jen Angel, it was always about more than music.
\n\n-Eric Boehme
\n
\n\n\nJen Angel was loving, was loved, and was love. She exuded a presence which was magnetic and powerful. It was an invitation for like-minded souls to join hands with her and together reach forward into a better world.
\n\nAs I’m typing, the very writing of this eulogy makes no sense. Jen isn’t supposed to be dead. This world isn’t supposed to go on without her in it. She is supposed to be here as she was last week, and every month and year before this one. I started typing this thinking that finding the right words would be possible, but all of this is wrong. All I can say is that connecting with Jen was pure fire.
\n\nI’m holding her close tonight. I’m in shock that all this has happened. And I am hoping anyone reading this feels, amidst the shared pain we are all experiencing, that you are not alone. We will remember her together. And mourn together. And we will hopefully, on whatever level we can, help make the world better together. This would be a fitting legacy. None of this makes sense. But knowing that Jen would want us all connected, does.
\n\n-Greg Bennick
\n
\n\n\nJen Angel believed in my work and took it and me seriously before I even really took myself seriously. She was always doing thankless behind-the-scenes work, but with an eye towards being strategic, towards building the better world we’re fighting for, and specifically, towards building each other up, providing venues for sharing ideas and coming to know one another.
\n\n-Margaret Killjoy
\n
\n\n\nOver the last 30 years, Jen Angel has been a visionary influence and pioneering participant within multiple movements and subcultures that have significantly informed and shaped our world in the here and now, from punk rock and anarchism in the 1990s, through the Global Justice and anti-war movements of the early 2000s to Occupy in 2011 and contemporary fights for racial justice, climate justice, economic justice, and beyond.
\n\n \n
As Anarchist Agency recounted, on her 48th birthday, a few days before her death, Jen posted this poem by Mary Oliver on social media:
\n\n\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/12/16/counterpoint-yes-trump-represents-fascism", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/12/16/counterpoint-yes-trump-represents-fascism", "title": "Yes, Trump Represents Fascism : Counterpoint", "summary": "", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/12/16/counterpoint-yes-trump-represents-fascism.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/12/16/counterpoint-yes-trump-represents-fascism.jpg", "date_published": "2016-12-16T21:15:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:29Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "“Tell me, what else should I have done?
\n
\nDoesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
\nTell me, what is it you plan to do
\nwith your one wild and precious life?”
Earlier this week, we published a text from a comrade entitled Does Trump Represent Fascism, or White Supremacy? We’ve received this counterpoint on the same topic.
\n\nTrump’s election signals a turn in a century-old cycle, one we ought to recognize by now. The U.S. has been experiencing growing populist discontent, a sentiment fostered by poor material conditions for the working class. The Left has had a few token victories (a black president, gay civil rights), but has, predictably, not demonstrated the revolutionary potential that could lead to real changes in most peoples’ lives. This failure is bitterly felt.
\n\nMost U.S. residents see the government as corrupt and untrustworthy. They feel alienated from the democratic process, and from their physical communities, retreating instead into online echo chambers of shared opinions and mythologies. The long legacy of white supremacy in the United States, which has never truly subsided, is fed by all of this: rather than directing their anxiety and frustration towards the true structures of power that oppress everyone in this country, many within the white working class are sharpening their feelings, stemming from precarity, into resentment directed at the bodies of black and brown people. These emotions are manipulated and exploited by members of the bourgeoisie who are worried that their power may be slipping. The specter of ISIS without—a true and yet mythologized enemy—is used to justify infinite repression within.
\n\nMany people like the comrade who wrote the article “Does Trump Represent Fascism or White Supremacy?” are cautious about calling current political movements fascist. Dozens of books debate even the past—was Nazi Germany fascist, or only Mussolini’s Italy? What about Franco’s Spain, or Perón’s Argentina? More recently, people ask: do the self-organized, until recently rather pathetically unthreatening white supremacists in the United States who call themselves fascists actually count as such? What about Silicon Valley billionaires pouring money into racialized campaigns of secession? Perhaps this caution stems from the urge to be precise, to avoid name-calling—though all know that Trump has earned most epithets one could imagine.
\n\nIn the case of the aforementioned comrade, this concern is framed as technical:
\n\n\n\n\nFascism is not just any extreme right-wing position. It is a complex phenomenon that mobilizes a popular movement under the hierarchical direction of a political party and cultivates parallel loyalty structures in the police and military, to conquer power either through democratic or military means; subsequently abolishes electoral procedures to guarantee a single party continuity; creates a new social contract with the domestic working class, on the one hand ushering in a higher standard of living than what could be achieved under liberal capitalism and on the other hand protecting the capitalists with a new social peace; and eliminates the internal enemies whom it had blamed for the destabilization of the prior regime.
\n
Sure. The United States is on this trajectory, and it can only be stopped from reaching its destination by the full-hearted efforts of all. The fact that we have not yet arrived, that it may look slightly different here and now, or that many proto-fascist parties in Europe did not reach their goal, does not make the situation less serious; it rather means that people struggle every day against oppression of all kinds, fascist or no, and too often pay the price for that struggle. We fight the tide, but people have fought before; nothing is guaranteed.
\n\nAs McKenzie Wark recently said: “It’s curious that the political categories of liberal, conservative and so forth are treated as trans-historical, but you are not supposed to use the category of fascism outside of a specific historical context… But maybe we should treat it not as the exception but the norm. What needs explaining is not fascism but its absence.” During Hitler’s rise to power, many calmed themselves by saying that he would not really murder Jews, that it was all election rhetoric. Today, as the CNN scroll asks “Are Jews people?” and neo-fascists salute Trump with the sieg heil mere blocks from the White House, let us not fall into a similar error.
\n\nFascism and white supremacy are not mutually exclusive concepts; in fact, the scholar Hannah Arendt, as well as the fascists Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco, attribute the rise of fascism to European “imperial adventures” in Africa. Such murderous adventures provided practical experience, forms of governance, and newly vicious tactics (some of the first people gassed to death were Rif people rebelling against Spanish colonizers) to those who went on to be fascists. Achille Mbembe and others have shown how the creation of whiteness and the state of exception through American and European slavery foreground fascism on a more subtle and pervasive level. I am not certain if fascism would be possible without white supremacy; but white supremacy thrives under other systems of government, and I believe anarchy is likely the only thing that can fully eradicate it. What is clear is that white supremacy and fascism are as much bosom friends as Trump and Steve Bannon.
\n\nThe comrade to whom I am responding makes a mistake in assuming that people’s responses are intellectually founded: “If economics were the bottom line, white Americans would feel more secure, not less secure, after Obama’s presidency.” People read facts (though less often, given the growing U.S. reliance on fake Facebook news and Twitter feeds)… but they believe stories. The story Trump, Breitbart, and a million other online and community influencers are feeding white people and aficionados of “traditional values” speaks to deeper and older impulses that feel like truth. White mythology (and, Jasbir Puar reminds us, whiteness is utterly contingent and can be extended in exchange for loyalty) is founded in the fear of the Other; a lack of empathy or even familiarity with the cultures and lives of black and brown people; a suspicion that white is not right, and that the privileged will someday pay in hell for the goods they have laid up on earth; and a boiling resentment and sense of disenfranchisement bred by that suspicion. Whiteness—again, a social condition—is a sickness; and white people in America are burning with its fever. Fascism seems to many like the solution to their problems, imagined though they may be.
\n\nI am not writing to propose a new framework that we should all use to define our conditions of struggle. There are endless history books describing life before and under fascism, and we ought to all familiarize ourselves with them, and form our own judgments. Rather, I propose that we reject the mystification of endlessly re-categorizing our enemies. Fascists and anarchists are historic enemies, and we can learn lessons from our previous mistakes and betrayals to help us in the fight today. Racist attacks are on the rise in the United States; trolls terrorize people on Twitter along lines of race, gender, gendered expectations, and perceived “Jewishness”; politicians, emboldened by the political climate, are already attempting to ban us from bathrooms and from getting abortions. None of this is new, but the tone has changed. Acting as though social democracy is infallible and that our “gentle parent,” whose rule we have been rebelling against a long time, will always step in to save us from our more terrifying intimate enemy, contravenes not only what we know from the histories of fascism in Spain, Italy, Germany, and Argentina, but from our own experiences as anarchists.
\n\nThe good news is that this election both signals and generates a huge crisis of faith in the U.S. government: if we anarchists can provide a coherent and present alternative, one of peace, camaraderie, and joy in struggle, we may have more opportunity for realizing a fully different society than we ever did in more comfortable times. The state is our enemy, no matter the season… but the different aspects it wears should inform our tactics. As always, the project is not defeating a particular enemy or ensuring our own personal comfort, but total freedom and real possibilities for all. I join the comrade in calling for solidarity between the oppressed in our struggles; I caution that we do not adopt the Manichaean perspective of our enemy in so doing. Names are useful; categories are not real; we are not at war any more than we ever have been. The struggle continues as always, in our hearts, communities, and world.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/11/14/welcome-to-athens-obama", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/11/14/welcome-to-athens-obama", "title": "Welcome to Athens, Obama", "summary": "", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/11/14/1b-3.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/11/14/1b-3.jpg", "date_published": "2016-11-14T19:42:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:29Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "A joint statement published on the occasion of Obama’s visit to Athens, Greece by Void Network and the CrimethInc. ex-Workers’ Collective. To respond to the inauguration of Donald Trump, click here.
\n\nToday, November 14, outgoing US President Barack Obama sets out for Greece. Speaking from both the United States and Greece, we call on every partisan of freedom to participate in the night demonstration called for Athens on November 15.
\n\nIt is symbolic that Obama is visiting Greece on his farewell tour. The Balkans have served as a laboratory for neoliberalism and US military interventions since the late 20th century; Greece in particular has undergone a global experiment of crisis management and repression. As war draws closer and closer—Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Turkey—the Balkans are expected to serve Europe and the US as a buffer zone while suffering the same abuse as the periphery.
\n\nNow that the pipe dream of universal economic growth has come to an end, giving way to a vista of chaos and climate catastrophe, we can see that the new order will only be stabilized by the empty promises of politicians and the brute force of the police and military. In a word, by the ballot and the bullet. The buffer zone is getting smaller and smaller, and the United States is not exempt—the same National Guard sent to Iraq have already been deployed in Baltimore. Now is the time to fight, before the situation grows any worse.
\n\nIn expressing shock and outrage about the election of Donald Trump, many on the Left have obscured the systemic nature of the problem. By taking action against the Democratic favorite of the US, we show that our opposition is not directed against any particular representative, but against the state and capitalism themselves. In the pleas Clinton and Obama have made for a “peaceful transition of power” to a man they declared unfit to rule, we see the collusion of liberals who would rather preserve the apparatus of the state even in the hands of outright fascists than permit real freedom to emerge.
\n\nIndeed, as the candidate of supposed “Hope” and “Change,” Obama not only preserved the structures of power, but persuaded many of the people who are most targeted by the system to invest more faith and resources in those structures—which will now be used to repress them more aggressively than ever. Just as we reject the false solutions of Syriza, we understand that Obama’s reputation as a “good” politician has only made him more dangerous to those he purports to protect. Those who promise a more “inclusive” neoliberalism today pave the way for tomorrow’s fascism.
\n\nObama has deported two and a half million people, as many as all the US Presidents of the 20th century combined—turning Mexico and Central America into a detention center for the population capitalism has no use for. Just as we act in solidarity with those targeted by the so-called “migrant crisis,” a crisis imposed by the borders and wars that are endemic to capitalism, we demonstrate against Obama’s visit in solidarity with all the people of Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and the world. If we don’t tear down the borders that fence other people out today, who will help us tear down the borders that fence us out tomorrow?
\n\nAs the first Black President, Obama has served the agenda of those who want to convey the impression that white supremacy is a thing of the past. Yet under his reign, a million Black people have languished in prison while police have murdered Black people in the streets with impunity on a daily basis. Over the past months, we have seen indigenous warriors attacked by the same police for defending the water that gives life to their communities. Inspired by the courageous fighters of Ferguson, Baltimore, Oakland, and Standing Rock, we aim to strike blows against racism, prisons, and police everywhere.
\n\nThese struggles will not be concluded when Obama leaves Greece, nor when he exits office. As President of the most hegemonic state power of our era, Obama arguably represents the interlaced and mutually reinforcing hierarchies that divide humanity—property, citizenship, gender roles, and every other form of authority—yet he himself is merely a cog in a much greater machine. When he is replaced this coming January, the economic interests that have pulled the strings in his administration will move on to utilizing Donald Trump to the same ends, albeit via a more overtly brutal strategy suitable to these times.
\n\nWe, too, must update our strategies. Today, fewer and fewer people retain the illusion that voting, party politics, or the state could solve the problems we face. The situation is the same the world over. When we take action against politicians, we must not understand ourselves as engaging in mere protest. We are not simply seeking to obtain leverage by militant means. We are developing forms of self-defense in order to open up liberated spaces in which we can experiment with ways to meet our own needs, directly, rather than being experimented upon.
\n\nWe have to undertake immediate initiatives to create communities of struggle everywhere—opening spaces and social centers, organizing discussions and demonstrations, liberating public spaces, breaking through apathy and isolation, producing free food, shelter, and culture for all. We have to think freedom and enact emancipation.
\n\nThe blows we strike in Greece will resonate across the world, from all the other peripheries to the very heart of the United States. Together, let’s become ungovernable.
\n\nFor international coordination and solidarity in the struggle against global capitalism and the state
\n\nFor anarchy, the perpetual reinvention of our relations in pursuit of freedom
\n\nFor freedom, the collective capacity to fulfill our tremendous potential on our own terms
\n\nJointly composed and signed\n— CrimethInc. ex-Workers’ Collective Void Network [Theory, Outopia, Empathy, Ephemeral Arts]
\n\nΚοινή δημόσια ανακοίνωση που δημοσιεύθηκε με την ευκαιρία της επίσκεψης του Μπάρακ Ομπάμα στην Ελλάδα από το ΚΕΝΟ ΔΙΚΤΥΟ (Αθήνα) και την “Συλλογικότητα πρώην- Εργαζομένων” CrimethInc. (ΗΠΑ)
\n\nΣήμερα 14 Νοεμβρίου, ο απερχόμενος πρόεδρος των ΗΠΑ Μπαράκ Ομπάμα φτάνει στην Ελλάδα. Οι συλλογικότητες μας καλούν τόσο από τις Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες όσο και από την Ελλάδα κάθε άνθρωπο που αγωνίζεται για την ελευθερία να συμμετάσχει στη διαδήλωση το βράδυ της Τρίτης 15 Νοεμβρίου 2016 στους δρόμους της Αθήνας με έναρξη το Πολυτεχνείο στις 5.30 μ.μ.μ.
\n\nΤο γεγονός ότι ο Μπάρακ Ομπάμα επισκέπτεται την Ελλάδα στην αποχαιρετιστήρια περιοδεία του αποκτά έντονους συμβολισμούς. Τα Βαλκάνια έχουν υπηρετήσει ως εργαστήριο πειραμάτων για το νεοφιλελευθερισμό και τις στρατιωτικές επεμβάσεις των ΗΠΑ από τα τέλη του 20ου αιώνα. Η Ελλάδα ειδικότερα έχει υποστεί στις μέρες μας ένα παγκόσμιο πείραμα εφαρμογής μοντέλων διαχείρισης κρίσεων και κοινωνικής καταπίεσης. Καθώς ο πόλεμος πλησιάζει όλο και πιο κοντά, στο Αφγανιστάν, το Ιράκ, τη Συρία, την Ουκρανία και την Τουρκία, τα Βαλκάνια αναμένεται να εξυπηρετήσουν την Ευρώπη και τις ΗΠΑ ως ουδέτερη ζώνη, ενώ θα υπομένουν την ίδια κακοποίηση με όλη την υπόλοιπη περιφέρεια.
\n\nΤώρα που η ψευδαίσθηση της καθολικής οικονομικής ανάπτυξης έφτασε στο τέλος της μπορούμε να δούμε ξεκάθαρα ότι η νέα τάξη πραγμάτων θα σταθεροποιηθεί μόνο με τις κενές υποσχέσεις των πολιτικών και την ωμή βία της αστυνομίας και του στρατού: με τα ψηφοδέλτια και τις σφαίρες. Η ουδέτερη ζώνη γίνεται όλο και μικρότερη, και οι Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες δεν εξαιρούνται από αυτή την διαδικασία-η ίδια Εθνοφρουρά που περιπολεί απόψε στο Ιράκ έχει ήδη παραταχθεί και στους δρόμους της Βαλτιμόρης. Τώρα είναι η ώρα να πολεμήσουμε, πριν η κατάσταση γίνεται χειρότερη.
\n\nΕκφράζοντας σοκ και οργή για την εκλογή του Donald Trump, πολλοί στην Αριστερά έχουν αποκρύψει τη συστημική φύση του προβλήματος. Με την ανάληψη δράσης ενάντια στον Μπαράκ Ομπάμα, τον αγαπημένο πρόεδρο των Δημοκρατικών στις ΗΠΑ, δείχνουμε ότι η αντίθεσή μας δεν στρέφεται εναντίον κάποιου συγκεκριμένου εκπρόσωπου, αλλά εναντίον του κράτους και του ίδιου του καπιταλισμού. Στους πρόσφατους μετεκλογικούς λόγους τους, η Χιλαρι Κλίντον και ο Ομπάμα μίλησαν για μια “ειρηνική μετάβαση της εξουσίας» σε έναν άνθρωπο που έχουν οι ίδιοι χαρακτηρίσει ως ακατάλληλο να κυβερνήσει, αποκαλύπτοντας τη σύμπραξη των φιλελεύθερων, που με σκοπό να διατηρήσουν τη λειτουργία του κράτους είναι πρόθυμοι να παραδώσουν την εξουσία ακόμη και στα χέρια των απροκάλυπτων φασιστών από το να αποδεχθούν την ανάδυση της πραγματικής ελευθερίας.
\n\nΠράγματι, ως υποψήφιος της δήθεν “Ελπίδας” και της “Αλλαγής”, ο Ομπάμα όχι μόνο διέσωσε τις δομές εξουσίας, αλλά και έπεισε πάρα πολλούς ανθρώπους που υπομένουν την πιο στοχευμένη επίθεση από το σύστημα να επενδύσουν περισσότερη ακόμα πίστη και πόρους σε αυτές τις δομές- οι οποίες τώρα θα χρησιμοποιηθούν για να τους καταπιέσουν πιο επιθετικά από ποτέ. Με τον ίδιο τρόπο με τον οποίο έχουμε απορρίψει τις ψεύτικες λύσεις του ΣΥΡΙΖΑ, καταλαβαίνουμε ότι η φήμη του Ομπάμα ως “καλός” πολιτικός τον κάνει ακόμα πιο επικίνδυνο για αυτούς που φιλοδοξεί να προστατεύσει. Εκείνοι που υπόσχονται έναν νεοφιλελευθερισμό «χωρίς αποκλεισμούς» σήμερα, είναι αυτοί που ανοίγουν τον δρόμο για τον αυριανό φασισμό.
\n\nΟ Ομπάμα έχει απελάσει δυόμιση εκατομμύρια ανθρώπους, ίσο αριθμό με όσους έχουν απελάσει όλοι μαζί οι Πρόεδροι των ΗΠΑ ολόκληρο τον 20ο αιώνα, μετατρέποντας το Μεξικό και την Κεντρική Αμερική σε ένα απέραντο κέντρο κράτησης για τους πληθυσμούς που για τον καπιταλισμό δεν έχουν καμία χρήση. Ακριβώς όπως δρουμε σε αλληλεγγύη με εκείνους που στοχεύονται από τη λεγόμενη “προσφυγική κρίση”, μια κρίση που επιβάλλεται από την ύπαρξη των συνόρων και των πολέμων που είναι ενδημικοί στον καπιταλισμό, δρούμε εναντίον Ομπάμα σε αλληλεγγύη με όλους τους ανθρώπους του Μεξικού, της Νικαράγουας, της Ονδούρας, του Ελ Σαλβαδόρ και όλου του κόσμου. Αν δεν γκρεμίσουμε μαζί τα σύνορα που φυλακίζουν άλλους ανθρώπους σήμερα, ποίοι θα ενωθούν μαζί μας για να γκρεμίσουμε αύριο τα σύνορα και τους φράχτες που κρατάνε εμάς φυλακισμένους;
\n\nΩς ο πρώτος μαύρος πρόεδρος, ο Ομπάμα έχει υπηρετήσει την ατζέντα όσων θέλουν να δοθεί η εντύπωση ότι η ρατσιστική “λευκή υπεροχή” είναι ένα πράγμα του παρελθόντος. Ωστόσο, στο πλαίσιο της βασιλείας του, ένα εκατομμύριο μαύροι λιώνουν στις φυλακές, ενώ η αστυνομία δολοφονούσε ατιμώρητη έναν μαύρο στους δρόμους των Η.Π.Α. κάθε μέρα. Κατά τη διάρκεια των τελευταίων μηνών, έχουμε δει πολεμιστές αμερικανικών ιθαγενικών πληθυσμών να δέχονται επιθέσεις από την ίδια αστυνομία για την υπεράσπιση του νερού που δίνει ζωή στις κοινότητές τους. Εμπνευσμένοι από τους θαρραλέους μαχητές και τις μαχήτριες του Φέργκιουσον, της Βαλτιμόρης, του Oakland, και του Standing Rock, έχουμε ως στόχο να καταφέρουμε και εμείς ισχυρά χτυπήματα κατά του ρατσισμού, των φυλακών και της αστυνομίας παντού.
\n\nΦυσικά αυτοί οι αγώνες δεν θα ολοκληρωθούν όταν ο Ομπάμα φύγει από την Ελλάδα, ούτε όταν θα εγκαταλείψει το προεδρικό μέγαρο. Ως Πρόεδρος της πιο ηγεμονικής κρατικής εξουσίας της εποχής μας, ο Ομπάμα προσωποποιεί όλες τις διαπλεκόμενες και αμοιβαία ενισχυόμενες ιεραρχίες που διαχωρίζουν την ανθρωπότητα -την ιδιοκτησία, την ιθαγένεια, τους ρόλους των δύο φύλων, καθώς και κάθε άλλη μορφή εξουσίας- και όμως, ακόμη και ο ίδιος, δεν είναι τίποτα άλλο πάρα ένα γρανάζι σε μια πολύ μεγαλύτερη μηχανή. Όταν αντικατασταθεί τον ερχόμενο Ιανουάριο, τα οικονομικά συμφέροντα που κρατούσαν τα νήματα της διακυβέρνησης του και καθόριζαν τις επιλογές του θα προχωρήσουν αξιοποιώντας τον Donald Trump με τους ίδιους βασικούς στόχους, έστω και μέσω μιας πιο απροκάλυπτα βίαιης στρατηγικής, κατάλληλης για αυτούς τους χρόνους που μας περιμένουν.
\n\nΑπό μεριάς μας και εμείς επίσης, πρέπει να ανανεώσουμε τις στρατηγικές μας. Σήμερα, όλο και λιγότεροι άνθρωποι διατηρούν την ψευδαίσθηση ότι οι εκλογές, το κόμμα, ή το κράτος θα μπορούσαν να λύσουν τα προβλήματα που αντιμετωπίζουμε. Όταν παίρνουμε μέτρα εναντίον πολιτικών σαν τον Ομπάμα, δεν πρέπει να κατανοούμε τους εαυτούς μας ως συμμέτοχους σε μια απλή διαμαρτυρία. Δεν επιδιώκουμε απλά να αποκτήσουμε δύναμη με μαχητικά μέσα. Αναπτύσσουμε μορφές αυτο-άμυνας, προκειμένου να δημιουργήσουμε απελευθερωμένους χώρους στους οποίους μπορούμε να πειραματιστούμε με τους δικούς μας τρόπους για να καλύψουμε τις δικές μας ανάγκες, άμεσα, αντί άλλοι να υποβάλλουν τις ζωές μας σε πειράματα.
