![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/13/1.jpg\")
\nJust outside the European Union, Serbia is the latest country in the COVID-19 era in which simmering unrest has given rise to open revolt. In this upheaval, as at the beginning of the Gilets Jaunes movement in France, protesters of every persuasion from fascists and football hooligans to liberals, leftists, and anarchists are competing to determine the shape of future protest movements. In the following account, anarchists in Belgrade describe a week of confrontations in the capital city, analyzing why it is important to prevent fascists from dominating clashes with the authorities and to prevent liberals from delegitimizing such clashes as “violent” or inherently fascist.
\n\nAs images of civil unrest and police violence in Serbia spread around the world, many of us here in Serbia received messages from comrades inquiring about the nature of the unrest, especially considering how confusing and often contradictory these images and narratives have been. A few of us who have been on the ground every night since the protests began in Belgrade wish to offer our observations and analysis. We will only speak about Belgrade, since the situation in Novi Sad and other cities has been quite different.
\n\n\nAlthough the recent unrest was triggered by a government decision to reintroduce curfew and other restrictive measures following a new surge in COVID-19 cases, the true causes lie in long-term widespread discontent with the increasingly repressive regime of Aleksandar Vučić and the Serbian Progressive Party. At the very beginning of the epidemic, the regime paraded out a quack doctor at press conferences who literally laughed off the virus, claiming it to be the “funniest virus in the world” and making sexist remarks about how women should take the pandemic as an opportunity to go shopping in Italy. As the virus spread, the government quickly shifted gears and Serbia implemented some of the strictest measures in Europe. Vučić and Prime Minister Brnabić denied ever underestimating the virus and placed blame on ordinary people, giving the lockdown measures a punitive character. By early May, as soon as the numbers were down, the government rapidly abandoned most precautionary measures and allowed life to return to normal. Within a week, residents of Serbia went from being instructed not to exit our apartments to being told that we could freely go to bars.
\n\nThis end of the lockdown was just ahead of the planned June elections, which the opposition parties were boycotting even before the pandemic. The government manipulated the death tolls and infection numbers until the elections. The ruling party won easily, having run virtually unopposed. After the elections, the dire nature of the situation quickly became apparent. Serbia’s crumbling public healthcare infrastructure, in shambles from decades of neglect, was overwhelmed. In badly hit cities like Novi Pazar, healthcare workers reported being forced to treat COVID-19 patients in hallways as a consequence of lack of space and resources. President Vučić and Prime Minister Brnabić gave press conferences essentially gaslighting medical professionals, stating that Serbian hospitals are as well equipped to deal with the epidemic as the hospitals in the richest countries of Western Europe.
\n\nThe prelude to the large spontaneous protests occurred on the night of July 2, a few days before the announcement from President Vučić that triggered the upheaval. In response to the declaration of increased control measures including the eviction of students from their dormitories, many students marched from dormitories in various parts of Belgrade towards the Parliament building in the center of the city.
\n\nThe students had a number of reasons to be angry. They had just recently returned to their dormitories after the university had reopened, only to find out that they had been lied to and now ran the risk of being sent back to their homes to potentially endanger their families. This is a major concern in a country where many people live in multi-generational households, especially for students from smaller towns and rural areas that are even less equipped to deal with an influx of new cases.
\n\nThese protests passed without any major state intervention. However, as more people began to arrive, a contingent of right-wing protesters gathered as well, leading to a confrontation when some of the student activists confronted the right-wingers, demanding that they remove a nationalist banner. After the protest, these activists were subjected to doxxing and threats of rape and murder from online right-wing trolls.
\n\nHours after President Vučić announced new measures, including a curfew over the weekend, protestors began to gather in front of the parliament building. Most of us heard about this by word of mouth; others saw posts about it on the internet. By the time I arrived, well over a thousand people had already gathered. The crowd included many regular people, members of various left and liberal groups and parties, and a vanguard of right-wingers in the front, closest to the parliament. The right-wingers are primarily identifiable by their flags and chants, commonly heard at football matches and other right-wing gathering places. By 10 pm, protestors had occupied the steps of Parliament and began to lob flares and fireworks at the building; eventually, some protesters gained entry to the building.
\n\nMany people were still arriving when the police deployed tear gas. The police response was heavy-handed; they arbitrarily tear-gassed many bystanders, apartments, and people stuck in traffic. The clashes continued for hours, winding down around 3 am.
\n\nAlthough many people participated in the clashes with police, the primary participants came from the ranks of the right. Images of police violence quickly spread across social media and live television, notably including a video of a person on live TV stating that he was doing this for his father who had died because there were not enough respirators available in the hospital, and a video of cops viciously beating several guys sitting on a park bench.
\n\nThe moment that tear gas was first deployed.
\n“Dad, this is for you.”
\nOutraged by the previous night’s police violence, thousands of people descended on the Parliament building the following evening. This time, the police had significantly increased their presence in the city, bringing in riot cops from other cities along with Gendarmerie and special police units. The clashes started early; predictably, police repression was even stronger. They deployed tear gas throughout the city center, even reaching one of the main maternity wards in the city.
\n\nOver a period of hours, the police continued to violently push protestors away from the city center towards the surrounding neighborhoods. By the end of the night, there was seldom a street in the wider area around the center that was not blocked by some kind of improvised blockade, mostly dumpsters.
\n\nAlthough again, the far right were largely at the front of the clashes, this time there was more of an atmosphere of generalized revolt. That night, several of us encountered acquaintances of ours who have nothing to do with the right wing clashing with the police and engaging in property destruction.
\n\nThe beginning of clashes.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/13/6.jpg\")
Barricades in residential neighborhoods.
\nThe third consecutive day of protests was primarily characterized by what can be seen as a liberal reaction to the violence of the previous days. This time, the main call to protest was for a peaceful sit-in in front of the parliament. The idea promoted by the organizers and backed by several political movements and parties was that sitting down would prove that the majority of the protestors were peaceful and did not wish to provoke violence.
\n\nOnce again, the protest was widely attended, but it was unclear to many people what we were supposed to achieve other than just sitting and denouncing “violence.” Some of us overheard comments from a number of people who were upset about being told to sit down over and over again in a patronizing manner.
\n\nIronically, some protestors petted police horses and hugged the same cops who had mercilessly beaten people the previous two evenings. While protesters did succeed in pushing the right-wingers out to the fringe of the demonstration, most of the people sitting there eventually started to leave, since they lacked an agreement to do something concrete like occupy the square. Later in the evening, some of the right-wingers returned and sang the national anthem, broke out into a folk dance, and eventually went home.
\n\nPolice brutally attacking spectators at random on July 7.
\nThese are the vicious mercenaries that self-described “nonviolent” demonstrators hugged just a day later.
\nGiven the ineffectiveness of the previous night’s protests, it was unclear what was going to happen on Friday night. For the first time, a left bloc was visible, involving a few leftist groups with banners, mostly pertaining to police brutality and healthcare.
\n\nOnce again, the most confrontational element at the front was dominated by right-wing groups. However, this time, there was a greater prevalence of chants that were not explicitly right wing. Overall, the mood seemed to favor confrontation; when people started to shoot flares and fireworks at the parliament, there was a mixture of boos and cheers, but on the whole it appeared people were more or less in favor. Protestors broke the police line defending the parliament and managed to reach the stairs, where a standoff eventually ended in tear gas and beatings from the police. The police made some arrests and eventually dispersed the crowd.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/13/8.jpg\")
The “left bloc” in the demonstrations in Belgrade on July 10. The banners read “USA, France, Montenegro, Serbia—working people are standing up—police kill” and “Money for healthcare, not police.”
\nPeople chanting “Fuck you, Vučić.”
\nA right-wing group centered around a defrocked priest who traffics in conspiracy theories brought a podium with a sound system. While he rambled on to his supporters, most people abandoned the protest. As we were leaving, one of us overheard a guy saying “C’mon, let’s fucking attack parliament.”
\n\nLater that night, riot cops and undercover officers brutally attacked and arrested several people who remained, who were not associated with the aforementioned right-wingers.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/13/2.jpg\")
\nFrom the very beginning, the narrative both from the state and from most political groups across the spectrum was dominated by denunciations of “violence” perpetrated by fascists on the grounds that it discredited the apparent message of the majority of the protestors. But what do the majority of protestors want? The mismanagement of the COVID-19 response is just a symptom of something much larger and the composition of the protests reflects a representative cross section of the opposition to the regime of Aleksandar Vučić.
\n\nThe right wing was there because, to them, Vučić has betrayed his far-right roots and “sold out Kosovo,” becoming a puppet of the European Union/George Soros/NATO/migrants/reptoids or whatever the new conspiracy theory of the month is. For people unfamiliar with the Balkans, Aleksandar Vučić spent most of his political career in the far-right Serbian Radical Party; during the dissolution of Yugoslavia, it was one of the most virulent, genocidal political movements of the era, bearing responsibility for the deaths of thousands. Afterwards, Vučić remade himself as a “modern, pro-EU politician.” On the other hand, the liberal opposition to the Vučić regime, in all the different forms it assumes, is widely discredited for implementing the neoliberal reforms that enabled Vučić to come to power in the first place.
\n\nObviously, as anarchists and anti-authoritarians, we reject all of the above options. Now it appears that a fair number of the other demonstrators on the streets do as well. On both the first and second days, several politicians who showed up to try to capitalize on the anger of the crowds were chased off or attacked. That included a far-right politician and several other opposition leaders of various stripes. Likewise, from our perspective, attacking the symbols of power and capital is not violence. The police exist solely to protect these institutions; resisting them can never be inherently wrong. We reject any politics that seeks to describe attacking these structures as inherently illegitimate or fascist. In the case of the most recent unrest, it was the far right who were most prepared to engage and attack. We will never share their goals, nor should we fetishize their actions just because they are currently willing and able to confront the structures of power for their own aims.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/13/7.jpg\")
Getting wild on state television.
\nThere has been much talk of the state using fascists and hooligans to provoke violence. It is well known that in Serbia, the far right has deep ties to the state, police, and intelligence services. Vučić instrumentalized them heavily in his rise to power and throughout the 1990s. Were there agitators placed in the crowd to instigate police violence? Probably. Over the past few days, we’ve heard of numerous examples of some of the more prominent far-right groups (such as Levijatan) cooperating with police and even detaining and beating people on their behalf. All the more reason to fight them—they’re just another wing of the state.
\n\nIf the past few days have taught us anything, it’s that we must not allow fascists to coopt direct action. In recent rebellions from Chile to the US, we’ve seen that directly confronting the state can achieve a great deal, and we’ve seen how much a movement can lose by allowing liberal respectability politics to dominate it. We know that most anarchists, anti-authoritarians, and radicals largely stayed home when they saw who was at the forefront of the action. We also know of friends and comrades who went to the demonstrations, actively agitating and confronting people at considerable risk to themselves.
\n\nThe far right in Belgrade has many ties to the state and capital. Many fascists work as private security or own bars or other businesses. This created an unfavorable situation for many people to come out in force. But we’ve seen that there is an appetite for confrontation and that we need to create space in which we can prepare for further action.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/13/3.jpg\")
Photo from masina.rs.
