![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/03/29/4.jpg\")
Protests in Lorient on Tuesday, March 28.
\nIn France, a powerful movement has erupted in response to an attempt to raise the retirement age. While millions have gone on strike and poured into the streets, President Emmanuel Macron and his henchmen have attempted to crush this movement by escalating police violence to lethal extremes. In the following report, we offer a chronology of the events of the past week, including a translation of an account by one participant in the movement and a statement from the parents of another who remains in a coma. You can read an overview the first phase of the movement and an analysis of the issues at stake here.
\n\nWhen French president Emmanuel Macron ran for office last year, part of his platform was an unpopular pension reform that would force workers to work several years more before retirement. Forced to choose between outright fascists and neoliberals, French voters grudgingly elected Macron, but a showdown has been brewing ever since.
\n\nThe movement against the pension reform got underway with a strike on January 16, 2023. Polite protests gave way to generalized unrest on March 16 when prime minister Élisabeth Borne used article 49.3 of the Constitution to bypass a vote in the National Assembly, implementing the new law by force. As the revolt gathered steam, it expanded beyond opposing the pension reform to rejecting neoliberalism as a whole. The protests, strikes, and blockades became gestures of resistance against the arbitrary power of the executive office as well as against Macron and his cronies (“Macron et son monde”), reminiscent of the Yellow Vests movement in 2018.
\n\nToday, the movement has reached another stage. In response to the intensification of the struggle and the diversification of tactics and battlefronts, police have dramatically escalated the violence with which they are targeting demonstrators. Even corporate business media like the The Financial Times are criticizing Macron’s repressive and authoritarian handling of the movement.
\n\n Protests in Lorient on Tuesday, March 28.
\nOn March 22, the day before a general strike called by the unions, Macron stoked the fires of resentment. He showed up to address corporate media wearing a watch worth 80,000 euros, which he attempted to subtly remove during the interview. In that media appearance, Macron presented an authoritarian and disdainful figure, lying about the movement and the repression that the police had meted out. Effectively, he told the unions and the people that he cared neither about what they had to say nor about their lives in general.
\n\nOn Thursday, March 23, about 3.5 million people took the streets, including more than 800,000 in Paris alone. The blockades and strikes were successful all over the country, impacting high schools, universities, city transit, garbage collection garages, refineries, harbors, airports, trains, highways, and other institutions. The day ended with numerous “manifs sauvages” (wildcat marches) in the streets of Paris and fires all around the country—some at symbols of the executive and the government, including county offices, town halls, and police stations.
\n\nWhile it felt like a victory and a sort of coming together, Thursday also revealed that Macron and his police aimed to crush the budding uprising at any cost. Police targeted everyone without exception—for example, they usually abstain from hitting the security line that protects the unions, but in this case, they did not hesitate to. Images circulated widely showing police charging protestors indiscriminately, shooting military-grade GM2L grenades upwards and into the crowd, knocking people unconscious. While French police have never shied from using military weapons to subdue rebellious crowds—for example, during the Yellow Vest movement and the eviction of the ZAD in Notre-Dame-des-Landes in 2018—it is unusual for them to target elected officials, unions, students, and children as well as the black bloc. In many cases, the entire crowd responded with collective anger, which is also unusual.
\n\nCompared to the tremendous number of people in the streets, there were very few arrests. This was for two reasons. First, people were well organized, outnumbered the cops, and protected each other as much as they could. Second, the cops were not trying to grab people, but to inflict physical and emotional damage, in hopes of dissuading the many people who were taking to the streets for the first time from returning. Whether they succeeded or not remains to be seen.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/03/29/2.jpg\")
Anger directed at Élisabeth Borne, prime minister of France.
\nFriday, March 24 opened with a strong presence on the picket lines, in particular at the refinery Total Normandy (close to Le Havre). People came from Paris and neighboring regions to support the blockade throughout the night and early in the morning. Comrades who appreciate French pop culture will be happy to know that rapper Medine and actress Adèle Haenel were on the picket line.
\n\nA part of supporting the strike is resisting “réquisitions.” Despite the right to strike being written into the French Constitution, there is a legal provision that allows the local government (la Préfecture) to force strikers back to work if the strike puts the economy at risk. In Le Havre, the blockade remained strong, but the state has been carrying out réquisitions across the country, especially in the field of energy. This confirms that the strike is working, as there is usually a delay between refineries shutting down and fuel shortages beginning, but it also indicates that the government is prepared to send the cops to people’s houses in order to force them back to work.
\n\nProtests in Lorient on Tuesday, March 28.
\nOn Saturday March 25, 30,000 people assembled in Sainte-Soline, a small town near Poitiers, to protest the privatization of water and the excavation of the biggest of the industrial “mega-basins” in France. Announced by the Confédération Paysanne (the largest and most historic union of farmworkers in France), the collective Bassines Non Merci! (BNM), Les Soulèvements de la Terre (literally, “Earth Uprisings”), and more than a hundred other associations and unions, the demonstration had the same objective as the previous protest at that same location: to set foot in the empty crater where the basin is supposed to be built.
\n\nThe previous mobilization in Sainte-Soline had been a success. On Saturday, October 30, 2022, some 7000 people marched on the basin and managed to breach the massive police lines (1700 police backed by helicopters). Three groups walked in teams, with separate trajectories and strategies, targeting three different access points with scaled levels of risk tolerance; it was all framed as a big game in the style of capture-the-flag. Police did their best to retaliate, but they were overwhelmed.
\n\nOn March 25, at first, the atmosphere was merry and determined, continuing the tone of October. Many signs were encouraging. The number of participants had more than tripled since the previous demonstration, likely benefitting from the fact that a powerful movement was in full swing throughout the country. Farmers from the Confédération Paysanne driving tractors had evaded police lines to reach the camp, which was established quite close to the site of the intended mega-basin.
\n\nHowever, things got nasty very fast. The police, determined to get revenge for the setbacks they had experienced in the streets elsewhere in France, set out to make an example of the protesters in this big open area that afforded very little shelter or protection.
\n\n\n\n\n“The objective of the protesters at Sainte-Soline was to skirt the police and reach the crater, and to plant their flags as a way of thumbing their nose at power and at these absurd reservoirs. The goal of the police was to deploy the full range of their force and brutality against unprotected (or poorly protected) protesters in order to traumatize, maim, and demoralize them.”
\n\n \n
Once again, three groups formed, but when they reached the edges of the basin, police quickly forced them to converge into one procession, mixing them all together. The police attacked first with tear gas and shrapnel grenades, to which the front line replied with fireworks and stones. Under police fire, with over 5000 grenades falling from the sky—some of them tear gas grenades, some of them the extremely dangerous GM2L grenades—any distinction between the black bloc, the union leaders, politicians, and the rest of the people in the march evaporated. More than two hundred people were injured, many of them severely.
\n\nThe police intentionally fired at the part of the field where the wounded were being treated. They blocked the ambulances and did their best to make it impossible to take the injured to the hospital in time to treat their injuries. As a consequence of this intentionally murderous strategy, as of now, two people remain in critical condition, in grave danger of death. Many more have been permanently mutilated, some losing eyes.
\n\nDespite spectacular images of a huge protest bloc walking in the field among deer and tear gas and of police wagons burning, despite the brief incursion into the perimeter of the basin, it’s impossible to consider the day a success. Now is the time to heal and take stock of the situation. It is clearer than ever that the state is ready to kill to maintain control and protect the interests of the capitalists who rule the agro-industry at the expense of a sustainable future. Likewise, the authorities used the protest in Sainte-Soline as an opportunity to do as much harm as possible to many of those who had been outmaneuvering them in the streets.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/cardojo2/status/1640004370874941446\n\n\n
This is a translation of an anonymous report-back describing the protest that took place in Sainte-Soline against the construction of the mega-basins and the privatization of water on March 25.
\n\nShit, what the hell are we doing here? Yes, yes, we fight for water, we fight against the privatization of life, we fight against the state that protects the interests of the few instead of defending the lives of the many.
\n\nMedic, medic! Here, here! And while we yell and point to the wounded, we need to keep an eye on what’s falling from the sky. Other hands point to a projectile right above our heads. What is it? Tear gas, sting-ball grenade? Identify it, evaluate the trajectory, the risk, run a little, feel our eardrums burst from the nearby explosion. Ears ringing for a couple of minutes.
\n\nShit, what the hell are we doing here again? Yes, yes, crossing the blue barrier to get to the basin. Ha, no, not a blue barrier but two, it’s not only blue but khaki green, and it has wire fencing, and barbed wire, and there’s the embankment to climb. What’s hidden behind all of this? A lake, water that belongs to everyone pumped and stored for the few. Medic, medic! Fuck, where are the medics, things are pretty urgent right now. Shit is falling left, right, in front of us, behind us. Hey, comrade, need some saline? Hey, did you notice, your head is bleeding? Careful, grenade!! Fall back, a little, keep calm, forward again.
\n\nShit, what the hell are we doing here again? Yes, yes, we have numbers, we’re the mass. it’s all we have against the military-grade weapons that are raining down on us, that cut our legs off, that tear our limbs apart.
\n\nMedic, medic! How long have we been here for? Twenty minutes, perhaps. A group of medics hovers around a body. One of them is already short on supplies. The others don’t have much left, either. What are they going to do? What’s going to happen to me if I fall?
\n\nCareful there! Watch out for the grenade a couple of meters away, can’t remember to move, explosion, head banging. Fuck, I’m beat, I forgot to run out of the way. I’m fine, need to keep moving forward. Grab your partner, a quick check to see if they’re fine, too. All good. Let’s go.
\n\nThere’s fire in front of us, black smoke coming from the flaming vehicles, white smoke from the tear gas, the flash of a flame, the spark of a grenade dying down, we can’t see shit.
\n\nHow long were we there for? Two, three hours? Less than an hour, in fact. An eternity, or maybe it wasn’t long enough?
\n\nWhy did we fall back all of a sudden? A guy on the brink of death up front, a line of four-wheelers that tried to surround us, the realization that we didn’t stand a chance, fatigue on the frontline?
\n\nShit, what the hell we were doing there? It’s over.
\n\nEvacuating the wounded, reuniting with the crew. Perceiving the shock by the look in the others’ eyes, assessing injuries, attempting a few words. A comrade breaks down in tears, we huddle close. Absurd, uneven, dangerous.
\n\nWhat happens after something like that? Someone must know.
\n\nWe go home, an endless procession black with anger and rancor, an unwilling army, exhausted. We’re alive, we’re lucky.
\n\nA clip from a livestream of the events in Sainte-Soline on March 25, 2023.
\nThis is a translation of a statement from the parents of an activist who remains in a coma five days after the police violence at Sainte-Soline.