\n\nΝΑ ΠΑΡΟΥΜΕ ΤΗΝ ΜΟΙΡΑ ΜΑΣ ΣΤΑ ΧΕΡΙΑ ΜΑΣ. Να πάρουμε άμεσα πρωτοβουλίες, να δημιουργήσουμε κοινότητες αγώνα παντού, να ανοίξουμε χώρους, στέκια, καταλήψεις, σημεία συνάντησης, να καταλάβουμε και να απελευθερώσουμε τον δημόσιο χώρο, να ανοίξουμε συζητήσεις, να οργανώσουμε διαδηλώσεις, να παράγουμε ελεύθερη τροφή, στέγη και κουλτούρα για όλους, σκέψη χειραφέτησης και δράσεις απελευθέρωσης, να συμμετάσχουμε στις κοινωνικές δομές του κινήματος, να σπάσουμε την απάθεια και την ιδιώτευση.
\n\nΤα χτυπήματα που θα καταφέρουμε εδώ στην Ελλάδα θα ακουστούν σε όλο τον κόσμο, από τις υπόλοιπες περιφέρειες έως την καρδιά των Ηνωμένων Πολιτειών.
\n\nΜαζί, από όλες τις πλευρές του πλανήτη, να γίνουμε ακυβέρνητοι.
\n\nΓια τον διεθνή συντονισμό και την παγκόσμια Αλληλεγγύη στον αγώνα ενάντια στο κράτος και τον παγκόσμιο καπιταλισμό.
\n\nΓια την Αναρχία, την αέναη επανεφεύρεση των σχέσεών μας με σκοπό την άσκηση της ελευθερίας
\n\nΓια την Ελευθερία, τη συλλογική ικανότητα να εκπληρώσουμε τις τεράστιες δυνατότητές μας με τους δικούς μας όρους
\n\n— Κοινή διεθνής ανακοίνωση Κενό Δίκτυο [Θεωρία, Ουτοπία, Συναίσθηση, Εφήμερες Τέχνες] / Αθήνα και Crimethinc ex-Workers’ Collective (USA)
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/08/24/49-september-9th-national-prison-strike", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/08/24/49-september-9th-national-prison-strike", "title": " #49: September 9th National Prison Strike", "summary": "", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/08/24/1b.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/08/24/1b.jpg", "date_published": "2016-08-24T18:24:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:29Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "#49: September 9th National Prison Strike — The Ex-Worker is back! And just in time, because a potentially historic national prisoner strike is just around the corner. In our 49th episode, we discuss the upcoming September 9th strike to end prison slavery, with an interview with the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee. You’ll also hear a review of Dan Berger’s book Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era; an interview with an anarchist from the UK about the Brexit vote; listener feedback on Spanish revolutionary militias, Comintern, and parallels with Rojava; updates on Kara Wild, a trans anarchist incarcerated in Paris; a letter from trans anarchist prisoner Jennifer Gann; plus news, prisoner birthdays, event announcements, and plenty more.
\n\nYou can download this and all of our previous episodes online. You can also subscribe in iTunes here or just add the feed URL to your podcast player of choice. Rate us on iTunes and let us know what you think, or send us an email to podcast@crimethinc.com. You can also call us 24 hours a day at 202–59-NOWRK, that is, 202–596–6975.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/06/23/the-democracy-of-the-reaction-1848-2011", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/06/23/the-democracy-of-the-reaction-1848-2011", "title": "The Democracy of the Reaction, 1848-2011", "summary": "", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/06/23/1b.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/06/23/1b.jpg", "date_published": "2016-06-23T17:47:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:29Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "What harm could possibly come of using the discourse of democracy to describe the object of our movements for liberation? We can answer this question with a fable drawn from history: the story of the uprising that took place in Paris in June 1848.
\n\nIn addition, to commemorate the June 1848 uprising, 168 years ago this week, we’ve prepared a biography of one of its many colorful participants, including the first translation into English of the only surviving account from the proletarian side of the barricades.
\n\nDavid Graeber has drawn parallels between the revolutions of 1848 and the uprisings of 2011. None of the revolutionary movements of 1848 managed to hold power for more than a couple years. Yet the basic goals that they fought for were widely achieved within a few decades: everywhere, monarchies were giving way to constitutional democracies, with universal suffrage and social safety nets on the way. The argument by analogy is that, though the uprisings that peaked in 2011 were not immediately successful, they will have a long-term impact on how we think about politics. The struggles for state democracy in the Middle East and Southeast Asia and the experiences of directly democratic movements in Europe and the US created a situation in which people around the world are bound to demand more democracy in their governments and their lives.
\n\nPerhaps. But this framework doesn’t offer us any tools with which to understand how the reactionary forces that suffered setbacks in 1848 and 2011 could reconfigure themselves under democratic banners. In Egypt, after the revolution of 2011, the idea of democratic government re-legitimized the apparatus of state repression long enough for the military to return to power. In Europe and the US, the momentum of directly democratic grassroots movements was channeled into political parties like Syriza and Podemos and the doomed candidacy of Bernie Sanders.
\n\nIn fact, what happened in Egypt between 2011 and 2014 is a lot like what happened in France between 1848 and 1851. A wide-ranging coalition of different groups overthrew a dictator; the most conservative elements in the coalition won the elections; the resulting popular uprisings were repressed in the name of protecting the fledgling democracy; and in the end, a new despot came to power through a combination of election and coup. The reemergence of the Deep State in France in June 1848 and in Egypt in 2013 underscores why anarchists have argued ever since 1848 that the only sure way to hold on to revolutionary gains is to delegitimize and disarticulate the state. The problem with democratic discourse is that, because the vast majority of democratic models are state-based, it offers cover to anyone who wants to relegitimize state power. Indeed, even those who explicitly oppose the state can end up reinforcing it—whether by joining the government, as anarchists from the CNT did during the Spanish Civil War, or more obliquely, by legitimizing frameworks and objectives that ultimately enable partisans of the state to present themselves as the ones with the most effective strategy, as anarchists like Cindy Milstein and David Graeber risk doing.
\n\nTo understand how this works, let’s go back to 1848.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/06/23/2b.jpg\")
The barricades of June 1848.
\nIn February 1848, an uprising in Paris toppled the king; revolt radiated throughout Europe along with the news of the French revolution, spreading faster than any wave of unrest in the digital age. The transformation of France into a Republic occasioned much rejoicing, but there was little agreement as to what a Republic was. Just as anarchists, socialists, liberals, neoconservatives, and fascists rub shoulders under the banner of democracy today, in 1848 a vast range of people identified with the ideal of the Republic, confining themselves to debates about what the true nature of the Republic might be. Even Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, already a self-professed anarchist, called himself a Republican, and his explicit opposition to authority didn’t stop him from serving in the National Assembly alongside conservatives like Adolphe Thiers—the statesman who later butchered the Paris Commune in the name of the Republic.
\n\nIndeed, universal manhood suffrage, long sought by radicals, brought a predominantly reactionary government to power. Former monarchists and aristocrats reinvented themselves as Republicans and set out use their superior resources to game the system. All this illustrates why, once a goal is achieved, it’s best to dispense with the old rhetoric in favor of language that clarifies the new problems that arise. Today, we can’t imagine anarchists or other sincere proponents of freedom laying claim to the banner of the Republic, though many still present themselves as the champions of real democracy.
\n\nIn June 1848, four months after the revolution, the newly elected government of the Republic rescinded the few steps it had taken to address the plight of the poor—and the workers who had risen up in February once again barricaded the streets of Paris and called for revolution. From the perspective of the good Republicans, this was unthinkable: they had finally achieved a democratic government, so anyone who revolted against it was an enemy of democracy. This time, the workers found no allies among middle-class Republicans. They were on their own.
\n\nVictor Hugo, elected to the National Assembly alongside Proudhon and Thiers, considered it his civic duty as a democrat and Republican to accompany the army as it stormed the city and gunned down the rebels. The reactionaries who had not been able to vanquish the workers in the name of the monarchy now slaughtered them in the name of the Republic, preserving the social order that had caused the revolution in the first place. Thousands were butchered in a three-day hail of lead. Afterward, many shops could not reopen because all the employees had been killed.
\n\nShortly thereafter, Napoleon’s nephew was elected President of the Republic. At the end of his term, he organized a coup d’etat to establish himself as Emperor, bringing the brief reign of democracy to an end. This time, Victor Hugo implored the workers of Paris to build barricades and rise against the usurper, but they turned him a deaf ear. Why should they risk their lives to preserve the authority of the Republicans who had massacred them last time they rose against their oppressors?
\n\nNow that the Reaction had no more use for the politicians who had paved the way for it, they too were herded into prison and exile. Their elections and patriotism had served to maintain the legitimacy of the government just long enough for a shrewder tyrant to take the helm. Urging the poor to break the law in the name of the Constitution, Victor Hugo and his comrades showed the contradictions inherent in their lukewarm revolutionism.
\n\nWith the novels he published from exile, Hugo earned worldwide acclaim for putting words in the mouths of the same poor people whose slaughter he had overseen. He wrote about the events of June 1848 in his memoirs, bewailing “on one side the despair of the people, on the other the despair of society,” sidestepping his role in the killings he described with such pathos. In Les Miserables, he struggled to make sense of how the people who had made the revolution could take up arms against its legitimately elected representatives:
\n\n\n\n\n“It sometimes happens that, even contrary to principles, even contrary to liberty, equality, and fraternity, even contrary to the universal vote, even contrary to the government, by all for all, from the depths of its anguish, of its discouragements and its destitutions, of its fevers, of its distresses, of its miasmas, of its ignorances, of its darkness, that great and despairing body, the rabble, protests against, and that the populace wages battle against, the people.
\n\n“It was necessary to combat it, and this was a duty, for it attacked the republic. But what was June, 1848, at bottom? A revolt of the people against itself… It attacked in the name of the revolution—what? The revolution. It—that barricade, chance, hazard, disorder, terror, misunderstanding, the unknown—faced the Constituent Assembly, the sovereignty of the people, universal suffrage, the nation, the Republic.”
\n
In short, Victor Hugo sided with society against the people who comprise it; with sovereignty against liberty; with humanity against human beings. In the name of democracy and the republic, he hoodwinked himself into doing his part to preserve class society at the barrel of a gun. He wasn’t alone in this: Proudhon and nearly all the well-known socialists chose the government’s side of the barricades.
\n\nAt the time, republican democracy was new enough to Europe that few could foresee how it might advance a reactionary agenda. The same is true of direct democracy today: it has occurred to very few people that a more participatory digital democracy might buttress the legitimacy of police and prisons. Graeber’s prediction—that the democratic aims of the movements defeated in 2011 will nonetheless be achieved in the years ahead—might be fulfilled without achieving any significant gains towards liberation, just as the agendas of the revolutions of 1848 were implemented in a repressive way by politicians like Adolphe Thiers who slaughtered the original revolutionaries in the process. The French Republic finally triumphed in 1871, with the massacre of tens of thousands of Communards; like the workers of June 1848, the generations of anarchists and communists that came after 1871 had to fight against the republican government without the assistance of those who had opposed the monarchy and the emperor. Contrary to Graeber’s optimism, the aspirations of 1848 were realized in letter but not in spirit—as too might the aspirations of 2011 be, unless we develop a critique of the democracy of the reaction.
\n\nHow can we be sure not to repeat the tragedy of June 1848? First, we should never let a shift in the political sphere substitute for social and economic self-determination. Likewise, we should never become so enamored of a particular decision-making method—be it parliamentary democracy or consensus-run assemblies—that we can be induced to countenance injustice in its name. In every Occupy encampment in which middle-class participants used the general assembly to lord it over homeless occupants of the encampment, we can recognize an echo of June 1848. Finally, above all, we should always be thinking beyond our own victories, developing critical tools with which to tackle the problems that will arise afterwards—fighting the next war, not the last one.
\n\nTo commemorate the uprising of June 1848, we’ve prepared a biography of one of its many colorful participants, Emmanuel Barthélemy. Vilified by Victor Hugo in the same chapter of Les Miserables quoted above, Barthélemy risked his life on the barricades, escaped from prison, and later fought a duel with a Republican who served on the National Assembly. Among other historical materials, we’ve tracked down and translated Barthélemy’s report on his role in the uprising. Although it is practically the only surviving account from the proletarian side of the barricades, this is the first time it has appeared in English.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/06/23/3a.jpg\")
\nDespite his uneven track record, Proudhon’s critical reflections on democracy, published at the outset of the 1848 revolution, are also of interest. For more on the anarchist critique of democracy, consult our series on the subject.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/05/26/democracy-the-patriotic-temptation", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/05/26/democracy-the-patriotic-temptation", "title": "Democracy: The Patriotic Temptation : Uri Gordon on the Difference between Anarchy and Democracy", "summary": "", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/26/1b-4.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/26/1b-4.jpg", "date_published": "2016-05-26T18:07:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:29Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "In this installment in our series exploring the anarchist critique of democracy, guest author Uri Gordon discusses the attractions and risks of democratic discourse.
\n\nLike most political words, democracy is an “essentially contested” concept—its meaning is itself a political battleground. What political ideologies do, as mass patterns of political expression, is to “de-contest” or fix the meaning of such concepts and place them in particular relationships. The term “equality,” for example, can mean equal access to advantage (liberalism), equal responsibility to the national community (fascism), or equal power in a classless society (anarchism). On such a reading, there is no way objectively to determine the meaning of such concepts—all that exists are distinct usages, each of them regularly grouped with other concepts in one or another ideological formation.
\n\nI would therefore like to suspend the discussion of the appropriate conceptual understanding of democracy, and instead ask about the strategic choice to employ the term. Is it worthwhile for anarchists to de-contest “democracy” in ways that point towards statelessness and non-domination? Two arguments follow. The first is that anarchist invocations of democracy are a relatively new and distinctly American phenomenon. The second is that the invocation is problematic, because its rhetorical structure and audience targeting almost inevitably end up appealing to patriotic sentiments and national origin myths.
\n\nHistorically, democracy was not a word that anarchists tended to use in reference to their own visions or practices. A survey of the writings of the prominent anarchist activists and theorists of the 19th and early 20th century reveals that, on the rare occasions on which they even employed the term, it was used in its conventional, statist sense to refer to actually-existing democratic institutions and entitlements within the bourgeois state. Democracy meant representative government, as opposed to monarchy or oligarchy.
\n\nProudhon clearly viewed democracy in these terms. In chapter 1 of What is Property he wrote:
\n\n\n\n\nThe nation, so long a victim of monarchical selfishness, thought to deliver itself for ever by declaring that it alone was sovereign. But what was monarchy? The sovereignty of one man. What is democracy? The sovereignty of the nation, or, rather, of the national majority… in reality there is no revolution in the government, since the principle remains the same. Now, we have the proof to-day that, with the most perfect democracy, we cannot be free.
\n
The issue for Proudhon is sovereignty as such, and not the question of who or what legitimates it. In chapter 7 of The Philosophy of Poverty he also objects to any “system of authority, whatever its origin, monarchical or democratic” (Proudhon 1847). At no point does Proudhon distinguish between “real” and “so-called” democracy; the term simply stands for government by representatives.
\n\nThis approach persists through the anarchist tradition. Bakunin in Statism and Anarchy (1873:178) attacks Marxists who “by popular government… mean government of the people by a small number of representatives elected by the people… a lie behind which the despotism of a ruling minority is concealed, a lie all the more dangerous in that it represents itself as the expression of a sham popular will.” Alexander Berkman sounded a similar critique in the Mother Earth Bulletin of October 1917:
\n\n\n\n\nThe democratic authority of majority rule is the last pillar of tyranny. The last, but the strongest… the despotism that is invisible because not personified, shears Samson of his passion and leaves him will-less. Woe to the people where the citizen is a sovereign whose power is in the hands of his masters! It is a nation of willing slaves.
\n
Finally, Malatesta (1924) also treats “democracy” only in terms of a system of government:
\n\n\n\n\nEven in the most democratic of democracies it is always a small minority that rules and imposes its will and interests by force… Therefore, those who really want ‘government of the people’ in the sense that each can assert his or her own will, ideas and needs, must ensure that no one, majority or minority, can rule over others; in other words, they must abolish government, meaning any coercive organisation, and replace it with the free organisation of those with common interests and aims.
\n
In all of these cases, there is no attempt to align anarchism with democracy, or to construe the latter on any terms other than those of conventional representative institutions. The association between anarchism and democracy makes its appearance only around the 1980s, through the writings of Murray Bookchin.
\n\nBookchin’s disavowal of anarchism towards the end of his life is irrelevant here, since his statements regarding democracy had remained consistent since the late 70s, when they were couched in terms of a strategy recommended to anarchists. Echoing Martin Buber’s critique of the expansion of the “political principle” of top-down power and centralised authority at the expense of the “social principle” of horizontal and spontaneous relationships (Buber 1957), Bookchin sees the only promising avenue for resistance in “a recovery of community, autonomy, relative self-sufficiency, self reliance, and direct democracy” on the local level, fostering “social institutions that by their very logic, stand in sharp opposition to increasingly all pervasive political institutions” (Bookchin 1980). This vision is clearly one of an anarchistic localism, based on “free popular assemblies,” “collectivization of resources,” and strictly mandated delegation of administrative coordinators. The question remains, however: should this arrangement be promoted with the language of democracy—albeit direct and participatory? What is the appeal of such language in the first place?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/26/2b-2.jpg\")
\nEssentially, the association of anarchism with democracy is a two-pronged rhetorical maneuver intended to increase the appeal of anarchism for mainstream publics. The first component of the maneuver is to latch onto the existing positive connotations that democracy carries in established political language. Instead of the negative (and false) image of anarchism as mindless and chaotic, a positive image is fostered by riding on the coattails of “democracy” as a widely-endorsed term in the mass media, educational system, and everyday speech. The appeal here is not to any specific set of institutions or decision-making procedures, but to the association of democracy with freedom, equality, and solidarity—to the sentiments that go to work when democracy is placed in binary opposition to dictatorship, and celebrated as what distinguishes the “free countries” of the West from other regimes.
\n\nYet the second component of the maneuver is subversive: it seeks to portray current capitalist societies as not, in fact, democratic, since they alienate decision-making power from the people and place it in the hands of elites. This amounts to an argument that the institutions and procedures that mainstream audiences associate with democracy—government by representatives—are not in fact democratic, or at least a very pale and limited fulfilment of the values they are said to embody. True democracy, in this account, can only be local, direct, participatory, and deliberative, and is ultimately achievable only in a stateless and classless society. The rhetorical aim of the maneuver as a whole is to generate in the audience a sense of indignation at having been deceived: while the emotional attachment to “democracy” is confirmed, the belief that it actually exists is denied.
\n\nNow there are two problems with this maneuver, one conceptual and one more substantive. The conceptual problem is that it introduces a truly idiosyncratic notion of democracy, so ambitious as to disqualify almost all political experiences that fall under the common understanding of the term—including all electoral systems in which representatives do not have a strict mandate and are not immediately recallable. By claiming that current “democratic” regimes are in fact not democratic at all and that the only democracy worthy of the name is actually some version of an anarchist society, anarchists are asking people to reconfigure their understanding of democracy in a rather extreme way. While it is possible to maintain this new usage with logical coherence, it is nevertheless so rarefied and contrary to the common usage that its potential as a pivot for mainstream opinion is highly questionable.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/26/3b-2.jpg\")
\nThe second problem is graver. While the association with democracy may seek to appeal only to its egalitarian and libertarian connotations, it also entangles anarchism with the patriotic nature of the pride in democracy which it seeks to subvert. The appeal is not simply to an abstract design for participatory institutions, but to participatory institutions recovered from the American revolutionary tradition. Bookchin (1985) is quite explicit about this, when he calls on anarchists to “start speaking in the vocabulary of the democratic revolutions” while unearthing and enlarging their libertarian content:
\n\n\n\n\nThat [American] bourgeois past has libertarian features about it: the town meetings of New England. Municipal and local control, the American mythology that the less government the better, the American belief in independence and individualism. All these things are antithetical to a cybernetic economy, a highly centralized corporative economy and a highly centralized political system… I’m for democratizing the republic and radicalizing the democracy, and doing that on the grass roots level: that will involve establishing libertarian institutions which are totally consistent with the American tradition. We can’t go back to the Russian Revolution or the Spanish revolution any more. Those revolutions are alien to people in North America.
\n
Cindy Milstein’s formulation in her article “Democracy is Direct” (Milstein 2000) works directly to fulfill this program by seeking to build on American origin myths:
\n\n\n\n\nGiven that the United States is held up as the pinnacle of democracy, it seems particularly appropriate to hark back to those strains of a radicalized democracy that fought so valiantly and lost so crushingly in the American Revolution. We need to take up that unfinished project… Like all the great modern revolutions, the American Revolution spawned a politics based on face-to-face assemblies confederated within and between cities… Those of us living in the United States have inherited this self-schooling in direct democracy, even if only in vague echoes… deep-seated values that many still hold dear: independence, initiative, liberty, equality. They continue to create a very real tension between grassroots self-governance and top-down representation.
\n
The appeal to the consensus view of the American polity as founded in a popular and democratic revolution, genuinely animated by freedom and equality, is precisely intended to target existing patriotic sentiments, even as it emphasises their subversive consequences. Milstein even invokes Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address when she criticises reformist agendas which “work with a circumscribed and neutralized notion of democracy, where democracy is neither of the people, by the people, nor for the people, but rather, only in the supposed name of the people.” Yet this is a dangerous move, since it relies on a self-limiting critique of the patriotic sentiment itself, and allows the foundation myths to which it appeals to remain untouched by critiques of manufactured collective identity and colonial exclusion. While noting the need not to whitewash the racial, gendered, and other injustices that were part of “the historic event that created this country,” Milstein can only offer an unspecific exhortation to “grapple with the relation between this oppression and the liberatory moments of the American Revolution.”
\n\nYet given that the appeal is targeted at non-anarchist participants, there is little if any guarantee that such a grappling would actually take place. The patriotic sentiment appealed to here is more often than not a component of a larger nationalist narrative, one that hardly partakes of a decolonial critique (which by itself would have many questions about the Western enlightenment roots of notions of citizenship and the public sphere). The celebration of democracy in terms that directly invoke the early days of the American polity may end up reinforcing rather than questioning loyalties to the nation-state that claims, however falsely, to be the carrier of the democratic inheritance of the colonial period. This is especially poignant in the context of the recent wave of mobilization, which displays precisely this mix of quintessentially anarchist-influenced means of organization and action, and distinctly patriotic and nationalist discourses—from the Egyptian revolution’s embrace of the military, through the Jeffersonian sentiments pervading the Occupy movement, and on to the outright nationalism of the Ukrainian revolution.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/26/4b-2.jpg\")
“The recent wave of mobilization, which displays precisely this mix of quintessentially anarchist-influenced means of organization and action, and distinctly patriotic and nationalist discourses.”
\nThere is, indeed, one reason to question this concern—namely, the democratic and nationalist sentiments that have been expressed by movements with which anarchists have good reasons to sense an affinity. The most prominent of these are the struggles of communities in Chiapas linked to the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in southeast Mexico and the revolutionary movement in Rojava or Syrian Kurdistan. Both have not only employed the language of democracy to signify a decentralised and egalitarian form of society, but also an explicit agenda of national liberation. The Kurdish movement has publicly endorsed Bookchin as a source of inspiration. Does this mean that anarchists are wrong to maintain active solidarity with these movements? My answer is “No”—but due to a crucial difference that also vindicates the general argument above. It is not the same thing for stateless minorities in the global South to use the language of democracy and national liberation as it is for citizens of advanced capitalist countries in which national independence is already an accomplished fact. The former do not appeal to patriotic founding myths engendered by an existing nation state, with their associated privileges and injustices, but to the possibility of a different and untested form of radically decentralised and potentially stateless “national liberation.” To be sure, this carries its own risks, but anarchists in the global North are hardly in a position to preach on these matters.