\nFrom the very beginning, many messages of solidarity and support came in from others in the ex-Yugoslav region. Despite considerable differences, this has been the first large-scale unrest in the region after the revolts in Bosnia and Hercegovina in 2014. With protests ongoing in Slovenia, we can only hope to extend revolt throughout the Balkans.
\n\nThe apparent consensus of the liberals and right-wingers that violence and direct action is solely the domain of fascists is the worst aspect of recent events in Belgrade. This is especially dangerous considering that the state inevitably proclaims any action that is a genuine threat to it to be “violent,” regardless of how violent it actually is, and that the more this discourse is accepted at face value, the more the state is free to employ violence against those it deems “violent.” This was obvious when Vučić proclaimed a failed attempt of peaceful protesters in Novi Sad to block a highway to be “pure terrorism.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/13/4.jpg\")
Photo from masina.rs.
\nIn addition to the ways that any act of disobedience and rejection of state authority can be liberating, another positive aspect of these events has been that the majority of protestors responded with disgust to the chauvinistic chants and actions by the minority of fascist demonstrators. This was something that many of the protesters had not confronted before in such a direct way.
\n\nAt the same time, it would be a disaster for us if this disgust becomes associated with any “violent” action or with direct action as such. It is clear that this is the goal of both the ruling party and the opposition parties. The members of the regime were not able to hide their joy that the protests ultimately became toothless. Likewise, in the end, opposition politicians were allowed finally to attend the protests. When both factions of the state—those who currently hold the monopoly on violence and those who aspire to it—speak of the evils of violence, what they are really afraid of is that they will lose the ability to control us.
\n\nThis is especially obvious in the attempt that opposition politicians made to establish control as soon as they were permitted to attend the protests. They immediately started telling people what to wear (the color white, only) and dictating whether they were allowed to stand or not.
\n\nWe must not be fooled. We must
\n\nLet us conclude with the words that Marianne Ivšić, a surrealist poet from Belgrade who participated in the riots of May 1968 in Paris, wrote for an anonymous flyer at that time:
\n\n\n\n\n“In this moment, only the poetry of the street advances. The minimal program is an act of destruction: it is a political act par excellence. In it there is no control, no rules. Revolution can be only one of everyday life, if we want to fight against the fascination of power… The road to uprooting fascism and the death of God leads through CHAOS.”
\n
Let us find each other! Autonomy and solidarity!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/13/5.jpg\")
\nMay Day 2020 confronted us with a difficult challenge: it has never been more necessary to take action for change, and it has never been more difficult. In some parts of the world—including Ljubljana, Vienna, and Chicago—anarchists achieved inspiring breakthroughs; elsewhere, where people remained indoors out of despair or attempted to repeat familiar traditions, the results were disheartening. Here, we offer an overview of all the different experiments people engaged in, ranging across a dozen countries, in hopes of offering inspiration and useful models for the next round of organizing.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1255887921925763074\n\n\n
Our enemies in the ruling class want to resume the functioning of the economy without permitting us any of the freedoms we need to defend ourselves from their impositions. All around the world, we saw police without any sort of protective gear harassing and attacking properly masked demonstrators, blithely risking spreading the pandemic in the name of halting it. This underscores the foolishness of counting on state violence to protect us from a virus. Police have surely been one of the chief vectors via which the virus has spread around the world and penetrated into our communities. We won’t be safe until we are neither forced to engage in risky economic activities to survive nor forced to remain confined and subservient to our rulers by mercenaries who don’t care if we live or die.
\n\nYou can read strategic reflections about the possibilities and disadvantages of automobile demonstrations based on experiences in Atlanta, Durham and Raleigh, and Austin. We hope a wider array of tactics will emerge over the months of struggle to come.
\n\nAs usual, these reports are arranged by country to show the regimes that the participants are fighting against, not because we affirm the legitimacy of any state or colonial legacy.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/2.jpg\")
\nMay Day celebrations and demonstrations took place across Austria. The lockdown measures restricting individual movement ended at midnight, and several of the day’s demonstrations were officially registered and permitted. Besides the usual marches and gatherings of the Social Democrats and various communist groups, which took place in altered form with social distancing measures, there were also several demonstrations from radical left groups.
\n\nA large march met at noon under the motto, “Transnational Solidarity—against Racism and War.” About 850 people attended the march, wearing masks, maintaining distance, and carrying banners and signs. The march ended in front of city hall around 3 pm.
\n\nAs the protest ended, a critical mass (bike demonstration) with the motto “Solidarity instead of the ‘New Normal’” rode by and many people from the march joined in. The bike demo included almost 600 participants. The demo wound around the Ring, a wide boulevard circling the city center. The demo had not been registered with the authorities; larger and larger numbers of police started following the demo and a police helicopter could even be heard overhead.
\n\nAfter trying to block the road, the cyclists regrouped and made their way to the Prater, a large park where the demonstration was planned to end. The police attacked protesters in the Prater, knocking cyclists over, kicking a person who was sitting on the ground, searching people, and arresting three people, who were brought to the police detention center at the Rossauer Laende.
\n\nThe Plattform Radikal Linke, one of the groups who supported the call for the bike protest, summarized, “Despite the police repression, we were able to show a clear sign of solidarity: with refugees in camps and detention centers, against forcing those dependent on wages to carry the burden of the crisis and its effects, for another form of societal (re)production, outside of capitalist and patriarchal forces. For a stateless and classless global society! This is also what the 1st of May, as the day of struggle of wage workers and oppressed, stands for.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/18.jpg\")
\nAsparagus for everyone! In Salzburg, anarchists “liberated” some asparagus and gave it away in a pre-May Day direct action. Asparagus is expensive at the grocery store, but Austrian (and German) farmers rely on Eastern European laborers to harvest it for minimal wages. Asparagus producers have rejected the idea of using Austrian laborers who have offered to work the harvest, arguing that they want higher wages and would not work as hard. Eastern European laborers are being flown into Austria, despite Covid-19 restrictions, even though Austria has thus far refused to evacuate a single person from the detention camps at the EU’s outer borders (such as Moria). The conditions there are inhumane, as they already were before the Covid-19 outbreak. We see borders open for the profits of corporations, but not to save the lives of human beings.
\n\nHealth care for all! Open the borders, evacuate the camps! With the closing words, “Luxury for everyone” and “Bon appetit,” the Salzburg anarchists included some asparagus recipes. The full article with pictures is available here.
\n\nA new rent strike initiative got off the ground in Belgium ahead of May Day. A list of rent strike organizing efforts now includes groups in the US, Canada, France, Spain, Italy, Great Britain, Brazil, and Greece, as well.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/16.jpg\")
A poster for the rent strike mobilization in Belgium.
\nOn May Day, people held a demonstration in Brussels in front of the prison of St-Gilles. Nine people were arrested but released in the evening. Banners read “Rasons toutes les prisons, les mauvais jours finiront!” (“Destroy all prisons, the bad days will end!”) and “Liberté pour tous.tes” (“Freedom for all”). People chanted “Brique par brique, mur par mur, détruisons toutes les prisons” (“Brick by brick, wall by wall, destroy all prisons”).
\n\nThere was also a demo in front of a supermarket in Forest, where a worker had been killed by COVID-19 a couple of weeks ago after being denied the right to wear a mask while working.
\n\nA call for a feminist balcony demonstration circulated ahead of May Day. There was also a demonstration in front of the Turkish embassy in solidarity with Rojava. More information on the day’s events is available here.
\n\nIn Brazil, only a few anarchist actions took place for May Day, such as this banner drop in Bahia in the north.
\n\nIn Brasilia, the nation’s capital, a supporter of Brazil’s fascist president Jair Bolsonaro made the news by attacking a group of nurses who were demonstrating to bring attention to the plight of healthcare workers.
\n\nMeanwhile, Brazilian anarchists mourn the passing of a comrade who has just been killed by COVID-19.
\n\nIn Hamilton, a “Keep Your Rent” vehicle convoy drove through the Central, Durand, Corktown, Stinson, Gibson, Landsdale, and Beasley neighborhoods, stopping at high-rise buildings owned by some of the biggest landlords in Hamilton, to promote the rent strike and offer solidarity to those struggling to pay their rent..
\n\nIn Montréal, banners and graffiti appeared all over the city expressing anti-authoritarian messages.
\n\nIn Toronto, in response to pandemic profiteering, some anarchists glued the locks of several banks, decorating the buildings with graffiti and publishing a communiqué explaining their motivations in detail.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/13.jpg\")
A demonstration in Hamilton.
\nIn Chile, the pandemic halted a massive ongoing uprising that had been about to enter an exciting new phase.
\n\nIn many places, people called for cacerolazos (noise demonstrations) for May 1; one assembly had a day for making masks and face shields.
\n\nIn Santiago, there was a small demonstration in Plaza de la Dignidad (formerly, Plaza Italia), one of the chief flashpoints of recurring confrontations with police last fall, where a small number of people gathered to commemorate international workers’ day and to demand the release of all political prisoners. This began around 11 am; there was already a heavy police presence. Around noon, the police started violently arresting people and shooting water at them with the water cannon. Police were playing a recording over a loudspeaker warning of the dangers of violent protest and declaring that the police “would take proper action against illegal gatherings” and so on. The recording said something about violent protest—which, by any standard, is not what was taking place in the plaza. People were just standing, holding banners, sometimes throwing fliers in the air.
\n\nThe first demonstrations of the day in Santiago, Chile.
\n\n\n \n\n\n\n \n\n \n
“We will live, we will return, we will triumph.” Concepción, Chile.
\nThe police arrested almost 60 people; the official news says 57. They arrested a lot of journalists, including a reporter from a national TV channel, who continued to broadcast live from inside the holding vehicle for a few minutes until the cops came to take the camera away.
\n\nAt the police station, they released members of the press first. Then they took arrestees to another police station, supposedly because this one had too many people inside and there were rumors that someone infected was inside. The news reports claim that this is confirmed; we don’t know for sure. Besides moving prisoners to another station for processing, they did not take preventative measures or release the detainees with any special instructions to quarantine or that they would be provided with testing,\nfor example.
\n\n\n \n\n \n
After some people left the first police station, the cops there tear-gassed everyone waiting and showing solidarity outside.
\n\nAlthough the police took advantage of the situation to spread the news that one of the arrestees allegedly tested positive for COVID-19, we note that they did not even request that the arrestees engage in any sort of self-quarantine after release. This calls their narrative into question. It is certain that from here on, the authorities will use the specter of COVID-19 to terrorize people out of demonstrating, even as they try to force us to resume dangerous work without any protection.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/6.jpg\")
Chile.
\nConfrontations continued in the plaza through out the day. There was also a demonstration outside of the government palace, where a union leader was arrested for trying to put up a banner. Demonstrations also took place in other cities, including Valparaiso and Concepcion, where there is also video evidence of the particular\nbrutality of police repression that day.
\n\nLater on, police attacked the residents of various neighborhoods of Santiago with tear gas, specifically Villa Olimpica and Lo Hermida, two places that are usually politically active and confrontational towards the police.
\n\nThe Chilean government—almost universally regarded as illegitimate before the pandemic—keeps doing things to antagonize people. Over the past several days, they have reopened some malls, yet continue to forbid public gatherings. They had originally wanted to send schools back to class this week, but faced a lot of backlash from different sectors, including mayors of municipalities and other politicians, so they decided to not do it just yet. The truth is that the school system here doesn’t have the capacity to hold classes following health regulations limiting the number of students per classroom and so on.