\n\nFollowing the injury caused by a GM2L grenade, during the demonstration of March 25, 2023 organized in Sainte-Soline against the irrigation basin projects, our son Serge is currently in a hospital fighting for his life.
\n\nWe filed a complaint for attempted murder and voluntary obstruction of the arrival of the emergency services; and for violation of professional secrecy within the framework of a police investigation, and misappropriation of information contained in a file for that purpose.
\n\nFollowing the various articles published in the press, many of which are inaccurate or misleading, we would like to make it known that:
\n\nWe believe that these are not criminal acts that would sully our son, but on the contrary that these acts are to his credit.
\n\nSerge’s parents
\nMarch 29, 2023
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/03/29/3.jpg\")
Graffiti reading “Vengeance for S. [Serge]—49.3° of rage!” “Beneath the BRAV-M, the beach” [a reference to the famous graffiti from May 1968, “Beneath the concrete, the beach”] and “Bring us the head of the henchmen.”
\nBack in the city, many people attended a nationwide mobilization against the “Loi Asile et Immigration” (also called the Loi Darmanin, after the Minister of the Interior—the head cop of France, if you will). This law, the next one on Macron’s oppressive agenda, will severely reduce the rights of migrants, facilitating the imprisonment and deportation of exiled and undocumented people on French land. While the number of people who attended that protest was nothing close to the number of people who are protesting against the pension reform, we are slowly building ties connecting anti-racist resistance and solidarity with wider resistance against the government.
\n\nFrom Saturday on, police violence became the chief topic of conversation and media coverage. Gérald Darmanin and Laurent Nuñez (the head cops of France and of Paris, respectively) did their best to spread lies about the events in Sainte-Soline and to try to legitimize the police retaliation in Paris. In the city, the BRAV-M police units—the “mobile” units that chase people around on motorcycles—took center stage in this discussion. There is already a remarkable number of videos of the BRAV-M assaulting isolated individuals, running over people, and verbally and sexually abusing people; this should not be surprising, as their ancestors, the “voltigeurs,” were famous for similar behavior, including the murder of Malek Oussekine in 1986, which inspired the movie La Haine.
\n\nSome unions—including the CGT and Solidaires—also spoke out against police brutality, expressing solidarity with those who suffered in Sainte-Soline. The slogan “Ni oubli, ni pardon” (“don’t forget, don’t forgive”) is slowly proliferating among striking workers. Even international media covering the movement and condemning Macron’s autocratic and repressive strategy has begun focusing on police violence rather than the pension reform.
\n\nAt several work sites, as a consequence of requisitions and fatigue, workers had taken a break from the strike over the weekend. Many resumed striking again on Monday and Tuesday, but there is undoubtedly a certain weariness amongst strikers and supporters doubled with sadness and fear in the face of large-scale military repression. Darmanin and Macron are hoping to sway public opinion by brandishing the specter of violence in front of people’s eyes in the same way that the government did to suppress the Gilets Jaunes movement in December 2018. Whether this strategy will be successful remains to be seen. It will depend, in part, on how successful we are at presenting other narratives.
\n\nThe general strike of Tuesday, March 28 was relatively successful, depending on who you ask. The number of people in the streets is diminishing, but it was still among the highest recorded over the past two months—about two million. Cities in the west of France (“le Grand-Ouest”), famous for their insurrectionary tendencies, coordinated successful road blockades. A significant number of refineries, fuel storage units, and other logistical centers were blocked or on strike; more than 400 gas stations in France were out of fuel on Wednesday, March 29. Schools and universities remained on strike as well—as did the Eiffel Tower, among other well-known French institutions.
\n\nAs for the demonstrations themselves, the results were mixed. Fierce gatherings took place in Rennes and Nantes, where the black bloc is always offensive, and in cities like Lyon, St-Etienne, and Toulouse. In Paris, the atmosphere was tense. While some confrontations with police broke out late in the day, they felt more symbolic than strategic. Significantly, the spontaneous night marches have died down. If spontaneous marches and other forms direct action return to the streets despite the government’s show of force over the weekend, that could give the movement a second wind; if they do not, that could determine its fate.
\n\nProtests in Lorient on Tuesday, March 28.
\nWhile the government’s perverse rhetoric should not shape our actions, it is important to puncture the narratives that they are trying to propagate. Essentially, Macron is using the same strategy he used to suppress the Yellow Vests. He is blaming the protesters for the injuries that police inflict on them, in order to infantilize and discredit those who defend themselves against the police and to justify the escalation of police repression.
\n\nThis circular rhetoric is already at play in Darmanin’s lies about the events in Sainte-Soline, as explored in the analysis “The Trap of Sainte-Soline.” Darmanin has initiated a legal process targeting the collective “Les Soulèvements de la Terre” for “dissolution,” equating ecological sabotage with terrorism by claiming that many of the protesters at Sainte-Soline are long-time “A-listed dangerous individuals” (“fichés S” in the French counter-information databases).
\n\nThe state is attempting to turn the popular outcry about police violence on its head. The goal is not so much to legitimize the use of military force on unarmed protesters—Macron won’t admit to that—but to present it as the unavoidable side-effect of his righteous efforts to protect the French Republic from dangerous and irresponsible individuals who must be stopped for their own sake.
\n\nBut there is another way to read this whole situation.
\n\nIf Macron is determined to force his agenda through without a vote regardless of how unpopular it is, and to suppress all protest by means of militarized police violence, then the only way to prevent the arrival of outright autocracy is to establish a rapport de force with the police. In that case, those who take the initiative to experiment with ways to defend themselves from police are neither infantile nor irresponsible. On the contrary, they are the only thing standing between us and tyranny.
\n\nPolice footage from of the events in Sainte-Soline on March 25, 2023, showing people defending themselves against the police assault.
\nIn this spirit, many people have called for gatherings across France on Thursday, March 30 to oppose police brutality and stand up for the people who have been wounded, some of whom are still fighting for their lives in the hospital.
\n\nFacing down the police is not a matter of bringing symmetrical force to bear against them, but of outflanking them. It requires outsmarting them as they attempt to isolate and corner us, whether physically or discursively. It means escalating all together, uncontrollably, as a network too extensive to surround—moving, merging, branching off, changing course, and innovating more rapidly than they can keep up with, and doing so on every kind of terrain, from the streets themselves to the narrative about what is taking place in them.
\n\nFor now, the issue of police brutality threatens to supplant all other subjects of public discussion, including the pension reform, work itself, and the power of the state. This may also conceal a trap for the movement. Focusing on the police alone will not necessarily produce a strategy that enables us to overcome them.
\n\nThe intersyndicale (the coordination of the eight biggest national unions in France) has called for the next nationwide strike to occur on Thursday, April 6. In many people’s eyes, that is too late, as the events that will determine whether the movement lives or dies will have occurred by then. This long gap will give unions time to negotiate with the state: already, some union leaders have been speaking with the government. While a few hardliners inside the CGT and other unions are resisting their leaders’ pressure to concede, the history of union politics is a veritable litany of cautionary tales.
\n\nOf course, when the unions announced the general strike for March 23 after the spontaneous protests of Thursday, March 16, many people also believed that the movement would die over the following week. As always, what takes place in the streets will determine everything. Despite fatigue, pain, and grief, French people have yet to give up the fight. Long live the revolution!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/03/29/1.jpg\")
The police in Sainte-Soline on March 25, 2023.
\nTestimony of Layla Staats, a member of the Mohawk nation who participated in the action in Sainte-Soline.
\nWe present a second statement written by Serge’s comrades and close-ones, released on Wednesday, March 29.
\n\nWhile our comrade Serge continues fighting for the life that the state has attempted to take away from him, we are witnessing a new outpouring of violence against him. The media are attempting to depict him as a man who ought to be shot. Today, he is still in a coma, in critical condition. We send our solidarity to Mickaël and to all who felt the brute force of police violence brought down on them.
\n\nThe bourgeois media continue endlessly parroting words carefully chosen by the state in order to construct, out of thin air, the enemy that it wants to fight. Their false front will crumble in the face of the many narratives that have corrected and and rewritten the course of events. The police used grenades with the specific purpose of inflicting physical and mental harm upon the protesters; they are responsible for preventing emergency responders from evacuating the injured, even if that meant leaving our comrades to die.
\n\nIntelligence services have been liberally handing out the information they had collected on Serge to newsrooms across the country. Their objective is to force us to define ourselves in the words used by the police. Here, we will not engage with the deliberately abridged versions of Serge’s identity that the police has been circulating. We don’t believe that any truth about him can be found within the arcana of state and media propaganda. As a revolutionary, Serge has been participating with all his might and for many years in many class struggles against our exploitation, always with a view to the broadening and strengthening of life and victory for the proletariat.
\n\nAnd indeed, we cannot let ourselves be crushed.
\n\nWe call on all those who know him to tell others around them who he is. Remember: Serge, in struggle, refuses the state’s strategy to separate good and bad protesters. With him and for him, we uphold this line.
\n\nOn Tuesday, March 28, people everywhere took it upon themselves to show their solidarity with the movement against the pension reform in France. We have also received many messages from international comrades. We warmly thank them, and encourage them to continue and support the movement. More actions are already planned, and we encourage people to join and multiply them without restraint, in France and in the rest of the world.
\n\nWe want this communiqué to be shared as widely as possible.
\n\nPS: There are many rumors about Serge’s medical condition. Don’t share them. We will keep you updated.
\n\nTo contact us: s.informations@proton.me
\n\nComrades of S.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2022/06/07/a-tale-of-two-general-strikes-updating-the-general-strike-for-the-21st-century", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2022/06/07/a-tale-of-two-general-strikes-updating-the-general-strike-for-the-21st-century", "title": "A Tale of Two General Strikes : Updating the General Strike for the 21st Century", "summary": "What would a general strike look like today? We explore the last two general strikes to take place in the US—both in Oakland, in 1946 and 2011.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/header.jpg", "date_published": "2022-06-07T21:17:01Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:55Z", "tags": [ "general strike", "labor", "Work", "ex-workers", "Riot", "Strike", "Oakland", "union", "Occupy", "blockade", "port" ], "content_html": "What would a general strike look like today? The last two localized general strikes in the United States occurred in the same city—Oakland, California—in 1946 and 2011.1 This makes it easy to compare them in order to see what we can learn from the ways that labor struggles have changed over the past century.
\n\nLooking at the strikes of the 1940s, we can see that any combative labor resistance that breaks out today will likely emerge in defiance of union leadership rather than because of it. Looking at the general strike of 2011, we can see that to succeed, combative organizing must begin outside the workplace as well as within it, connecting the struggles of the unemployed and precarious with those of the employed. Exploring how the strategies that people experimented with in 2011 have fared in the decade since, we can draw up new proposals about what to bring to tomorrow’s uprisings.