\n\nThus we return to the main point: for anarchists in the USA and Western Europe, at least, the choice to use the language of democracy is based on the desire to mobilize and subvert a form of patriotism that is ultimately establishment-friendly; it risks cementing the nationalist sentiments it seeks to undermine. Anarchists have always had a public image problem. Trying to undo it through the connection to mainstream democratic and nationalist sentiments is not worth this risk.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/26/5b-2.jpg\")
\nIn the latest installment in our series exploring the anarchist critique of democracy, guest author Paul Z. Simons offers us a meditation on revolutionary forms of organization. Drawing on his experiences in Rojava in 2015, he contrasts conventional democratic practices with what he has seen of democratic confederalism and evaluates the federation of communes as a model for North American anarchists. At a time when the ruling order has been discredited but there are very few proposals for how else to shape our lives, Simons suggests some much-needed points of departure.
\n\nLessons from Rojava, Part One:
\n\n\n\n\nDemocracy: “a system of government in which all the people of a state or polity… are involved in making decisions about its affairs, typically by voting to elect representatives to a parliament or similar assembly,” (a:) “government by the people; especially: rule of the majority” (b:) “a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.” —Oxford English Dictionary
\n
I hate democracy. And I hate organizations, especially communes. Yet, I favor the organization of democratic communes.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/19/1b-3.jpg\")
The author with HDP representatives at a Kobanê Day rally in Paris.
\nDemocracy is always about mediation. Whether it separates the subject from decision-making, separates the subject from herself, or functions as an excuse for graft and fraud. Democracy stands in the way of the individual, blocks unmediated communication by imposing the requirement of structure—an outcome, a decision. And when a decision is reached, it is usually arrived at by the most banal and ruthless method ever devised: the vote—the tyranny of the majority.
\n\nAnarchism has had a mixed history of criticism regarding democracy. Étienne de La Boétie in his Discours lays out a first line of inquiry by wondering why it is that people allow themselves to be governed at all—and as he explores the problem, he points out that it seems not to matter whether a tyrant is chosen by force of arms, by inheritance, or by the vote. “For although the means of coming into power differ, still the method of ruling is practically the same; those who are elected act as if they were breaking in bullocks; those who are conquerors make the people their prey; those who are heirs plan to treat them as if they were their natural slaves.” 1 And it might be added that the subject population submits to such abuse without question and little contestation. La Boétie’s treatise is truly prescient; written in (roughly) 1553—a full 250 years before the emergence of the modern nation-state—it contemplates exactly the type of unbridled war, oppression, and terror that democratically elected governments were to unleash on subject populations, and each other.
\n\nPower cannot exist in stasis; it functions as a result of flows between and among institutions and individuals. The monarchs of Europe learned this lesson the hard way during the upheavals of 1848 as they watched their respective regimes disintegrate one after the other. With democracy came the calculation of exchange—one iota of power given to a citizen via the vote—concentrating a vast quantity of power in legislature, executive, and judiciary. It’s unsurprising that political systems began to apply equations of power and exchange at the same time that in the economic realm Capital was introducing similar equations in order to usurp labor-time in trade for survival. Further, such an exchange ties the population all that much closer to the rulers. Vaneigem illustrates the mechanism thus: “Slaves are not willing slaves for long if they are not compensated for their submission by a shred of power: all subjection entails the right to a measure of power, and there is no such thing as power that does not embody a degree of submission.” 2
\n\nIt was Proudhon who had the most varied interaction with democracy, both theoretically and practically. His career included writing and publishing tomes of critical analysis denouncing democracy, running for elected office, serving in the National Assembly during the 1848 Revolution, and finally returning to his original rejection of voting and representation. He alternately urged his readers to abstain from voting, then to vote, then to abstain from voting (again), and finally to cast blank ballots to protest voting.
\n\nProudhon unleashed a number of critiques on democracy. The critical prisms he used vary from the purely psychological to the empirical, and the targets of his barbs span the entire menagerie of democratic platitudes from sovereignty to the myth of “The People” to the realpolitik of how legislatures operate. Of interest is his critical analysis of the democratic decision-making process itself. He scrutinizes the mechanism of the vote and its outcome, specifically majority rule: “Democracy is nothing but the tyranny of majorities, the most execrable tyranny of all, for it is not based on the authority of a religion, nor on a nobility of blood, nor on the prerogatives of fortune: it has number as its base, and for a mask the name of the People.” 3
\n\nBut Proudhon doesn’t finish there. He protests that those left in the minority are forced by circumstance to follow the will of the majority—a situation he finds untenable, not only for the explicit coercion, but also because those in the minority are forced to abjure their ideas and beliefs in favor of those who oppose them. This, he notes wryly, makes sense only when political views are so loosely held by individuals so as to hardly be worthy of the name. Analyzing the same scenario, William Godwin declares, “nothing can more directly contribute to the deprivation of the human understanding and character” than to require people to act contrary to their own reason. A conclusion proven empirically when one conducts even the most rudimentary survey of representative government and its effects on humanity over the course of the past 250 years.
\n\nIn conclusion: for an anarchist, for myself, democracy—as a system of self-governance, as a decision-making tool, as an ideal—is utterly devoid of redeeming value. It functions as a mask for coercion, making horror palatable while producing unbearable consequences for the individual, for the species, and for the planet. A dead end.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/19/2b-1.jpg\")
Border crossing on the Tigris River into the Kurdish Autonomous region.
\nIt is at this point that most anarchists and critical theorists begin backpedaling, some slowly (like Proudhon) and others rapidly (like Bookchin). Historically, theorists have offered a scathing critique of democracy and then immediately digressed, stating that the representative form of democracy as conceived by bourgeois (or socialist) society isn’t really democracy. That real democracy is reflected in some other form—for Proudhon, delegated democracy, for Bookchin, the Greek city-states or the Helvetican Confederation. The argument then becomes that democracy can (and should) be recuperated 4 by the Left as a workable form.
\n\nMy own critique veers wildly off course at this point, having been skewed by empirical observation of an alternate form of democratic practice. I’ve recently returned from the Kurdish Autonomous Region in Northern Syria, known as Rojava, where I had the opportunity to observe a unique form of democracy implemented by a revolutionary libertarian social movement.
\n\nSome theoretical context: in 1999, Abdullah Öcalan, the head of the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê (PKK, the Kurdistan Worker’s Party) was captured by Turkish Security Forces, with assistance from the CIA and Israel’s Mossad. Dodging a firing squad, he was eventually sentenced to aggravated life imprisonment—and that’s where things get interesting. Rather than making license plates or working in the laundry, Öcalan began the long slow intellectual journey out of Marxist-Leninist gibberish into some pretty durable anarchist theory. He eventually published his ideas in several works including Democratic Confederalism, War and Peace in Kurdistan, and a multi-volume tome on civilization, particularly the Middle East and Abrahamic religions. In his writing, Öcalan does what no one in the contemporary North American anarchist milieu is even willing to think—he constructs, albeit vaguely, a blueprint for a libertarian society. This simple exercise, content aside, is incredible. His engagement resembles far more the utopian socialist project of the early 19th Century than any of the ensuing theoretics associated with social contestation, especially Marxism and working class anarchism; indeed, his silence on class analysis, Marxist teleology, historical materialism, and syndicalism is deafening. Öcalan is clear in his task when he states, in “The Principles of Democratic Confederalism,” that “Democratic confederalism is a non-state social paradigm. It is not controlled by a state. At the same time, democratic confederalism is the cultural organizational blueprint of a democratic nation. ” [emphasis mine] 5
\n\nAs implied in the name, there is a great reliance on democratic processes in the system known as Democratic Confederalism. Yet Öcalan is silent about the definition of democracy—he never offers one—and it’s implementation: he never discusses it with any specificity. In fact, democracy is presented as a given, as a decision-making process, as an approach to self-administration, and little else. There is no favoring of voting versus consensus-based models, nor does he describe in any detail or at any level (communal, cantonal, regional) the forms that he foresees democracy taking. For example, “[Democratic Confederalism] can be called a non-state political administration or a democracy without a state. Democratic decision-making processes must not be confused with the processes known from public administration. States only administrate [sic] while democracies govern. States are founded on power; democracies are based on collective consensus.” He expands on what he means by “decision-making processes” in “The Principles of Democratic Confederalism”: “Democratic Confederalism is based on grass-roots participation. Its decision-making processes lie with the communities.” Fair enough. So how does all this play out in Rojava? In other words, how are Öcalan’s ideas being translated into revolutionary institutions?
\n\nI gained my first insight into democracy in Rojava over a plate of hummus and pita in downtown Kobanî. I was sitting with Mr. Shaiko, a TEV-DEM (Tevgera Civaka Demokratîk, Movement for a Democratic Society) representative on a warm, dusty afternoon, some three days after we had attended a commune meeting together. In that meeting, of the council of Şehid Kawa C commune, Mr. Shaiko had raised the issue of commune boundaries and perhaps moving them to account for the number of people returning to the rubbled, venerable hulk that is Kobanî. After some discussion, Mr. Shaiko left the meeting, requesting a phone call to let him know what they decided.
\n\n“So,” I asked Mr. Shaiko, “What happened with the commune? Did they call?”
\n\n“No, no decision yet.”
\n\n“Oh, do they need to give one?”
\n\n“No, they’ll decide when they’re ready. That’s how it is,” Mr. Shaiko looked at me over his glasses with a half-grin and then returned to the plate of pita and hummus.
\n\nThis is clearly a divergent view of democratic decision-making, in which no conclusive result is as valid a response as a “yes” or a “no.” While I only saw this adjustment to democratic decision-making in operation a few times it seems to be fairly common, especially with the TEV-DEM folks whose charge is implementing democratic confederalism. It is also an interesting “fix” applied to the issue of decision-making processes. In a sense, it negates the democratic process in favor of discourse, argument, and engagement, without the concomitant requirement of an outcome.
\n\nThe response of the revolutionaries to the tyranny of majority rule has been structural rather than directive. Here, Öcalan describes his views on a plural society and outlines how he plans to weaken or subsume majority rule: “In contrast to a centralist and bureaucratic understanding of administration and exercise of power confederalism poses a type of political self-administration where all groups of the society and all cultural identities can express themselves in local meetings, general conventions and councils… We do not need big theories here, what we need is the will to lend expression to… social needs by strengthening the autonomy of the social actors structurally and by creating the conditions for the organization of the society as a whole. The creation of an operational level where all kinds of social and political groups, religious communities, or intellectual tendencies can express themselves directly in all local decision-making processes can also be called participative democracy.”
\n\nSo for the revolutionaries the formation, growth and proliferation of all types of “social actors”—communes, councils, consultative bodies, organizations and even militias—is to be welcomed, and encouraged.
\n\nThis plays out in Rojava in a patchwork quilt of organizations, interests, local collectives, religious affiliates, and… flags. For example, TEV-DEM, the umbrella organization charged with implementing democratic self-administration, is actually an agglomeration of several smaller organizations and representatives from political parties. These various organizations include groups centering around sport, culture, religion, women’s issues, and more. For example, in December of 2015, a new organization under the TEV-DEM system was born—TEV-ÇAND Jihn, which focuses on women and cultural production. This new organization is in addition to the generic TEV-ÇAND, which focuses on society, generally, and cultural production. To sidestep the problems with majority rule, the revolutionaries have introduced a structural caveat that allows individuals to find an organization that suits their needs, and through which their voice can be heard in society. Note that TEV-DEM and others have not sought to tinker with the actual mechanics of how a commune or organization operates or decides. Rather, they have changed the social order such that if an individual refuses to uphold a decision by a group, commune or council, she always has the ability to opt out and find a more amenable assembly.
\n\nThese innovations seem like good first steps towards turning democracy from a worthless antiquity into a workable principle within anarchist theory. As such, they should be encouraged and studied.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/19/3b-1.jpg\")
Meeting of Commune Şehîd Kawa C council to determine possible new boundaries. Mr. Shaiko, TEV-DEM representative points to map of Şehîd Kawa neighborhood.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/19/4b-1.jpg\")
Martyr poster on the road from Qamishlo to Kobanê. Note picture of Abdullah Öcalan at the top.
\nMy essay regarding the organizational form and its various moments of domination, “The Organization’s New Clothes,” was first published in February of 1989 (and republished in 2015), and I see no reason to retract any portion thereof. 6 That critique, therefore, resonates throughout the following discussion, though time and space prohibit using it in any way other than as a critical prism.
\n\nThe commune is a scrambled term. Its origins lie in the smallest administrative entity in France, the commune—corresponding roughly to a municipality. The word itself is derived from the twelfth-century Medieval Latin communia, meaning a group of people living a common or shared life. This is an interesting point of departure in that, even then, the concept implied some degree of autonomy, both political and economic. It was, however, the Paris Commune during the French Revolution (1789-1795) that wrote the term in large red letters in the book of revolution. In that first great explosion, the Communards distinguished themselves by their intransigence and demands for the abolition of private property and social classes, eventually earning themselves the nickname les enrages (“the enraged ones”).
\n\nThe revolutionary commune, then, has a subversive nature. It is dangerous. It is always dangerous when humans interact beyond the terrain of Capital and state, or in opposition to them.
\n\nThroughout the 19th century, outside the administrative network of France, the term commune came to be associated with socialist and communist experiments and, in a looser sense, with all manner of utopian projects and communities—Owen, Fourier, Oneida, Amana, Modern Times. There was a slump for a few decades through the first part of the 20th century, and then, to confuse things further, the 1960s happened. The definition of the word “commune” ends for many North Americans somewhere in 1972, in a tangerine swirl of bad acid, free love, and the Manson Family.
\n\nWhich is not to say that there weren’t some important projects. Among the more interesting were the West Berlin-based Kommune 1(1967-1969) and Wisconsin’s contribution to utopia, Dreamtime Village. There have been thousands (likely tens of thousands) of communes over the past two centuries: intentional communities, collectives, cooperatives, each with its own “glue”—the stuff that brought people together and “stuck” them to one another. In most cases, this glue has been a mix of politics, anarchism, communism, utopianism, religious sentiment (usually wacky), livelihood, necessity, drugs, sexuality, or just plain detesting the dominant culture.
\n\nSo what, exactly, is a commune? Who the hell knows? The problem is not the vagueness with which the commune is understood; rather, it’s the lack of theory (and experience) that would provide nuance to this vagueness. The idea of the commune has been lost or diluted as a result of its own jangled historical context and the easily recuperable forms that it has recently taken. Ultimately, very much like democracy, the commune seems a quaint and faded relic in the cabinet of anarchist theory, filed under “V” for vestigial.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/19/5b-1.jpg\")
A village near Qamishlo; the majority of Rojava’s residents live in such settlements.
\nAs above, so below. My own relation with the Commune spans several articles on the Paris events of 1871, and includes my ongoing engagement with the conundrum of anarchist organization. All of my interactions with the concept of organizations operating in a revolutionary context had been on paper—in theory—until I crossed into the Kurdish Autonomous Region. Then things changed.
\n\nThe commune and council meetings I attended varied widely, ranging from an ad hoc encounter of a team of YPG militiamen near the Turkish border in Kobanî Canton to a council of the Şehid Kawa C commune, to a ceremony and meeting between TEV-DEM representatives of Kobanî and Cizîrê Canton. In each instance, I recall a series of similar impressions. First, each encounter was characterized by a sense of purpose, of meaning. The attendees seemed clear that what they were engaged in, the simple task of meeting together—as a commune, as a team of YPG fighters—carried within it a seed, a possible future, for Northern Syria, perhaps for the planet. Many people commented on this when I asked their thoughts regarding these political forms. A woman I met in Paris at an HDP rally put it best: “We are here reinventing politics, in fact, the world.”
\n\nThis perception, which could easily foster arrogance, seemed instead to produce a mindset of quiet determination in these attendees. These folks were not wealthy, they worked hard in an area where there was little work. The men’s faces were lined and etched with long hours spent under the harsh Middle East sun. The hands of the women were simultaneously delicate and rough: while they bore callouses and cuts, they also carried the scent of lotion and perfume. The voices, gestures, and faces of the revolutionaries during the meetings were intent, searching, serious. There was kindness, hugs for a developmentally disabled young adult, a moment spent with a mother who had lost a son in the siege of Kobanî, and respect—as each person spoke to the accompaniment of silent nods from their peers.
\n\nThere was also hope, a quantity that history has so long denied to anarchists, and which some of us have reclaimed—not as an eventuality, but as a birthright. These folks believed that they could change their lives, their community; many believed they could change (and were changing) the world.
\n\nFinally, and most importantly, in each of these meetings there was an overwhelming sense of the ordinary. When they mentioned the cantonal authority at all, these folks referred to it laconically as the anti-government, or the anti-regime. They had seen and participated in sweeping social changes and experimentation, and in the process it had become commonplace, like lunch. This is not to say that there was no joy in the proceedings, far from it. Rather, what was really missing was fear, and in this sense the social revolution in Rojava may truly be said to have passed into a phase of maturity and permanence. The sole condition in the short-term being the defeat of Daesh.
\n\nSome theorists have been advancing on the idea of the commune, but from strange directions, post-left directions. Peter Lamborn Wilson in The Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) and Pirate Utopias forces the issues of time and failure/success in reference to the commune. He rejects utterly, as we must, the technological reasoning that the longer a commune exists the better or more successful it must be. In TAZ, he specifically provides a formula for a new idea of a commune, a temporary encounter—perhaps hours, perhaps minutes—characterized by conviviality, joy. This encounter is autonomous in that it is as independent and free of the fetters of Capital and state as possible. This is essential to understand. The commune is combative, not subservient. That is the basis of its autonomy.
\n\nRather than bounding the definition of the commune or trying to refine it, I believe that defocusing the concept seems a sound strategy. I would argue that whether it is a phalanstère with all the Fourierist fauna intact, or a meeting between friends to relive old times or create new ones, it doesn’t matter—it is a commune. Why bound something, why hem something in when it presents itself as a viable model for organization? Rather, without a definition, we can move with tiny baby steps towards an understanding of what works and what is useless in the commune model. That strikes me as one promising, potential direction towards both engaged social experimentation and ruthless social contestation.
\n\nFinally, at a macro-level, the concept of federalism may make a theoretical comeback. If the commune model makes any sense at all, then federalism isn’t very far behind. This returns anarchism to its philosophical roots—Proudhon especially, but also Pi i Margall and Bakunin. The insurrectionary potential for federalism seems vastly underestimated. The movement to divide society into smaller and smaller units, the federation of these units by mutual agreement, and the potential for economic cooperation and shared self-defense make federalism a potentially daunting, though rather blunt, instrument. Note here that the current usage of federalism—the nation-state’s accumulation of power, wealth, and knowledge in order to control and dominate subject populations—is precisely the opposite of the concept’s standard historical definition. It is Pi i Margall, the non-anarchist grandfather of Spanish anarchism, in his 1855 work La Reacción y la Revolución, who offers the final word on the potential of federalism: “The constitution of a society without power is the ultimate of my revolutionary aspirations,” stating he would, “divide and subdivide power,” in order to “destroy it.” 7
\n\nThe formation of communes also seems a viable real world strategy in that it fulfills two immediate functions. First, they can act as support, a backbone for the movement of militants quickly to areas where their services might be required. In this way, they may function very much as the bookstores, infoshops, and alternative spaces did in the anarchist milieu of the past several decades in the US, or as the communes did in Kobanî during the siege. Their resources can assist in the provision of shelter, food, medical aid, and comfort for fighters. The communes can also provide valuable intelligence on local conditions, law enforcement, and assist in identifying those specific targets most noxious to the community. Put in contemporary military parlance, one type of commune may not be a weapon, but it can function as a weapons platform for the mobile anarchist fighters.
\n\nSecondly, the communes provide for the sedentary members of the milieu a laboratory, a setting in which to experiment with new ideas, new forms, coalescing, in protoplasmic form, the seeds of revolutionary institutions yet to be. Communes are nurseries where budding insurrections are reared. Ancillary to this effect, yet no less important, is the possibility that communes will help to offset the attrition that has plagued anarchism since its inception as a political movement. A life dedicated to liberty is difficult to sustain, and most anarchists [who can] eventually succumb to the Cthulhu call of new cars, big houses, and squandered lives. At the age of 55, I have seen thousands of anarchists come and go; only those too stubborn or anti-social, like my friends and myself, seem to remain. Communes may stem this drift by producing a social milieu that is amenable to the various vagaries of the anarchist personality type, and by distributing resources for assistance with the real world issues of food, shelter, childbirth and rearing, loneliness, illness, old age and death.
\n\nThe commune is a verb. The commune is a question.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/19/6b-1.jpg\")
An exploded mine on the road between Serekaniye and Kobanê.
\nAnarchism has been adrift since the end of the Second World War. With little understanding of its roots, history, and struggles, most of us did the best we could with what we could find. There were no organizations to criticize or join; it was difficult enough just to find anarchists in NYC in 1984. We were orphans. The situation has changed: there are more anarchists, they are more easily contacted and the explosion of information has given us our story back. As a confluence, the news out of Greece, Rojava, Europe, in fact just about everywhere seems to be turning in our direction. Those in the milieu, therefore, have some choices to make about where to place energy, where to invest time and effort, in a word—what to do? There are at least as many possible answers to this question as there are anarchists now alive. As my response, I suggest the following:
\n\nForm democratic communes.
\n\nFederate.
\n\nBe ready.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/19/7b-1.jpg\")
Destroyed tanks and little girl, near YPG/J headquarters in Kobanê.
\nLa Boetie, Etienne (1975) The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. Montreal; Black Rose Books. ↩
\nVaneigem, Raoul. (1994) The Revolution of Everyday Life (Donald Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). London: Rebel Press. ↩
\nProudhon, Pierre-Joseph. (1867-1870) Oeuvres completes de P-J. Proudhon. Paris: A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et Cie. ↩
\nRecuperation is a concept developed by the Situationists to describe the process in which ideas and strategies that originally served a revolutionary agenda, are appropriated by Capital and the state to preserve the status quo. ↩
\nOcalan, Abdullah (2011). Democratic Confederalism (transl. International Initiative). Transmedia Publishing Ltd. London, Cologne ↩
\nSimons, Paul Z. (2015). “The Organization’s New Clothes,” Black Eye: Pathogenic and Perverse. Ardent Press, Berkeley CA. ↩
\nPi y Margall, Francisco. “Reaction and Revolution,” in Anarchism, A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas Volume One ↩
\nOn April 23, 2016, hundreds of people gathered to oppose a rally called by the Ku Klux Klan at Stone Mountain Park, Georgia. This convergence brought together a wide range of groups committed to shutting down the KKK. The crowd circumvented several blockades consisting of hundreds of local officers, riot police, and state SWAT teams to reach the parking lot where the white supremacists were assembling.
\n\nThis was just one of many events in the wave of black-led revolt since the eruption in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014 following the murder of Mike Brown. To understand the context of what happened in Stone Mountain, we have to pan back across the struggles of the preceding years. In this report, we recount the demonstrations that led up to this one and offer a blow-by-blow account of the action for everyone who may have to mobilize in response to similar rallies in the years to come.
\n\nIn fall 2011, Troy Anthony Davis was executed by the State of Georgia for allegedly killing a police officer in 1989. In the week preceding his execution, thousands of people took the streets of Atlanta and the parking lot outside of Jackson Prison, where the execution was to take place. While Amnesty International and other non-profit organizations held protests during the day, autonomous groups coordinated multiple breakaway marches and an overnight occupation of the plaza of the GA Board of Pardon and Paroles. This was one of the first signs of confrontational protest Atlanta had seen in years.
\n\nWhile the Occupy movement was camped out downtown, metro Atlanta police killed many black people and at least one white person. When an officer murdered Joetavius Stafford on his way home from prom, Occupy protesters and others marched through downtown, flooding a train station and chanting anti-police slogans. When Dwight Person was shot to death in his East Point living room, angry Occupy protesters, recently evicted by riot police, marched through downtown again. When Ariston Waiters was shot in the back while handcuffed in Union City, a predominantly white black bloc joined black youth in painting graffiti and smashing the windows of the Justice Center.