\n\nMany people have lost their jobs and the government has offered practically no help with that, either.
\n\nIn general, people are trying their hardest to keep the memory of struggle strong, to remind each other why the revolt of last fall happened and to hold on to the idea that when things quiet down a little bit with the pandemic, we will return to streets.
\n\nDue to the COVID-19 pandemic and the authoritarian and liberticidal political measures taken by the French government in order to stop it, there were a lot of uncertainties approaching May Day 2020. For almost two months now, the population has been asked—or rather, forced—to comply with the unilateral decision taken by the government to implement a drastic confinement strategy. To make sure that people follow these new sanitary measures, the government has deployed a massive number of police forces in the streets in order to control people’s movements and attack any gatherings. As we already mentioned in a previous article, the fact that police squads are among the only groups of people allowed to be in the streets at any time has caused an escalation of police harassment and brutality on the pretext that those targeted were not respecting confinement. In this strange and alarming time, we knew that we would not be able to gather freely in the streets to celebrate May Day the way we did in 2018 or 2019.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/12.jpg\")
“The virus, capitalism, [state] power—let’s destroy what destroys us.”
\nNevertheless, despite all this, several calls to demonstrate on May Day all over France spread online. One of them, entitled “1er mai : pour des cortèges sans cortèges” (“May Day: for processions without processions”), had the merit of explaining why demonstrating during May Day 2020 was important, but also, why we should take the opportunity of the current pandemic situation—embodied by social distancing behavior—to reinvent offensive strategies against the state and capitalism outside of classic, ritualized, mass marches.
\n\nHere are two excerpts from the call:
\n\n\n\n\n“May Day is a good test to find out if we have the virus of fear, an indicator to find out where we are in terms of street confrontation, a thermometer to take the temperature of the insurrectional fever and the state of our antibodies against repression.”
\n
\n\n\n“Well, maybe if the social distancing measures not only prevent us from organizing massive demonstrations, but also stop us from taking advantage of what is usually reassuring and effective, that is to say: to feel the strength of numbers, the heat of the crowd… therefore, these questionable, unpleasant hygienic measures force us to develop another type of demonstration. Isn’t this the historic occasion for developing offensive demonstrations (of any level and embracing any kind of tactic, from simply making noise to actively participating in property destruction) that are multiple, decentralized, mobile, never static, and the less often repressed? As we are more and more into micropolitics—this resistance to biopower—could we not make micro-demonstrations a new strategy? By recalling that the Hong Kong slogan “be water” didn’t mean “be like a river,” but rather “be like a drop,” I hope for May 1, 2020, a rain of micro-demonstrations to avoid the drought of the struggles to come.”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/11.jpg\")
“A first of May without confinement.”
\nDue to the difficulty of gathering in the streets this year, we can’t provide an exhaustive list of all the actions taken throughout France. Here, we’ll present some of the initiatives in the Paris region. Other demonstrations and actions took place in Lyons, Saint-Étienne, Grenoble, Gap, Poitiers, Toulouse, and Rennes.
\n\nIn Paris, a call was made to gather at 10 am at Place de la République. A small group of people showed up with several banners and spread across the square while respecting social distancing. Unfortunately, the action didn’t last very long, as a large number of law enforcement units were already on site and started controlling and arresting people.
\n\nOther calls were made to gather in the 18th and 20th districts of Paris. Again, police forces were already on site to prevent any gatherings, and some units were even patrolling the streets to control and dissuade potential demonstrators. The police strategy of occupying the streets and harassing pedestrians ended up succeeding, insofar as the call to gather in the 20th district was finally cancelled.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/7.jpg\")
Attempting to demonstrate in France.
\nOn a more positive note, some hospital workers and demonstrators succeeded in demonstrating around the Saint-Antoine hospital in Paris and took this opportunity to denounce the financial cuts imposed on public hospitals for decades.
\n\nIn Montreuil, people gathered and started a wildcat demonstration in the streets while respecting social distancing. Unfortunately, a large number of police forces ended up blocking their progression at some point and started checking IDs and distributing fines. However, another group of people who organized their own demonstration succeeded walking freely and happily in the city streets during an hour and a half. Also in Montreuil, the Brigades de Solidarité Populaire (Popular Solidarity Brigades)—an initiative inspired by the Brigate Volontarie per l’Emergenza created in Milan, Italy—had organized the distribution of food to people in need, showing once more that solidarity and mutual aid is one of our best weapons. However, authorities decided to send police forces to attack them in the name of public safety and confinement. As a result, dozens of members of the BRAV (Brigades for the Suppression of Violent Action) surrounded the market, stopped the food distribution, and gave fines both to activists and to people in need.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/10.jpg\")
French police destroying a mutual aid program.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/9.jpg\")
Despicable mercenaries preventing people from providing resources to the needy in France.
\nAs we already explained, the current pandemic gives governments worldwide the opportunity to develop and implement new policies in order to increase control and surveillance of targeted groups of people and communities, tactics which will later be extended to the entire society. In France, it’s becoming harder and harder for authorities to hide the fact that people are treated very differently in terms of confinement enforcement according to which community they are part of. On one hand we see people constantly harassed, injured, or killed by cops because they are considered as not respecting the confinement rules—while, on the other hand, traditional homophobic and xenophobic bigots can gather freely in a church with the authorization of the police prefect.
\n\nMay Day 2020 wasn’t an exception to this rule. While on one hand, the authorities decided to repress any form of gathering or action during May Day, at the same time, the officials of the Rassemblement National—a xenophobic far-right political party—were able to carry out their traditional ceremony in front of the Joan of Arc statue without any police presence, surrounded by journalists aiming to capture this moment.
\n\nTo top it all, during his May Day address—in which he glorified “work” as one of the chief pillars that “unifies” a “nation”—president Emmanuel Macron explained that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this May Day was special and “unlike any other,” adding that we should all keep the hope “to rediscover as soon as possible the joyful, and sometimes squabbling, May Day that make our nation.” A classic condescending statement from a president who considers May Day riots, confrontations, and demands simple child’s play, and who legitimizes the use of brutal force by police forces, considering the permanent mutilations that the police inflict in these clashes a net gain for his side in the class war.
\n\nOn May 2, 2020, after a special meeting between all its ministers, the French government announced that they want to extend the “sanitary” state of emergency to July 24. This decision gives gendarmes and security guards in stores and public transportation the power to issue a ticket if they allege that the target is not respecting some sanitary rule during the transition towards the end of confinement. This means that we will have to deal with even more police aggression in our daily lives.
\n\nAll these elements highlight once more that in France, as everywhere around the world, we all have to fight several viral pandemics at once. Not only are we fighting against the COVID-19, we are also fighting the virus of control and surveillance that is rapidly spreading in our streets—as shown in this video. We are also fighting against the virus of xenophobia, against the virus of the state and capitalism.
\n\nMore than ever, we must not go back to normal!
\n\nGermany saw a lot of banner drops, symbolic occupations, music from the neighbors, and the like. Some of the most interesting events took place in smaller cities like Greifswald and Wuppertal.
\n\nIn Leipzig, people carried out two symbolic occupations:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/leipzigbesetzen/status/1256099895322214400\n\n\n
In the morning, there were decentralized actions in Berlin:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/LeftstyleMag/status/1256244532909420545\n\n\n
3000 people participated in the traditional radical demonstration in Berlin; basically, this meant running from one meeting point to another without anything really happening. In the end, it was almost the way Berlin May Day always is these days, but less people.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/pm_cheung/status/1256393105240186883\n\n\n
The night before, there had been fireworks for Walprugis Night and some very small confrontations in Friedrichshain:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/antifastnd/status/1255938400907153409\n\n\n
There was also a serious attempt to carry out a new occupation in Berlin:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/besetzenberlin/status/1256146783530553344\n\n\n
In Hamburg, during the day, a lot of people went around looking for Nazis who eventually didn’t show up. In the evening, there were some attempts at demonstrations, little confrontations:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/jannisgrosse/status/1256304409291755522\n\n\n
In Dresden, anarchists held an illegal demonstration involving 40 people, without facing any police repression (so far). Photos are available via the Anarchist Network Dresden.
\n\nIn Greifswald, there was a legal demonstration involving 250 people and legal fireworks and legal masks. This was the only demonstration of its kind:
\n\n\n \n\n \n
In Wuppertal, there was a demonstration on the night of May 1:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/autonomer1mai1/status/1256137597702885376\n\n\n
Some spontaneous demonstrations took place during the day, another demonstration including fireworks at night. Three houses were squatted; one remains occupied as of this writing.
\n\nIn Freiburg, 500 people joined an anarchist bicycle demonstration.
\n\nIn Dortmund, people carried out banner drops and symbolic occupations:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/LassMalRedenDo/status/1256199925920120832\n\n\n
In Hannover, the “Alliance for a Combative May 1st” experimented with radio demonstrations, a potential new model for protest and outreach. People used free radio to stream a specific audio program, making it public through radios on their balconies and in the streets.
\n\nAt the same time, fascists and conspiracy theorists were on the streets, causing some problems. They beat up the camera team of a liberal mainstream media satire show.
\n\nThis list is hardly complete, but it gives a sense of the events of the day.
\n\nWith what the press described as “military” discipline, the notoriously authoritarian Greek Communist Party (KKE) held its May Day demonstration with a specific location marked for each protester to stand apart from the others.
\n\nUp to 600 anarchists gathered for a march involving perhaps 1000 leftists; police did not engage. A motorbike demonstration called by a grassroots labor union drew 200 participants, who drove through many neighborhoods around the city, followed by a large number of police. Smaller anarchist demonstrations of several dozen people apiece happened in neighborhoods throughout Athens.
\n\nThe anarchist group Rovikanos (“Rubicon”) also carried out a daring attack on a corporate office.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/23.jpg\")
A motorbike demonstration called by a grassroots labor union in Athens.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/22.jpg\")
A motorbike demonstration called by a grassroots labor union in Athens.
\nMany public meetings were held online by groups all around Italy. May Day celebrations took place in many cities in the form of flash mobs, strikes, and demonstrations. Several of these focused on denouncing the hypocrisy of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and on attacking Confindustria (the Italian employers’ federation and national chamber of commerce) on account of all the workplace deaths and infections caused by the disinterest of the government regarding the lives and health of workers. Many strikes were held at the logistic warehouses in Milan, Padua, Florence, Rome, Naples, and elsewhere.
\n\nMost of gatherings were organized by Potere al Popolo, a radical left-wing party. In Naples, for example, there was a surprise action at Confindustria headquarters; demonstrators held banners reading: “It will be all right if we defend the workers.”
\n\nIn Genoa, the group Non Una Di Meno demonstrated outside the headquarters of the Region for women’s rights, emphasizing that “Health is a common good, care cannot be profit!” and demanding an end to cuts and privatization. The flash mob was stopped by law enforcement after a few minutes.
\n\nIn Trieste, a peaceful demonstration took place at 11 am. After 30 minutes, police approached some people holding a banner and riots began. Protesters were claiming their right to protest, while respecting all the social distancing measures. The banners displayed slogans including “Produce, consume, die—the real virus is the state” and “We don’t obey, Covindustria go away.” Demonstrators will be fined because of gatherings and resisting the police.