\n\nAs it has become increasingly difficult for workers to exert leverage on employers on a workplace-by-workplace basis, the general strike might represent a more ambitious way to wield power against the capitalist class as a whole.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/8.jpg\")
“General strike—occupy everything—death to capitalism.” A banner in downtown Oakland on the night of November 2, 2011.
\nThe general strike of December 1946 in Oakland was arguably the last general strike of the 20th century in the United States. As Jeremy Brecher details in Strike!, it occurred on the heels of the Second World War, during which the union bureaucracy renounced strikes.
\n\n\n\n\nWhen the United States entered the war, the leaders of both the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations pledged that there should be no strikes or walkouts for the duration of the war. Thus, at a time when profits were “high by any standard” and a great demand for labor meant “higher wages could be secured… and a short stoppage could secure immediate results,” the unions renounced the principal method by which workers could have gained from the situation.
\n\nInterestingly, the unions with Communist leadership carried this policy furthest.
\n
Defying the united front of government and labor bureaucrats, rank-and-file workers shifted to wildcat strikes as a way to exert leverage. As Brecher recounts:
\n\n\n\n\nAt first, the power of the government and the unions, combined with general support for the war, virtually put an end to strikes. The chairman of the War Labor Board called labor’s no-strike policy an “outstanding success.” Five months after Pearl Harbor was bombed, he reported that there had not been a single authorized strike and that every time a wildcat walkout had occurred, union officials had done all they could to end it.
\n\nFaced with this united front of government, employers, and their own unions, workers developed the technique of quick, unofficial strikes independent of and even against the union structure on a far larger scale than ever before. The number of such strikes began to rise in the summer of 1942, and by 1944, the last full year of the war, more strikes took place than in any previous year in American history.
\n
When the war ended, capitalists were determined to regain control of the production process by suppressing wildcat strikes, while workers hoped to win wage increases to offset inflation. As a result, a new wave of wildcat strikes broke out.
\n\nMany of these wildcat strikes ultimately forced the union bureaucracy to declare official strikes. For example, immediately after the conclusion of the war, United Auto Workers requested a 30% wage increase from General Motors—but the union president declared that he hoped to reach an agreement with the management without any work stoppages. It was only after the workers at 90 plants in the Detroit area went on strike that the union ordered a strike vote, which eventually resulted in 225,000 workers walking out.
\n\nThe United States Bureau of Labor Statistics called the first half of 1946 “the most concentrated period of labor-management strife in the country’s history.” Stan Weir described it as “the largest strike wave that ever occurred in the United States.”
\n\nAccording to Brecher,
\n\n\n\n\nTrade unions played an essential role in forestalling what might otherwise have been a general confrontation between the workers of a great many industries and the government, supporting the employers. The unions were unable to prevent the post-war strike wave, but by leading it they managed to keep it under control.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/23.jpg\")
A scene from the Russian film Forgotten Melody for a Flute.
\nAltogether, 1946 saw general strikes in six cities: Rochester, Houston, Hartford, Lancaster, Camden, and—last of all—in Oakland, California.
\n\nBrecher notes that by 1946, 69 percent of production workers in manufacturing were covered by collective bargaining agreements. But unionizing efforts in the service industry had not been as successful—and after the war ended, women who had been employed in well-paid unionized production jobs were forced back into precarious service industry employment.
\n\nIn the Bay Area, storeowners had their own Retail Merchants’ Association, which fought viciously to prevent the Oakland Retail Clerks’ union from organizing department store workers. Nonetheless, the momentum of the strike wave bolstered the union drive at Kahn’s Department Store, the largest store in Oakland—located downtown at the intersection of Broadway and 16th—and Hastings, the men’s store beside Kahn’s. At the same time, a nationwide maritime strike dragged on into late November in the Bay Area, creating an atmosphere of tension.
\n\nWorkers at Hastings went on strike on October 21, and workers at Kahn’s joined them on October 31. In “The Oakland General Strike,” Richard Boyden describes how these strikes became a flashpoint for labor unrest:
\n\n\n\n\nThere was strong sympathy for the strikers, most of whom were women. Not only did they receive crucial support from the Teamsters who honored the picket lines, but from the other unions, many of whose members volunteered their free time to join the strikers at the store entrances. Even before the general strike, therefore, activists—both rank-and-filers and officials—of a broad cross section of the labor movement were meeting each other on the strike scene. This contributed to a growing sense of common purpose and struggle and sentiment, as the strike dragged on, for a general strike.
\n
According to census records, Oakland was predominantly white in 1946. It was also plagued by racial tension: the Zoot Suit Riots that had broken out in Los Angeles in 1943 had spread to Oakland as well. Nonetheless, photographs from November 1946 show an array of workers picketing in front of Kahn’s, including both Black and white workers of various genders.
\n\nAccording to Boyden, the local leadership of the Teamsters union “covertly opposed the Kahn’s-Hastings strike, but was prevented from acting on this opposition by its own membership.” As Boyden puts it,
\n\n\n\n\nThe Retail Clerks’ union had always relied on Teamster support in strikes because retail workers are relatively unskilled and easily replaced. The stopping of deliveries, therefore, often is the key to success.
\n
Blocking deliveries remains a crucial element of today’s strikes.
\n\nOn Sunday, December 1, starting before dawn, 400 Oakland police officers shut down the pickets around Kahn’s and Hastings, attacking the picketers with billy clubs and cordoning off the area. As thousands watched, the police accompanied a professional strike-breaking team from Los Angeles in delivering merchandise to the two department stores. The cops towed away the cars belonging to picketers and set up machine guns in the middle of the square facing Kahn’s.
\n\nIn response, streetcar operators and bus drivers abandoned their vehicles downtown, removing the steering mechanisms, effectively blockading traffic. Union organizers gathered at the Labor Temple to discuss the situation. The president of the Teamsters’ local demanded that the assembly announce a general strike immediately, declaring that his union would strike the next day regardless. A larger meeting was planned for Monday.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/24.jpg\")
Oakland police stand guard as strikebreakers’ trucks deliver goods to Kahn’s department store on December 1, 1946; a line of Key System streetcars abandoned on Telegraph Avenue by their operators.
\nThe next day, thousands of people gathered to reinforce the pickets around the stores. Union officials gathered at 10 am for what must have been a contentious meeting, judging by the fact that the call for a strike did not come out until 10 pm that night. According to Boyden, union leaders were propelled forward against their will by popular outrage: “They were frightened—first by the specter of anarchy, which seemed to grow every minute, and by the possibility of repression and reprisals.”
\n\nOn Tuesday morning, Boyden writes,
\n\n\n\n\nThe industrial and residential districts of Oakland, Alameda, San Leandro, and Hayward were silent, the streets empty… Twenty-thousand people came downtown to join the pickets. Some workers joined the strike in organized contingents, marching from their union halls.
\n
Police attempted to establish a line in front of Hastings again, but Teamsters ran them off. Picketers also intervened when reporters attempted to take photographs in the streets (an important precedent to recall today in the age of livestreaming).
\n\nAccording to participant Stan Weir,
\n\n\n\n\nA mass of couples danced in the streets. The participants were making history, knew it, and were having fun. By Tuesday morning, they had cordoned off the central city and were directing traffic. Anyone could leave, but only those with passports (union cards) could get in. The comment made by a prominent national network newscaster, that “Oakland is a ghost town tonight,” was a contribution to ignorance. Never before or since had Oakland been so alive and happy for the majority of the population…
\n\nIn all general strikes the participants are very soon forced by the very nature of events to themselves run the society they have just stopped. The process in the Oakland experiment was beginning to deepen. There was as yet little evidence of official union leadership in the streets.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/21.jpg\")
Massive crowds gather in front of Kahn’s department store on December 3, 1946.
\nRestaurants opened as usual that morning, but the Teamsters shut down all of the unionized ones by 8 am. Some people set up a soup kitchen downtown, but it was not able to feed the tremendous number of people who had gathered. In 1946 as today, sufficient infrastructure is fundamental to any mass mobilization.
\n\nWell over 10,000 people convened at the Oakland Auditorium that night for a meeting; an overflow crowd of thousands stood outside in the rain, listening to the proceedings over loudspeakers. The prize for rhetoric goes to Norwegian-born American Federation of Labor organizer Harry Lundeberg:
\n\n\n\n\n“This,” said Lundeberg of the police action, “is fascism in America.” The Los Angeles strike breakers were “…just the average finks,” he shouted: “…the super finks are the city administration… These finky gazoonies who call themselves city fathers have been taking lessons from Hitler and Stalin.”
\n
Lundeberg had spent the earlier part of 1946 engaging in red-baiting attacks on the rival Congress of Industrial Organizations during the maritime strike, but in the heat of the moment, all was forgotten. The next day, there were 35,000 people downtown for the pickets.
\n\nIn response to the strike, the head of the Retail Merchants’ Association reached out to the leadership of the Teamsters. The upper echelons of the union leadership, it turned out, were more sympathetic to the employers than they were to rank-and-file workers. Dan Tobin, President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, announced that “The International Brotherhood of Teamsters is bitterly opposed to any general strike for any cause. I am therefore ordering you and all those associated with you who are members of our International Union to return to work as soon as possible.”
\n\nWest Coast Teamster boss Dave Beck complained that “This damn general strike is nothing but a revolution. It isn’t labor tactics. It’s revolutionary tactics.”
\n\nStan Weir attributes the failure of the strike to spread beyond predominantly white demographics to the fact that the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the only organized labor contingent in the Bay Area headed by leaders sympathetic to the Communist Party, effectively stood aside throughout the events. (This didn’t prevent reactionaries from attempting to associate the general strike with the Communist Party afterwards.) If we accept Weir’s account, racial divisions played a role in limiting how far the strike could spread, but chiefly as a consequence of the concentration of power in the hands of leaders who had different goals from the ordinary workers under them.
\n\nOn the evening of Wednesday, December 4, the American Federation of Labor committee met with the department store owners until 4 am. At 10:30 am the next morning, the AFL representatives voted to end the strike.
\n\nRank-and-file workers were outraged. Some continued picketing and convened local union meetings to try to keep the strike going. According to Stan Weir,
\n\n\n\n\nThe people on the street learned of the decision from a sound truck put on the street by the AFL Central Labor Council. It was the officials’ first really decisive act of leadership. They had consulted among themselves and decided to end the strike on the basis of the Oakland City Manager’s promise that police would not again be used to bring in scabs. No concessions were gained for the women retail clerks at Kahn’s and Hastings Department Stores whose strikes had triggered the General Strike; they were left free to negotiate any settlement they could get on their own. Those women and many other strikers heard the sound truck’s message with the form of anger that was close to heartbreak. Numbers of truckers and other workers continued to picket with the women, yelling protests at the truck and appealing to all who could hear that they should stay out. But all strikers other than the clerks had been ordered back to work and no longer had any protection against the disciplinary actions that might be brought against them for strike-caused absences.