\n\nAfter George Zimmerman murdered Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, thousands of people rallied at the state capitol. Mostly black university students and churches led chants and prayers for several hours, casting dubious glances at the predominantly white masked demonstrators who later joined others in a breakaway march of perhaps 100. The march vandalized nearly a dozen police cruisers, stomping in windshields and smashing windows with no arrests. No news station reported the vandalism.
\n\nOn the one-year anniversary of the execution of Troy Davis, around 100 demonstrators marched through downtown chanting anti-police slogans.
\n\nImmediately after the verdict of “not guilty” in the Zimmerman trial, a crowd marched downtown. Masked demonstrators and unmasked young black participants began vandalizing construction equipment and painting graffiti. Other black and white activists physically obstructed this behavior. The next day, thousands marched with the Trayvon Martin Organizing Committee from West End to downtown via a highway. Black professionals, activists, and clergy physically assaulted white people in the masked contingent and collaborated with police to attempt to isolate them. Later, masked protesters made a poorly timed attack on a police cruiser. No one was arrested.
\n\nOn April 8, 2013, Atlanta police pepper-sprayed and beat a crowd of children and their parents playing kickball in the Edgewood Courts Apartments in northeast Atlanta. The following day, over 100 residents joined by others spontaneously marched and attacked police with bricks and bottles for an hour. No one pleaded for nonviolence or argued against masking.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/18/2c.jpg\")
Protesters block a highway in Atlanta on October 22, 2014.
\nFollowing the explosion of anti-police revolt in Ferguson, Missouri, demonstrations spread to hundreds of cities around the US. Dozens of protests took place in the Atlanta area under the Black Lives Matter banner. Activists hoping to impose nonviolence and top-down control repeatedly failed to outmaneuver anarchists and other participants intent on being uncontrollable. From August to November, several marches blocked traffic and one demonstration forced police out of West End. These crowds were racially diverse, comprised largely of students, young workers, artists, skateboarders, and professionals from non-profit organizations.
\n\nFollowing the failure to indict Darren Wilson in the murder of Michael Brown, thousands of people took to the streets near Underground Atlanta, a predominantly poor and black shopping area downtown. The night before, organizers from a few different activist organizations had met secretly with police to develop a plan to avoid the mass conflict that had engulfed St. Louis, Oakland, Seattle, and other cities. Despite this, two hours into the protest, a breakaway group of masked people with a sound system joined by nearly 1,000 people marched into downtown toward the capitol building. They began overturning barricades and trash cans while lighting traffic flares, engaged in a shoving match with Capitol police armed with machine guns, and then marched onto the I-75/85 highway connector, blocking traffic and throwing stones at police. A smaller but determined group of roughly 100 including gang members, black and white proletarians, anarchists, and other autonomous groups threw projectiles at police for nearly an hour before being joined by others at Underground Atlanta. The now much larger crowd was strictly divided about street conflict, with white and black students and activists marching in the back, booing and filming, while multiracial groups towards the front clashed with police and vandalized storefronts on Peachtree Street. Eventually, riot police dispersed the crowd and arrested dozens. Afterwards, some activist groups popularized the theory that “white anarchists” had caused the repression. A group called the Atlanta-Ferguson Solidarity Committee released a statement to the news decrying the arrests and the peace police who attempted to “citizen’s-arrest” a vandal.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/18/3c.jpg\")
March in Atlanta on November 25, 2014.
\nProtests erupted again in December 2014, when Officer Daniel Pantaleo was not indicted for strangling Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York. In Atlanta, young black activists pre-emptively ejected “white anarchists” and non-white “agitators” from the demonstration. In the following months, police killed Nicholas Thomas in Smyrna, GA while he was at work and Anthony Hill in nearby Chamblee while he was in dire need of mental health assistance. Racially diverse crowds marched repeatedly, disrupting businesses and attempting to occupy a local police department. At each of these demonstrations, speakers warned against “provocateurs” and “troublemakers,” while professional activists filmed, intimidated, and ejected those they felt fit the profile. Many anarchists and other aspiring revolutionaries did not engage in these protests, fearing that event organizers were collaborating with the police as some had in November.
\n\nFollowing the explosion in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray, autonomous groups organized a march for May Day in West End Park. The crowd of perhaps 150 young people marched around the area, blocking traffic and occasionally tossing projectiles at police who were blocking highway entrance ramps in anticipation of a highway blockade like those of 2014. Demonstrators broke a single window of a bank. There were no arrests. When the crowd returned to the park, students and protesters argued about the ethics of white people wearing masks, finally agreeing that it would be preferable to riot in rich white areas of town.
\n\nFor thousands of years, Stone Mountain served the Creek Nation as a ceremonial and administrative site; it offered a neutral zone for the Creek and Cherokee Nations to coordinate against colonial invaders. In 1821, under the Treaty of Indian Springs, the US Government and the State of Georgia seized the mountain. In 1845, with the protection of the State of Georgia, whites settled in the new town of Stone Mountain. Early in the 20th century, inspired by the film Birth of a Nation, the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan began using Stone Mountain as a meeting place. Later, the State of Georgia and the Stone Mountain Memorial Association collaborated to carve a massive image of Confederate war generals into the side of the granite mountain.
\n\nAfter Dylan Roof’s attack on a black church in Charleston, SC in 2015, neo-Confederate and white power organizations began holding demonstrations at Stone Mountain Park and other locations around the US. The Klan participated in all of these demonstrations. Apparently as part of a nationwide “white identitarian” regrouping strategy, the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan announced their intentions to host a white power rally and march at the site on April 23, 2016.
\n\nStarting in January 2016, the ad-hoc organization All Out Atlanta called for people to shut down the Klan rally. The group brought together a wide range of people under principles of solidarity, autonomy, and diversity of tactics. When internet attention to the event skyrocketed, authorities limited the Klan rally to a single parking lot. As the date approached, a range of groups including Rise Up Georgia, Students for a Democratic Society, Unitarian churches, the Street Groomers, the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, the Bastards Motorcycle Club, various street organizations, and informal networks of anarchists and anti-fascists around the country prepared to confront the KKK.
\n\nThe recent history of tense encounters between autonomous militants and other activists made cooperation with Leftist groups challenging. Relationships were strained between some All Out Atlanta organizers and participants in formal activist organizations. On one side, there were allegations of “white anarchist” opportunism; on the other, of authoritarian power-grabs and collaboration with police. Going into the mobilization, the stakes were high: would the protesters be able to act effectively together? Or would racialized conflicts about tactics and risk incapacitate them?
\n\nMeanwhile, alongside the Klan, a wide range of law enforcement agencies including Stone Mountain police, Atlanta and DeKalb County police, various Sheriffs’ Departments, Georgia Highway Patrol, and the State and Federal Bureaus of Investigations readied their riot gear and SWAT equipment. At the same time, the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement issued a call for unity to all white power organizations for a rally two hours away in Rome, Georgia to take place later that afternoon and evening.
\n\nAt a convergence center in downtown Atlanta, people arriving from all around the country picked up welcome packets and conferred with others about the plan for the weekend. Suspense was mounting. No one expected to be able to reach the parking lot where the Klan was gathering; some feared that the authorities would not even allow the counterdemonstration to enter the park.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/18/4c.jpg\")
A map tracing the trajectory of the front line of the demonstrators (represented in red) into Stone Mountain Park and past a series of police blockades (represented in blue).
\nAt 9 am on April 23, 2016, a few hundred people gathered in downtown Stone Mountain at the corner of Main and East Mountain Street. A single officer cruised the area in a golf cart while a helicopter buzzed overhead. When the march began, with a large number of people masked or in full black bloc regalia and equipped with flags and banners, there was no police escort in sight.
\n\nStone Mountain Park is surrounded entirely by a chest-high wrought iron fence offering few points of entry. Police officers backed by twenty squad cars blocked the first entrance—a pedestrian gate at the end of East Mountain Street—so the march proceeded to the car entrance a block east. A police officer came into view leading a police dog, intending to screen attendees for weapons. Masked demonstrators who had picked up lightweight police barricades began slamming them on the ground, effectively making it impossible for the dog to perform its duty.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/18/5c.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/18/6c.jpg\")
The march approaches the second entrance to Stone Mountain Park.
\nBehind this officer, twenty police cars and many officers barricaded the car entrance. Initially, as it seemed that the only way into the park was through the barricade, several people began trying to weave around the police officers. The march slowed to a standstill at this bottleneck until some participants directed attention past the gate to a broken section of the fence hidden by tree cover. As the march poured through this opening and sprinted across the field towards the road, chants rang out: “I believe that we will win!”
\n\nAt this point, police without tactical gear ran into the crowd, shouting for participants to remove their masks and attempting to arrest those who did not comply. The police operation was disorganized; individual police officers were repeatedly surrounded by the crowd or beaten back. Sources report five arrests at this point—the majority of the arrests that occurred throughout the day—and several more unsuccessful attempted arrests that ended with the targets escaping or being de-arrested by the crowd. One officer was left kneeling on the ground, having been pepper-sprayed and beaten with flagpoles. Lacking even a rudimentary first aid kit, police treated him with water stolen from the backpack of an arrestee. Arrestees report that the local police were confused about where to take them.
\n\nThe march continued, with some participants temporarily removing their masks, while others retained their anonymity. After this initial contact, the police backed off, shifting to another strategy. In retrospect, it appears that local Stone Mountain police were tasked with searching and controlling protesters as they entered, while the larger body of riot police was positioned deeper in the park with orders to block the protesters rather than engage and arrest them. While some demonstrators had feared that a body of riot police would block entry to the park entirely, the police seem to have considered that option a likely PR disaster, since the park was supposed to remain open to the public.
\n\nAs this was taking place, participants in the march heard that Rise Up Georgia was attempting to block the main entrance to Stone Mountain Park on the other side of the parking lot hosting the KKK rally. A contingent from Rise Up Georgia joined the march later in the day.
\n\nInside the wrought iron fence, a four-lane boulevard runs the perimeter of the entire park. This was the only route traversing the half-mile stretch between the park entrances and the three access roads to the parking lot where the Klan was to rally. Midway between the entrance and the access roads, at least fifty riot police with clubs and shields formed a line to prevent the march from advancing. The demonstration halted in front of the blockade for several minutes. The police were positioned to prevent an easy exit into the woods on either side. They made no effort to kettle or push back the crowd, but officers did arrest a couple more people in the ensuing moments of hesitation.
\n\nThis was the first time some protesters called for others to remove their masks or get out of the street, on the grounds that the police would then allow the march to proceed. This premise struck other participants as highly unlikely. The state of Georgia had not mobilized hundreds of police in order to permit us to approach the site of the Klan rally, masks or no. Complying with police orders only emboldens them to take further liberties. By giving the police the impression that they can intimidate the crowd into doing their bidding, it endangers all participants—not to mention the risks that ensue for those whose employment or immigration status will be compromised if they are seen participating in a protest.
\n\nThis breakdown of solidarity within the crowd is the result of time-tested policing methods used around the globe. If the police can position themselves as neutral enforcers of stability, rebellious social forces will appear to be the catalyst of repression in a simple equation in which police violence appears to be automatic and inevitable. This is the power that the authorities hope to monopolize: the power to determine the limits of conflict, power that becomes invisible because it is taken for granted—power over what is thinkable, over reality itself. A crowd that includes masked and well-equipped participants can keep police at a distance, creating a safer environment for everyone; if necessary, it can defend itself by throwing back tear gas canisters and rescuing people when the police attempt to arrest them. But this is only possible if the police are understood as one of many forces struggling for ascendancy in society, rather than as a natural feature of the social terrain or as legitimate referees in squabbles between rival constituencies of the state.
\n\nAs it turned out, the march was eventually able to reach the parking lot where the Klan was rallying, but it was not due to any form of cooperation with the police. On the contrary, at every point in the march, creative disobedience was the only factor that enabled the crowd to advance.
\n\nAfter multiple attempts to get around the blockade, the crowd began to retreat. The retreat, however, was a feint: the march walked back and started climbing the road up the mountain, only to immediately turn left onto the tracks of a tourist train line and a path in the woods, both parallel to the boulevard, in order to move past the line of police. A single officer stood by the tracks, fruitlessly attempting to dissuade protesters from taking that route. Vastly outnumbered, he cautioned: “I wouldn’t go there if I were you… it’s an active line… even cars can’t outrun a train…” The trains had obviously been shut down at this point, and the tracks offered a route unavailable to the vehicles transporting police. Nonetheless, most participants opted for the narrow path adjacent to them, slowing the march and stretching it out into a long line.
\n\nPassing one access road to the Klan’s rallying site—visibly blocked off by police—the crowd descended to the boulevard at the next access road, where a large group of black protesters had already assembled. In the moments it took for both crowds to make their way forward, the police blocked off the second road. The march continued further east towards Old Hugh Howell Road, the final road leading to the Yellow Daisy Lot, where the Klan rally was about to begin.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/18/7c.jpg\")
A police line in Stone Mountain Park.
\nA thick line of riot police deployed ahead of the march as it approached the intersection. The crowd halted there for some time as a communication breakdown ensued between some hierarchical organizations within the march and other participants. Calls for people to remove their masks and get out of the street resumed, including an SDS group leading a chant of “Take off your masks!” This position was never able to attract enough participants to dominate the character of the march, but it did create tension and delay the crowd for several minutes.
\n\nMeanwhile, white buses were seen passing behind the crowd and north along an access road to the parking lot. At the time, some participants feared they might be used to carry out mass arrests; in retrospect, they were likely transporting riot police from the first blockade to the final intersection at the mouth of the parking lot, a block beyond the line of riot police.
\n\nAfter much chaotic internal discussion, a large portion of the crowd backed up the road and struck out into the woods, climbing down a slope and making its way through thick underbrush toward the parking lot. For the second time, the march was out of view of the cameras and police, with tree cover around and the way open ahead, in no danger of being penned in or mass arrested. Some people were singing. Leaving the striated space of the roads for the smooth space of the forest proved decisive.
\n\nThe crowd emerged on the street leading directly to the parking lot, having outmaneuvered entirely the previous blockades of riot police. Everyone moved briskly at this point, the march’s objective not far away. But before the crowd reached the final intersection, a line of riot police scrambled to block the final access road. The period of hesitation before descending into the woods had afforded the police enough time to reinforce the roads leading to the rally site.
\n\nStill running, some participants attempted to pass through the woods to the left of the intersection, but the riot police fanned out there, as well. There was an industrial container dumpster there, and some people pulled out the contents, building a barricade—somewhat enigmatically—in the woods ahead of the line of riot police. A single wooden pallet, some bags of trash, and tires were set aflame. Masked demonstrators began throwing stones, pipes, and debris at police on the other side of the fire. Others dragged more barricading materials back into the road, where masked participants were throwing rocks and firecrackers at the distant line of riot police. When the firecrackers exploded, there was cheering from many participants who were not throwing projectiles. While there was a brief internal conflict over tactics at this point, it was quickly resolved — none of this behavior appeared to be particularly controversial within the march. The police, dressed in high-tech suits of armor, had little to fear in terms of injury, but the projectiles kept them at a distance. It appears that this line of police could afford neither to advance nor to retreat, being the final line separating racists and counter-demonstrators; this likely explains why they were unable to respond to attacks from the crowd.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/18/8c.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/18/9c.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/18/10c.jpg\")
Clashes between police and protesters at the police blockade outside the KKK rally.
\nRather than dallying too long, the march backed up and climbed over a guardrail back into the woods. Again, people moved as rapidly as possible through the trees, fording a small brook and ducking under hanging limbs. Jubilant, the crowd emerged in front of the parking lot no one had expected to reach—an expanse of pavement the length of a football field. Behind a chain-link fence in the distance, a surprisingly small number of racists were visible. The crowd was blocked only by a handful of officers in full SWAT gear wearing gas masks and brandishing assault rifles, a couple of tactical vehicles parked behind them.
\n\nThe arriving crowd paused at this sight. The smooth acreage of the parking lot, empty but for policemen and racists, was intimidating. It was unclear whether the police were going to make arrests, launch tear gas, or make use of other weapons; they were materially equipped, but not numerous enough to make more than a handful of arrests themselves. The crowd paused, building up the momentum to make a decision—missing the moment in which a decision could be made. A couple minutes later, a contingent of police cars raced up and a large number of officers in civilian dress rushed out to reinforce the SWAT team, while a massive contingent of riot police fanned out around the Klan on the other side of the lot. The window of opportunity during which the march could have run around the police into the parking lot had closed.
\n\nFor another hour or more, the crowd stood in front of police. More and more protesters trickled in, including a predominantly black contingent that had circled back up to Robert E. Lee instead of cutting through the forest the second time. People chanted and sang, and the first protester armed with an assault rifle appeared alongside several dozen heavily armed members of various street organizations. The members of Bastards MC finally showed up, as well. With great effort, participants managed to force the police line to back up a few feet. One vocal black participant urged white protesters to the front of the line. But at this point, all the pieces were on the playing board and there wasn’t any way to get closer to the Klan. The final arrest of the day occurred during this standoff, with police snatching a person out of the crowd after participants had let their guard down. Based on observer reports, the arrestee almost certainly was not throwing things at the police as they alleged.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/18/11c.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/18/12c.jpg\")
The SWAT team holding the line at the edge of the parking lot.
\nEventually, it appeared that the police might be moving the Klan out of the lot. The crowd began to filter back along the side of the parking lot, past the third line of riot police, towards the exit from the park. As the crowd marched slowly out of the park, there were a couple run-ins with sketchy white people who may or may not have been racists. They denied having anything to do with the Klan rally, but some of the signifiers they bore suggested otherwise. As the crowd returned along Robert E. Lee Boulevard, at least one driver shouted racial epithets from his car, creating a situation in which he and his vehicle were attacked and he nearly ran over a park-goer.
\n\nAs a result of the mobilization, the police had to shut down park attractions for the day on what was to be the opening day of spring attractions. This is surely a major black eye for them; hopefully, it will discourage them from welcoming Klan rallies in the future.
\n\nMeanwhile, that afternoon, a couple hours away in Rome, Georgia, about 80 bona fide Nazis participated in the aforementioned rally called by the National Socialist Movement. A non-confrontational group protested, held at bay by yellow caution tape. Racists still have a social base in small towns in the South, as the rally in Rome confirms. In the future, a larger and more regionally coordinated effort might aspire to block them in all of the Atlantas and Romes of the US, simultaneously.
\n\nNevertheless, the demonstration in Stone Mountain consolidated the gains of the preceding years of struggle against white supremacy in the South. It is increasingly difficult for openly white supremacist groups to organize in formerly welcoming spaces like Stone Mountain Park and the grounds of the capitol in Columbia, South Carolina.
\n\nThe tactical successes of that day can be ascribed to some participants’ knowledge of the terrain and to the diversity and collective complicity of the crowd. The police did not appear to be able to track crowd movements through the woods, nor to predict where to mobilize in response; they stuck to the roads, and to a ponderous and reactive strategy. If some groups of demonstrators had been able to make decisions more rapidly and independently, they might have been able to exploit the opportunities presented by this situation. These experiences may be of use to readers reflecting on how to be ready to act in response to future white supremacist rallies.
\n\nA few scenes from the day.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/05/13/born-in-flames-died-in-plenums", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/05/13/born-in-flames-died-in-plenums", "title": "Born in Flames, Died in Plenums", "summary": null, "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/13/1b-1.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/13/1b-1.jpg", "date_published": "2016-05-13T17:36:23Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:29Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "In the latest installment of our series exploring the role of democracy in the struggles of the past decade, we trace the Bosnian uprising of 2014 from its first fiery days though the massive directly democratic plenums that swept the country to its rapid collapse and the return of business as usual. Enthusiasts of direct democracy all around the world reported eagerly on the plenums when they were at their peak, but within three months they had died away. What can we learn from this brief explosion of popular assemblies? What was its relationship with the riots that opened up an opportunity for social change? Why was it possible for the government to reestablish order?
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/05/11/reflections-on-direct-democracy-in-slovenia", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/05/11/reflections-on-direct-democracy-in-slovenia", "title": "Reflections on Direct Democracy in Slovenia", "summary": null, "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/11/1b.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/05/11/1b.jpg", "date_published": "2016-05-11T17:43:12Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:29Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "In winter 2012-13, a massive wave of protests swept Slovenia, a small country in the northern Balkans. It started in the second largest city, Maribor, a de-industrialized husk that was once the center of Slovenia’s vanished automobile industry. The corrupt mayor had installed speed-checking radar at every major crossroads, resulting in hundreds of already impoverished people being charged with penalties they could not afford to pay, for the profit of a private company. In a series of clandestine attacks and public demonstrations, people burned the speed-checking devices one by one, then gathered on the squares and streets to inform the mayor by means of Molotov cocktails, rocks, and everything else they could get hold of that he was no longer welcome in their town. In response to the initial police repression, solidarity protests spread around the country in a matter of a few days. They lasted for six months.
\nOn one hand, these protests were a reaction to the disastrous effects of the transition from socialism to free market capitalism, which left many people poor and humiliated. On the other hand, from the beginning, they were clearly aimed against those who held institutional political power. This was the biggest self-organized struggle in Slovenia since the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991. It brought down the mayor of Maribor and the national government—but more importantly, it opened up a space in which it became possible to invent new forms of autonomous action and to question representative democracy.
\nThis is part of our series exploring the role of democracy in the struggles of the past decade.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/04/14/occupy-democracy-versus-autonomy", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/04/14/occupy-democracy-versus-autonomy", "title": "Occupy : Democracy versus Autonomy", "summary": "", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/04/14/1b-2.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/04/14/1b-2.jpg", "date_published": "2016-04-14T17:47:00Z", "date_modified": "2025-05-27T18:26:00Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "The story goes that the very first gathering of Occupy Wall Street began as an old-fashioned top-down rally with speakers droning on—until a Greek student (and perhaps—an anarchist?) interrupted it and demanded that they hold a proper horizontal assembly instead. She and some of the youngsters in attendance sat down in a circle on the other side of the plaza and began holding a meeting using consensus process. One by one, people trickled over from the audience that had been listening to speakers and joined the circle. It was August 2, 2011.
\n\nHere, in the origin myth of the Occupy Movement, we encounter a fundamental ambiguity in its relationship to organization. We can understand this shift to consensus process as the adoption of a more inclusive and therefore more legitimate democratic model, anticipating later claims that the general assemblies of Occupy represented real democracy in action. Or we can focus on the decision to withdraw from the initial rally, seeing it as a gesture in favor of voluntary association. Over the following year, this internal tension erupted repeatedly, pitting democrats determined to demonstrate a new form of governance against anarchists intent upon asserting the primacy of autonomy.
\n\nThough David Graeber encouraged participants to regard consensus as a set of principles rather than rules, both proponents and authoritarian opponents of consensus process persisted in treating it as a formal means of government—while anarchists who shared Graeber’s framework found themselves outside the consensus reality of their fellow Occupiers. The movement’s failure to reach consensus about the meaning of consensus itself culminated with ugly attacks in which Rebecca Solnit and Chris Hedges attempted to brand anarchist participants as violent thugs.
\n\nHow did that play out in the hinterlands, where small-town Occupy groups took up the decision-making practices of Occupy Wall Street? The following narrative traces the tensions between democratic and autonomous organizational forms throughout the trajectory of one local occupation.
\n\nThis text is an installment in our series exploring an anarchist analysis of democracy, which is collected in our book, From Democracy to Freedom.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/04/14/2b.jpg\")
\nA decade and a half ago, I participated in the so-called “anti-globalization movement,” so described by journalists who preferred not to say “anticapitalist.” Beginning with a groundswell of local initiatives, it culminated in a string of massive riots at international trade summits from Seattle in November 1999 to Genoa in July 2001. Although I had been an anarchist for some years already, I learned about consensus process in the course of those experiences. Like many other participants, I believed that this form of decision-making pointed the way to a world without government or capitalism. We cherished the seemingly impossible dream that one day that decision-making process might be taken up by the population at large.