\n\nIn Lebanon, where powerful protests broke out last October, we see a grim vision of the future. With the economy in free fall, the army has been set loose on the streets to crack down on a new, more confrontational wave of protests against banks and the government. Social distancing and other protective measures are unthinkable as unmasked soldiers brutalize civilians.
\n\nOur hearts go out to those fighting for survival in Lebanon today.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/JadChaaban/status/1256289094080102401\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/LunaSafwan/status/1256303858118283272\n\n\n
As of April 26, nearly 800,000 people in Spain (nearly 2% of the total population) had been fined and 7000 arrested for violating lockdown. The fine comes close to the median monthly income.
\n\nWith all public gatherings prohibited and the police empowered to arrest groups of two or more adults as well as any individuals outside without a “valid” purpose, comrades found novel ways to celebrate May Day. The CNT and anarchist publishing collectives in dozens of cities organized online speeches and presentations. In Barcelona, people sacked a supermarket, graffiti appeared overnight in countless locales, and organizing continues apace for the rent strike that began on April 1, with tens of thousands of people participating and dozens of strike committees popping up across the country alongside the hundreds of mutual aid networks that already existed. The rent strike is expected to grow this month.
\n\nThere is also a hunger strike spreading in some prisons.
\n\nIn Slovenia, this year’s May Day coincided with the fifth week of anarchist and anti-authoritarian mobilizations against repressive governmental policies under the pretense of fighting COVID-19. After weeks of massive graffiti actions, noise demonstrations from balconies, and the first bicycle mobilizations a week ago, yesterday more than 5000 people hit the streets of the capital city Ljubljana on bicycles, blocking all major roads and intersections in the city center along with all governmental institutions under the slogan “A May Day of solidarity, not fear-mongering and austerity.” For the second week in a row, anti-authoritarian protests on bikes occurred in several other cities and villages as well, accompanied with “protest rowing” on 11 rivers by 160 activists fighting against the devastation of the environment in Slovenia.
\n\nIn the beginning of March, when the pandemic was acknowledged in Slovenia, the far-right government took the power. It is led by the same prime minister who was overthrown by a popular six-month uprising in Slovenia in 2012-2013.
\n\nThe government’s measures were similar to those in other European countries: complete lockdown of people, total disregard for those who cannot afford to stay at home, and free rein for capitalists. While most industries and factories kept their workers at work with mostly insufficient health prevention measures, the government prohibited all public gatherings, including protests, and embarked on a path of changing the laws in order to give itself more executive power—increasing the authority of the military (they tried to call them in to police the streets), increasing the power of police to track citizens via cell phones, enter our apartments, and surveil us more efficiently, and, of course at the same time, they got involved in several corruption scandals. Meanwhile, they are leading a hate campaign against migrants and people who express any sort of dissent, be that independent journalists, whistle-blowers, or, especially, protesters.
\n\nFor anarchists and anti-authoritarians in Slovenia, the question since the beginning of pandemic has been simple: how do we organize collectivity in a time of complete governmentally imposed isolation? How do we create mutual aid and safe spaces in our communities while at the same time initiating conflict with the government and capital? How do we create new forms of togetherness, conflict, and disobedience while at the same time taking care to protect each other against both the police and the virus?
\n\nThe stakes are higher than ever in terms of the forms of control that governments are trying to impose on us, the threatening rise of the far right, and the challenges of finding new ways of relating as we face the virus in adverse circumstances, seeing how neoliberalism has destroyed the public health system and health care is simply not available for everyone that needs it. We knew from the beginning that this is a moment for a wide mobilization of all anarchist and anti-authoritarian initiatives.
\n\nDuring the first few weeks, we were focused on creating situations in the city that would spread disobedient messages and create wider mobilization. These included slogans against the military policing the streets, solidarity with homeless people, against rent collection and evictions, authoritarianism, and the like; graffiti appeared all over the walls of the city, not just in Ljubljana, but also elsewhere in Slovenia. Many people took creative actions—for example, placing 800 black duct-tape crosses on the square opposite to the parliament at 1.5-meter “social distance” regulations in order to demonstrate a safe way of protesting. There were numerous solo actions carried out across the city, including car protests around governmental buildings, placing candles and symbolic drawings on the ground in the streets, jogging around the city with banners, and hanging banners on windows and balconies. Most of the actions “went viral.” Police were helpless, chasing people one by one, issuing citations, but failing to stop more and more people from all walks of life from participating in dissent.
\n\nThe message was clear: people are angry and there is something boiling in the city, an unstoppable spirit of revolt.
\n\nEvery Friday since April 2, people have gathered on their balconies, in parks, and on the rooftops of buildings for noise demonstrations with pots and pans. Each week, this highlighted a different topic—from the class dimension of the #stayathome message that failed to address the homeless or people working in industries, to a mobilization around the global rent strike, opposition to the militarization of society, capitalism, precarious conditions of labor, and so on. More and more, anti-authoritarian initiatives were joining the call: from anarchist groups, squatting communities, do-it-yourself cultural collectives, environmental activists, and feminist initiatives to groups organizing mutual aid in response to the pandemic.
\n\nLast week, noise demonstrations moved to the streets under the slogan #frombalconiestobycicles. A bicycle-based “critical mass,” a method familiar from the early 2000s anti-globalization era, was chosen because it allows for quick movement around the city, enabling people to blockade major intersections, and at the same time provides a certain amount of physical distance that many people need in order to be able to find their place in the movement.
\n\nThis first gathering of more than 400 people was already a great success. After weeks of quarantine, the fact that we were able to create a different kind of togetherness was extremely empowering. Through in their presence, our collective bodies symbolized conflict with the police, government, capital, and all the other sources of power and oppression. Police were unprepared for the boldness of the biker gangs; they were outmaneuvered and people from all walks of life took over the streets—from random delivery personnel who stepped away from their daily precarious lives to join the protest to small children. The slogans were explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-nationalist. The protest ended with slogans calling for us to meet up again in a week. Over the following days, a few smaller bike gatherings followed across the country along with graffiti and banner drops.
\n\nThe stage was set for May Day.
\n\nMay Day in Ljubljana.
\nAfter this buildup to the symbolic point of struggle for May Day, it became clear that the government was feeling threatened again. All week long, we saw attempts to intimidate people out of joining the actions, with the minister for internal affiars threatening jail sentences for everyone “endangering public health” by protesting. They failed. People showed up in greater numbers than any average self-organized protest in Slovenia usually gathers. There were more than 5000 bicyclers in Ljubljana, 200 in Maribor, 100 in the small towns of Koper and Trbovlje, and couple dozen people even gathered in the village of Brežice. People also took to their bicycles in Celje, Novo mesto, Nova Gorica, Slovenj Gradec, and Murska Sobota, and several symbolic action took place in small villages across the country. In most of these places, anarchists had a significant presence with messages and slogans. Combined environmental action was simultaneously happening on 11 rivers, protesting against dams, the building of new hydroelectric plants, and the general destruction of environment.
\n\nIn Ljubljana, we directed special attention to the Ministry of Internal Affairs with the slogan “First of May without barbed wire, military, and fences” in order to emphasize the repressive border regime against migrants crossing from Croatia. The message we were spreading was clear: we are not only fighting this far-right government, but against all governments, and we are not fighting to get back to normal, we are fighting against normality. Because this mobilization was anti-authoritarian, all attempts at nationalist interference were blocked. Due to the anti-nationalist nature of the mobilization, in Ljubljana, we did not see a single one of the state symbols (such as flags) that we usually see at such demonstrations for May Day in Eastern Europe.
\n\nThere was also an explicitly anti-capitalist bloc in the bicycle parade.
\n\nIf May Day in Eastern Europe is usually also observed by official bureaucratic unions that are completely detached from workers, it was funny that on the day of these massive protests, their leaders gathered to have a chat with the president of Slovenia. The masses self-organized on the streets, the leaders of all kinds were together in the palaces. The lines of history are clearly drawn.
\n\nPolice repression was heavy against smaller demonstrations across the country, but even in Koper, where the police showed up in the greatest force, they failed to subdue the demonstrators, who continued with their protests across the city after the conflict. In Ljubljana, the police were outmaneuvered again. Decentralization worked, just as it did during the uprising eight years ago. The more we spread out, the more unstoppable we are.
\n\nThe success of the mobilization in Slovenia, which drew much greater numbers than usually attend anti-authoritarian protests, shows that the usual suspects who aim to maintain this oppressive order are feeling helpless in the new circumstances caused by the pandemic. Before the left political parties, liberals NGOs, and civil society and bureaucratic unions manage once again to consolidate the situation to maintain the status quo, anarchists and other anti-authoritarians have a window of opportunity to set an example of what it means to fight.
\n\nThis is the time to be bold in our actions and daring in our ideas. Let’s think together about how to create new forms of social conflict and where we will find each other next.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1256306140406845440\n\n\n
Corporate media coverage of the day’s events is available in Slovenian here.
\n\nA more complete overview of events around the United States is available here. Below, we zoom in on the details of some of these actions and the reflections the participants have drawn.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/8.jpg\")
Graffiti in Bloomington, Indiana.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/17.jpg\")
\nA car demonstration:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/3.jpg\")
\nFollowing a protracted struggle by anarchists and other prison abolitionists, on Thursday US District Court Judge ordered the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to reduce the number of detainees in three Florida detention facilities from 1400 to about 350 within two weeks. Demonstrators gathered at one of these facilities again on May Day to demand the release of all the detainees.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/19.jpg\")
Demonstrators outside an ICE detention center in South Florida on May Day. The Associated Press listed their names as “E. Goldman, left, and Alex Berkman, right.”
\nOn May 1, a group of outraged neighbors, abolitionists and other rabble-rousers came together at the end of a march to storm the gates and occupy a child detention center run by nonprofit Heartland Alliance in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood. This child prison is currently undergoing renovations and is temporarily unoccupied. It is the site where migrant children who attempt to escape or rebel against their captors in other detention centers are transferred to and imprisoned.
\n\nAs the demo approached its final destination, after visiting another currently occupied facility, fireworks and smoke filled the air. People danced joyously in the streets and lit mortars with abandon. As part of the chaos, a group stormed the facility, gaining access to the grounds. The rent-a-cop stationed there, after throwing a pair of bolt cutters back at a protester, walked off the property without a word. People defaced the building with slogans such as “Free Them All” and “This is a Baby Jail.” One person got on the roof, and dropped a banner proclaiming “Close The Jails—Open The Houses” and threw copies of a written\nstatement of solidarity onto the street below. As the cops closed in, protesters helped sound the alarm and assisted each other in getting to safety.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/20.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/21.jpg\")
\nHeartland Alliance masks its sinister programs of social control and isolation as altruism and non-profit do-goodery. They hail themselves as leaders at the forefront of a noble fight, and deny their role as an arm of the prison-industrial complex. This torture chamber located at 1627 W. Morse has been used to isolate and punish migrant children who attempted to escape or rebel against their captors in other facilities.