\n
By Friday, the general strike was over, sabotaged from above. At noon that day, 25 strike-breakers were brought into Kahn’s. Picketers responded angrily, but the union leadership once again deescalated the situation by calling for a mass meeting at the Labor Temple, enabling the strike-breakers to get into the department store without a confrontation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/25.jpg\")
The Oakland Tribune announces the end of the strike on Thursday, December 5; the Oakland Auditorium on the afternoon of Friday, December 6, 1946, as 1200 employers met to discuss the strike.
\nSix months later, the workers at Kahn’s and Hastings were still out on strike.
\n\nAccording to Boyden, Teamster bosses like Dave Beck exemplified the sort of profiteers who professionalized the union bureaucracy, transforming it into a junior partner of the capitalist class:
\n\n\n\n\n[Beck] rightly viewed the general strike as a revolutionary tactic, and opposed its use no matter what the situation. He was a business unionist par excellence and a professional anti-communist. He sought to build and consolidate his organization by “selling” the conservative Teamsters union to the employers as a “responsible” alternative to militant and/or radical unions…
\n\nBeck viewed the union as a business, not a cause. He wanted to “Taylorize” the labor movement, apply to it the business methods developed by the corporations and create in the person of the union official a new professional, whose position and power rested in expertise and efficiency, not on the democratic participation of the union members. And Beck treated his union like his own company. He used his profits from the Teamsters to become a millionaire, investing extensively in Seattle real estate and other business ventures. There was no place in this scheme for militant trade unionism.
\n
The tensions that lingered in Oakland after the general strike were channeled into electoral politics. The rival American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations united to form a Political Action Committee to run candidates for the Oakland City Council. The strikes at Kahn’s and Hastings ended with a compromise the day before the elections. Four of the labor candidates were elected, though they were always outvoted by the other five City Council members. In any case, according to Stan Weir, “The four winners were by no means outspoken champions of labor. They did not utilize their offices as a tribune for a progressive labor-civic program.” Looking back, Weir realized that Harry Lundeberg, in his “finky gazoonies” speech, had begun to shift workers’ attention away from a direct struggle against employers to a focus on City Council.
\n\nAfter the general strike in Oakland, it was all downhill for labor struggles in the United States. Workers never again regained the leverage they had wielded during the general strikes of 1946.
\n\nPresident Harry Truman’s Executive Order of March 21, 1947 required that all federal civil-service employees be screened for “loyalty.” That June, Congress introduced the Taft–Hartley Act, prohibiting wildcat strikes, solidarity strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing, and closed shops. Union leaders were required to file with the United States Department of Labor declaring that they did not support the Communist Party and had no relationship with any organization seeking the “overthrow of the United States government by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional means.” The years that followed saw the second Red Scare, including the rise of the Federal Bureau of Investigation under J. Edgar Hoover and the imprisonment, firing, blacklisting, interrogation, and persecution of countless thousands of workers and organizers. All of these served to hamstring the labor movement while contributing to the ascendancy of its most reactionary elements. This occurred long before globalization enabled capitalists to sidestep unionized labor forces entirely, though the taming of the labor movement helped to pave the way for that. By the end of the twentieth century, subsequent waves of white flight, deindustrialization, gentrification, and the shift of the majority of wage earners into non-unionized service industry jobs had utterly transformed Oakland and other cities like it.
\n\nTo those who have participated in the social upheavals of the early twenty-first century, many aspects of the story of the general strike of 1946 will be familiar: police brutality as the spark that catalyzes a contagious uprising, the ingenuity and initiative of the participants (Stan Weir described striking workers as “people who have been released from the necessity to hide their feelings”), the challenges of coordinating to meet the needs of a revolt that interrupts capitalist logistics without replacing them, the retreat into electoral politics during the waning phase.
\n\nThe part that may be surprising for those who grew up after the heyday of the old labor movement is the extent to which the union leadership worked directly with the capitalist class to suppress the strike. The decades of labor organizing that had created these unions built the shared consciousness and commitments that made the strike possible, but the union hierarchies were among the chief threats to the movement itself. Today, as a new generation seeks tools with which to stand up to the capitalist class, we should not forget the lessons of 1946. Formal unions do not suffice to enable workers to stand up for themselves. The important things are organizing, solidarity, and audacity, outside of the workplace as well as inside it. The official recognition of a union—however hard won—will not automatically deliver those things, and is no substitute for them.
\n\nIn 1946—as today—the power of a strike did not derive simply from the fact that workers stopped working in a given workplace. The power of the strike derived from their determination to shut down that workplace, to defend themselves against strike-breakers and police, and to interrupt business as usual on all fronts—and from the fact that when they did these things successfully, it was contagious, drawing in the participation of many people who did not share their workplace or their immediate concerns.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/26.jpg\")
Strikers gather in front of Hastings department store on December 3, 1946; graffiti on the smashed window of a Bank of America on November 2, 2011.
\nAfter 1946, decades passed before anything like a general strike took place again in the United States. Besides the “Day without an Immigrant” protests of May 1, 2006—a subject for another study—the closest thing to a successful general strike in the United States thus far in the 21st century arguably took place in Oakland on November 2, 2011, at the high point of the Occupy movement.
\n\nThe strike of November 2, 2011 differed from the general strike of 1946 in several instructive ways. Rather than mobilizing card-carrying union members to shut down their own workplaces, a motley assemblage of students, precarious workers, unemployed people, radicals, and other rebels set out to shut down the city from outside the economy proper.
\n\nThree years into the recession, the year 2011 opened with the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, followed by the plaza occupation movements in Spain and Greece—setting the stage for sluggish social movements in the United States to finally kick into gear.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/3.jpg\")
The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt inspired people around the world in 2011. In this photograph, demonstrators wave an Egyptian flag during the port blockade in Oakland on November 2, 2011.
\nThough rapidly gentrifying, Oakland had not entirely lost its character as a longtime hotbed of radical activity. If few recalled the strikes of 1946, the legacy of the Black Panther Party and other radical groups from the 1960s and ’70s lingered in the popular imagination. At the same time, the local government was comprised in part of alumni of the previous generation of activists, who were experts at co-opting and pacifying social movements.
\n\nRiots had broken out in Oakland at the beginning of 2009 in response to the murder of Oscar Grant by Bay Area Rapid Transit police. Afterwards, a combative student movement took off in the Bay Area with a series of building occupations; it peaked on March 4, 2010 in a mass march from Berkeley to Oakland that ended with a breakaway march blocking the freeway. Anarchists carried a reinforced banner in that march reading “Occupy Everything”—an image from the future. In the buildup to March 4, some people had talked about calling for a general strike, but no one had a clear idea of what that could look like.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/7.jpg\")
Anarchists participating in the March from the University of California at Berkeley to downtown Oakland on March 4, 2010.
\nIn February 2011, in response to a bill stripping public-sector unions of collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin, demonstrators in Madison occupied the capitol. Again, there was some talk about calling for a general strike. On April 4, longshore workers from Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) shut down the ports of San Francisco and Oakland in solidarity with workers in Wisconsin.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/5.jpg\")
A poster promoting the idea of a general strike during the protests in Madison, Wisconsin in early 2011: “General strike means nobody and nothing works.”
\nIn summer 2011, seeking to revitalize local networks and experiment with new tactics, a small number of anarchists and anti-state communists organized a series of anti-austerity demonstrations dubbed Anticuts. As participants later recounted,
\n\n\n\n\nThe third and final Anticut action—organized in solidarity with a hunger strike in California prisons—marched from the future home of Occupy Oakland in Frank Ogawa Plaza down Broadway past the police headquarters, courthouse, and jail, holding a noise demo there before circling back towards the plaza to disperse. This small demonstration marked the first time this loop was tried. Months later, during the high-tension moments of Occupy Oakland, that march route became intimately familiar to thousands of people, sometimes repeated multiple times per day.
\n
In following this march route, the Anticuts demonstrators started by City Hall—from which the police had attacked the pickets on the morning of December 1, 1946—then passed by the site where Kahn’s department store had been, and then, a block later, crossed the intersection where the first streetcar driver had abandoned his vehicle in protest that morning sixty-four and a half years earlier.
\n\nWhile the strikers of 1946 focused on asserting their interests in their workplaces, the Anticuts demonstrators focused on the control of public space, the defunding of libraries and other public resources, and the prison-industrial complex. Work itself had become more precarious and diffuse in the intervening decades to such an extent that it had become easier to take on other aspects of capitalism. The demonstrators confronted the conditions of their survival rather than seeking to negotiate better rewards for participating in production.
\n\nOn September 17, a thousand people responded to a call to occupy Zuccotti Park in New York City. The original proposal was to gather in imitation of the Tahrir Square demonstrators in Cairo and agree on a single demand to present to the government; the editor of Adbusters, the magazine that first published the call, said “We’re hoping it’s something specific and doable, like asking Obama to set up a committee to look into the fall of US banking.” Occupy Wall Street began as form without content, a calculated attempt to create a memetic imitation of overseas movements. Owing to the involvement of anarchists like David Graeber, however, the movement adopted a horizontal, participatory structure that enabled it to surpass the vision of those who had founded it.
\n\nAcross the United States, activists with a wide range of agendas and ideologies established copycat occupations. One of the first of these appeared in San Francisco. Occupy Oakland began weeks later; this gave the participants time to discuss the character of the other occupations around the country and identify what they wanted to do differently. “If this movement is to bring any fundamental change in the quality of our lives,” argued one participant ahead of the first gathering, “it must be drastically different than any of the other Occupations [sic] around the country.”
\n\nDespite rain, a thousand people gathered on October 10 in front of Oakland City Hall at Frank Ogawa Plaza, rechristened Oscar Grant Plaza—one block from the site of Kahn’s Department Store. The camp drew together participants in many earlier struggles in the Bay Area, augmenting their commitments and experience by connecting them with a broader social body.
\n\n“From the start, Occupy Oakland immediately rejected cooperation with city government officials,” the authors of “Who Is Oakland?” noted. In contrast to Occupy groups elsewhere around the United States, Occupy Oakland involved large numbers of people who were uncompromisingly opposed to the police and to reformist strategies; many participants defended the legitimacy of autonomous action, rejecting the idea that the assemblies should exert centralized control over the movement through formal consensus process.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/2.jpg\")
“Worker solidarity: no compromise with bosses or politicians.” Banners at Oscar Grant Plaza during Occupy Oakland.