\n\nTen years later, I visited the Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zuccotti Park. It had only existed for two weeks, yet it had already developed its political culture: daily assemblies, “mic check,” consensus process. This was all familiar to me from my “anti-globalization” days, though most people there clearly did not share that background.
\n\nI heard a lot of legalistic and reformist rhetoric in the course of my brief visit. At the same time, this was what we had dreamed of, our practices spreading outside our milieu. Could the practices themselves instill the political values that had originally inspired us to employ them? Some of my comrades had argued that directly democratic models could be a radicalizing step towards anarchism. The following months put that theory to the test.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/04/14/3b.jpg\")
\nTwo weeks after my visit to Manhattan, I was back in my hometown in Middle America, attending our Occupy group’s second assembly. A hundred people from a wide range of backgrounds and political perspectives were debating whether to establish an encampment. It’s not easy for a crowd arbitrarily convened through an open invitation on Facebook to make a decision together. Some argued against occupying, claiming that the police would evict us, insisting we should apply for a permit first. In the nearest city, occupiers had applied for a permit but were only granted one lasting a few hours; everyone who remained after it expired was arrested. A few of us thought it better to go forward without permission than to embolden the authorities to believe we would comply with whatever was convenient for them.
\n\nA different facilitator would have let the debate remain abstract indefinitely, effectively quashing the possibility of an occupation in the name of consensus. But ours cut right to the chase: “Raise your hand if you want to camp out here tonight.” A few hands went hesitantly up. “Looks like five… six, seven… OK, let’s split into two groups: those who want to occupy, and everyone else. We’ll reconvene in ten minutes.”
\n\nAt first there were only a half dozen of us meeting on the occupiers’ side of the plaza, but after we took the first step, others drifted over. Ten minutes later, there were twenty-four of us—and that night dozens of people camped out in the Plaza. I stayed up all night waiting for the police to raid us, but they never showed up. We’d won the first round, expanding what everyone imagined to be possible—and we owed it to people taking the initiative autonomously, not to reaching consensus.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/04/14/4b.jpg\")
\nOur occupation was a success. Over the first few weeks, scores of new people met and got to know each other through demonstrations, logistical work, and nights of impassioned discussion.
\n\nThe nightly assemblies served as a space to get to know each other politically. First, we heard a wide range of testimonials about why people were there. These ranged from boring to fascinating, but they died out swiftly once the business of making decisions via assemblies got underway. Next, we weathered lengthy debates about whether there should be a nonviolence policy, with nonviolence serving as a code word for legalistic obedience. Thanks to the participation of many anarchists, this discussion was split pretty much down the middle, but it enabled many occupiers who had never been part of something comparable to hear some new arguments.
\n\nIt was interesting to watch so many people go through such a rapid political evolution. I enjoyed the debates, the drama of watching middle-class liberals struggle to converse on an equal footing with anarchists and other angry poor people.
\n\nOn the other hand, the assemblies were ineffective as a way to make decisions. After weeks of grueling daily sessions, we gave up entirely on formulating a mission statement about our basic goals, consensus having been repeatedly blocked by a lone contrarian. Some people managed to push a couple small demonstrations through the consensus process, but they attracted almost no participants. The assembly’s stamp of approval did not correlate with people actually investing themselves; the momentum to make an effort succeed was determined elsewhere.
\n\nWhile the nightly assemblies helped us get to know each other politically, if you wanted to get to know people personally, you had to spend time at the encampment. Standing night watch, facing off with drunk college students and other reactionaries, I became acquainted with many of the occupiers who had first arrived as disconnected individuals. It was those connections that gave us cause to be invested in each other’s efforts over the following months.
\n\nUnexpectedly, the liberals were among the most invested in the protocol of consensus process—however unfamiliar it was, they found it reassuring that there was a proper way of doing things. This emphasis on protocol created rifts with the actual inhabitants of the encampment, many of whom felt ill at ease communicating in such a formal structure; that class divide proved to be a more fundamental conflict than any political disagreement. From the perspective of the liberals, there was a democratic assembly in which anyone could participate, and those who did not attend or speak up could not complain about the decisions made there. From the vantage point of the camp, the liberals showed up for an hour or two every couple days, and expected to be able to dictate decisions to people who were in the camp twenty-four hours a day—often not even sticking around to implement them.
\n\nAs a part of the minority that was familiar with consensus process yet simultaneously a denizen of the camp proper, I could see both sides. I tried to explain to the liberals who just showed up for the assemblies—the ones who understood Occupy as a political project rather than a social space—that there were already functioning decision-making processes at work in the encampment, however informal, and if they wanted to establish better relations with the residents of the encampment, they should take those processes seriously and try to participate in them, too.
\n\nAfter the first few weeks, the flow of new participants slowed. We became a known quantity once more. Consequently, we began to lose our leverage on the authorities. Meanwhile, it was getting colder out, and winter was on the way. Based on our experience attempting to formulate a mission statement or call for demonstrations, it seemed clear to us that if there was to be a next step, it would have to be decided outside the general assemblies.
\n\nI got together with some friends I had known and trusted for a long time—the same group that had called for Occupy in our town in the first place. We discussed whether to occupy a vast empty building a few blocks from the plaza. Most of us thought it was impossible, but a few fanatics insisted it could be done. We decided that if they could get us inside, we would try to hold onto it. But the plan had to be a secret until we were in, so the police couldn’t stop us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/04/14/5b.jpg\")
\nThe building occupation was a success. Over a hundred people flooded into the building, setting up a kitchen, a reading library, and sleeping quarters. A band performed, followed by a dance party. That night, dozens of people slept in the building rather than at the plaza, relieved to be out of the cold. Once again, I stood watch all night, waiting for the police—the stakes were higher this time, but they didn’t show up. Spirits were high: once again, we had expanded the space of possibility.
\n\nThe following afternoon, as we continued cleaning and repairing the building, a rumor circulated that the police were preparing a raid. Several dozen of us gathered for an impromptu meeting. It struck me how different the atmosphere was from our usual general assemblies. There were no bureaucratic formalities, no deadlocks over minutia. No one droned on just to hear himself speak or stared off listlessly. There was no payoff for grandstanding or chiding each other about protocol.
\n\nHere, there was nothing abstract about the issues at hand. We were putting our bodies on the line just by being present; these were real choices that would have immediate consequences for all of us. We didn’t need a facilitator to listen to each other or stay on topic. With our freedom at stake, we had every reason to work well together.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/04/14/6b.jpg\")
\nThe day after the raid, a huge crowd gathered at the original encampment for a contentious general assembly—the biggest and most energetic our town witnessed throughout the entire sequence of Occupy. Our decision to occupy the building, arrived at outside the general assembly, had ironically made the general assembly irresistible to everyone. Some people were inspired by the building occupation and our response to the police raid; others, who assumed the general assembly to be the governing body of the movement, were outraged that we had bypassed it; still others, who had not been interested in Occupy until now, came to engage with us because they could see we were capable of making a big impact. Even if they were only there to argue that we should “be peaceful” and obey the law, we hoped that entering that space of dialogue might expand their sense of what was possible, too.
\n\nSo the assembly benefitted from the building occupation, whether or not people approved of it. But they only came because of the power we had expressed by acting on our own. It was this power that they sought to access through the assembly—some to increase it, some to command it, some to tame it. In fact, the power didn’t reside in the assembly as a decision-making space, but in the people who came to it and the connections they forged there.
\n\nOver the following week, people inspired by the building occupations in Oakland and our little town occupied buildings in St. Louis, Washington, DC, and Seattle. This new wave of actions pushed the Occupy movement from symbolic protests towards directly challenging the sanctity of capitalist notions of property. Our town saw its biggest unpermitted demonstrations in years.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/04/14/7b.jpg\")
\nMonths later, I compared notes with comrades around the country about how this mass experiment in consensus process had gone. Everywhere, there had been the same conflicts, as some people who saw the assemblies as the legitimate space of decision-making criticized those who propelled the movement forward for acting autonomously. Even in Oakland, the most confrontational encampment in the country, they never made a consensus decision to keep police out of the camp—that decision was made by individuals, independently. A friend from Oakland recounted to me how, when he prevented an officer from entering, a young reformist who had just learned the buzzwords of consensus process angrily shouted “I block you, man! I block you!” at him. In a photograph taken after the riots with which occupiers retaliated against the eviction of their encampment, someone has written on a broken window, “This act of vandalism was NOT authorized by the GA,” as if the GA were a governmental body, answerable for its subjects and therefore entitled to legitimize or delegitimize their actions.
\n\nThat shows a profound misunderstanding of what consensus procedure is good for. Like any tool, power flows from us to it, not the other way around—we can invest it with power, but using it won’t necessarily make us more powerful. Every single step that made Occupy succeed in our town, from the call for the first assembly to the decision to occupy the plaza to the decision to occupy a building, was the result of autonomous initiative. We never could have consensed to do any of those things in an assembly that included anarchists, Maoists, reactionary poor people, middle-class liberals, police infiltrators, people with mental health issues, aspiring politicians, and whoever else happened to stop by at random. The assemblies were essential as a space where we could intersect and exchange proposals, creating new affinities and building a sense of our collective power, but we don’t need a more participatory—and therefore even more inefficient and invasive—form of government. We need the ability to act freely as we see fit, the common sense to coexist with others wherever possible, and the courage to stand up for ourselves whenever there are real conflicts.
\n\nAs the movement was dying down, the faction of Occupy that was most invested in legalism and protocol called for a National Gathering in Philadelphia on July 4, 2012, at which to “collectively craft a Vision of a Democratic Future.” Barely 500 people showed from around the country, a tiny fraction of the number that had blocked ports, occupied parks, and marched in the streets. The people, as they say, had voted with their feet.
\n\n\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/04/07/destination-anarchyevery-step-is-an-obstacle", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/04/07/destination-anarchyevery-step-is-an-obstacle", "title": "Destination Anarchy/Every Step Is an Obstacle", "summary": null, "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/04/07/1b-1.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/04/07/1b-1.jpg", "date_published": "2016-04-07T18:51:55Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:29Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "Anarchists all over the country made mistakes about direct democracy and the general assembly form—a mistake revolutionaries have been making for decades. It could be useful to attend assemblies, but it is not useful to be governed by them.
\n\n-Don’t Die Wondering: Atlanta Against the Police Winter 2011-2012
\n
In summer 2011, tens of thousands of people came together in Syntagma Square in front of the Greek parliament in Athens to express a complete rejection of the government and experiment with direct democracy. At the high point of the protests, over a hundred thousand people clashed with the authorities. Years later, many of the people who flooded Syntagma have poured into the ranks of the ruling party, Syriza, or the fascist party Golden Dawn. In this reflective account, a Greek anarchist narrates the events of 2011 and the developments since then, illustrating the ways that one day’s steps towards liberation become the next day’s obstacles and drawing out the questions that anarchists will have to answer to open the way to freedom.
\n\nThis text is an installment in a series exploring the anarchist analysis of democracy, tracing the trajectories of directly democratic movements around the world.
\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/04/05/from-15m-to-podemos", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/04/05/from-15m-to-podemos", "title": "From 15M to Podemos", "summary": null, "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/04/05/1b.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/04/05/1b.jpg", "date_published": "2016-04-05T17:52:58Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:29Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "In May 2011, protesters inspired by the Arab Spring occupied plazas across Spain in lively anti-government demonstrations centered around directly democratic assemblies. This was the first of a wave of such movements that spread across Europe and the world. Five years later, the energy that began as a push for participatory politics has been channeled into the rise of new Spanish political parties. Is this a corruption of the discourse of the plaza occupation movement, or its logical conclusion?
\n\nThis eyewitness account is an installment in our series exploring the anarchist analysis of democracy.
\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/03/31/from-democracy-to-freedom", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/03/31/from-democracy-to-freedom", "title": "From Democracy to Freedom", "summary": "", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/03/31/1b-2.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/03/31/1b-2.jpg", "date_published": "2016-03-31T13:20:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:29Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "Billions around the world have watched the familiar pageantry of the US Presidential race: Trump, the champion of the new extreme right, laying the groundwork for the despotism to come; Sanders, the partisan of an impossible dream, who nonetheless succeeded in luring disaffected millions back into electoral politics; Clinton, the despised representative of the status quo—around whom the hapless majority are forced to rally, since the future is sure to be even worse. Contemplating this bleak spectacle, some people object that this isn’t real democracy.
\n\nThis talk about real democracy will be familiar to anyone who lived through the Occupy movement or one of its overseas equivalents. In 2011, from Tunis to Madrid and New York, movements triggered by the economic crisis turned into experiments with new forms of governance. By 2014, the luster of real democracy had begun to wear off: the Ukrainian revolution confirmed the right-wing appropriation of the discourse, while the movement that spread from Ferguson began with a riot, not an assembly. But next time revolution is on the agenda, we’ll surely hear more calls for “real” democracy. As long as democracy is the only paradigm we have for change, even anarchists will demand it.
\n\nReflecting on the revolts of the preceding decade, we decided it was high time to get to the bottom of what democracy really is—and whether it’s what we want, after all. After years of research, discussion, and experimentation, we are excited present our conclusions in a massive new feature: From Democracy to Freedom.
\n\nIn this text, we examine the common threads that connect different forms of democracy, trace the development of democracy from its classical origins to its contemporary representative, direct, and consensus-based variants, and evaluate how democratic discourse and procedures serve the social movements that adopt them. Along the way, we outline what it could mean to seek freedom directly rather than through democratic rule.
\n\nThis is the flagship text in a series we will be publishing over the next several weeks, including testimony and critical analysis from participants in directly democratic movements around the world.
\n\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/03/16/series-the-anarchist-critique-of-democracy", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/03/16/series-the-anarchist-critique-of-democracy", "title": "Series: The Anarchist Critique of Democracy", "summary": "", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/03/16/1b-1.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/03/16/1b-1.jpg", "date_published": "2016-03-16T18:17:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:29Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "What is democracy, precisely? Will it ever deliver on what it promises? How significant is the difference between state democracy and direct democracy? Is anarchism a kind of direct democracy, or something else entirely? And how do democratic discourse and procedures serve the social movements that adopt them?
\n\nThis spring, we’re publishing a ten-part series exploring these questions, presenting an anarchist analysis of democracy in all its forms. The flagship text, “From Democracy to Freedom,” traces democracy from its origins up to today, examining its representative, direct, and consensus-based variants. We’ll follow up with case studies from participants in several of the recent movements that have been acclaimed as models of direct democracy: 15M in Spain (2011), the occupation of Syntagma Square in Greece (2011), Occupy in the United States (2011-2012), the Slovenian uprising (2012-2013), the plenums in Bosnia (2014), and the Rojava revolution (2012-2016). We’ll conclude the series with guest contributions on the subject from Paul Z. Simons, Uri Gordon, and others.
\n\nTo kick off the series, we’ve prepared an updated online version of our classic text on this subject, The Party’s Over. We also encourage everyone to read the English translation of Contra la Democracia (“Against Democracy”) from Spain. Here’s an incomplete syllabus for the whole series:
\n\nYou’re invited to form a reading group to participate in this project! We have set up a discussion platform where groups around the world can compare notes on the texts and the topic itself, in hopes of drawing on the conversation for a future episode of the Ex-Worker podcast. If you’re interested, get together some friends and write us at rollingthunder@crimethinc.com for details.
\n\n#47: Introducing the Anarchist Critique of Democracy — Is Democracy what we’re fighting for, as anarchists? In episode 47 of the Ex-Worker Podcast, a contentious debate between Clara and Alanis on this topic sets the stage for an upcoming, in-depth engagement with the topic of Democracy. In addition, we clean out our backlog of listener feedback, clarifying our trash-talking of both the Bay Area and Adbusters in past episodes, as well as hearing from a listener in Australia about various online resources for finding out what’s happening with anarchist and anti-fascists in the land down under. NYC Anarchist Black Cross provides us with thorough political prisoner updates, and we share a review of the book Huye Hombre Huye, available from Little Black Cart. As always, the episode is bookended with global news updates, plus prisoner birthdays, a whole slew of upcoming anarchist bookfairs and other events and more.
\n\nYou can download this and all of our previous episodes online. You can also subscribe in iTunes here or just add the feed URL to your podcast player of choice. Rate us on iTunes and let us know what you think, or send us an email to podcast@crimethinc.com. You can also call us 24 hours a day at 202–59-NOWRK, that is, 202–596–6975.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/02/24/rolling-thunder-10-pdf-now-available", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/02/24/rolling-thunder-10-pdf-now-available", "title": "Rolling Thunder #10 PDF Now Available", "summary": "", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/02/24/1b-2.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/02/24/1b-2.jpg", "date_published": "2016-02-24T19:52:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:29Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "This morning we sent out the last copy of Rolling Thunder #10, and you know what that means—the full high-resolution RT#10 PDF is now available for free download. This issue was two years in the making and absolutely jampacked:
\n\n\n\n\nRolling Thunder #10 begins with a reappraisal of the anarchist project in today’s context of crisis and technological transformation. From there, we chart the global trajectory of momentum from 2010 to 2012: the student movements in the US and UK—the insurrections in Tunisia, Egypt, and beyond—the occupation movements in Spain, Greece, and finally the USA, from its awkward beginnings in Wisconsin to its aftereffects in Oakland. For case studies, we focus in on the anti-police struggles that catalyzed the rise of confrontational anarchism in Seattle, and scrutinize how US immigration policy is applied on the ground at the border to explain how its actual objectives differ from its ostensible purpose. The issue concludes with a historical review of Canadian anarchism, following it from its origins through the 2010 Olympics and G20 riots and up to the present day. All this, plus a graphic history from Argentine anarchism, 24 pages in full color, and all the other bells and whistles you’ve come to expect from us times two. (114 pages)
\n
Last month we added Rolling Thunder #12 (the most current issues) to the Rolling Thunder Bundle, which now contains issues #8, #11, and #12 for just $10. And, don’t forget, you can subscribe to Rolling Thunder to get future issues hot off the press, while also supporting the project and ensuring the journal’s continued existence.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/02/16/europe-between-rape-and-racism", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/02/16/europe-between-rape-and-racism", "title": "Europe: Between Rape and Racism", "summary": "", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/02/16/europe-between-rape-and-racism.gif", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/02/16/europe-between-rape-and-racism.gif", "date_published": "2016-02-16T18:33:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:29Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "As Europe descends further into nationalism and xenophobia, we are seeing feminist, atheist, and progressive discourses appropriated to serve reactionary ends. Following the assaults in Cologne and the media feeding frenzy about “migrant violence,” many people have struggled to find a way to speak about the situation without minimizing the issue of sexual assault or contributing to the demonization of migrants. Yet displacement and sexual assault are not distinct issues—they are interrelated components of a larger context that must be confronted as a whole.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/02/16/2b.jpg\")
Nationalist graffiti in Slovenia: “Let’s rape leftist women.”
\nThe past decade has seen a series of cascading disasters in the Middle East and Europe. First, there was the bloody occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, which destabilized the region and ultimately enabled the Islamic State to seize weapons and power. Then a series of civil wars from Mali to Libya and Syria, combined with economic hardship throughout the region, triggered a mass influx of migrants seeking a new life in Europe. In response, European nations closed their borders and attempted to trap migrants in internment camps. Then, in November, Islamist attacks in Paris gave the French government an excuse to declare a state of emergency and intensified the momentum of an already violent backlash against migrants.
\n\nIn this charged environment, news reports circulated that “gangs of migrants” had carried out a series of sexual assaults in Cologne and elsewhere around Europe on New Year’s Eve. A new series of xenophobic attacks followed, along with demonstrations from Pegida and other nationalist groups. Many demonstrators appropriated slogans from anti-border movements, transforming “Refugees Welcome” into “Rapefugees Not Welcome” and demanding security for “Fortress Europe”—the Nazi expression for Occupied Europe during the Second World War. The overwhelming sentiment from participants was “We need to protect our women.”
\n\nOn one side, nationalists and fascists sought to exploit the trauma of sexual assault survivors as a tool for promoting hatred. On the other, many people who consider themselves to be feminists and advocates of migrants’ rights struggled to find a way to speak about the situation, afraid of minimizing the issue of sexual assault or contributing to the demonization of migrants.
\n\nThese are precisely the sort of difficult situations that we will be confronting as the world slides further into crisis, forcing populations into conflict and rupturing the neat and tidy narratives of a seemingly simpler era. If we don’t develop a language with which to articulate the nuances of such situations, reactionaries of all stripes will have a free hand to capitalize on them. In many regions, old-fashioned progressive politics are quickly losing ground to new waves of nationalism, while the state uses security concerns as a pretext to target anyone proposing a radical solution. Rather than ceding the discourse to those who would force us to choose between opposing rape and opposing racism, we have to articulate the ways that displacement and sexual assault are interrelated components of a larger context of oppression that has to be confronted in its entirety.
\n\nThe invasion of Iraq in 2003 opened the latest chapter in a history of colonial intervention in the Middle East that goes back hundreds of years. Sooner or later, the consequences of this were bound to reach Europe. In 2015 alone, over a million people crossed the Mediterranean Sea, mostly to Greece and Italy, then continued their journey further north. At least 3735 people died or went missing on the sea crossing, including many children. Well over three million more people are currently living in refugee camps in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and North Africa.
\n\nDoing their best to conceal their part in creating this disaster, Europe’s political elites dubbed it the “migrant crisis.” This phrase reduces a complex situation to a question of security; in fact, the crisis was not produced by migration, but by destabilization and borders. Tasking security experts with managing the situation, European governments erected new border walls, expanded the authority of the military, dehumanized migrants, and criminalized solidarity efforts.
\n\nGermany is one of the primary destinations migrants are trying to reach. Despite its supposed open door policy, Germany has been dividing migrants into deserving and undeserving, welcome and unwelcome—the former being mostly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, the latter mostly from Northern Africa but also from other war-torn areas such as Pakistan, Somalia, and Eritrea. This means that many migrants are being deported to countries in which their lives are in danger. Switzerland, Denmark, and some southern German states have been confiscating money and valuables from migrants, as well. Right-wing discourse maintains that most migrants entering Europe are young men—but in Slovenia, through which nearly half a million people have passed en route to northern Europe, the official numbers indicate that the majority of those crossing are women and children. Almost 300 refugee hostels have been attacked in Germany, with the pace escalating towards the end of 2015.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/02/16/3b.jpg\")
A planned asylum center in Germany burns down.
\nThis was the climate in which Cologne’s 2016 New Year’s celebration took place.
\n\nAccording to state reports, approximately a thousand men “of Arab or North African appearance” congregated around Cologne’s Central Station, where groups surrounded, groped, and robbed women. By the end of January, over a thousand people had filed complaints to the police about that night, including three rapes and 433 sexual offenses; charges have been filed against 44 people, ten of whom are in custody. Of those detained by the police, dozens were identified as asylum seekers or other migrants. Similar events were described in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Dortmund, Stuttgart, and as far as away as Helsinki.
\n\nThe events in Cologne were a windfall for nationalists and xenophobes who had long labored to build a narrative framing migrants as criminals, rapists, and purveyors of militant Islam, despite the fact that many of them are fleeing Islamist violence. Suddenly, all the repressive measures that governments had carried out over the preceding months were retroactively justified.
\n\nHow seriously should we take this story about a wave of crime, rape, and misogyny? Contrary to right-wing propaganda, official reports show that crime rates among migrants in Germany are no higher than among European citizens. This is significant when we consider that white men are more likely to be treated leniently by the police and court system than men of color.
\n\nAt the same time, we should never reduce our concern with sexual assault to a matter of statistics; the state does not document all the sexual violence that takes place, nor does it offer any constructive response to it. Likewise, we must not relativize such attacks in a way that takes them for granted. We consider the events in Cologne significant because we oppose all sexual violence, whether the perpetrators are from the upper echelons of political parties or the most oppressed sectors of society. For us, the attacks are specific acts of harm against individual human beings, not a public relations nightmare or an opportunity to promote an ideology. Addressing sexual violence and harassment is always important, even when nationalists attempt to hijack the discussion.