\n\nThe following communiqué was thrown across the surrounding streets and flung from the rooftop of the facility:
\n\n\n\n\n“We are occupying this building in solidarity with all of the rebellious children who have been detained here in the past, those who are still being detained elsewhere, incarcerated people everywhere, and all who continue to experience violence at the hands of the state. With each passing day of this pandemic, we realize, as some have long known, that coronavirus is not the only thing killing us—its effects are weaponized by systems we are told to trust and rely on but which are actively harming and disposing of us.
\n\nHeartland Alliance—a non-profit organization masquerading its sinister program of social control as altruistic endeavor—jails migrant children in all corners of this city, including right here at 1627 W. Morse. This detention center is currently empty, not because Heartland has started releasing kids to their families, but because the brick-and-mortar cage is being renovated and re-secured to continue detaining and traumatizing children or to transform it into another type of carceral facility to hold our houseless neighbors while thousands of CHA units remain vacant. Regardless, this building’s purpose will be to surveil, control, and\ncriminalize.
\n\nThere are currently 42 cases of COVID-19 at Heartland’s facilities. Even before these numbers were confirmed, solidarity demos have been denouncing what in cages is inevitable. As a result, Heartland has claimed that singing to the children, demanding their freedom and expressing love, both frightens and endangers them. Meanwhile, those on the outside witness smiles, waves, hands forming the shapes of hearts, signs reading “thank you” and “I love you.” At a recent demo, a written plea for “HELP” was launched towards the crowd standing below, after which Heartland covered their windows with tarps to stop children from interacting with us. Their flustered responses reflect the intensity of our connection and reveals an important truth: solidarity is powerful and our collective action is starting to create some cracks across the prison walls.
\n\nWe are destroying the illusion that Heartland’s baby jail business is anything but an insidious overlap between the non-profit and prison-industrial complexes. The pandemic has laid bare this tortured interplay, exposing an avalanche of contradictions. It is within these cracks that we begin to grow new worlds. Worlds without incarceration, without domination, in which we no longer rely on systems that seek to extinguish and exterminate our autonomy and joy, and which reject separation from our greater power: each other.”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/4.jpg\")
Graffiti in New Orleans, Louisiana. The message is a little oversimplified, but it’s undeniable that the inequalities created by capitalism are responsible for a great part of the danger that the virus poses us.
\n\nhttps://twitter.com/lets_go_wild/status/1256354964403879939\n\n\n
The city government of St. Louis aims to evict a homeless encampment in downtown that has been there since the outbreak of the pandemic, seeing that homeless people cannot “shelter in place.” City government director of operations Todd Waelterman had quipped that he could get rid of the encampment quickly himself with a bulldozer. On Friday, a resident of the encampment pulled off Waelterman’s face mask, exposing him to a tiny part of the risks that he constantly imposes on others without any consideration.
\n\nWe regard this as a courageous, laudable act. If it were impossible for privileged officials like Waelterman to protect themselves from the health consequences that they ceaselessly impose on the poor and defenseless, they would change their policies soon enough.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/14.jpg\")
\nIn Austin, a car demonstration including more than 30 vehicles shut down the main arterial freeway running through the city for over an hour. Police ultimately attacked, arresting over a dozen participants and towing and impounding their vehicles.
\n\nA car demonstration:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/ash_antifa/status/1256361421757198340\n\n\n
In Olympia, a rowdy caravan of rent strikers, unemployed people, and anarchists paraded through downtown in festive vehicles. Crafty cyclists held intersections and directed traffic, keeping the demonstration together. Two property management companies got a small taste of tenant power when they were visited and redecorated with banners and fliers declaring a rent strike. Property managers at each site came out and attempted to argue, only to be drowned out by the honking of dozens of car horns. We hope they know that this is only a small taste of what will happen to them if they try to evict anyone during or after this pandemic.
\n\nAfter a jubilant and chaotic parade, we convened with a caravan in solidarity with undocumented and migrant workers that had driven all the way from Seattle to demonstrate at the capital. A smattering of reactionary death-cultists huddled densely with their MAGA flags and their Q-Anon conspiracy signs, but they were largely drowned out and jeered at by the many cars of our comrades.
\n\nAfter the caravan, organizers hosted a spatially distant migrant farm worker ceremony, complete with a coffin covered in candles and offerings in memory of those whose lives are being unnecessarily sacrificed on the altar of the economy.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/olyrentstrike/status/1256401586823114752\n\n\n
Car demonstrations are a new tactic, and a strange one; around the country, everyone is learning by doing. Cyclist scouts & traffic flaggers were essential to maintaining a tight formation through small city streets with roundabouts and traffic lights. After an uncertain start, we realized that with cyclists holding cross traffic back, we could stay together in formation and ignore traffic lights. Many of the basic tactical lessons from marching in the streets together translated to the car realm quickly. Communication, however, proved more difficult; a low-power FM radio transmitter, or an internet radio station, could allow everyone to play the same soundtrack and also receive announcements and coordinate directions on the fly. The police were largely hands-off and seemed at a loss as to how to engage with a large pack of cars.
\n\nOnce we reached the capital, the dynamic changed dramatically. Right-wingers were also parading in cars; we often found ourselves stuck in traffic right next to a band of Trump cultists, trading jeers. After facing down these same reactionaries in the streets for years, it felt much more disorienting to all be in vehicles together, partially protected from one another but also potentially at greater risk. The confusion and inability to draw easy spatial lines between parties made policing essentially nonexistent, but it also reduced most of the conflicts to individual exchanges rather than the unity that arises when a bloc marches together. It’s not difficult to imagine a near future in which clashing car demos become more antagonistic, but it is difficult to imagine anything desirable emerging from such clashes.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/5.jpg\")
\nWhile this caravan was largely a show of power and unity and less a material disruption of the world, the possibilities of strategic caravan demonstrations are endless. A caravan of 30 cars could easily shut down an interstate, surround distribution centers for Covid-19 profiteers, picket striking workplaces, and more.
\n\nThere is a strange inversion at play with this new tactic. While wearing a mask is finally socially acceptable in everyday life now, making anonymity easier, we also find ourselves reduced to using our vehicles in demonstrations, complete with their license plates. It seems a necessary tradeoff at the moment—better to take some risks and build an antagonism than to cede antagonism entirely to the virus-denying death cultists who can’t imagine anything better than going back to work. But it remains to be seen how we can preserve anonymity in an era where car demonstrations appear to be the safest and most effective tactic.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/15.jpg\")
Stay home—if you want to see totalitarianism consolidated forever. But don’t help COVID-19 spread, either. A challenging set of imperatives, but we must rise to the occasion.
\nIn the Mission District of San Francisco, Station 40 has served the Bay Area community as an anti-authoritarian collective living and organizing space for nearly two decades. Five years ago, their landlord attempted to evict them, only to be forced to back down by a powerful coordinated solidarity campaign. Now, Station 40 has taken the initiative to respond to the crisis currently playing out across the world, unilaterally declaring a rent strike in response to the economic precarity caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. We interviewed residents of Station 40 about the history of their project and the context and objective of their bold refusal.
\n\nWhat is Station 40?
\n\nStation 40 is a 17-year-old collective living space that has seen hundreds of residents and thousands of guests and many iterations over the years. This space has hosted numerous and diverse events, housed countless people, served food to the masses, beat the odds on everything from infestations to evictions. We’ve been a hub for organizing Mutual Aid workshops, healing pop-ups, memorials for fallen anarchists, revels, book releases, report-backs from comrades all over the world, prisoner support projects, reading groups, benefits for more projects than we can count. Food Not Bombs cooked here weekly for the better part of 15 years. Communication infrastructure like Indymedia and Signal have their roots here.
\n\nWe hope to continue this ever-developing work, most recently bringing a focus of spirituality to the preexisting anarchy of Station 40 and our block in general. This space has been a means for us to continue to afford to live and fight in a city where that is increasingly miraculous.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/03/18/2/4.jpg\")
A protest against gentrification in the Mission district on January 1, 2014.
\nFive years ago, people mobilized to defend Station 40 against eviction driven by gentrification in the Mission district of San Francisco. What factors and strategies were essential to your victory at that time? Did you learn anything important from it?
\n\nAt the time, there was a large push for development in San Francisco. In response to the influx of venture capitalists and start-up companies, our landlords were looking for quick capital by selling their constellation of properties for a fast payout. The “Monster of the Mission”—a giant box of luxury housing not unlike the other developments that were popping up—was supposed to be erected across the street; property prices were skyrocketing.
\n\nWe had a pro bono lawyer who helped us, but ultimately the lawyer wanted us to settle and take the cash-for-keys so everyone would get a cut—of a payoff that could never match long-term affordable housing costs in the heart of this city. The housemates who were living together in Station 40 at that time decided to stay here instead. They employed a myriad of tactics, such as calling on the friends of Station 40 from around the world (an autonomous group of supporters who organized to support us), “knowing the enemy” (gathering information about our landlords via public records), holding a press conference and events and fundraisers, consulting housing militants and the local Land Trust, and coordinating with supportive independent journalists.
\n\nWe demanded that the building should go into a land trust and that our residency would be secured in perpetuity. We also made it clear that we would fight by any means to stay here. Two weeks into the fight, our landlords called us wanting to make peace; this resulted in a verbal agreement to leave us alone and revisit the issue in three years.
\n\nToday, it has been five years. All this time, the housemates here have been on alert, while also choosing to maintain our quality of life by not stressing too much about potential unpredictable outcomes—particularly in light of the fact that we have already beaten an eviction before. It was just recently announced that the “Monster of the Mission” is officially cancelled. Two years after our negotiated discussion date, the landlords have continued to cash their checks happily.
\n\nUntil now.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/03/18/2/3.jpg\")
A protest against gentrification in the Mission in 2015.
\nHere is some coverage of our fight against eviction in 2015:
\n\nWhy did you decide to go on strike this time?
\n\nCoronavirus first began getting traction around these parts via memes, fleeting stories from news sources, and whispers from friends of friends in social services. We began listening to the whispers early and prepared as much as possible. It was less than a week later when news from Italy started coming in, travel bans were put in place, and—most notably—the toilet paper was gone.
\n\nWithin a couple more days, all events were canceled, bars and restaurants had closed, and a soft lockdown quarantine was underway. At that point, 90% of the house had either lost work entirely or had their hours cut significantly. Meanwhile, the other 10% is now being asked to work twice as hard in social services to help maneuver through this crisis—but they are not getting paid any more for their extra efforts. This crisis has shined a glaring light on the injustices relating to housing inequality, the absence of affordable medical care, the astronomical costs of rent in the Bay Area, and the ways that capitalism robs us of our time, energy, and quality of life.
\n\nWhen this situation became clear, there was no other choice but to declare a rent strike. Trying to hustle during a mandatory shut-in not only puts us in danger but also endangers others who are more vulnerable.
\n\nHowever, this opens a larger question. Some projections say that after several weeks of this shutdown (though it may be longer), there will be no way to go back to “business as usual.” As anarchists, as a collective, we have to imagine what could be next and to do what it takes to be a part of building that new reality. Getting free from rent (which is to say, theft) and debt amid a full-blown pandemic crisis seemed like the best possible way to start. We believe that the simple tactics of refusal (rent strike, sick-outs, redistribution of resources, mutual aid) are essential to getting through this situation. We hope the rent strike spreads. We have the best chance of survival and victory together.
\n\nWhat is your vision of how we should respond to the pandemic and the social, political, and economic crisis accompanying it? What is the worst-case scenario for how this could pan out? What is the best case scenario?