\nAccording to an early report from participants,
\n\n\n\n\nOn the very first day, the camp had a fully functional kitchen, an info-tent, and a supply tent. By the end of this week there was a medic tent, art supply tent, an insurrectionary library, a free store, the Raheim Brown Free School, a media tent, a POC tent, a Sukkah, a DJ booth, and not to mention hundreds of sleeping-space tents. In addition, the rotating kitchen crew has been feeding everyone consistently from 8 am until midnight and throwing spontaneous BBQs.
\n
The two dozen tents that had appeared the first night increased to one hundred and fifty tents by the end of the first week. Participants described the occupation as a liberated zone, while rival elements of the power structure sought to co-opt or suppress it. According to the authors of “Who Is Oakland?”,
\n\n\n\n\nThe press releases of the city government, Oakland Police Department, and business associations like the Oakland Chamber of Commerce continually repeat[ed] that the Occupy Oakland encampment, feeding nearly a thousand mostly desperately poor people a day, was composed primarily of non-Oakland resident “white outsiders” intent on destroying the city. For anyone who spent any length of time at the encampment, Occupy Oakland was clearly one of the most racially and ethnically diverse Occupy encampments in the country—composed of people of color from all walks of life, from local business owners to fired Oakland school teachers, from college students to the homeless and seriously mentally ill. Unfortunately, social justice activists, clergy, and community groups mimicked the city’s erasure of people of color in their analysis of Occupy, when they were not negotiating with the mayor’s office behind closed doors to dismantle the encampment “peacefully.”
\n\nFrom the beginning, the Occupy Oakland encampment existed in a tightening vise between two faces of the state: nonprofits and the police. An array of community organizations immediately began negotiating with city bureaucracies and pushing for the encampment to adopt nonviolence pledges and move to Snow Park (itself later cleared by OPD despite total compliance of individuals who settled there). At the same time, police departments across the Bay Area [were] readying one of the largest and most expensive paramilitary operations in recent history.
\n
In the early hours of October 25, Occupy Oakland became the first Occupy encampment in the United States to be raided in a full-scale police operation. According to the authors of “The Rise and Fall of the Oakland Commune,”
\n\n\n\n\nAfter the Commune repeatedly resisted attempts by the city administration to assert control over the camp—staging public burnings of warning letters during general assemblies in the amphitheater on the steps of city hall—Mayor Jean Quan authorized the militarized police operation that left the camp in ruins and over 100 in jail.
\n\nLater that same day, thousands of enraged people poured back into downtown, charging police barricades around the plaza and braving countless barrages of tear gas and projectiles until the early hours of the morning. Partly because of the near murder of Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen by a police projectile that night, and the dramatic footage of the entire downtown area covered in gas, the next day the police withdrew in a storm of controversy. Exultant crowds reoccupied the plaza, holding an assembly of 2000 people—the largest of the whole sequence—and agreed to go on the offensive with the November 2 strike. The fact that it seemed possible to organize a general strike in a single week indicates the degree to which normal calendar time warped and stretched in those first three weeks.
\n
According to “Insurrection, Oakland Style: A History”:
\n\n\n\n\nA general assembly was called for 6 pm on October 26. The police were nowhere in sight, but some reported that they were massing at a nearby parking garage. They were never to mobilize in any show of force. Bike patrols were passing back information, and a general feeling of safety permeated the camp. The metal fence that had been set up by the city was taken down, and once again the plaza was in the hands of #OccupyOakland. A proposal was submitted for a general strike in Oakland on November 2. The proposal passed by 96.9%; 1484 votes for to 77 against, with 47 abstentions, more than enough in Oakland’s modified consensus of 90% for the proposal to pass.
\n
96.9% was a considerable majority out of one of the largest assemblies to take place. But the population of Oakland totaled almost 400,000, and the participants in Occupy were arguably among the less steadily employed residents of Oakland: many of them were unemployed, while others were employed in the gig economy or other precarious labor. The general strike of 1946 had involved more than 100,000 workers. How could a couple thousand people pull off the same thing?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/14.jpg\")
A pumpkin at Oscar Grant Plaza announcing the forthcoming general strike.
\nIn 1946, a significant part of the population of Oakland had been unionized; in 2011, something like 89% of workers had no unions, and most of the unions that remained had been thoroughly integrated into the smooth functioning of the economy. The general strike of 1946 drew its force from the fact that, without workers, the Oakland economy ground to a halt; in 2011, in the midst of a continuing recession, most workers were employed in sectors of the economy that were hardly essential to its functioning. How do baristas, dishwashers, dog-walkers, sex workers, medical study lab rats, self-employed graphic designers, grad students, and those who seek employment on Craiglist make an impact by not working for a day?
\n\nBy shutting down the economy from outside.
\n\nBut how?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/22.jpg\")
The announcement of the November 2 general strike.
\nOf course, not everyone involved in Occupy Oakland was a precarious worker. Some were connected to the same ILWU local that had shut down the ports on April 4. Elements in the nurses’ and teachers’ unions were also sympathetic to the movement. Negotiations ensued with and within Bay Area unions ahead of November 2.
\n\nBy Friday, October 28, fault lines were emerging. Representatives of the ILWU and other unions announced that they would not call on their members to strike. “However energetic we are about the cause, we also are law-abiding organizations that are very cautious,” Matthew Goldstein, president of the union representing faculty at four East Bay schools in the Peralta Community College District, told reporters. “A general strike on the order of the 1946 general strike in Oakland is an ambitious goal, especially in just a few days.” (As we have seen, the 1946 general strike broke out in two days, whereas Occupy Oakland had given themselves a week to organize.)
\n\n“Only a few unions, such as the SEIU (public sector) gave an official call-out for their members to take a day off in order to participate,” the Rust Bunny collective recounted afterwards, noting that the Service Employees International Union struck a tacit agreement with City Hall to that purpose. Many unions informally encouraged their members to participate in the day of action without calling for a strike, neither wishing to risk losing credibility nor to face the legal consequences of an illegal strike.
\n\n“It’s virtually impossible for any union to endorse a work-stoppage because all contracts have no-strike clauses, which unions are bound to honor,” ILWU communications director Craig Merrilees told reporters.
\n\nThat same day, Jack Heyman, a retired Oakland longshoreman and chairman of the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee, speaking at Zuccotti Park to Occupy Wall Street, declared, “Longshore workers are attempting to shut down the ports in the Bay Area. We will be calling on other workers in other ports to join us.”
\n\nAt Occupy Wall Street on Friday, October 28, 2011, Jack Heyman announces the solidarity of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union with the Occupy Oakland’s call for a General Strike on November 2 in response to police violence against protesters in Oakland.
\nThe ILWU had a longstanding clause in their contract permitting them to refuse to cross a picket line and cancel a shift if the situation was deemed unsafe. Radicals within the ILWU encouraged participants in Occupy Oakland to set up picket lines at the Port of Oakland in order to enable them to activate that clause. This approach relied upon the precarious and unemployed to enable unionized workers to walk off the job without suffering the consequences of breaching their contracts. It represented an ambitious effort to integrate the unionized working class and the precarious underclass into a single unified strategy. As we shall see, this strategy had drawbacks of its own.
\n\nYears earlier, in Washington, DC, anarchists mobilizing against the meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank had called for a “People’s Strike” on September 27, 2002 to shut down the nation’s capital. Though only a few thousand protesters turned out for the day’s action, their militant messaging achieved the goal in advance: the government advised people not to ride the metro or come downtown to work, and the police themselves surrounded and effectively shut down many of the targets in their efforts to secure them. In Oakland in 2011, the call for a general strike had similar effects. A spokesman for the University of California Office of the President in downtown Oakland announced the office would be closed on November 2 and that the 1300 employees who worked in the building would work from home, for fear that the Bay Area Rapid Transit system might be impacted. The mayor gave city employees permission to take November 2 off—with the exception of police.
\n\nOn November 1, the Oakland Police Officer’s Association took the unusual step of publishing an open letter criticizing the mayor and hinting at a strike of their own:
\n\n\n\n\nWe represent the 645 police officers who work hard every day to protect the citizens of Oakland. We, too, are the 99% fighting for better working conditions, fair treatment and the ability to provide a living for our children and families. We are severely understaffed with many City beats remaining unprotected by police…
\n\nOn Tuesday, October 25th, we were ordered by Mayor Quan to clear out the encampments at Frank Ogawa Plaza and to keep protesters out of the Plaza. We performed the job that the Mayor’s Administration asked us to do, being fully aware that past protests in Oakland have resulted in rioting, violence, and destruction of property.
\n\nThen, on Wednesday, October 26th, the Mayor allowed protesters back in—to camp out at the very place they were evacuated [sic] from the day before.
\n\nTo add to the confusion, the Administration issued a memo on Friday, October 28th to all City workers in support of the “Stop Work” strike scheduled for Wednesday, giving all employees, except for police officers, permission to take the day off.
\n\nMeanwhile, a message has been sent to all police officers: Everyone, including those who have the day off, must show up for work on Wednesday.
\n
Conflicts within the halls of power are often a crucial element in successful revolutionary mobilizations. The police carried out a sort of strike of their own on November 2, almost completely withdrawing until midnight.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/17.jpg\")
Oakland police prepared by boarding up their windows—from the inside.
\nMeanwhile, energized by the proposed general strike, countless new participants were flowing into Occupy Oakland. Many of them had not previously been exposed to the radical politics of those who had been involved in it since the beginning. Nonetheless, according to one member of the Industrial Workers of the World,
\n\n\n\n\nThe General Assembly passed several key motions leading up to the General Strike—a motion supporting autonomous actions that occupied buildings for the purpose of expropriating them, a motion that reprisal pickets would be sent out where requested against schools and businesses that disciplined their students or workers for participating in the general strike, and that health and safety pickets would be sent out early where requested, so that workers would have a picket line to refuse to cross…
\n\nBy Tuesday, the community colleges had large, public walkouts planned, most instructors had cancelled classes, and it all just seemed to arise out of the air.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/atc/atc-oak-6b.jpg\")
Oscar Grant plaza on November 2, 2011.
\nOn November 2, many longshore workers called out of work in the morning, leaving the port running at a diminished capacity. Students and teachers from Berkeley and Laney College marched downtown to join the strike after serving a symbolic eviction notice at Oakland Unified School District headquarters. The Men’s Wearhouse beside the plaza displayed a sign in its window saying “We stand with the 99%. Closed Wednesday, Nov. 2.” The marquee of the Grand Lake Theater read “We proudly support the Occupy Wall Street movement—closed Wednesday in support of the strike.”