\n\nSo we must begin from the standpoint of solidarity with everyone targeted by sexual violence, while refusing state and nationalist narratives about how to respond. We need not have the illusion that all migrants are above reproach to see the value in resisting the state repression and racist violence directed at them. On the contrary, since different forms of violence reinforce each other, we recognize that the more effective we are in interrupting the violence of governments and nationalists, the more capable we are likely to be of putting an end to sexual violence and misogyny.
\n\nThe best way to counter nationalists’ attempt to exploit the Cologne attacks is to take the initiative against rape and misogyny ourselves, while debunking racist narratives about who the majority of rapists and misogynists are. Likewise, one of the ways to put a stop to sexual violence is to oppose the segregation, repression, and xenophobia that fractures the population into mutually hostile factions. This is especially important in the current climate of hatred, when nationalists, Islamists, and media outlets are all bent on representing us to each other in ways that breed distrust and violence. All of them have an interest in fomenting a religious war, dividing Europeans and migrants between the rival camps of Le Pen and al-Baghdadi so we will not find common cause against leaders and wars together. And the more fear, the more conflict, the less trust, the less mutual accountability… the more sexual assaults.
\n\nRacist narratives aside, we can’t rule out the possibility that as nationalist violence intensifies, many of those who are targeted will turn to anti-social activity. Already, we have seen how the alienation that led to the Banlieu riots in 2005 is now offering a fertile recruiting field to ISIS. This is yet another example of how reactionary movements and social conflicts spring up wherever we fail to demonstrate the virtues of fighting for total liberation. Unless we act effectively against nationalism and misogyny now, we will find ourselves more and more alone in our efforts to promote a world in which people are not divided along lines of gender, citizenship, ethnicity, and religion.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/02/16/4b.jpg\")
Don’t protect us, thanks.
\nThe demand for more policing complements the militarization of the borders. In a society in which the function of police has always been to preserve the state and male privilege, police will never be on the side of women and others targeted by sexual violence. If sexual violence is really the issue, it would be more effective to promote self-defense and mutual aid between targeted groups. But the nationalists who are suddenly talking about rape and misogyny were not exactly volunteering at domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers before New Year’s Eve.
\n\nIn fact, the narrative that women are being victimized by people of a rival ethnic or religious group is the oldest tool in the nationalist toolbox. It is easy to revive this narrative whenever it is convenient because, in a patriarchal society, assaults against women are always taking place, so nationalists can emphasize or conceal them as it serves their purposes. One of the easiest ways to justify violence is to argue that it will prevent or avenge violence against the innocent and defenseless—so in this narrative, women are always portrayed as victims on whose behalf others must take action.
\n\nLocal Europeans, not migrants, are responsible for most rapes in Europe. Again, this is not a justification for minimizing or relativizing the attacks that took place in Cologne. But the events in Cologne must not be used to justify further attacks and racism in the name of the women who were assaulted.
\n\nLet’s look at some earlier instances of this narrative about defending women. In the late 19th and early 20th century, thousands of black men in US were lynched; many of these killings were justified with rhetoric about protecting white women. In 1923, an entire black community was massacred in Florida in response to rumors that a black man had sexually assaulted a white woman. In 1955, white men killed a 14-year-old boy accused of flirting with a white woman. In some cases, lynchings occurred as a result of white women reporting that they had been raped in order to conceal their love affairs; in other cases, lynchings were provoked by the jealousy of husbands. Even explicitly consensual sexual relationships between white women and black men were interpreted as sexual attacks.
\n\nWho owns white women’s sexuality? Sexual access to white women has been traditionally seen by white society as a privilege reserved for white men as a symbol of their authority. This legacy continues up to today. In June 2015, 21-year-old Dylann Roof entered Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, announcing “You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go.” He shot and killed nine people.
\n\nDespite the general agreement that this was a white supremacist hate crime, Roof was represented to the public as an unfortunate, mentally troubled individual. By contrast, when Muslims engage in violent acts, pundits are quick to identify those acts as terrorism, because such acts are supposedly an inherent part of Muslim identity.
\n\nIf we compare the lynchings in the American South with the revenge attacks on migrants after the news spread from Cologne, we see two correlations. First, such revenge attacks are randomly directed at members of a group that is portrayed as an undifferentiated whole—in other words, they are racist violence, pure and simple. Second, even in the cases where sexual assaults had in fact taken place, the resulting attacks were not directed by the survivors and involved no real attempt to achieve accountability or take measures against sexism.
\n\nSuch claims of ownership over women’s bodies and sexuality often coincide with war. During the Balkan wars at the beginning of the 1990s, between ten and sixty thousand (mostly Muslim) women were raped in former Yugoslavia, often repeatedly, in front of family members, or in special camps. Sensationalist media reporting took no steps to protect the identities of women who were raped, while creating a discourse of victimization and erasing the voices of the survivors.
\n\nMost (male) politicians interpreted the mass rapes as an attack on national sovereignty. They drowned out the voices of rape survivors by speaking over them, presenting them as victims in order to fight wars in the name of their honor regardless of what the survivors actually wanted. They reduced the survivors to their ethnicities—to playing pieces in an ethnic conflict. The targets of rape were not individual human beings, but Bosnians, Serbs, Croats. This discourse was heard from all sides in the Balkan conflicts: the survivors were “their women.” Not surprisingly, those same men socially rejected survivors who became pregnant as a result of rape; many of their children are still orphans in Bosnia today.
\n\nAlready in the 1990s, Balkan feminists identified mass rapes as attacks against specific women, not just against an ethnicity, and openly opposed the war itself. Many women organized informal mutual aid for survivors during the war, refusing to permit the care of raped women to be left up to state institutions. These feminists were branded traitors; often, they were assaulted themselves. In 1992, an infamous article in the Croatian newspaper Globus claimed that “Croatian feminists are raping Croatia.”
\n\nHere we see how women’s attempts to defend themselves not only against assault but also against unsought “defense” place them outside the narrow zone of protection afforded under patriarchy. Insofar as men or the nation itself are understood as owning the female body, women’s bodies will be considered a resource to be controlled or attacked during wartime—and the desire to own or attack women’s bodies will function as an incentive to go to war. Rather than understanding rape as a weapon of war in a way that creates the demand for other weapons of war to be deployed in response, we can set out to oppose rape in ways that also oppose war itself. This offers some insight into how we might respond to the events in Cologne.
\n\nToday’s nationalists aspire to preserve Europe as a gated community; their aspirations are couched in the language of property ownership. At the beginning of the migrant crisis, they asserted ownership of the territory of the state: “We must defend our borders against migrants.” Then they asserted ownership of their roles in capitalist production: “The migrants are going to take our jobs.” Later, they took it upon themselves to protect their perverted version of multiculturalism: “We must defend our language, culture, and traditions from migrants.” Finally, they have started to claim ownership of female bodies as well: “We must defend our women from migrant rapists.”
\n\nThis portrayal of migrants as terrorists who rape European women is nothing new; it has played a central role in right-wing political propaganda for decades. This is the Other—the Foreigner, the Perpetrator—who exists in relation to the European white man, the Protector. The events of New Year’s Eve only confirmed a narrative that had long been circulating on right-wing blogs and message boards, catapulting it onto the front page of the mainstream news.
\n\nThe narrative that “migrants are rapists” encourages hatred towards all migrants as a single homogenous population. In Europe, particularly in the southeast, this idea that a given ethnic group has an inborn propensity for crime has historically been associated with the Roma population. News reports of assaults by non-white individuals have always specified ethnic, national, or racial descriptors—“A young migrant (or black, or Romani) man raped a woman”—while white men from the dominant ethnic group are not similarly identified.
\n\nToday, this sort of racism is often concealed under the argument that Islam is inherently more violent and oppressive than other religions. Even setting aside the obvious counterarguments (the Inquisition, the forcible conversion of the Americas, slavery and genocide in Africa, abortion clinic bombings, Anders Brevik…) it’s clear that this narrative functions to justify the same colonialist interventionism that produced the rise of fundamentalist Islam in the first place. Nationalists are trying to coopt progressive and radical ideas, including atheist critiques of religion as a whole, to craft a story in which the civilized West is forced to do battle with superstitious religious barbarians. Even some ostensibly anarchist groups have published texts that assert this narrative. In fact, if your goal is to undermine the repressive cultural values associated with some forms of Islam, it is more effective to support rebels in Muslim communities than to demonize Muslims as a whole.
\n\nThe goal of these narratives is to render it impossible to imagine a world without borders. Whoever rejects nationalism is branded naïve—“What would you say if they raped you, or your sister or mother or daughter or wife?”—or else as a supporter of rape. Right-wing rhetoric alleging that “Western women” are to be “sacrificed on the alter of mass migration” in a “rape epidemic” aims to divide radical movements between two subjects we have worked hard to push into the public awareness—rape culture and migrant solidarity. Nationalists are especially eager to force this division, since they have a lot to be defensive about when it comes to misogyny.
\n\nIf it is possible to make such a distinction in the first place, it is only because those critiques reached the public in a watered-down single-issue liberal form. Likewise, the storyline of man as protector or perpetrator and woman as victim only reinforces the gender binary, pressuring people to adhere to their assigned genders for fear of becoming targets. Claiming to protect women is a way to police everyone’s gender and sexuality.
\n\nBy the same token, as soon as they speak out about the links between sexual violence and racism, women are considered legitimate targets for the same assaults white men claim to be protecting them from. In Slovenia’s capital Ljubljana, graffiti appeared around the city proclaiming Posilmo Levičarke, “Let’s rape leftist women.” In Slovenia, “levičarke” is a right-wing slur referring explicitly to anarchists, queers, and other antifascists and feminists. The message is clear: everyone who does not line up to support the nation and white manhood is a traitor who should be taught a lesson. Meanwhile, social centers throughout Europe that show solidarity with migrants have been targeted with the same violence aimed at migrant hostels.
\n\nLikewise, a month after New Year’s Eve, white Germans groped a reporter who was speaking live on television in Cologne. So long as the idea prevails that women are men’s property, all women can expect to be treated thus, even those who don’t threaten the nationalist agenda. Nationalists aren’t interested in protecting anyone—they just need a way to popularize the violence they wish to perpetrate against migrants and women alike. The rhetoric of protection is a thinly veiled threat.
\n\nNationalist violence continues the process of silencing that began with the sexual assaults, in that it replaces and drowns out the voices of the survivors who should be the ones speaking in the first place. Foremost among those are the migrants who are themselves targeted for sexual assault and harassment. Women traveling from Turkey to Greece and north through the Balkans into the European Union have reported being sexually assaulted and harassed at every stage in the journey. In the transit camps of Croatia, Greece, and Hungary, where they are forced to sleep in the same spaces as men and to use same shower and toilet facilities while being watched, some stopped eating or drinking in order to avoid having to use the toilets. They are often pressured to offer sexual favors to smugglers, camp guards or other security personnel, or other migrants. If nationalists were truly concerned about sexual assault, they would begin with what migrants have been going through.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/02/16/5b.jpg\")
A migrant sits on a bed at her first registration point.
\nSexual violence threatens people everywhere that there are “secure borders” and military controls. In the process of crossing the border between Mexico and the US, almost 80 percent of women from Central America are raped by government officials, cartels, guides, or other migrants. It just came out that minors were raped by United Nations peacekeeping units in Central African Republic, following last year’s revelation that UN troops had sexually abused children in Central African Republic as well as more than 200 women and children in Haiti.
\n\nIt is no coincidence that so many rapes are perpetrated by representatives of the state. Putting some people in a position of power over others structurally increases the likelihood of rape. Sexual assaults often occur within hierarchical institutions such as prisons, mental heath institutions, churches, schools, offices, and heteronormative families in which the same structures that are supposed to protect people render them vulnerable. If we grant that misogyny and sexual assault exist in Muslim communities—citing, for example, the sexual assaults in Tahrir Square, which Egyptian black bloc anarchists took the lead in resisting—that doesn’t mean that white Europe is free of rape or sexism. They just don’t come to light as often because the perpetrators are protected by their status.
\n\nThe central question here is not who the rapists are, but how to respond to sexual assault and rape culture in a way that puts an end to them. Imposing more coercive force, exacerbating power imbalances, and creating more conflicts between “peoples” will only intensify the factors that produce rape in the first place. The fight against sexual assault and patriarchy cannot prioritize any specific group, culture, society, or territory. Sexualized violence exists in a feedback loop with other forms of patriarchy, heterosexism, trans oppression, ageism and oppression of youth, colonialism, and genocide. To fight any of these effectively, we have to fight all of them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/02/16/6b.jpg\")
A Syrian refugee resists Hungarian police who have taken her husband and are attempting to lock her in an internment camp.
\nRacism and fascism have gotten a makeover in Europe, casting off the old uniforms in favor of suits and ties. Meanwhile, many previously apolitical people are embracing xenophobia, blaming all the problems caused by capitalism on the most vulnerable and marginalized. As discourses and power alliances are reconfigured in this context, we must be careful not to be drawn into the narratives of our enemies.
\n\nNo state or nationalist security could offer us the safety that comes from social ties and solidarity that extend across the lines of ethnicity and religion. Just as we seek to unlearn our own sexism and to take responsibility for the ways we do harm to others, we have to understand our world as a single unified space in which neither exclusion nor coercion will put an end to misogyny and sexual violence. The solution to sexual assault has never been to externalize the problem behind bars or across borders. The fight against sexism is not a fight against something external, but against all identities that are constructed within gendered matrices of power, including our own identities. This is a fight we can share with migrants, with survivors, with everyone who has a stake in creating a different world.
\n\nThe nationalists have no real plan for putting an end to the violence they pretend to oppose. Their strategies of division can only exacerbate it—and perhaps that is their true intention. Dehumanizing or deporting migrants will strengthen the position of the Islamic State, Ansar Dine, Boko Haram, and other groups who want to create a situation in which Muslims have no choice except to join their religious war. This makes it all the more pressing to establish a common struggle with migrants while demonstrating empowering and inclusive solutions to the problem of sexual violence. Rape and racism are manifestations of the same thing. Let’s fight them together.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/02/16/7b.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/02/16/8b.jpg\")
More pro-rape nationalist graffiti in Slovenia, modified to read “Who is afraid of the leftist woman?” and “Let’s support leftist women.”
\nUnfortunately, our efforts to update tochangeeverything.com have lagged behind the efforts of comrades around the world to produce versions of To Change Everything in their own languages. We will be updating the site on an ongoing basis, but in the meantime, here are the PDFs of ten more versions of the project, along with the videos for six of them. If you are interested in working on a version for your own language or region, please get in touch!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/01/25/catalan-a.jpg\")
\nScreen PDF (Single Page View) [4.4MB]
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/01/25/chinese-a.jpg\")
\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/01/25/danish-a.jpg\")
\nPrint PDF (A6, Color, Imposed) [1.7MB]
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\n Print PDF (Color, Imposed) [21.1MB]
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/01/25/greek-a.jpg\")
\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/01/25/italian-a.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/01/25/korean-a.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/01/25/romanian-a.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/01/25/russian-a.jpg\")
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\nWe’ve just mailed out the last print copy of Rolling Thunder #9, and as such, we’re very happy to make the full issue available for download as a beautiful, high-resolution PDF. With issue #9 we were really hitting our stride, and its contents still hold up quite well:
\n\n\n\n\nHow important is legitimacy—in our own eyes, in the eyes of potential allies, in the eyes of the public? How can anarchists cultivate it? What pitfalls does it hold? Rolling Thunder #9 explores these questions while reporting on the past six months of upheavals around the US. Following up on our coverage of the 2008 convention protests, this issue assesses anarchist action at the 2009 G20 summit, mapping conflict throughout the city and analyzing the strategies of the police and protesters. The accompanying Pittsburgh scene report examines the decade of local organizing that prepared the ground for this and other confrontations. Elsewhere herein, we scrutinize protest and resistance on campus—from the recent occupation movement to efforts to shut down fascist student organizations—and overseas in the Smash EDO campaign. All this, plus obscure Russian history, a reappraisal of the concept of “free speech,” and the usual stunning prose. No advertisements; 16 full-color pages.
\n
We’ve taken this opportunity to add Rolling Thunder #12 (the most current issues) to the Rolling Thunder Bundle, now containing issues #8, #10, #11, and #12 for just $10. And, don’t forget, you can subscribe to Rolling Thunder to get future issues hot off the press, while also supporting the project and ensuring the journal’s continued existence. Our current plan is to release issue #13 this spring.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/01/08/ex-worker-45-2015-year-in-review", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2016/01/08/ex-worker-45-2015-year-in-review", "title": "The Ex-Worker #45: 2015 Year in Review!", "summary": "", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/01/08/1b.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/01/08/1b.jpg", "date_published": "2016-01-08T19:23:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:29Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "#44: 2015 Year in Review! In our first episode of the new year, the Ex-Worker looks back over 2015 and its highlights, lowlights, and everything in between. We summarize some of the year’s key news developments, including tech developments and struggles around gender, anarchist publishing and media, a hilarious look at mass media coverage of anarchism, and our reflections on the last year of the podcast itself and our new year’s resolutions. You’ll also hear some analysis of some of the important themes within anarchism and revolutionary struggles in 2015, including an extended discussion on identity and solidarity, a review of the AK Press anthology “Taking Sides”, and reflections on our relationship to mass movements. The anarchist news website “It’s Going Down” contributes their end of year thoughts, a new project called “The Spaces Between” sets out to document US anarchism outside of its major urban hotspots, and a supporter offers an important update on NATO 3 prisoner Jared “Jay” Chase. We also received a number of detailed and inspiring year in review reports from anarchists around the world… but we’ll save those for our next episode.
\n\nYou can download this and all of our previous episodes online. You can also subscribe in iTunes here or just add the feed URL to your podcast player of choice. Rate us on iTunes and let us know what you think, or send us an email to podcast@crimethinc.com. You can also call us 24 hours a day at 202–59-NOWRK, that is, 202–596–6975.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2015/12/28/report-to-change-everything-us-tour", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2015/12/28/report-to-change-everything-us-tour", "title": "Report: To Change Everything US Tour", "summary": "", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2015/12/28/1b-1.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2015/12/28/1b-1.jpg", "date_published": "2015-12-28T18:09:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:29Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "Last month, we concluded the To Change Everything US tour, bringing together anarchists from Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and North America to compare notes on the uprisings and social movements of the past decade. In the course of 65 days, we presented 59 events in 57 towns, speaking with well over 2000 people altogether. To hear an audio recording from one of the presentations, tune in to episode 44 of the Ex-Worker Podcast.
\n\nMany people have seen the booklet and video we are distributing on the theme To Change Everything; we wanted to follow up by initiating intercontinental conversations about strategy and liberation. In the digital age, it is more important than ever to meet and debate and form bonds in person. If you met us on this trip, please stay in touch and help brainstorm what we should do together next.
\n\nWe had a wonderful tour. For those of us from the US as well as overseas, it is instructive to take in the entire country in a single continuous trip. It gives you the lay of the land. Here is what we saw.
\n\nThe good news is that plenty of people around the United States are newly interested in anarchism. Most of our events were better attended than anyone anticipated, drawing crowds of more than a hundred in a few cases. In the Midwest, for example, not known for being a hotbed of radicalism, we were surprised how many people wanted to talk revolution, especially in cities within a day’s drive of St. Louis, Missouri. This is the generation radicalized by the Ferguson protests. Even as state repression intensifies and survival gets more difficult, that creates windows of opportunity.
\n\nAt the same time, it seems that the forms of infrastructure and organization that would enable people to follow through on this interest are largely missing. In Washington, DC, once an epicenter of anarchist activity, after we spoke to a full room, many people asked how they could get involved with local in anarchist groups—and none of the longtime locals in attendance knew what to tell them. Over and over, in perhaps a dozen cities, we heard that our event was perhaps the largest gathering of anarchists their community had seen for years. This is not good news. Rather than waxing nostalgic about the structures of the past, we urge our comrades across the US to experiment with new ways to bring people together.
\n\nHaving to articulate our experiences and critiques on a nightly basis in dialogue with a wide range of people enabled us to learn from others and to refine and clarify our own views. In addition to introducing the basic tenets of anarchism, our talks focused on the distinction between democracy and autonomy, the pitfalls of organizing around demands, and how nationalism, fascism, and militarization are spreading in response to the same crises that anarchists hope to address. That last subject proved especially timely, as our tour coincided with the so-called “migrant crisis” in Europe, itself brought about by borders and nationalism. Additionally, on the northeast and northwest coasts, a comrade from the group that published Para Cambiar Todo in Argentina joined us. She concentrated on the ways that the gains of the Argentinean revolution of 2001 have been reintegrated into the prevailing order there, to encourage critical thinking about how to resist the processes of cooptation.
\n\nDifferent threads from our presentation resonated in different parts of the country. In the northeast, where some of our events were booked by members of the Black Rose Anarchist Federation, the discussions often focused on basic strategic questions, as comrades coming from a background of activism or labor organizing struggled to understand our critique of demand-centered organizing. Elsewhere, attendees were more focused on how to respond to the spread of nationalism and how to act in solidarity with targeted populations. Occasionally, we got to debate supporters of Syriza or leftist movements in Argentina—proponents of a reformism for which the prospects seem to be increasingly bleak.
\n\nThis was an ambitious tour. The last comparable anarchist speaking tour of the US was probably in 2010, when our Greek comrades came to present We Are an Image from the Future. We hope that our efforts will inspire others to go further in similar ventures. The tour gave us an invaluable chance to get perspective on our immediate struggles, to engage in collective critical reflection on the challenges ahead, and to start new friendships that will continue to inspire us for a long time to come.
\n\nAlong the way, we saw the coastline on all four sides of the continental US, three of the Great Lakes, Niagara Falls, and several deserts and canyons. We climbed mountains and swam in a dozen lakes, rivers, and oceans. We got lost in Mexico and wandered downtown Los Angeles on Halloween night with nowhere to sleep. We held correspondence between Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman in our hands at the Labadie Collection, the largest archive of anarchist material in North America. We visited Goldman’s grave and the graves of other comrades at Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago, and the memorial near the site of the Haymarket massacre. We deplored the aesthetics of Las Vegas and the gentrification of the Albany Bulb in Berkeley. We saw llamas, skunks, sea lions, coyotes, snakes, turtles, elk, deer, rabbits, raccoons, and thousand-year-old Redwoods. We argued in six languages. On some days, we paid visits to as many as four towns, with a different activity scheduled in each of them. We had a lot of adventures.
\n\nThanks to Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness and Hayes Auto Service for help with transportation, and the generous individual who loaned us a minivan while we replaced the transmission in our own disabled vehicle—not to mention countless other comrades who organized events for us, fed us, housed us, raised funds to help cover our expenses, mailed things that we had forgotten, and shared their insights and enthusiasm with us. Above all, we are grateful to all the courageous people who risk their freedom and sometimes their lives in pursuit of liberation.
\n\nHere follow a few stories from some of the places we visited, recounted in seven different voices.
\n\n\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2015/12/28/3b.jpg\")
The Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space in Manhattan.
\nAs soon as we arrived in the Big Apple, we went and gave a presentation on overseas occupation movements at the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space on the ground floor of Manhattan’s notorious See Squat. Afterwards, we squatted a disused apartment in Brooklyn, where we stayed for the duration of our stay in New York City. Gentrification is sweeping the world, washing away radical social centers and squatting movements everywhere—and New York has been one of the worst hit. See Squat itself is marooned in a bourgeois wasteland of expensive eateries, literally reduced to a museum marking what once was. That’s exactly what we were warning against in our discussion of the uses and pitfalls of focusing on infrastructure. But for a few days, gentrification be damned, we lived the dream—complete with the roaring subway right outside our rent-free front window.