\n\nIt seems that the best possible answer to the first question is that we need to find balance. We must find a balance between caring for ourselves and understanding what forms of mutual aid we have to share. We are being forced into fear, separation, and the dismay of confronting feelings of scarcity and a pandemic we can’t cure. The greatest strength of our house and our community has always been our connections based in trust. When you have community that you’re willing to show up for, that you can trust will show up for you, there is a sense—a faith—that everything can be OK. In times like these, hope and faith can be among the few things that keep us alive.
\n\nThe easiest things to imagine right now are worst-case scenarios, overrun hospitals, the National Guard being flown in to violently enforce mandatory lockdowns, countless deaths caused by handshakes and coughs, being unable to work or connect with community for the unforeseeable future, all-out dystopian biopolitical authoritarianism.
\n\nBut for us, it’s more interesting and exciting to think about what the best-case scenarios might be—the moments of imagination and creation—like a caterpillar dissolving in its cocoon, imagining itself into a butterfly. Imagine a world entirely without rent, in which people would have more time and space to envision and practice the things they love, the things that benefit them and their community alike. Imagine there being zero homelessness in the world because we took the ample empty housing currently available and gave it to houseless people, rather than letting those spaces sit vacant while real estate speculators wait to try to sell them to the highest bidder. How about not having to work 40 to 70 hours a week as a capitalist cog, making money for rich people who don’t care about whether we live or die?
\n\nImagine no one having crippling debt. Imagine there being free medical care and food for all, instead of us having to spend all our money funding colonization and murder worldwide. How wonderful would it be if the people took the streets, gathered together to dance, break bread, practice ritual… honestly, the possibilities are endless. I imagine a healthier population that respects the earth and all living beings, giving the land back to indigenous stewards, reparations for all enslaved peoples, the end of incarceration and the entire military-industrial complex.
\n\nBut we have to start somewhere. A widespread rent strike seems like as good a place as any.
\n\nFor our part, we would like our housing to be secure in perpetuity—whether through a land trust or via other communal means. We think now is the time to push for that.
\n\nDear friends of Station 40,
\n\nWe decided tonight that we’re going on rent strike. The urgency of the moment demands decisive and collective action. We are doing this to protect and care for ourselves and our community. Now more than ever, we refuse debt and we refuse to be exploited. We will not shoulder this burden for the capitalists. Five years ago, we defeated our landlord’s attempt to evict us. We won because of the the solidarity of our neighbors and our friends around the world. We are once again calling on that network. Our collective feels prepared for the shelter-in-place that begins at midnight throughout the bay area. The most meaningful act of solidarity for us in this moment is for everyone to go on strike together. We will have your back, as we know you will have ours. Rest, pray, take care of each other.
\n\nEverything for everyone!
\n\nThe residents of Station 40.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/03/18/2/2.jpg\")
\nStation 40 Tenants Fight Eviction of Their Home and Propose “Win-Win” Land Trust Solution
\n\nAbout a week ago, we received eviction papers (an unlawful detainer) from our landlords, Ahuva, Emanuel, and Barak Jolish. Their legal documents aim to displace the dozen of us tenants from our affordable, eleven-year-old home, Station 40, located at 3030B 16th Street. It is no coincidence that Station 40 is being evicted on the same intersection as the hotly contested proposed development by Maximus Real Estate Partners of a 350-unit luxury apartment building in what is a predominantly working-class neighborhood.
\n\nFor over a decade, Station 40 has been home to anarchists, queer and transgender refugees, broke people, veterans against war, those healing from the prison system, lifelong San Franciscans, immigrants, people with disabilities, and those who were previously homeless. Most of us work in the neighborhood in various parts of the service industry, cooking and educating, in Rainbow Grocery Co-op and other grocery stores and thrift shops. We’ve hosted and/or organized hundreds of anticapitalist-oriented events, including fund-raisers, critical discussions, film screenings and performances, assemblies, book releases, art shows and workshops, and indie media projects, contributing to the rebel spirit of the Bay Area. Station 40 is also host to the weekly Thursday Food Not Bombs, sharing free home-cooked meals on the BART Plaza with those who are increasingly being brutally disappeared from 16th and Mission.
\n\nAlthough the Jolish family had previously stated their intentions many times to sell our building, they have refused a viable proposal presented by the Station 40 collective, San Francisco Community Land Trust, and Mission Economic Development Agency to sell their property to the land trust, in what would be a win-win situation for the property owners, current tenants, and Mission community at large.
\n\nThe Mission has already seen many evictions, and much resistance to them. Benito Santiago won his fight to stay in his home, which is now owned by the SF Land Trust. Patricia Kerman and Tom Rapp also won their eviction case against their landlord, but still struggle courageously to stay in their home. We have now been served eviction papers, too. Our turn has come, and we don’t intend to make it easy for our landlords.
\n\nIn the context of the rapid development and displacement in our neighborhood and on our corner, our own eviction comes as no surprise. When the proposed Maximus luxury apartments were announced, we all knew that we’d be next. If we were surprised, it was only with how quickly it happened. Within a week of that announcement, the Jolish family had already begun talking about getting us out. Ahuva Jolish repeated the now all too common refrain of “wanting to get out of the business”—a phrase that tenants throughout the city have come to dread as a signal for a brutal wave of eviction and redevelopment.
\n\nOur position in this has remained the same: if the Jolish family wishes to sell this building, they should sell it to the San Francisco Community Land Trust—an option that would allow them to sell at a more than fair price and allows us to stay, still with affordable rents, while also keeping many of the other struggling neighbors in place. The offer from the land trust would make it possible to maintain and even create more housing for working-class and struggling people—in perpetuity. As soon as this offer was on the table, however, our landlords changed their tune. They now insist that they do not want to sell our building. This is a half-truth—in other words, a lie. Our home is sandwiched between two adjacent properties owned by the Jolish family and their business partners, Ruth and Oded Schwartz. They do not want to sell this individual building to the Land Trust, because they want to sell all three buildings, as a package, to a developer. If sold together, the properties have (to use a disgusting term) added “tear-down value.”
\n\nIn their current attempt to evict us, Ahuva and Emanuel Jolish use the false justification that we are in violation of a commercial lease by living in our home. Furthermore, they claim that they have had no knowledge we’ve been residents here. This is yet another lie. We have lived here for over eleven years, it is zoned for residential use, and we therefore have all the just cause protections afforded to tenants, and Ahuva and her family know all this.
\n\nThe truth is that the Jolish family stands to make millions off the fact that 16th and Mission along with San Francisco as a whole are being flipped for the benefit of the rich, while devastating those who have called this place their home for decades. The Plaza 16 Coalition, which Station 40 is also a member of, likes to call the Maximus project “the monster in the Mission.” Behind this monster, we see many intertwining monsters—capitalism and white supremacy, to name just two.
\n\nTragically we’ve seen developers like Maximus Real Estate Partners and their shadowy peons from the “Clean Up the Plaza” campaign look at the community at 16th and Mission as nothing more than a barrier to their riches. In 2013, we started to see Clean Up the Plaza placards everywhere. This was strange since no one seemed to know who was behind the campaign or what its agenda was. It soon became clear when Maximus announced its intention to build a 350-unit luxury apartment building that would take out a whole corner of businesses, a plaza used by hundreds of poor—mostly black and Latino people—and cast an ominous shadow over the playground of nearby Marshall Elementary. It turns out that one of the political consultants for Maximus, Jack Davis, is one of the main organizers of the Clean Up the Plaza scheme. Then the police occupation of the plaza began. Day and night, SFPD menaced over those who kick it in the plaza, such as immigrants, SRO residents and people without homes, addicts, working people, multigenerational families, and outcasts of all stripes. We watched from our windows across the street in horror as more and more of these people were targeted, criminalized, and disappeared.
\n\nThe insidious power plays used to displace people along with their culture at 16th and Mission are happening throughout the Mission District, Bay Area, and in many cities nationwide. There’s first the most obvious issue: evictions. Evictions come in the form of lawsuits where losing means potentially being forced to pay for your own attorney and your landlord’s attorney (who is likely getting paid $300 or much more per hour). This process takes months, and necessitates that you are able to go to meetings with lawyers and attend several court dates during work hours, among numerous other tasks that become a full-time job. Everyday people, the very people who make up the heart and soul of San Francisco cannot compete with this apparatus that is set up to work against them. The property “rights” of millionaires trump the basic needs of the rest of us to simply live.
\n\nThen there’s the police state. Not only will the police come and literally force you from your home if you refuse to leave, but they also contribute to the project of gentrification by disappearing working-class and poor black and brown residents. In a city of 6 percent black residents (in 1980 it was 13 percent), the SF County Jail is made up of 56 percent black prisoners. To paint the picture in even more stark terms, in the last year SFPD has murdered Alex Nieto, O’Shaine Evans, Matthew Hoffman, and just days ago, Amilcar Perez-Lopez. These men, three men of color, and Hoffman, a poor man struggling with his mental health, represent the demographics of the folks who are being lost right now in San Francisco.
\n\nWe gotta say it: the phenomena of rampant police murders, the banishment of thousands of longtime residents from city centers, all those forced to live on the streets, and the increasing number of poor people getting warehoused in jails and prisons—2.5 million people nationwide—signals that our society condones state-sponsored ethnic cleansing that targets black and brown residents.
\n\nAdriana Camarena of the Justice for Alex Nieto organization pointed out in a recent demonstration that the new Condo “Vida” should really be named “Muerte” because that’s what condos represent to the people who have lived here for decades. Everyone knows that the people who move into these new developments are quick to call the cops on their Latino neighbors (like Alex) and say that the neighborhood is being improved as Latino residents get forced from their homes. Meanwhile, they gloat about how great it is that they live in a neighborhood with so much culture and taquerias on every block.
\n\nAll this is happening while mysterious fires are destroying the homes of working-class people throughout the Mission District, leaving the next-door condos completely intact, and the city moves on plans to build an even bigger jail to replace the one at 850 Bryant.
\n\nWe know that the eviction of our space is a stepping-stone toward the eviction and demolition of this entire block. As of yet, the Jolish family has made no offer that we could accept and still hold our heads high. We want to maintain, defend, and build collective, autonomous, and working-class space in this neighborhood. We cannot accept any offers that do not make that possible. Even if we were made such an offer, we do not conceive of winning in solely individual terms. The choice to stay and fight is also a choice to fight for this neighborhood as a whole. We want to stay, but we also want everyone else to stay as well.
\n\nWe draw inspiration from all who are fighting for their lives and a place to live them: the indigenous people all over this continent who are occupying their sacred places to resist development; the squatters in the deindustrialized urban centers of the Midwest who are building homes amid the ruins; those in Athens and Barcelona who take to the streets in reaction to the evictions of long-standing occupied social centers; the Kurdish and international fighters in Kobane who have used all means to defend against fascist occupation; the fighters in Ferguson who have used similar means to resist the police occupation of their streets as well; and especially everyone in this neighborhood who has already stood up and refused to be moved now and in the past.
\n\nWe believe that by fighting together, we can jointly hold back the system of death and erasure. We are infinitely grateful for all the solidarity we have already received; because of it we are still here. We’re asking for your continued support because we want to stay put in our home and in this neighborhood for many years to come.