\n\nMassive numbers of people gathered at Oscar Grant Plaza. According to the authors of “The Rise and Fall of the Oakland Commune,”
\n\n\n\n\nPeople gathered in the early morning under a giant banner, stretched across the central intersection in downtown, reading “Death to Capitalism.” From there, the crowds quickly fanned out across the center of the city, shutting down businesses that had refused to close for the day. The camp at the plaza became a crowded anti-capitalist carnival offering music and speeches from three different stages.
\n
A participant in one of the flying pickets described their experience shutting down a café that had refused to close:
\n\n\n\n\nWe began loudly shouting slogans like “Shut it down!” “General Strike!” and “Let them strike, it’s their right!” After we noisily created havoc and prevented the café from operating, someone negotiated with the boss and he agreed to close, let the workers leave, and pay them for a full day’s wages—even though they had not even been there half a shift. There were about 15 people working there, with about five Latino guys baking and cooking in the visible kitchen and the rest were young Black and white women and men working the counter and serving food.
\n\nMost of the workers were excited at our action, especially the ones who knew some of the Wobblies, but they had to be discrete in front of management. There was some confusion, at least until management disappeared from the windows, but once that happened the workers were all smiles and talked to us through the glass doors. We asked if we should stay or leave, and the enthusiastic response was “Stay!” …The same worker who told us to stay later said through the glass “You did it! You shut it down!” and gave one of the Wobblies a fist bump through the glass door. We stayed until all the workers had left the café, hoping that some of them would make it to the area around Oscar Grant Plaza to join the strike.
\n\nWhile we were waiting for the workers to leave, a couple of potential customers complained that we were “attacking a small local business.”
\n
This narrative, like the events at the port, illustrates the extent to which this kind of “strike from outside the workplace” could be misunderstood or misrepresented as anti-worker. In fact, in 1946, it had been the Teamsters who had shut down restaurants in downtown Oakland, also acting from outside the workplace.
\n\nAt 2 pm, at the intersection of Broadway and Telegraph beside the former site of Kahn’s, an anti-capitalist march that had been announced autonomously outside the consensus process of the Occupy assemblies gathered behind banners proclaiming “If we cannot live, we will not work—general strike!” and “This is class war.” Many participants sported black flags, motorcycle helmets, masks, matching black clothing, and shields painted to resemble the covers of books. These shields had first appeared during the Anticuts marches of the preceding summer, inspired by similar shields in Italy.
\n\nLed by a black bloc of hundreds, the march visited Chase Bank, the Bank of America at the Kaiser Center, the Wells Fargo at 12th and Broadway, Whole Foods—the management of which had refused to give workers the day off—and the University of California Office of the President, leaving a trail of graffiti and broken windows in its wake. One participant spray-painted “1946” across a cracked Bank of America window. This was a return to the tactics that anarchists and others had employed in the riots responding to the murder of Oscar Grant—and before that, most famously, during the mobilization against the summit of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. In addition to forcibly shutting down the targets, these tactics expressed uncompromising opposition to capitalism itself—establishing a confrontational pole in the distinctly heterogeneous Occupy movement. In effect, the participants were counterposing a rival memetic gesture to the assembly and occupation that had characterized Occupy up to that point.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/20.jpg\")
“A large canister of paint was used to write the word “STRIKE” across the front windows. As the painters ran back toward the crowd some of those in the crowd decided these people needed to be tackled and knocked to the ground. Eventually, the scuffle grew to include the painters, the tacklers and the people who broke the painters free and allowed them to run into the crowd for safety.” –Bruce Valde in the December 2011 issue of the Industrial Worker.
\nSome witnesses disapproved; others charged that vandalism would discredit the movement. Debates about “violence” were rampant in the United States at that time, including in the Bay Area, peaking with Chris Hedges’ notorious text “The Cancer in Occupy.” It was only later, between the rebellion in Ferguson in 2014 and the first year of Trump’s presidency, that large numbers of people began to accept the need—at least in certain circumstances—for tactics that many had previously delegitimized as “violent.”
\n\nAt 4 pm, thousands began to gather at 14th and Broadway to march to the Port of Oakland. According to one eyewitness,
\n\n\n\n\nTwo marches would leave for the port, at 4 and 5 pm, the first, from reliable estimates, consisting of at least 10,000 people, the second consisting of 15,000-20,000 people. Plus many more people went to the port from elsewhere. The best estimates I have seen for the numbers at the port were 35,000-50,000, which I can easily believe.
\n
According to another eyewitness,
\n\n\n\n\nAs we got to the intersection at the Port where there is a traffic signal at the entrance to the APL terminal, I marveled at the trucks idled six abreast in the midst of the human swarm. I wondered what the troqueros thought about the shutdown, so I asked the first two I saw standing next to their trucks. I began by apologizing for preventing them from working. They immediately responded by rejecting my apology, saying “We’re part of this and we’re happy it’s happening.” Their only disappointment was that they thought the strike would happen in the morning.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/19.jpg\")
According to Stephen Coles, “After 8 pm, there was some confusion among our crowd picketing the APL Gate about whether we had successfully blocked the full shift. Amid the arguing, this man stepped forward and said he was with the Longshore Union. He confirmed that the strike was successful and workers were not able to cross the lines. Some in the skeptical crowd demanded his ID as we were getting mixed messages from Twitter and other sources. He supplied it: Craig Merrilees, Communications Director for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. He went on to say the workers were grateful to Occupy marchers for facilitating the picket line and then answered questions about arbitration from folks in the crowd around him.” This testimony is interesting because the following month, Craig Merrilees took an outspoken role in denouncing Occupy in the corporate media.
\nFinally, after night fell, hundreds of people occupied the Traveler’s Aid building a few blocks from Oscar Grant Plaza. Long empty, it had previously housed a nonprofit serving the homeless. In anticipation of a police raid, defenders built a barricade at 16th and Broadway to defend the area—though when they lit it ablaze, conflicts about “violence” broke out with renewed vigor. Finally, at midnight, the police, who had been absent all day, appeared in considerable force and attacked, recapturing the Traveler’s Aid building and provoking a night of rioting during which many of the businesses and city offices around the plaza were damaged, including a police substation.
\n\nScenes from Oakland on November 2, 2011.
\nAnd then it was over. Having called for a big day of action, the movement went into a refractory period. It took some participants months to realize that November 2 had been the high point of Occupy.
\n\nDebates followed about the legitimacy of some of the tactics that anarchists had employed. Although the general assembly had passed a motion supporting autonomous building occupations, some still objected to the occupation of the Traveler’s Aid building; others were angry about the anti-capitalist march that had visited Whole Foods. As one participant observed, however, “Far more people participated in the Oakland General Strike than have ever attended a General Assembly.” Discussions about direct democracy, consensus process, and self-determination continued for years after Occupy.
\n\nOn November 10, a man was fatally shot beside the encampment in Oscar Grant Plaza, underscoring the severity of the challenges that Occupy Oakland had taken on in attempting to create a commons in the midst of poverty and desperation. Early on November 14, the police evicted the camp again, this time permanently.
\n\nNonetheless, some elements of Occupy Oakland were determined to continue developing a model for a 21st-century strike. In “Blockading the Port Is Only the First of Many Last Resorts,” published on December 7, some participants argued that it was essential to understand how the economy had changed since 1946:
\n\n\n\n\nThis is why the general strike on November 2 appeared as it did, not as the voluntary withdrawal of labor from large factories and the like (where so few of us work), but rather as masses of people who work in unorganized workplaces, who are unemployed or underemployed or precarious in one way or another, converging on the chokepoints of capital flow. Where workers in large workplaces—the ports, for instance—did withdraw their labor, this occurred after the fact of an intervention by an extrinsic proletariat. In such a situation, the flying picket, originally developed as a secondary instrument of solidarity, becomes the primary mechanism of the strike. If postindustrial capital focuses on the seaways and highways, the streets and the mall, focuses on accelerating and volatilizing its networked flows, then its antagonists will also need to be mobile and multiple… mobile blockades are the technique for an age and place in which production has been offshored, an age in which most of us work, if we work at all, in small and unorganized workplaces devoted to the transport, distribution, administration, and sale of goods produced elsewhere.
\n
As participants in Occupy Oakland began to organize towards another port shutdown, scheduled for December 12 and intended to encompass the entire West Coast, union bureaucrats and capitalist media outlets took advantage of the vulnerabilities of the model of strike as “intervention by an extrinsic proletariat” to sow dissension. The fact that ILWU members had to claim to be endangered in order to stop work—and had to claim to oppose the strike in order to avoid legal consequences—offered a convenient wedge.
\n\n“Occupy Oakland plans West Coast port shutdown, but port workers don’t support it,” proclaimed the Washington Post on December 5.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/13.jpg\")
One’s perspective on the general strike of 2011 depended considerably on whether one was positioned within it…
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/9.jpg\")
…or outside of it.
\n“The ILWU International officers in San Francisco are claiming to have nothing to do with the December 12 action and even oppose it,” wrote the former Communications Director of the ILWU on December 8. “Officially, they must distance themselves from the action call to protect themselves from being sued by the PMA [Pacific Maritime Association] for the damages of the action. But they are going beyond the legally required disclaimers.”
\n\nAfter the blockades of December 12, which were more or less successful in the Bay but drew considerably fewer participants than the November 2 general strike, the New York Times accused Occupy Oakland of “co-opting the unions’ cause instead of working with them.” ILWU communications director Craig Merrilees denied that the ILWU tacitly approved of the strike, charging that Occupy organizers had been “very disrespectful of the democratic decision-making process in the union and deliberately went around that process to call their own action without consulting workers.”
\n\n“Their actions further alienate the movement from average American workers,” Forbes crowed.
\n\nHostile press like this was inevitable. Even if the entire conflict had played out within the ILWU without any “outside agitators” to blame, corporate media would have published negative coverage of any faction promoting tactics that could exert significant leverage on employers. But bad press was not the chief obstacle facing those who sought to continue developing this model for a 21st-century strike.
\n\nThe real problem was that a strategy based on precarious activists shutting down unionized workplaces from outside failed to bridge the gap between the divergent needs of the unionized employees and the precarious blockaders. If the goal was to shut down the economy as a generalized pressure tactic on behalf of the unemployed and precarious, it was not clear what the union members might stand to gain from this; many ILWU members earned comfortable salaries and had job security that was not worth risking for the sake of what some considered utopian or nihilistic adventurism. (“We have jobs and families,” said a random truck driver the Associated Press found to condemn the Occupy protesters; “Most of them don’t.”) If the goal was only to defend the bargaining rights of the ILWU, it was not clear what the precarious blockaders might stand to gain from taking considerable risks to preserve the security of workers who occupied a stabler position in the economy.