\n\nThere is such a thing as American exceptionalism. Americans are certain that however bad things are in the US, they must be worse elsewhere. This notion of America as the promised land is deeply engrained in the American psyche. Over and over, we heard audiences explain that the resistance movements we were describing in other parts of the world are inspiring, but that people won’t revolt like that in the United States because they have it easy—they’re seduced by material comforts and middle-class apathy. This was dramatized for us at our first presentation in New York, when a woman stood up to express solidarity with our squatting struggles in Eastern Europe, and to ask how to help. She said that people don’t have it bad enough yet in the US to be ready to fight back. To put that in perspective, she was an unemployed middle-aged HIV-positive African-American woman whose housing project was being evicted. Maybe the problem is not that people don’t have it bad enough here, but the idea that it must be worse elsewhere.
\n\nThe following night, we had a packed event at the Base in Brooklyn. Thanks to all our comrades there, for the fancy letter-pressed posters and everything else.
\n\nA decade and a half ago, Boston was one of the centers of old-fashioned anarcho-communist organizing in the United States, boasting a chapter of the Northeastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists that published NEFAC’s regular English-language journal and even took the lead in calling for the black bloc at Bush’s inauguration in 2001. We [CrimethInc.-affiliated anarchists] had our differences with that crowd, and were bemused by the love-hate relationship certain NEFACers had with our efforts. But they were an essential part of the anarchist movement of the time, and proportionate to their numbers, they accomplished a great deal.
\n\nIt would be nice if they were still around. We could debate why workplace organizing never regained centrality in anarchist strategizing: they would insist that this is why anarchists haven’t made more inroads into reaching “the masses,” while we would counter that precarization driven by capitalist globalization and the transition of the majority of workers from industrial production to the service industry has relocated the epicenter of economic struggles from the workplace to the street. We could tell each other “I told you so” about the crises and uprisings of the past decade. They would grant that we had a better grasp of how to open dialogue with people outside the anarchist milieu, while we would acknowledge that in our halcyon youth it was only thanks to their stodgy, steady efforts that we could present ourselves as the prodigal children of freedom.
\n\nUnfortunately, there’s little sign of our old rivals in Boston today. It’s ironic that our informal network has outlived all their carefully federated infrastructure. This may be because, as we once argued about insurrectionist anarchism, some forms of organization produce more energy and resources than they consume, while others cost more than they produce. But it also speaks to the transience of anarchist projects—and social networks of all kinds—in North America. Our talk drew intelligent and committed comrades from a variety of struggles and backgrounds, but the class struggle perspective was represented by a very small number of activists who are striving against the current to revive anarchist labor organizing in Massachusetts. The last thing we want is to win arguments by attrition; it’s better to be part of a vibrant range of anarchist practices and strategies, with room for disagreement and debate. Don’t drop out, comrades, especially if you disagree with us.
\n\nAfter the discussion, taking a scenic foot tour of the city, we saw the hotel where both Ho Chi Minh and Malcolm X once worked, serving as a pastry chef and a busboy, respectively. The indignities of the service industry will surely go on producing revolutionaries; the question is whether anarchists will be involved.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2015/12/28/4b.jpg\")
The Flying Squirrel Community Space in Rochester, NY.
\nA group of comrades were waiting for us on 28th and Liberty Street. One of them had thoughtfully prepared a historical tour of the neighborhood for us. Though we had never met, we were treated as old friends.
\n\nOur host told us a story from almost 140 years ago. After years of wage cuts and layoffs, railroad workers across the US went on strike. It began in West Virginia in the summer of 1877 and quickly spread to several other states. Workers spontaneously rose up, independent of their unions, preventing trains from moving and destroying train cars and stations. The strike lasted 45 days, and was eventually put down by local, state, and federal militias. Apparently, the worst violence occurred there in Pittsburgh.
\n\nHe led us through some streets to different spots where workers had fought against 300 militia members from Philadelphia. The workers armed themselves and the conflict went on for days, forcing the militia to the street, where they where shot at from all directions. We were taken back in history for a moment, just as if a friend were telling me about a riot he participated in a few weeks ago. It is a gift to tread in the footsteps of rebels past, to understand that whatever happened is never lost, it’s still there.
\n\nEarlier that day, we had spotted an impressive but strange building as we drove through the town. It was a high tower, like a cathedral or a castle out of a desert-empire-fantasy story. We took some photos and didn’t give much more thought to it, but as one of us put it, “It’s just typical of my fate that that’s where our presentation will be today.” In fact, the building was part of the university; though it looked like a school of wizardry inside, we found our designated classroom. It looked quite normal.
\n\nWhile we were fooling around with the rollable podium, the room filled with over 120 people. Most were students, but there were others, young and old. An interesting discussion followed, ranging from powerful political wonderings and loving fiery statements to basic questions like “Who will clean the streets in Anarchy?” Many might laugh (so did I), but it led to a conversation about valuing people’s lives over their labor, individual responsibility in a community, and the brutal force of money and the economy. Whoever feels like their question is not “clever enough,” forget about that and speak up! Usually great things come out of being honest.
\n\nLater that evening, yet another event had been planned with us; we found ourselves in a lovely home with a living room filled with local anarchists. One of the goals was to strengthen the city’s internal web of radical individuals, especially since many people did not know each other. For me personally, this is one of the things I wish to see more of in any context, whether at home or in places I visit. To challenge ourselves to make our lives, joys, and problems a collective matter, a collective concern.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2015/12/28/5b.jpg\")
A public monument in Pittsburgh, PA autonomously placed by the Howling Mob Society to celebrate the riotous Railroad Strike of 1877.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2015/12/28/6b.jpg\")
Another longstanding public installation in Pittsburgh.
\nThree days after our presentation in the Cathedral of Learning, we sat around a fire on logs in the grass and dirt of a lovely community garden on a squatted field surrounded by asphalt and low buildings. People said the city was called ”Little Detroit,” probably because of the economic (and architectural?) similarities. I don’t know, but the GPS had taken us to Toledo.
\n\nWhile the sun was still up, I explored the little paths around the vegetable and sunflower beds. A big, colorful mural of fable animals, badger gardeners, and squirrel anarchists decorated the side of a brick house facing the garden. Children were running around the romantic setting; even the compost piles of rotting plants looked beautiful in the orange autumn light. Next to the fire circle was an outdoor kitchen, built DIY out of wood and clay. While the sun was setting, people put out stews brought for the occasion. We all shared a meal together and our fire grew while the darkness spread.
\n\nThe atmosphere of this presentation was very different from other times on this tour. Introductions and discussion intermingled as people came with thoughts from all directions. A warm welcoming feeling to anyone who looks inward in a circle, who accepts, listens, and teaches horizontally. To be next to everyone, but also to face them from the opposites we come from. It was a magical evening and I would like to thank everyone who shared their powerful and confrontational insights. Even in the asphalted terrain among domesticated, modern human beings, I felt the presence of humble warriors.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2015/12/28/7b.jpg\")
The squatted community garden in Toledo.
\nIn Ayn Rand’s classic work of capitalist propaganda, Atlas Shrugged, she depicts a Detroit that has been ruined by socialism. Without the impetus of free market competition, the economy has collapsed along with the buildings it erected. The survivors linger on in a bestial state, sullen and unmotivated; Rand hints that they are even losing the power of speech. Worse yet—at least by her standards—they have ceased to use currency for their economic transactions.
\n\nDetroit today is indeed a ghost of its former glory, with entire neighborhoods abandoned and destroyed. Ironically, this was brought about by the globalization of the very same unbridled capitalism Ayn Rand considered the wellspring of all life. Bicycling around downtown Detroit, it often felt as though we were passing through a sprawling ghost town, the sort of rural wasteland produced by the emergence of industrial metropolises like the Detroit of the early 20th century. Rand’s beloved market economy produces apparent abundance by sucking resources into tremendous concentrations, then burning them up, leaving only wreckage in its wake. To quote Sole, “Look at Detroit, now look at the world.” If the impact of the boom and bust of the US automotive industry is represented by the present state of Detroit, what will the rise and fall of Google do to us all?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2015/12/28/8b.jpg\")
Derelict houses turned into art in one of the nearly abandoned neighborhoods in downtown Detroit. The blossoming of creativity in spaces abandoned by capitalism… or incipient gentrification?
\nDetroit. I never saw so much emptiness in one city, not even in Balkan cities, torn by war, and yet inhabited by people determined to live. In Detroit I saw that emptiness in the abandoned avenues, train stations, skyscrapers, and neighborhoods, everything over-dimensioned for an army of giants—all for industry long disappeared, with nothing but these empty relics of Fordism to indicate it ever was.
\n\nBut I saw that emptiness among comrades too. Even the room in which our presentation was held seemed oversized, the empty chairs at what was a well-attended event by Detroit standards seemed to me to represent comrades long gone.
\n\nDuring the discussion, I notice an older comrade, sitting in the back row in the dark. It takes a while before she speaks. She comes from a rundown neighborhood, where they have to fight fiercely to keep the electricity on in a building that is soon to be evicted. “But even if we win this one, there are so many more people about to be evicted,” she says. There is no despair in her voice, though. No lack of confidence. No thought of defeat. “We must fight, even if we put our bodies in danger, all together,” she concludes in language much more radical than what I have heard from most comrades on our tour. She and her friends are obviously fighting for their lives.
\n\nHer simple yet powerful words haunt me deep in the night as I crouch over the computer, trying to answer the emails that keep piling up and to refine my part of our presentation. In the middle of my struggle with words, I hear a loud noise—is that a crowd of people smashing up the pantry?
\n\nI was raised from childhood on tales of restless spirits who wander the land on unfinished business. Did our stories about the courageous actions of modern-day anarchists wake the revolutionary spirits of the industrial workers that I saw in Diego Rivera’s murals at Detroit’s Institute of Arts? Is it the poets, the bandits, the hobos, some other mystical creatures of the night? Or did our dreams of freedom awaken the present-day inhabitants of Detroit, the armies of the unemployed, the precarious workers sick and tired of running from one graveyard shift to the next? Did they stop to make a riot? As the commotion intensifies with devilish banging and rumbling, my curiosity draws me from my seat.
\n\nI steal carefully into the kitchen—only to find it empty and abandoned. Then I realize I am not alone. A pair of eyes glances at me from a high shelf, from which food has been torn out of its containers and thrown all over the floor. A rat. A single rat.
\n\nWe stop and stare for a moment, our eyes locked together. We need no words to understand each other. We are accomplices in the crime of living in the city of sleepers. I turn off the light so she can continue looting the kitchen. She won’t disturb me organizing my thoughts on the struggle for freedom. We feel it differently, but we fight the same kind of hunger.
\n\nThe following night we meet again. This time I see the rat carrying a tin twice her size up the wall. The weight of her loot pulls her down, yet she rises and keeps climbing.
\n\nI encountered that stirring, determined, courageous gaze in the eyes of unseen fighters many places on our trip. Maybe not in the places you would expect; rather, in the unexpected geographies of struggle. In the eyes of those who lived through the battles of Ferguson, in those who fight against borders in Arizona desert, in the stares of those living without papers in Las Vegas, in deported migrants on the abandoned streets of Tijuana, in eyes of those being gentrified out of New York.
\n\nThey might not be many. Their light might be—darkness. People might not expect them to rise. But we’ll hear them roar.
\n\nWho is going to roar with them?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2015/12/28/9b.jpg\")
Passing around Emma Goldman’s press credentials at the Labadie Collection in Ann Arbor, Michigan—the largest archive of anarchist material in North America.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2015/12/28/10b.jpg\")
The Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument at Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago, where Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Voltairine de Cleyre, August Spies, Boris Yelensky, Ben Reitman, and other anarchists are buried.
\nWe spoke in an occupation, one of the few in the United States and the first openly squatted building that we saw on this tour. It’s a big house with a lovely back yard, to which we moved the talk from the basement, which had been prepared with rows of chairs and banners on the walls. The neighborhood is inhabited by immigrants from Guerrero, Mexico, and many people at the talk were from there as well; it was good to feel a bit at home and to practice my Spanish. The day before, there had been an event in Chicago to remember the 43 students disappeared in Mexico a year earlier, and before my presentation I spoke about that and about the massacre in Carandiru prison in São Paulo in 1992, the anniversary of which was the same week.
\n\nAfter weeks of speaking to people who were mostly new to anarchism, I was glad to exchange perspectives with comrades who have been involved in these struggles already, so we could get into some subjects in greater depth. Near the end, some people pointed out that this was the biggest gathering of anarchists in Chicago for a long time. It was good to feel that the tour was bringing people together and motivating them to do things. At the conclusion of the presentation, someone pointed out that the eclipse was in full effect in the sky, and everyone hurried to the back of the yard to admire the blood moon. What a magical night!
\n\nA few of the projects we encountered in Chicago:
\n\nWarzone zine distribution, an anarchist vegan straight edge collective from Elgin, Illinois Book’Em, an anarchist lending library South Chicago Anarchist Black Cross, a longstanding ABC group
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2015/12/28/11b.jpg\")
Graffiti in solidarity with eco-prisoner Marius Mason.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2015/12/28/12b.jpg\")
A sticker we saw on a colonialist monument at the juncture of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers in St. Louis.
\nAfter the first three weeks of non-stop touring, we drove overnight yet again, this time from Evansville, Indiana to Carbondale, Illinois. We didn’t know what to expect, most of us coming from metropolises of millions. Just having finished traveling the overcrowded East Coast and Chicago and Detroit, another small town sounded exciting to me, especially after the amazing time we had in Bloomington the day before.
\n\nArriving late at night, we were welcomed by three friendly people who showed us their house and offered snacks and refreshments. One of the first things that took my attention was a bow and arrows by the wall. Then there was another bow, but this one was really tall. While I lost myself in childhood nostalgia, one of our hosts began talking to me. Yes, its big, she said, once we took down an elk with it. Being vegan, like almost everyone involved with the tour, I didn’t really share her excitement.
\n\nI thought about it for some time later that night. I have to admit that I never met people who would hunt animals for food with a bow. This time I felt different. I see this wasn’t another macho person determined to “kill everything that moves,” one of those who my comrades in Brighton risk their lives to sabotage when they go hunting. She seemed to be very kind, considerate and conscious, connected to the surrounding environment. For the first time after many years, I didn’t feel uncomfortable the way I usually do when people start to talk about animals as food or products.
\n\nSharing bed with another two friends was cozy. Suddenly it was morning and our hosts were preparing breakfast. Most of us were excited to go out to check the infoshop and go hiking. The more people we are, the more time it takes, but finally we got out and joined all the comrades in the parking lot by the forest. This was one of the things I really liked: in many places, we were taken care of by a large group of people who dedicated a day to showing us around. For me, it is very important to see the natural surroundings; too often, we focus too much attention on the cities and urban life. Playing with the idea that cities can’t exist forever, I find it interesting to go out and see flora and fauna and learn something about them from locals. This time we climbed, walked over logs, crawled through caves, saw good views, learned about poison ivy, and heard legends about the forest and southern Illinois.
\n\nOn the way back, we saw a youth prison, which quickly reminded us what kind of world we live in. We went swimming in a lake, as well, and to my surprise these comrades joined us in our skinny-dipping culture. So unusual in the US.
\n\nThe Flyover infoshop in Carbondale was our home base for the day. While we prepared to present an entirely different and challenging talk in St. Louis the next day, one by one we were treated to a massage by one of our hosts. I believe he saved my back for the rest of the tour. Soon the rest of the crew returned with pots of great vegan food, and we all shared a tasty and healthy dinner.
\n\nThe infoshop seemed quite big for a town size of Carbondale, but the event was held in the university because the organizers said there wouldn’t be enough room in the shop. To my surprise, over 120 people showed up. Looking up the internet, Carbondale has little more than 24,000 inhabitants; that means that one out of every 200 residents came to the talk. I hadn’t heard of Carbondale before, but I learned that it has a radical history going back several generations.
\n\nAfterwards, we returned to the Flyover for informal discussion and snacking before yet another overnight drive. And I didn’t have enough time to compare notes and exchange experiences with my new comrade about prisoner support and anti-repression organizing. They had so much to say, but the road was calling. People brought us food from the guerrilla garden just across the street, and that reminded me about the bow. I still don’t see animals as food, and I’m not changing anything about veganism being part of my anarchism. But this time I met people whose lifestyle (harvesting from the garden, gathering fruits in the forest, maintaining their own herbal apothecary in the infoshop, and occasionally hunting by bow) is probably more sustainable and less harmful than the habits of some posh soy latte vegans I know in the big cities. Not to say there are only two ways or it makes one a better person if they do or don’t eat something, but rather, let’s not get stuck believing that some consumer choices we make take us closer to “better” lives. I think that our relationship to the land is an essential aspect of understanding what we are fighting for!
\n\nIowa City was yet another town in the Midwest where we had an unexpectedly big turnout. It was a full room of fifty or more people from many different walks of life. There was even someone else from Brazil! Another person, a local participant in the demonstrations in Ferguson, said that he knew nothing about anarchism except for what he saw anarchists doing there to support the protesters, and he had come to express his appreciation for what they contributed. We had a really energetic discussion.
\n\nIowa City was also one of the places where people came to me asking about the movements associated with Especifismo in Brazil. Originating in Uruguay and adopted by many organizations in South America, this anarchist tendency is famous outside Brazil but is still not very known by people here. Some of the autonomous movements (the networks where we find the greater part of the anarchists and anti-capitalists) involved in the most important moments of the uprising in 2013 against transit fare hikes or in the resistance against mega-events use some strategic tools praised by the especifistas, like federalism and autonomy from the influence of political parties.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2015/12/28/13b.jpg\")
To our surprise, the venue hosting one of our events in Denver, Colorado was displaying this petition requesting police to intensify their harassment of poor people in the neighborhood. Denver police are already notorious for killing and harassing people. At the conclusion of our presentation, we tore up the petition in a gesture of solidarity with everyone targeted by police violence.
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The Boing! anarchist collective in Salt Lake City, Utah.
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The Anarres Infoshop in Portland, Oregon.
\nAs we rolled into Portland, the distinctive smell of smoke filled the van; when we got out to have a look, our right front tire was indeed smoking. Predictions varied as to the cause… everything from “I’ve seen it before, just too heavy on the brakes that last stretch” to “The end is nigh, the van will burst into flames any moment.” We decided it was worth checking out.
\n\nThe next morning, after visiting a series of mechanics, we were advised that we would need a new transmission…to the tune of $2500. As we counted our coins and considered where we could cheaply rent a vehicle that could get us to Eugene, our host from Portland offered us his van until ours was repaired. This kind of unmeasured solidarity and trust between comrades is part of what made this tour so inspiring, shifting a moment of isolated stress and despair to one of collective strength and resolve.
\n\nWe continued on to events in Corvallis, Eugene, and Ashland in our new friend’s van, until we received word from the mechanic that our old tour van would be ready the next day. Two of us left in the middle of the presentation in Ashland—practically midsentence—and drove back to Portland, arriving at three in the morning. We slept a few hours and headed on to see the mechanic, who gave the van one last loving test-drive and sent us on our way.
\n\nInsanely vowing to arrive in Eureka, CA in time for that day’s presentation, we drove nonstop, propelled only by our unfailing sense of humor, deep and intimate conversation, and truly terrible Southern Oregon radio. As we navigated the last curvy stretch of coastal redwoods, we realized that there was no way we would make it to the event. The moon was a thin sliver hung just above the Pacific; the stars hummed. We stopped at a turnout overlooking the ocean and got out, spinning in wonder at the shift from the van’s tense interior to the breadth of the landscape. As the moon set into the sea, we held each other, breathing deeply… and then continued driving.
\n\nWe arrived to hugs and delicious plates of food, and slept like heroes after the long drive, glad to be reunited with the tour. The next morning it was on to San Francisco! But incredibly, as we loaded our newly-repaired van, we were met by yet another marvelous tour irony… a flat tire! Epic as the day before had been, this was only a minor hangup—but it was good to be reminded of life’s constant and humorous unpredictability.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2015/12/28/16b.jpg\")
The board at the co-op house where John Zerzan had supposedly booked us an event. He had not promoted it elsewhere, and didn’t bother to show up. Then, on his radio show, he criticized what he speculated might have been the content of the talk that he never saw. A poor reciprocation for the massive events one of us had organized for him overseas!
\nThe event in Eugene was a tragicomedy for many reasons, not all of which bear enumerating here. But the sparse attendance led to conversations among ourselves that we rarely had reason or opportunity to engage in during more packed presentations or crammed together in the close quarters of the van. This, for me, was magical. With tender honesty we talked about burnout and how to know when we are overextending ourselves, at the same time as we discussed the territorial distinctions of fighting neo-Nazis in urban settings in Eastern Europe compared to the rural enclaves of the Pacific Northwest. Even with an audience of just fifteen people, I found myself challenged and captivated, learning from every word of those sitting next to me on the panel.
\n\nPart of the joy of being on tour with anarchists from multiple continents and communities is how much we can learn from one another. In giving presentations to people who may be “brand new” to anarchism, every night I talked to folks who seemed to assume that those of us on the panel might have definitive answers to some of their most pressing questions about radical struggle. While it is true that we have many years of individual and collective experience in distinct parts of the world, what we can share is always already past: we are never entirely prepared for the next moment, for the constantly shifting terrain of struggle. So what we can offer are experiences to learn from, and some good guesses on how to build the infrastructure (material, relational, emotional, and ephemeral) to be a little better prepared. Demystifying our past successes and failures among ourselves or wondering out loud amid comrades—willing to admit that we don’t really have a final answer—can be a great way to spark insight into what we may previously have thought of as unremarkable processes in our own lives.
\n\nI suppose the success of an anarchist informational event can be measured in multiple ways—great debates and massive attendance being a few superficial ones. Personally, it was worth remembering, especially with the exhaustion of traveling many thousands of miles in a few months, how much we really are refueled and reshaped by the time we spend hearing from each other—and even the tiniest event can be the venue for a very memorable exchange of ideas.
\n\nFor once, the Bay Area lives up to its reputation: driving over the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco.
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The Omni in Oakland, California, an hour before some 150 people crowded in for the presentation.
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Murals in the Bay Area: the occupied garden at the Oakland community center Qilombo, Bound Together Books in San Francisco, and People’s Park in Berkeley.
\nOn October 20, we spoke in Berkeley at a longstanding infoshop, the Long Haul. The presentation was hosted by a reading group that has met for 17 years. Instead of making our usual presentation, we discussed questions posed by the organizers and other participants in the reading group.
\n\nIn the course of the conversation, I tried to make the point that texts and information from Europe and United States can spread all around the world, but the converse doesn’t seem to be true: there is disproportionately little familiarity with the Brazilian context in the United States. In general, the gringos don’t look for or translate what we do—only a few groups are seeking this dialogue across nations and borders.
\n\nEvery time I walked into the house of a host or found a social center library, I looked for new stuff and to see what they had from brazilian authors. The biggest anarchist bookstores had some academic authors that are only known outside Brazil because of their “for export” texts. In a house in Olympia, I found a book called Outlaws of Sertão, translated by Wolfi Landstreicher. I never heard about this interesting book, but it was one of the very few books I found with stories about Brazilian people. It was written by the 1980s French collective Os Cangaceiros in reference to the bandit groups from the northeast of Brazil, famous in the early 20th century—a very important historical subject. But the original Cangaceiros were not anarchists. And it was necessary for French people to write something about Brazil for this guy be interested in translating it! This kind of warned me about the way information flows around the globe—even inside anarchist circles.
\n\nAnother text from or about Brazil that I found on this tour was in a book collecting articles and interviews with outlaws and others “hated” by society. It was a translation of an interview with a famous narcotics kingpin, Marcola—that was actually a work of fiction by a journalist, which became a meme circulated via email years before today’s social media networks. The text was just a fabrication, but it was not presented as a work of fiction. Many people in Brazil took this interview as a real thing more than a decade ago, and it seems that this is still happening in the US.
\n\nThinking about this made it feel especially important to meet with people face to face, along with comrades from other peripheral countries, in order to counteract this imbalance in communication, and to show how all of these struggles have points in common even in very different contexts. I found this to be true especially in the cases of native, black, and feminist struggles, as all of the Americas share a similar background of colonization. True dialogue and solidarity across borders can be a way to strengthen struggles for freedom and against capitalism.