\n\nThe simple truth that the Jolish family continues to deny is also our greatest strength: this is our home. This is our home and we are going to fight tooth and nail for it. We are not millionaires trying to add a few more million to the pile. We are working class people, who against all odds, have built a home here. Having something to fight for makes us strong.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/03/18/2/5.jpg\")
\nFrom one side, our lives are threatened by a new virus; from the other side, our freedom is menaced by nationalists and authoritarians intent on using this opportunity to set new precedents for state intervention and control. If we accept this dichotomy—between life and freedom—we will continue paying the price long after this particular pandemic has passed. In fact, each is bound up in the other, dependent upon the other. In the following report, our comrades in Italy describe the conditions prevailing there, the causes of the escalating crisis, and the ways that the Italian government has taken advantage of the situation to consolidate power in ways that will only exacerbate future crises.
\n\nAt this point, the strategy of the authorities is not aimed at protecting people from the virus so much as controlling the pace at which it spreads so that it doesn’t overwhelm their infrastructure. As in so many other aspects of our lives, crisis management is the order of the day. Our rulers don’t intend to preserve the lives of everyone affected by the virus—they already wrote off concern for the destitute long before this crisis began. Rather, they are determined to preserve the current structure of society and their perceived legitimacy within it.
\n\nIn this context, we have to be able to distinguish between two different disasters: the disaster of the virus itself and the disaster wrought by the ways that the existing order responds—and does not respond—to the pandemic. It will be a grave mistake to throw ourselves at the mercy of the existing power structures, blindly trusting that they exist to save us. On the contrary, when our rulers say “health,” they mean the health of the economy much more so than the health of our bodies. Case in point: the Federal Reserve just allocated $1.5 trillion to prop up the stock market—$500 billion for the banks—but most US citizens still can’t get tested for coronavirus.
\n\nLet’s be clear: though Trump and other nationalists worldwide intend to use this opportunity to impose new controls on our movements, this pandemic is not a consequence of globalization. Pandemics have always been global. The bubonic plague spread worldwide several hundred years ago. In introducing a ban on travel from Europe while continuing to try to preserve the health of the United States economy—rather than directing resources towards preserving the health of human beings within the US—Trump is giving us an explicit lesson in the ways that capitalism is fundamentally hazardous to our health.
\n\nViruses don’t respect the invented borders of the state. This one is already inside the US, where health care is much less widely and evenly distributed than it is in most of Europe. All this time, as the virus spread, service industry workers have been forced to continue putting themselves at risk in order to pay their bills. To eliminate the pressures that coerce people into such dangerous decisions, we would have to do away with the system that creates such drastic inequality in the first place. The poor, the homeless, and others who live in unsanitary conditions or without access to decent health care are always the worst hit by any crisis—and the impact on them puts everyone else at greater risk, spreading the contagion further and faster. Not even the wealthiest of the wealthy can isolate themselves completely from a virus like this, as illustrated by the circulation of the virus in the upper echelons of the Republican Party. In short—the prevailing order is not in anyone’s best interest, not even those who benefit from it most.
\n\nThis is the problem with what Michel Foucault called biopower, in which the same structures that sustain our lives also constrain them. When these systems cease to sustain us, we find ourselves trapped, dependent on the very thing that is endangering us. On a global scale, industrially produced climate change has already made this situation very familiar. Some have even hypothesized that, by reducing pollution and workplace accidents, the industrial slowdown that the virus has brought about in China is saving lives as well as taking them.
\n\nLiberals and leftists are responding by criticizing the failures of Trump’s government, effectively demanding more government intervention and centralized control—which Trump, or his successors, will surely wield for their own benefit, not only in response to pandemics, but also in response to everything else they perceive as a threat.
\n\nFundamentally, the problem is that we lack a discourse about health that is not premised on centralized control. Across the political spectrum, every metaphor we have for safety and health is predicated on the exclusion of difference (for example, borders, segregation, isolation, protection) rather than the aim of developing a positive relationship with difference (for example, extending health-care resources to all, including those outside the borders of the US).
\n\nWe need a way of conceiving of well-being that understands bodily health, social ties, human dignity, and freedom as all being interconnected. We need a way of responding to crisis based in mutual aid—that doesn’t grant even more power and legitimacy to tyrants.
\n\nRather than placing blind faith in the state, we must focus on what we can do with our own agency, looking back to previous precedents for guidance. Let no one charge that anarchistic organizing is not “disciplined” or “coordinated” enough to address an issue like this. We have seen over and over that capitalist and state structures are at their most “disciplined” and “coordinated” precisely in the ways that they impose unnecessary crises on us—poverty, climate change, the prison-industrial complex. Anarchism, as we see it, is not a hypothetical blueprint for an alternate world, but the immediate necessity of acting outside and against the dictates of profit and authority in order to counteract their consequences. While the current models of “addressing the pandemic” that states are carrying out are based on top-down control that nevertheless fail to protect the most vulnerable, an anarchist approach would focus chiefly on shifting resources such as medical care toward all who require them, while empowering individuals and communities to be able to limit the amount of risk they choose to expose themselves to without tremendous negative consequences.
\n\nThere are precedents for this. We recall Malatesta returning to Naples in 1884, despite a three-year prison term over his head, to treat a cholera epidemic in his hometown. Surely our antecedents have theorized about this and taken actions that we could learn from today. Just a few years ago, some anarchists set themselves the challenge of analyzing how to respond to the ebola outbreak from an anarchist perspective. We entreat you to think and write and talk about how to generate a discourse about health that distinguishes it from state control—and what sort of actions we can take together to help each other survive this situation while preserving our autonomy.
\n\nIn the meantime, we present the following report from our comrades in northern Italy who have been living through this crisis a few weeks longer than we in the United States have.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/03/12/2.jpg\")
\n1918-1920: Already shaken by the First World War, the world faced a more insidious foe: Spanish flu, a catastrophic pandemic that infected 500 million people, killing as many as 50 million or more—twice the number of casualties as in the War.
\n\n2020: COVID-19, a new pandemic infection, is spreading all over the world. As of this writing, according to the World Health Organization, over 125,000 cases have been confirmed, with over 4,600 deaths. In Italy, there are 12,000 infections, with at least 827 deaths.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/03/12/3.jpg\")
A hundred years later, the two pandemics compared.
\nHere, we’ll focus on Italy, asking a couple of questions about how to face COVID-19. The first step is to refuse to take the corporate media narrative for granted and—above all—not to give in to the prescriptions and impositions from above, all of which are getting more and more oppressive.
\n\nWe begin from the most obvious facts. This outbreak highlights the need for international solidarity and cooperation so that people can join forces to cope with the difficulties and achieve common goals. But in the current system—in which every nation takes advantage of others’ tragedies and every “crisis” paves the way for profiteering—that’s not possible.
\n\nHowever we approach the question, we arrive at the same conclusion: capitalism and imperialism point out the need for a radical shift from the current state of things.
\n\nBut let’s step back and concentrate on Lombardy, going back to the day that the Italian government signed the first Decree attempting to control the spread of the infection.
\n\nOn this day, the Italian government signed the first decree attempting to control the spread of the infection.
\n\nMilan, 7 pm: The worry that all schools and gathering places will be closed spreads quickly, along with a panic that takes hold among people, creating pseudo-apocalyptic moments. Supermarkets are stormed as if we were on the brink of war, people buy huge quantities of breathing masks and hand sanitizer (thin paper masks have become a totem representing safety), we hear screams, we see people weeping, we experience mass panic.
\n\nFollowing the rumors about restrictions, Milan, the great Milan, the city that never stops, was paralyzed with fear. But it only took a few hours to return to liveliness. In fact, the morning after the announcement, what was stirring all over the city wasn’t fear of the virus but fear of not being able to live the “Milano da bere.” Bars and pubs were closed from 6 pm to 6 am—clearly, the viruses clock in to work at night like proletarians on graveyard shift. Restaurants were not—apparently, you get ill if you drink, but if you eat, the virus, on the contrary, respects you. At the same time, we saw the closure of all schools, universities, and other gathering places.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/03/12/4.jpg\")
Beppe Sala, Mayor of Milan, wearing a suportive shirt. Because Milan doesn’t stop…
\nA week passes and Milan, this provincial wannabe New York, doesn’t stop. Likewise, the virus advances, causing further panic. There are more infections, more deaths—even if, granted, the victims include many older people suffering from existing cardiovascular diseases. Once again, everything is locked down—schools, cinemas, theaters, kissing and hugging—but not bars, restaurants, malls, or public transit. Meanwhile, Beppe Sala, the city mayor, tries to give strength to the poor Milanese afflicted by this appalling virus that preys by night and only if you meet for drinks. Employing his beloved social networks, he posts a video with the hashtag #MilanoNonSiFerma (Milano Doesn’t Stop).
\n\nTechnically, the video is flawless—bird’s-eye shots with bright colors, catchy tunes—yet it’s as phony as a three dollar bill. No doubt about it, it has been promoted by the Unione dei Brand della Ristorazione Italiana (Union of Italian Catering Brands). Milan doesn’t stop. But in this video, we don’t really see Milan, the real Milan—the Milan I love not because it is the center of movida but because it is traversed by revolutionary shivers, even though they tried to bring her down through fascism and xenophobia, even though it has fallen asleep politically over the last twenty years. The video presented by Sala seems to step out of the 1980s when the advertisement for a very popular liqueur was broadcast: Amaro Ramazzoti, the liqueur of the “Milano da bere.”
\n\n#milanononsiferma, #milanodoesntstop, corporate video by Mayor Sala, because Milan doesn’t stop: “We are millions of people. We do great things every day. We work hard every day. We achieve the impossible every day. We are fearless every day. We can do it. We won’t stop.”
\nThe real Milan isn’t depicted in those images. The real Milan is the one expressed crudely but sincerely by Collective Zam in a video parroting the one of a Mayor that—within days—backs out of the statement he has asserted, resorting to a false narrative on the media; a false narrative where xenophobic class rhetoric is constantly and continuously served up, making this city living off precarious workers and outsiders that every day has to struggle against racism, patriarchy, gentrification, neglected suburbs and capitalism.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/03/12/5.jpg\")
Thank you, Mayor Sala, for the certainty you give us.
\nThe virus isn’t the heart of the emergency. The real emergency, patient zero of this “cosmopolitan” city, is the economic precarity that inflicts despair upon the workers who are forced to fight against the rising cost of living and exploitation that, in the last weeks, has occurred in the new form of “smart working,” never used before in Italy and that, surely, will become next year’s trend to further enslave through subcontracts and outsourcing. Many employers in Northern Italy’s red zones are forcing their employees to take sick or administrative leave without taking into account that this will further destabilize an already precarious state system and, above all, hit all those precarious workers who have to fight every day to put food on the table, who keep their heads above water by taking low-paid jobs, who endure awful work schedules in worksites without any sort of security measures. Just to give you an idea, from January 1 to February 6 this year, there have been 46 workplace deaths.
\n\n#milanononsipiega, #milandoesntbend, by Colletive Zam, is a reply to Sala’s corporate video, bringing reality to light: “Milan. Thousands of precarious workers. We make sacrifices every day. We have unsustainable workloads. Every day, we run the risk of not coming back home. “Great things every day” come from our flesh. The dismantling of public health, the outskirts, Milan a trash heap. Milan doesn’t bend because every day we fight against the fear created by capitalism. It doesn’t bend to racism, capitalism, patriarchy, precarity, fascism, coronavirus.”