\n\nThe ILWU leadership had no intention of being associated with blockades that could result in fines and other penalties, and they were determined not to cede control of the ports to a grassroots movement. In this context, even when rank-and-file union organizers attempted to organize a work stoppage—the chief form of leverage a union can exert—they had to do so from outside the workplace, defying the representatives of the union, as if they were themselves nihilistic adventurists. Calls from all sides to center the unions in actions at the ports only intensified this paradox.
\n\nEven in the best case, centering the unions—whether that was understood as the official leadership or as radical currents within the rank and file—meant deferring to people who were not necessarily invested in the fortunes of the Occupy movement or attuned to the strategic needs of the blockaders. It bogged down the organizing in internal debates within the group that had the most to lose from escalation, and shifted the objectives towards defending the jurisdiction of the official union structures rather than building new fighting formations to defend everyone impacted by capitalism. This produced diminishing returns as the movement itself melted away from one mobilization to the next.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/12.jpg\")
A repurposed street sign in Oakland on the evening of November 2, 2011: “No work ahead.”
\nJack Heyman and others did their best to legitimize the port blockades. Longtime radical labor organizers grappled with the questions that had come up in the blockades. And there was an opportunity to try again: some Occupy organizers were coordinating with an ILWU local in Longview, Washington, where the multinational corporation EGT was maneuvering to break the union. Hoping to show that Occupy could be real allies to unionized workers, they called for a regional convergence to block a ship that was scheduled to dock at the EGT facilities in that port.
\n\nOccupy Portland and Occupy Seattle organized planning meetings on January 5 and 6. At the first one, in Portland, the ILWU leadership made it clear that they would do everything in their power to hamstring the mobilization. According to a subsequent account, the president of one ILWU local seized the platform to read a letter from the president of the ILWU “calling on ILWU members who might participate in the convergence to be sure to keep their actions within the confines set by Taft-Hartley and to avoid working with Occupy.”
\n\nOn January 6, 2012, over 200 people gathered at a labor solidarity forum called by Occupy Seattle to support Longview ILWU Local 21 in its battle against EGT. Supporters of the ILWU leadership from the Seattle, Tacoma and Portland ILWU locals disrupted the meeting—first verbally, then physically.
\n\nJanuary 6: a meeting called for by Occupy Seattle to support ILWU strikers descends into chaos. Fighting unions means fighting within the unions. It always has.
\nIn the end, according to one account,
\n\n\n\n\nThe bureaucrats at the top of the ILWU outmaneuvered the planned blockade of the scab ship in Longview, and all plans for the convergence imploded. Occupy caravans had been organized from Oakland, Portland, Seattle, and elsewhere, while the federal government announced it would defend the scab ship with a Coast Guard cutter. Comrades from across the West Coast were just waiting for word from those working directly with the Longview Longshoremen to initiate a confrontational showdown. But in their determination to reorient Occupy towards labor activism, the tendency that had coalesced during the November 2 port blockade constructed a framework that was completely disconnected from the streets and plazas from which they had emerged. With every step from the November 2 strike through the December West Coast port blockade and towards Longview, these actions ceased to be participatory disruptions in the international flows of capital as a projection of the occupation’s power beyond the plaza. Instead, they became solidarity actions, organized only with supporting the union in mind. There was naïve talk about the actions sparking a wildcat strike in the ports, or prying the union away from the bureaucrats who were eager to defuse the conflict and cooperate with EGT. But none of this came close to materializing.
\n\nIn the end, the labor solidarity tendency within Occupy Oakland and the handful of radical Longshoremen allies were no match for the political machinations of those at the top of the ILWU, who coerced the rank and file of Longview to accept a compromise with EGT that kept them on the job while stripping them of many benefits and their job security.
\n
Radical elements of the ILWU described these events differently in a press release crediting the Occupy movement as a crucial element in the settlement with EGT. “It wasn’t until rank and file and Occupy planned a mass convergence to blockade the ship that EGT suddenly had the impetus to negotiate,” stated a sympathetic officer of ILWU local in the Bay Area. “Labor can no longer win victories against the employers without the community. It must include a broad-based movement. The strategy and tactics employed by the Occupy movement in conjunction with rank-and-file ILWU members confirm that the past militant traditions of the ILWU are still effective against the employers today.”
\n\nEven if this was a victory for the ILWU—which others denied—it did not help the Occupy movement to maintain momentum. They never repeated the port blockades of November and December. Efforts to coordinate with workers to blockade the Golden Gate Bridge for May Day 2012 fell through when, once again, the unions called off the action at the last minute. Though the blockaders’ risk tolerance may have given organized labor a small advantage at the negotiating table, putting union leadership in the driver’s seat of the entire movement drove it into the ground. In the end, the most vibrant events of May Day 2012 in the Bay as well as Los Angeles and Seattle drew more from the anti-capitalist march of November 2 than they did from the blockading of the port. Interrupting the economy from outside—without coordinating with union representatives or making demands—had proved more viable.
\n\nLooking back a year later, participants in the blockades argued that Occupy protesters should have shut down the ports themselves through direct action rather than focusing on loopholes in the ILWU contract. One organizer suggested that participants in Occupy were only able to offer meaningful solidarity to rank-and-file workers because they defied the union leadership and organized autonomously from it. Even Jacobin magazine, the executive director of which had willfully sought to discredit participants in Occupy who were skeptical of unions (disingenuously alleging that they believed that “‘building “communes,’ rather than confronting capital, should be the movement’s main mission”), detailed how the ILWU leadership had played a fundamentally reactionary role throughout the events.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/16.jpg\")
Diversity of tactics? A demonstrator meditates while others set up burning barricades in the background: downtown Oakland on the evening of November 2, 2011.
\nBack in December 2011, the authors of “Blockading the Port Is Only the First of Many Last Resorts” had already concluded that it was blockaders and rioters, not unions, who represented the future of labor resistance:
\n\n\n\n\nIn the present instance, the initiative is coming from outside the port and from outside the workers’ movement as such, even though it involves workers and unions. For the most part, the initiative here has come from a motley band of people who work in non-unionized workplaces, or (for good reason) hate their unions, or work part-time or have no jobs at all…
\n\nThe coming intensification of struggles both inside and outside the workplace will find no success in attempting to revitalize the moribund unions. Workers will need to participate in the same kinds of direct actions—occupations, blockades, sabotage—that have proven the highlights of the Occupy movement in the Bay Area. When tens of thousands of people marched to the port of Oakland on November 2nd in order to shut it down, by and large they did not do it to defend the jurisdiction of the ILWU, or to take a stand against union-busting (most people were, it appears, ignorant of these contexts). They did it because they hate the present-day economy, because they hate capitalism, and because the ports are one of the most obvious linkages in the web of misery in which we are all caught.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/1.jpg\")
The port blockade in Oakland: sunset on November 2, 2011.
\nTo repeat the words of the ILWU officer: “Labor can no longer win victories against the employers without the community. It must include a broad-based movement.” Even if you wish to focus on labor organizing alone, the only way to give it teeth is to organize with people outside of specific workplaces, without relying on union bureaucracy. Those who attempt to reenact a sanitized version of the strikes of 1946 without understanding what made the general strike of 2011 effective will not get far.
\n\nWhat would a modern-day general strike look like? It would involve a broad range of precarious workers, unemployed people, and other rebels taking disruptive action to shut down the economy from outside. However the strike might begin, it would have to proliferate horizontally, spreading beyond any single demographic as a contagious rebellion exceeding the control of any organization. It would entail targeting the choke points of the economy—physical locations like ports, highways, and distribution centers as well as online venues and other forms of infrastructure, not to mention the workplaces, schools, neighborhoods, and prisons in which most of us spend most of our lives. It would necessitate defying politicians, union representatives, community leaders, and everyone who defends their legitimacy. It would be controversial. To persist, it would require seizing and redistributing resources. Many of these actions would take place within workplaces, but to center the agency of official unions or other organizations that have legal standing under capitalism would be to ensure defeat in advance.
\n\n\n\n\nAs capitalism renders more and more people precarious or redundant, it will be harder and harder to fight from recognized positions of legitimacy within the system such as “workers” or “students.” Last year’s students fighting tuition hikes are this year’s dropouts; last year’s workers fighting job cuts are this year’s unemployed. We have to legitimize fighting from outside, establishing a new narrative of struggle.
\n\n-Nightmares of Capitalism, Pipe Dreams of Democracy: The World Struggles to Wake, 2010-2011
\n
\n\n\nWho is more entitled to occupy a school than those who can’t afford to attend it? Who is more entitled to sabotage the economy than those for whom there are no jobs?
\n\n \n
But the general strike of 2011 also hit a wall. There hasn’t been another since. How could we get past that impasse? To answer that question, we have to look at what happened after the general strike of 2011.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/4.jpg\")
A demonstrator paints “Strike” on the façade of the Whole Foods in downtown Oakland on November 2, 2011.
\nThe assembly; the occupation; the blockade; the riot. Confronting the declining leverage of unions and labor organizing in a changing economy, Occupy Oakland experimented with all four of these, in turn.
\n\nIn 2012, at the conclusion of the Occupy movement, if you had chosen participants at random and asked them which of those four models would be most widely adopted a decade later, they probably would have guessed that assemblies would become the most widespread, whereas rioting would remain the most marginal and extreme.
\n\nWhat actually happened is surprising.
\n\nOverseas, in Spain, where the immediate predecessor of the Occupy movement had appeared in the plazas of Madrid and Barcelona, people confronted the same questions in 2012 and arrived at some of the same answers. In Barcelona, during the nationwide general strike of March 29, 2012, many of the participants set out to shut down the economy from outside, using an array of tactics including roving pickets, blockading, and rioting fiercer than anything seen in the Bay Area in 2011. Striking students in Québec arrived at more or less the same strategy that same spring—crucially, with the assistance of non-student supporters. We can trace the circulation of these tactics around the world over the following years—from Turkey to Brazil, from France to Hong Kong, from Ecuador to Chile and Colombia. All of these upheavals offer useful reference points about how to disrupt the economy from outside the workplace.
\n\nIn the United States, the breakaway march in Oakland on March 4, 2010 and the port blockades during the general strike of 2011 foreshadowed the highway blockades that spread around the country in 2014, inspired by the revolt in Ferguson. This movement improved on Occupy in many ways, centering the agency of those most impacted by white supremacy and police violence. Later, at the opening of the Trump era, thousands of people blockaded airports, fulfilling a proposal that had seemed outlandish in 2012.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/15.jpg\")
“It’s a man’s world: let’s fuck it up.” A banner at the blockade of the port in Oakland on November 2, 2011.