\n\nExhausted and tired after almost seven weeks of touring and meeting so many interesting people and experiencing so much, I didn’t really have time to look up anything about Santa Cruz. If I hadn’t heard great references and hadn’t met several people from Santa Cruz already, I would have expected a surfer tourist city with not much happening.
\n\nWe again arrived late at night, driving straight from our talk in nearby city of Monterey. Some very friendly people welcomed us. It was Wednesday. And yes, it matters. Our hosts set aside every Wednesday as a day without electricity. An interesting and unusual thing, especially in a house occupied by three generations of people. They had some food prepared and we had a nice late talk by candlelight. Later, I realized that anarchists from Santa Cruz are largely anti-civilization oriented. We got an invitation to see more of that the following day.
\n\nAfter a quick breakfast, we left for the forest. Another comrade joined us to show us around the woods. We saw many different kinds of forest life, non-human and otherwise. Then we came to a big circle of redwoods with a space in the middle like a cathedral. Our host explained that redwoods, which can live for two thousand years, can be reborn from old roots. So in the middle, where there is a space today, there used to be very big tree. It fell down and around its diameter there are new trees growing. By new, I mean already several hundred years old. This place felt magical. I never expected to encounter a formation with such a long memory. I guess the indigenous people who used to live just few minutes away on a meadow between two forests, before they were killed or forced to move away, already knew the cathedral and probably had some unique use for it.
\n\nAfter lunch, we went for a walk on the pier to watch sea lions. For a person living in a landlocked country in central-eastern Europe, seeing redwoods and sea lions on the same day feels exotic indeed.
\n\nSharing a yard with a DIY bike shop, the infoshop Sub Rosa felt comfortable. The discussion went on long into the evening, and people had some new questions. What I remember most clearly, though, was that after we broke up into smaller groups in informal discussion, I got to talk with a person who was used to be a soldier and became conscious and dropped out. To my bigger surprise, his mate came to me and said that he liked everything I had to say and he agrees with my radical anti-militaristic and antinationalistic points. Then he told me that he was an active-duty soldier. We had a long discussion, with me speaking from the position of total military objection while he expressed the idea that he could influence people from the inside, in order that they might one day disobey the order to kill. I can only hope that as long as the military exists, there can be people like him, and that one day they can threaten its functioning. As another friend says, people like him are a much bigger threat for the US government that any anarchist group. I agree, but I add that they are also a much bigger threat to people in the Middle East or in Baltimore or Ferguson than any anarchist. We shook hands and I felt I was really challenged in my opinions. I hope they won’t kill us when the time comes that there is no choice other than to take one side of the barricade or the other.
\n\nLater that night, I was invited to go running. We jogged to beautiful beaches, along shores where no one else was around.
\n\nBefore we left for our long drive to Mexico, we had breakfast and talked more with our hosts. One of them focuses on moderating and resolving conflicts. I think this is an important topic, an activity we don’t focus on enough. In general, many of the people I met from Santa Cruz seemed to be wise and sensitive to group dynamics. There is so much to learn and the more I know, the more I feel I need to learn.
\n\nIn terms of learning, these were the most intensive time of my life. I was learning not only about politics and new ideas, not just about a new country and exotic places, not only about history, but also about different people, different opinions, different experiences, different dynamics, about our limitations, our potential, relationships, care, and so many other things. But mostly I learned about myself and that I need to learn a lot, that I want to progress and never stop. I will always be grateful for all the people I got to spend time with on the road. Thank you all.
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In California: signs of the times.
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Café A Infoshop in Tijuana, Mexico.
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Just across the border in Tijauna, a space emptied once by the drought and the second time by police. Until recently, this whole space was crowded with the encampments of the deported and homeless. Now its empty expanse speaks to all the state-imposed suffering we never see.
\nCrossing one of the bridges in Tijuana, only few meters from one of the most militarized borders in the world, I look down at an empty canal that used to be a river. Yet another sign of the drought plaguing this part of the West Coast. No water has run there for a while, but only a few months ago this canal was full of life: the encampments of deportees.
\n\nThe United States deports hundreds of people without papers to Tijuana, Mexico every day. The cartels often get first pick of the deportees, taking women and men of their choosing. Some for sex, torture, and death, some for the drug business. Others end up living in the canals, some not even speaking Spanish since they spent most of their lives in US. Most have nowhere to go.
\n\nEarlier this year, Tijuana authorities “cleaned” the canal. When you walk across the bridge now, you no longer see tents and a river of people. But everywhere in the city, you see the silent reminders of thousands and thousands lost in the machinery of the border regime. Abandoned shoes here, an empty sleeping bag there.
\n\nIn the evening, when dusk falls on the city, we walk through the red light district, still full of sex tourists. We stop in the square next to a church and set up the table for Food Not Bombs. “Free food,” comrade shouts in Spanish. In a second, the square that looked empty becomes alive. People come out of the dark corners, grab food, and disappear back into invisibility.
\n\nFor a second, I try to imagine how the scattered millions on both sides of the border could stand up against the wall together. Then I am violently wrenched from my dreams by a hoarse voice barking at me: “Papers!”
\n\nI stop after a steep hike for a second to catch my breath. I look around. No shade, everything looks the same, even cactus are lying rotting across the path. Death, nothingness, desert for as far as the eye reaches. Even though it is early November, the temperatures are still high; the absence of humidity dries me up and a bottle of water barely suffices to keep me hydrated.
\n\nUnexpectedly, we reach the top of the ridge and climb down into the bottom of a canyon. I hear the last sound I had expected in the middle of the Arizona desert: water. We follow a little stream until it runs into babbling waterfalls. I sink my legs into the cutting cold water. Relief.
\n\n“This is very rare,” explains our comrade who took us to the desert. “Most people who cross US-Mexico border don’t stumble across this kind of oasis. A lot of them become dehydrated or have heat strokes. Some of them die.”
\n\nThe only water they see is the bottles left along the route, along with food and first aid supplies, by tireless comrades determined to help people survive the deadly desert crossing.
\n\n“I sometimes wonder if this is enough,” my comrade ventures, his eyes locked to the horizon. “Maybe we’re just doing humanitarian support work when we should be looking for ways to fight borders more directly.” His forehead furrows, his cheeks beaten up by the rough desert wind. I wonder how many lives he has already saved.
\n\nThis takes my thoughts back to Europe, to the millions of refugees from Middle East, risking their lives to cross border after border, only to arrive in lands where people are organizing themselves into fascist formations and gated communities. What will it take to bring down Fortress Europe?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2015/12/28/22b.jpg\")
The Mohave desert.
\nWe’ve been driving through the desert for hours, having watched the sun rise over the dusty bleak khaki and orange expanses of northwestern Arizona. Yet arriving at the home of our host in Tempe, on the outskirts of Phoenix, we blearily file out of the van onto soft green grass, a well-manicured lawn that wouldn’t look out of place in any well-watered suburb east of the Mississippi. I’m reminded of something I read once that attributed the shrinking of the Colorado River—which no longer reaches the Gulf of Mexico, an environmental reversal of staggering proportions—to the expansion of the Phoenix metropolitan area, with over four million people flushing toilets and watering lawns. So maybe it’s that dim recollection, or just my weariness from the overnight drive, but as I stumble into the apartment, for whatever reason my mind keeps slipping back to that vivid green lawn glistening against the pale concrete sidewalk, a southwestern non sequitur whose very normalcy reveals an incomprehensibly vast apparatus of control deployed against the unforgiving landscape. A mode of producing a certain form of life that renders others impossible, that by its very structure erases or immiserates many as it eases a gauzy, sedative veil over the eyes of the few it ostensibly benefits. Neatly trimmed green grass lawns in the desert as a biological neon advertisement for itself, the tenuous triumphalism of the American Way of Life™ over and beyond any and all constraints of common sense or ecological capacity, the banal aesthetics of ecocidal power and self-destructive collective denial.
\n\nBut before long, my bleary mind is diverted from such concerns by the siren song of a well-stocked bookshelf, brimming not only with classic and contemporary anarchist favorites but substantial blocs of intriguing history, theory, fiction, and even an ample smattering of titles pertaining to some of my more specific and obscure interests (pre-revolutionary Irish history, the 1990s journal Race Traitor, and other divergences too embarrassing to enumerate). Unable to sleep past 9 AM in most circumstances—unlike my tour mates, who are already sprawled snoring on the couches—I resign myself to a few hours of gleeful solitary delving into the treasures of this well-curated collection. But before I manage to slip down that rabbit hole, I’m swept into conversation about politics in Arizona, a peculiarly horrifying landscape in which the right wing arrives to protests visibly armed with semi-automatic weapons, neo-Nazis rub shoulders with Republican officials in scheming how to hunt and exploit migrants, and identity politicians and nonprofits deploy guilt-driven notions of “allyship” to domesticate resistance that might exceed their limits. Or so it would seem; this is my first time in the state, and amidst my sleep deprivation I’m struggling just to keep up with the litany of different protagonists and conflicts, both inter- and intra-, let alone evaluate them critically. I emerge from the conversation with two impressions. First, that this area might be a fruitful space in which to introduce some of the critiques and questions we have been discussing on the tour. Second, that we’re stepping into a minefield in which a complex web of local alliances, conflicts, and backstories raise the stakes in ways we may not fully understand. Gulp.
\n\nBlink—did I doze off? It’s afternoon, and we’re scrubbing the last traces of beans and guacamole from our plates with tongues or tepid tortillas before scrambling back into the van to head to the event. As one of our tour mates has lost his voice, tonight will be my first time presenting the introductory and concluding chunks of our presentation, and I feel like a high school student cramming for an exam, sifting through sheets of notes and trying out different phrasings as I mumble to myself in the back of the van. In an innocuous strip mall, amid laundromats and pre-fab Chinese restaurants, we find ourselves at a surprisingly cozy cafe, already humming with people setting up rows of chairs and laying out zines and pamphlets from a range of different projects. As my tour mates set up our literature, mingle with the arriving crowds, and attempt to sift through the range of groups and personalities in anticipation of the discussion to come, I hole up in a corner, trying to shoehorn the last bits of what I plan to say into my overstuffed couch of a brain. My body tingles with that exhilarated, not quite frantic anticipation of a challenging but not overwhelming ordeal to come.
\n\nCome here, my tour mate tells me, interrupting my reverie; we’re going to meet some local O’odham organizers and talk about the panel. Shutting the laptop and pulling together my sheaf of papers, I think back to the question I asked our host about the indigenous land acknowledgment with which we prefer to begin our events when and where we can; the event tonight will take place on traditional Akimel O’odham territory. I’m still trying to mold my tongue to the unfamiliar words in preparation for the introduction, as we step outside and introduce ourselves to new friends who are active in O’odham struggles and have come to share the event with us. They offer us some context about the land we’re on, some of the struggles folks on their reservations are engaged in against environmental destruction and desecration of sacred sites, and their experiences doing radical organizing in the area, including with anarchists from settler backgrounds like those that form the majority of the evening’s audience. And, as they politely but pointedly make clear, as of yet they have no particular reason to trust us, or any miscellaneous mostly-white group of anarchists for that matter. What are we about? What do we stand for? Gulp, once again; suddenly my seemingly minor role introducing and concluding our presentation seems strikingly high-stakes.
\n\nThe panel is beginning; my mind is racing. We’ve agreed that four of us from the CrimethInc. tour and three O’odham folks will share the stage. They will open with a welcoming and introduction, followed by our presentation, and then they will share some of their responses as well as discussions of their struggles locally. We’ll share the Q & A and discussion afterwards. As the rumble of conversation dies down and attention focuses on the stage, the O’odham comrades stand and one sings a song of welcome in his native language, then, in English, greets us and the audience. With a flash of embarrassment, I recognize the tingle in my sinuses that foretells tears rising to my eyes. To be welcomed—somehow this gesture cuts to the heart of some powerful and previously unspoken disquiet and longing inside of me. Beyond any discourse of “rights” or entitlement, amidst the shameful histories of conquest and deception and betrayal, the simple act of being welcomed onto the land where someone lives feels indescribably powerful, humbling.
\n\nAnd yet the welcome is not merely for the crew of us who’ve arrived in the van and will leave a few hours later, some of us likely never to return. It’s also directed at the folks from settler backgrounds who do live in the area; in one subtle gesture, the welcome both reveals and defuses the tension that crackles beneath the surface of a “radical” gathering of mostly non-native folks on occupied indigenous land. I watch the faces of folks in the audience as they are welcomed into the place that perhaps they thought of as already “theirs.” Such a welcome performs a nuanced operation, reminding us of the submerged violence that our very presence connotes while encouraging us not get stuck in guilt over it. Rather than excusing or justifying our feeling of entitlement to be here in the first place, it invites us to contest and transform our relationship to the land we inhabit—whether for a night or a year or a lifetime—and to the unjust reality that structures our occupation of it.
\n\nThus welcomed, I rise to my feet, thanking our new friends and introducing ourselves and the evening’s event. Long-rehearsed words slide off my tongue even as I try to pan back, reformulate insufficiently nuanced thoughts, insert new language that contests old assumptions, and remain conscious of the specificity of the context into which we’ve been invited. As the panel unfolds, I’m delighted to see our international comrades absorbing and reflecting the paradigm shifts introduced in our conversations with the O’odham and other local organizers here. In the conclusion, I attempt to synthesize the reflections of Slovenian, Brazilian, and Czech anarchists into a framework engaging themes and questions that might open into local concerns and contexts. After I finish, the three O’odham panelists layer on their experiences and conclusions, sometimes parallel to our own and sometimes constructively challenging them. As questions pour in from the audience, we’re collectively able to address them from several different perspectives, alternately diverging and overlapping, making for a challenging and insightful discussion.
\n\nIn defiance of received wisdom about the limits of American attention spans, the joint panel and discussion lasts a solid three hours and beyond, and nearly the entire audience remains raptly attentive throughout. At last, we reluctantly conclude to enthusiastic applause, and break into a litany of thought-provoking smaller conversations as the night slowly winds down. Unfortunately, the hectic tour schedule demands that we once again drive overnight, so after barely twelve hours in the area we’re boxing up the zines and books, bidding our new friends farewell, and piling back into the van once again to drive south. Feeling energized from all of the challenging conversations, I offer to drive, but a perceptive tour mate sees the slightly deranged quiver of sleep deprivation in my eyes and gently but firmly insists that I climb into the back. It turns out that I’m actually too exhausted to disagree.
\n\nAs I drift off, packed amidst my friends in our sardine can of a tour van, I reflect on our too-short trip through Tempe/Phoenix. Over the course of the evening’s panel I’ve absorbed more about indigenous and anti-colonial politics in the southwest than I’d learned in years of anarchist organizing beforehand. In the part of the US I’m from, discourses of race have been constructed around a foundational black/white binary, with a growing Latino/a migrant population perched somewhere around or between. Indigenous peoples and struggles, despite their ongoing presence and the fierce resistance of folks like Lumbee anti-police organizer Eddie Hatcher, remain relegated to history or obscurity in most discussions of race and power, even among activists or radicals. In the context of Arizona, however, some of the largest and most actively organizing indigenous populations in the so-called US rub shoulders with an enormous Mexican and Central American migrant population, which is internally divided along lines of citizenship and status, language, education, and other factors. While these groups are often jointly targeted by a reactionary white settler/citizen population, they don’t necessarily share strategies or interests as “people of color,” with divergent perspectives and goals around their relationship to the state, the border, and the land. And white would-be allies, be they earnest liberal activists or militant anarchists, may inadvertently reproduce some colonial dynamics in their approaches to organizing in this context.
\n\nAt the same time, there are also many inspiring examples of cross-community actions, projects, and relationships that have managed to build trust. Some white anarchists and radicals have forged long-standing relationships with folks on the O’odham reservations, connections that made it possible for us to organize the joint panel in Tempe. Collaborative Dine, O’odham, and anarchist/anti-authoritarian blocs at marches against racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the border patrol provided explicit opportunities for indigenous and non-indigenous radicals to come together against the institutions that jointly oppress them. In Flagstaff, an indigenous infoshop, the Taala Hooghan, operated for years, connecting radical youth from different communities. Despite the grim conditions in Arizona, I left both inspired and humbled by how much we have to learn from folks who are refusing to simplify their situations or promote the struggles of some oppressed communities at the expense of others, instead striving to build trust and the capacity to resist while unflinchingly confronting the realities of poverty, racist violence, border militarization, environmental destruction, and attempted indigenous genocide. And it’s not just a question of learning about an exotic context remote from our lives; the popularity and wide circulation of the text “Accomplices Not Allies,” to take just one example, indicates how much the rest of the US (and beyond) can learn from the specific conditions and experiences of anti-colonial and anti-authoritarian rebels in Arizona.
\n\nBut what would it mean to extend these analyses of settler colonialism, border imperialism, and the complex nuances of white supremacy to other contexts? How can anarchists and other radicals connect to indigenous resistance in places with very different colonial legacies? How might our anarchist critiques of nationalism be complicated by indigenous concepts of nationhood and territory? Are we, as one of our O’odham comrades said, in fact “all indigenous to somewhere”? How do white people engage with that question without reinforcing narratives that have been appropriated by European fascists? How can we overcome the limitations of identity foisted on us by states, markets, and oppressive social systems, while cultivating a deeper sense of who we are rooted in a land base and an organic community, not predicated on borders or exclusion?
\n\nWe still have a lot to learn. But listening deeply to each other, building connections and building trust, we might find that our seemingly insurmountable differences could become a source of powerful strength. Eventually, inevitably, the last well-manicured green lawn will vanish from the desert. How, and how soon, and whether there will be any humans left to see it replaced by the regeneration of desert flora and fauna, is ultimately up to all of us.
\n\nI’ll close with a few links to projects by our O’odham comrades:
\n\nAkimel O’odham Youth Collective The struggle against the Loop 202 freeway O’odham Solidarity Across Borders
\n\n…and some politically motivated music: Hip hop from Phoenix: Shining Soul Akimel O’odham Ska Crust from the Gila River Reservation: Requiem
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2015/12/28/23b.jpg\")
Northeastern Arizona.
\nFor me, the presentation upon my return home was event number 60 of the tour. The end of every tour is the beginning of a new adventure. I was excited to return to my comrades, to share my experiences in the US with those with whom I had formed my ideas.
\n\nIt often happens that you can go away for months and yet when you return home it seems like you never left. This time, though, it felt quite different coming back to Europe. While I was gone, the world had turned upside down. More than a million refugees entered the European Union. With their courageous struggle, migrants temporarily knocked down the walls of Fortress Europe. The governments responded with forms of force not seen in Europe for a long time. Everywhere, there are barbed wire fences, soldiers, tear gas, police, hatred, and new border controls—both in the fields and in people’s heads.
\n\nRushing to inhale all the information about what I’d missed while preparing for my presentation about the US tour brought some of the lessons from the trip into a completely different light.
\n\n“We need to win small things, demand something realistic, so people get a taste of victory.” We heard this many times on our travels throughout the US from comrades who believe that small victories give people more determination to carry on the struggle, so they will demand more and more. We sometimes made the counterargument that in times of austerity, when the economy offers less room for compromise, it’s not strategic to foster a taste for victory, but rather a taste for the fight itself.
\n\nMaybe people in the West might still be able to win a $15 minimum wage, setting this as the purpose of their organizing and centralizing their struggle around it. But when anarchists looked around themselves in the Balkans in the end of summer 2015, it was clear that we needed to be talking about destroying the entire border regime along with racism, Fortress Europe, and the states and their militaristic expansionism if we were to even begin to address the problems people are facing here.
\n\nOn this tour, it came up over and over how being granted rights is first of all a matter of privilege. It might have worked as a Fordist compromise for workers in the past, at least in the US; it might to a certain degree still work for those who are most privileged in the global North; but negotiating with the governments for scraps is no longer even an option for a lot of people who are pushed to the margins. What we want is not something politicians can grant. In case of the latest migrant situation, for instance, opening up the borders and ensuring free movement for all is unthinkable under the prevailing power structures; when we push to do this, we are immediately confronting them, force to force. When my friends were at the borders when they were collapsing, it seemed clear that increasing control and militarization was a sign of state’s weakness and panic. Migrants have broken down one Balkan border after another, showing everyone how to fight and advance, rather than negotiate and compromise.
\n\nBut if three months ago my comrades were urgently responding to new inhumane border regimes in Europe, these had already became normalized by the time I returned. People are no longer massively drawn to this topic; in many ways, the window of opportunity has closed. We heard many times in US, how it is easy to imagine a demandless movement at the moment of a riot or uprising. But what do you do when you are dealing with a single-issue campaign about an invisible topic? What do you do when you know migrants have no access to social housing, no chance to travel on public transportation, no chance to become part of the society? In such a situation, maintaining our position of refusing to negotiate becomes much harder—yet even more necessary. “If we have learned anything from last three months along the so called Balkan route,” one comrade reported to me, “it is that it was the migrants themselves who courageously fought their way north. If we do not want to erase their stories of struggle, or to reduce ourselves to their advocates, we have to continue to claim border struggles as our own, organizing and broadening the space in which we can imagine bringing about the end of this regime of separation.”
\n\nListening to my comrades at the discussion in Ljubljana, it seemed to me that frustration and uncertainty about what solidarity means in practice resonate on both sides of the Atlantic. The solidarity struggles we have seen in and after Ferguson have been an inspiring point of departure. We have shared the concerns of our friends in the US who talk about privilege, warning about taking up space that should go to the people who are most oppressed in our society in order that they might organize themselves. We have also taken into account the stories that sometimes we do not even know how to approach communities that are more targeted than us. It is not just the language that is separating us, it is the lack of connections that is most problematic. When tens of thousands of migrants are being industrially transported out of sight of the public—prohibited from speaking, incapable of making connections—this forces the question I often heard anarchists in the US asking: what is our role? When we see migrants or poor black teenagers fighting the police, should we stand back for fear that we could not join in without taking over? Or is the best way to break our privilege to organize ourselves around the same topic, in hopes of finding ways that our struggles might converge?
\n\n“Well, one thing we can do is to build infrastructure, that can later be available for people in different communities in struggle.” We often heard this recommendation during our conversations in the US. Holding this discussion in a decades-old squatted complex buzzing with migrant solidarity efforts, that question felt immediate. Some comrades along the tour remarked that street fighting is a lot, but not everything. It is not just the fact that repeating a certain tactic is not likely to be effective. It is also that our endeavors should be open for many different people to participate in a variety of ways. However, this cannot be an excuse for not taking risks, or for failing to defend the gains of our struggle. Anarchist infrastructure extends beyond our skills and spaces. It is a practice of being, becoming, and overcoming our own limitations. Being confrontational means never taking your autonomy or freedom for granted, never mistaking infrastructure for a goal instead of a tool. It means that we never let ourselves fall into merely defensive struggles, but always seek to expand the space for articulation, for struggle, for life. That is what we were trying to do on the tour, and that is what we are trying to do back home in Slovenia.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2015/12/28/24b.jpg\")
A flier for a report back from the tour in Slovenia.
\n“Fire to the Houseprojects” and “Malevolent Europe,” Ill Will Editions
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2015/12/28/25b.jpg\")
\n We participated in the following dialogue with members of the French news source Lundimatin, comparing the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States with the situation in France today. This interview is available in French on their site.
\nBonjour, France, and welcome to team War on Terror! For fourteen years, you’ve looked askance at us across the Atlantic, raising your eyebrows at US foreign policy. Now you get to have your own state of emergency, your own far-right party in power, your own warrantless wiretapping and waterboarding scandals and Department of Homeland Security. Where will you put your Guantanamo Bay? (Finally, French fries and Freedom fries will mean the same thing!) For maximum effect, consider starting a new war that has nothing to do with the cause of the attacks, so you can destabilize another region and draw additional populations into the conflict.
\nWe Americans know all about this stuff. For decades now, the US has been the policeman of the world, while social democratic France has been its comfortable bourgeoisie. But in the 21st century, everyone has to take part in policing. To preserve France, the liberal alternative to the US, it is now necessary to copy the US model of anti-terrorism. Permit us to show you the ropes.
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