\nIf we study the two videos, we notice that, not by chance, the media keep focusing responsibility for everything that happens on the individual, from work to the displacement of people and the movement of goods.
\n\nIn short, there have been three stages, which we can summarize as follows. The first stage, now impossible to maintain, is to conceal the problem. The second stage is the so-called “media terrorism” that is still in progress, wavering and oscillating between mass panic and illusory calm. In the third stage, the current one, dramatic changes are imposed in society under the cover of a combination of panic and social consensus. Meanwhile, decrees are introduced that will have a considerable impact upon our future, denying us the right to protest, to go on strike, to gather on our own terms.
\n\nWhat will happen now that the decree signed by Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has appeared in the Official Journal? Additional restrictions and measures to contain the virus in Lombardy will be extended until April 3. We will need special permission to travel in and out of a region and also within it; people are urged to self-quarantine; all schools and universities are closed—we all know studying is not important, so why not seize the opportunity to drag parents and students, already exhausted from years and years of budgetary cuts, into the mess? Bars and restaurants can remain open from 6 am to 6 pm as long as customers can keep a distance of at least one meter between each other; theaters, gyms, ski resorts, and discotheques are shut down, but all major sporting events can take place behind closed doors (that’s Italy—you can’t live without football); all public gatherings are banned; no weddings and funerals; medium-sized and large malls are shut down, but only during weekends and bank holidays.
\n\nIn short, fear of contagion is sparking mass panic and, in the name of a supposed security, these new restrictions dangerously restrict freedom, justifying the state of emergency regardless of the impact it will have on small retailers and on family-run business. But the real danger, the one we should really be concerned by, isn’t so much about a contagion, but the one bound to the ignorance of a government that has leaked a draft decree that, as underlined by the virologist Roberto Burioni, “panics people.” Basically, these drastic measures ban people from working and impose “smart working” for a large proportion of workers, limit freedom of motion in some areas, pressure people to stay at home, and ban all public “gatherings” (inside or outside). Every right is more and more restricted or denied. All of this, amid the consequent mass panic and social isolation of millions of people.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/RobertoBurioni/status/1236424449576112131\n\n\n
And now, two of the biggest “social” issues appear on the horizon. The first, the sphere in which we Italians are undisputed sovereigns, is the “espertite” of many, resulting from information saturation, as a result of which everyone is “the greatest expert,” often ignoring issues such as how rapidly the virus spreads. This is clearly the result media and authority aims to achieve. The second issue is the consequence of the various specialists—doctors, virologists, biologists—raging on television, on the radio, in newspapers, and, especially, on the internet. These people are introduced, in bad or in good faith, as being able to provide some sort of resolution inasmuch as they are “neutral” experts—as if science were neutral and the experts analyzing it, doctors included, lack personal preconceptions. But that’s politics, anyway! If we don’t keep this aspect in mind, we will end up reaching erroneous conclusions even if we do our best.
\n\nWhat does the average Italian do to fight back against these controls and restrictions on his freedom? He doesn’t realize that he is already constrained by a wide range of restrictions imposed by control—via the media, surveillance cameras, and the like—and compelled to rush constantly to keep up with the wealthiest, even at the cost of taking out loans and starving just to buy an iPhone, paying loan shark rates for months just to be “worthy,” drooling after influencers who refuse to take a position when it’s time to shelter “outcasts,” but always ready to post a selfie wearing the latest model of shoes. He acts like Pulcinella, panicking because he can’t get back to the South; he rushes to board trains and buses; he couldn’t care less if this behavior could spread the virus to Puglia, Calabria, Sicily—all of the regions that were still considered “safe” as late as March 8—along with the quarantine in effect in Northern Italy. Tonight [March 9], hundreds of people stormed train stations and bus stations trying to escape from the red zone, compelling the railway police (POLFER) to intervene to keep people calm. Unable to understand how it was possible, Conte says: “The publication of a rough draft has created uncertainty, insecurity, confusion, we can’t accept it.”
\n\nSo why not give police special powers, enable them to stop people and demand to hear where they are going, while bars and restaurants still remain open? A cause leads to an effect; in this case, it’ll lead to the intensifying of pent-up anger and racism, obviously enough. And who knows—sooner or later, it wouldn’t be surprising to read that someone began shooting Chinese, Moroccan, or Romanian people, or whomever else, on the pretense of seeking to avenge the death via COVID-19 of his cousin or neighbor or acquaintance. There have already been assaults on some Eastern Europeans living in Italy.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/GuidoCrosetto/status/1236437207944134657?s=09\n\n\n
Hundreds of people storm the stations to escape Milan, at the risk of spreading the virus throughout Italy.
\n\nThe Italiot doesn’t think about others; he just focuses on feeling good, because what really counts is the pursuit of his own satisfaction. Who cares if the world around her falls apart? The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree; an excellent example of why the average Italian couldn’t give a damn is embodied by former Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini, the right-wing populist and anti-immigrant politician leading the Lega party. It seems only yesterday, but almost a month has passed since he was snarling, as always, that the government didn’t block boats loaded with migrants, wondering if the government had underestimated the coronavirus by “allowing the migrants to land.” Who cares that he wants to close Italian borders except to keep the borders open towards the United Kingdom. Just days before the decree was signed, he was able to go to London, challenging all common sense, spreading his nationalist and racist thoughts across Europe—the plague that precedes coronavirus.
\n\nNow we must ask ourselves some other questions that may be hard to answer. The first one is how we should react to what’s happening, taking into account all the objective difficulties connected to the bans (for example, punishments for violators including up to three months in jail or fines of $225), the continuous “media bombing,” the feeling of constant uncertainty.
\n\nOn one hand, we see an over-emphasis on individual responsibility, especially for those suffering from the coronavirus, and on the other hand, the state using the excuse of an emergency to impose new rules. They don’t talk about cuts to public hospitals (45,000 in the last ten years), about the situation of workers in the front line (especially, doctors, nurses, and the like), about the negative effects on the health sector—such as the interruption of regularly scheduled medical examinations including dialysis and the treatment of diabetics and others with serious medical conditions, who have seen their minimal rights denied by the diversion of economic efforts towards this “emergency” without ever taking them into account. Hypocritically, Italian politicians—the same ones who attacked the public health sector and its workers—heap praise upon our public health system, never mentioning all the profit-driven privatization.
\n\nSo what will happen now? What will be the historical consequences of these “emergencies?” In recent years, we can see clearly that a set of repressive rules has been created in Italy that didn’t disappear even when each “emergency” ended, whatever type of emergency it was.
\n\nIn this country, the creation and exploitation of emergency has created serious problems for us. On the pretext of making war on the Mafia and so-called “terrorism,” the authorities passed “special laws” such as the one stipulating a maximum sentence of 30 years (because, even in formal bourgeois hypocrisy, punishment should be “re-educational” and aimed at social reintegration); but in 1992, they introduced life without parole. This is perhaps the most obvious example of the more and more aggressive authoritarian tendencies of bourgeois democracy. To broaden our analysis, we should study how, over the past few decades, it has been possible to criminalize and repress the poor, and the struggling, and all who try to oppose the status quo in any way. This has led to hard punishment, with exceptions only when we are able to repel the attacks of the state.
\n\nFor example, earthquakes have served as an opportunity to introduce anti-social regional laws on the pretext of opposing “looting.” The earthquake in L’Aquilas illustrates this—even if, in that case, they had to face a very combative grassroots response.
\n\nLikewise, the “anti-hooligan special laws” that, since 2006, started addressing the most “unpresentable” part of the movement (from the point of view of the police), the organization of youngsters from the poorest suburbs, often prone to fighting against the police and to breaking the rules they impose. Those laws were supposed to target “dangerous hooligans” from organized football clubs, but in the years since they were passed, they have been used to repress strikes, mobilizations, and pickets as well. We can see the consequence in political struggles that are targeted with fines and the well-known “daspo,” an order banning access to sports events that has also been imposed in a “preventative” form against other targets without even going through courts, with the pure arbitariness of the police. Many organized football clubs’ efforts could be summarized as a form of protest against modern soccer (that is, against the deprivation of sociality in order to maximize profit) and as an organized mobilization that recognizes the danger that the “anti-hooligan special laws” pose to all organized movements. The anti-repression slogan “special laws: today for hooligans, tomorrow for the whole city!” is relevant here, too. First, they’ll target us, but eventually they’ll extend control to everyone.
\n\nThis brings us back to the decree that has been passed almost in silence, the above-mentioned “Conte Decree” that has hurriedly implemented a law reducing employees’ rights regarding “smart working” while increasing the bosses’ leverage. Even in ways that are not clearly connected to the coronavirus emergency, they are laying their hands on the rights of millions of people by means of such decrees.
\n\nBut this kind of repression can also generate revolt. In response to the government taking away a variety of prisoners’ rights (including visitation and recreation), prisoners rioted. As of March 9, more than 50 had escaped in the riots, though six more had been killed. Criminal trials were continuing even during the outbreak, though prisoners are prohibited from attending, supposedly out of fear they will contract the virus and spread it to those trapped in the prison system.
\n\nRiots in Foggia.
\nDespite all the threats and risks, on the first day of the national lockdown, a few dozen protesters converged on the empty streets of central Rome outside the Ministry of Justice to elevate the demands of prisoners across the country in revolt.
\n\nNew stricter measures have been imposed on those who falsify the self-certification to go out: you can be arrested in flagrante delicto and serve up to six years in jail. Furthermore, those who violate quarantine can be charged with “manslaughter against public health,” while those violating quarantine who exhibit COVID-19 symptoms such as fever and cough, causing the death of elderly people or subjects at risk, could be charged with “voluntary manslaughter” and jailed up to 21 years. The same applies to those having contacts with COVID-positive people and maintaining social relationships or working with them without taking the necessary precautions or inform the others.
\n\nEverything except malls, drugstores, and convenience stores are closed for two weeks. We are on lockdown and the quarantine isolates us from the world. Call me a catastrophist, but what comes to mind is the fate of Prince Prospero hiding in his fortified abbey:
\n\n\n\n\n“And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”
\n\n—The Masque of the Red Death, Edgar Allan Poe).
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But we will survive, despite the quarantine imposed upon us.
\n\nThe whole of Italy, brought to its knees, finally seems to be moved by a rebellious spirit. We are not talking about the singing flashmob scheduled for today at 6 pm—the call to go out on your balcony to sing and play music, to let the world know that “we can do it” and that everything will be all right. This is something else. “Irresponsible strike,” say the masters. Safety measures are lacking in the workplaces, say the employees. “We are not expendable”—”We are not cannon fodder.” These are the chants coming from Italy’s factories. From north to south, unions and workers are making a show of force and stirring things up with spontaneous strikes calling for measures to safeguard health. That, at least, is something.
\n\nOne Way or Another, One Day We’ll All Wear Masks
\n\nThe Threat of Contagion, Massimo De Carolis
\n\nAgainst Fear and Control, the Revolt Explodes in Italian Prisons
\n\ncoview.info—an autonomous watchdog effort focusing on COVID-19, based in Austria.
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