\nAs the intensity of these confrontations picked up, however, horizontal, open assemblies largely fell by the wayside. People overcorrected for the most maddening aspects of the Occupy assemblies (the centrality of white and male voices, the tendency for proposals to bog down in consensus process, the lack of meaningful affinity) by shifting to entirely decentralized and informal frameworks or else by adopting a cadre organizing model tying legitimacy to identity. Anarchists withdrew to affinity groups and collectives, other activists to organizations and parties. The social body that had gathered at the occupations fractured into invite-only Signal threads, socialist groupuscules, and the Bernie Sanders campaign.
\n\nAfterwards, while social movements picked up steam around the world, efforts to connect workplace organizing with confrontational street activity did not gain much momentum.2 The tactics that some activists in Oakland had experimented with in order to update the labor movement for the 21st century became associated almost exclusively with efforts to grapple with the capitalist landscape outside the workplace: fighting fascists, opposing deportations, imposing consequences for police murders.
\n\nThis culminated in the generalized uprising that broke out in May 2020 in response to the murder of George Floyd, facilitated by the fact that the first wave of COVID-19 had already imposed an almost total work stoppage on society. (Talk about a general strike introduced from outside the workplace!) The confrontational tactics that were essential to catalyzing this uprising were precisely the same tactics that had been most controversial during Occupy.
\n\nIn the wake of a high point of activity like the George Floyd uprising, activists often become disoriented and dispirited. Because the bar for what counts as a victory has been raised so high, projects or goals that felt worthwhile before the uprising can seem meaningless. Looking for a new way forward, some people who participated in defeating police departments and shutting down cities in 2020 have turned their attention to labor organizing without thinking about how the experiences of summer 2020 might inform it—and without any inkling that the tactics they employed that summer were descended, in part, from an effort to reimagine labor resistance for the 21st century.
\n\nIf blockading, rioting, black bloc tactics, the establishment of “cop-free zones,” and other tactics from 2011 have spread far and wide while labor organizing models have remained at an impasse, this should inform our strategizing. Of course, just because a particular tactic thrives in our current context does not mean that it will suffice to solve the problems we face. After the 2020 revolt, it’s a good idea to seek an even broader basis for collective struggle—and in theory, labor organizing could offer this.
\n\nSo what is missing from the toolset that reaches us, indirectly and incompletely, from the experiments of Occupy Oakland?
\n\nA decade ago, many anarchists considered it their top priority to escalate social conflict. In retrospect, those who fantasized about “social rupture” in 2009 were like the Futurists of 1909 who published a manifesto demanding more aggression, speed, and war immediately before the outbreak of World War I. Today, we have conflicts and ruptures aplenty; increasing atomization and polarization are the only things we can count on. What is not guaranteed is that we will be able to build long-term connections on a large enough scale to collectively produce a shared vision of how to improve our lives.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/18.jpg\")
Demonstrators at the port blockade in Oakland on November 2, 2011.
\nDespite the role that their leadership played in suppressing the general strike, the unions of the 1940s also offered an indispensable venue for rank-and-file workers to connect with each other in order to build a culture of solidarity. Without those unions, the general strike of 1946 would never have occurred in the first place. Likewise, in place of the unions of the 1940s, Occupy Oakland had the encampment and the assembly: these served as spaces of encounter, enabling a broad range of people from many different walks of life to rapidly build new social ties and shared visions. The “Oakland Commune” emerged in this space, a semi-mythological collectivity representing the dream of sharing and fighting together. In reality, the Occupy Oakland encampment was often a very challenging environment, to say the least; afterwards, some participants suggested that, like the unions of 1946, it was both essential to the movement and ultimately implicated in its demise. But this is an argument to improve on the model it offered, rather than trying to do without a space of broad connection.
\n\nAs our relations become ever more atomized, disposable, volatile, and fraught, mirroring the society we live in and the economy that drives it, the absence of spaces for meaningful ongoing connection is one of the greatest challenges facing us. If we are to apply the lessons of 2011 to today’s labor struggles—bringing together the employed, the precariously employed, and the unemployed in a common struggle that challenges capitalism as a whole, rather than seeking to defend the status of small segments of the working class—we will need new spaces of encounter in which to build collectivity.
\n\nWhat model could connect us today the way that the unions connected people in 1946 and the Occupy assemblies connected people in 2011?
\n\nFriends, we leave you with this question.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/11.jpg\")
“Revolt—for a life worth living.” A banner in downtown Oakland on the night of November 2, 2011.
\n\n\n\nForget about going back to the old days—there can be no more peace treaties between classes when even governments are scrambling to keep up with the accelerating effects of capitalism. Forget about fighting to preserve your economic role and privileges—the only hope is to legitimize common resistance from outside them, against them. Forget about strategies based on incremental victories, radicalizing our demands as people build up a taste for winning—today it’s easier to topple governments than to reform them. We have to popularize new ways of fighting that create social bodies outside all capitalist roles, that can one day put an end to capitalism itself.
\n\n \n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/10.jpg\")
\nA few points of departure to learn more about the two general strikes.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/6.jpg\")
\nFor the sake of brevity, in this analysis, we pass over over the nationwide “Day without an Immigrant” strike of May 1, 2006, one of few other contenders in the category of 21st-century general strike. It’s worth noting that the “Day without an Immigrant” strike was initiated by one of the most precarious demographics in the United States—and that the chief objective was not to negotiate their salaries or workplace conditions, but to press the government not to render them even more precarious. ↩
\nThe popularity of “anti-work” politics today is the logical consequence of seventy-five years of reversals in the labor movement. It represents a sober (if chiefly instinctive) assessment of the prospects for old-fashioned labor organizing. ↩
\nIn fall 2021, word spread about a revolt against work sweeping the United States. Yet what does it mean, practically speaking, to take action against work itself? Today, as some look to unionizing efforts with renewed hopes while others scramble to respond to the latest assaults on workers’ autonomy outside the workplace, that question remains unanswered.
\n\nTwo years of the COVID-19 pandemic have transformed the landscape of labor in the United States. Out of a workforce of 153 million, well over a quarter of workers quit their jobs in 2021, and the trend continued into 2022. Propelled by rage and desperation and amplified by a notorious Reddit page, anti-work sentiments achieved widespread exposure in late 2021, at the same time that economists were talking about a supposed “labor shortage.”
\n\nOne would think that these conditions would be favorable for labor organizing. Yet despite high expectations, a real strike wave has yet to emerge. The breakthrough vote to create the first Amazon union inspired optimism about the prospects for a renewed labor movement in the United States, but we are a long way from a return to the heyday of union organizing—and when labor unrest does emerge, it may take entirely different forms, as foreshadowed by “the great resignation.”
\n\nWhat does it mean to be “anti-work”? How should we understand today’s anti-work sentiments in their historical context? How is workplace resistance changing alongside work itself, and what strategies are likely to serve us in these new conditions?
\n\nYou can read a print version of this text in this book.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/05/10/4.jpg\")
\nIt’s one thing to hate your job—and having to work—and the system that compels everyone like you to have to work. It’s another thing to take your labor out of that system and put it towards creating a world in which no one ever has to work again.
\n\nWhen we say work, we mean all activity that is dictated by the imperative to turn a profit, whether for oneself or someone else. It’s important to define work this way, because we’re not just talking about wage labor—we’re also talking about slave labor, prison labor, unpaid housework, internships, and a wide range of forms of self-employment and self-marketing that are just as alienating as working under a boss.1
\n\nIn this society, nearly all power is distributed according to the imperative to turn a profit. And since the essence of profit is the concentrating of wealth in fewer hands,2 it should be no surprise that the disparities in our society are intensifying so rapidly. Yes, the “standard of living” has arguably improved—if we set aside the impact on the biosphere and future generations—but there have never been such tremendous gulfs between the wealthy and the poor.
\n\nWhen we say anti-work, we don’t mean an abstract political position disapproving of work; we mean a practice that actively abolishes the necessity to work, the way that anti-matter annihilates matter. In other words, an activity aimed at doing away with all the mechanisms that serve to concentrate power—from debt to intellectual property rights and the prison-industrial complex. All the things that force us to keep putting our noses back to the grindstone when there are so many other things we’d prefer to be doing.
\n\n\n\n\nAnother century like this—another century of work—and our species will be done for, along with countless others. Work—which is to say, all activity that is determined by the necessity to make a profit for someone, rather than chosen on account of its intrinsic value—is precisely what prevents us from fulfilling our needs.
\n\n \n
\nhttps://twitter.com/AbigailSusik/status/1479861358271229955\n\n\n
The social order that forces you to sell your time and labor to the highest bidder is squandering your potential, just as sure as it is grinding cows into hamburger and reducing rainforests to junk mail. You are justified not wanting to waste the irreplaceable moments of your life toiling to enrich bosses and investors.
\n\nOn the scale of the planet, the name for the problem is capitalism; from the vantage point of the individual, the name for it is work. Your personal struggle to resist work is a microcosm of our species’ struggle to escape the global feedback loop that is propelling us into oppression, war, and ecological catastrophe.
\n\nYet across practically the entire political spectrum, people celebrate work for its own sake, taking for granted that “productivity” is inherently good quite apart from the questions of what drives it, who controls it, and what it leads to. There’s always going to be somebody who wants to yoke your productivity to their agenda.
\n\nIf all this wasn’t obvious already, the pandemic made it crystal clear that function of the market is to force people to sacrifice their lives for others’ benefit. Usually, this takes place piecemeal, across decades, though workplace hazards sometimes speed the process; in the COVID-19 era, millions of people have lost their lives wholesale, forced to keep working until they contracted the virus and died.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/05/10/6.jpg\")
\nSome attribute the subsequent rash of quittings to the pittance that Trump and then Biden conceded to laborers during the pandemic, but that hardly explains it: countless potential workers passed up a great deal more money in the workplace than they ever received from the government. Rather, it appears that the pandemic compelled millions to ask themselves whether they really wish to sacrifice their lives for the benefit of the economy—and many concluded that it was not worth it, neither wholesale nor piecemeal.
\n\nQuitting your job can be a form of labor resistance, just like going on strike. As a point of departure for social change, the hatred of work is at least as promising as the desire for higher wages. Rather than simply negotiating better terms on which to sacrifice our time and our potential on the altar of economic imperatives—or simply going from one job to the next, seeking temporary solutions to structural problems—we need to take our lives back altogether.
\n\n\n\n\nOur resistances to discipline, to seduction, to extraction, and to work take diverse forms, from stopping work to working for free. [These] resistances are directed against governments, against management, against planners, against media, against wars, against authority, against surveillance, against representatives, and against dominant values.
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![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/05/10/8.jpg\")
\n\n\n\n“He that works for another, either for Wages, or to pay him Rent, works unrighteously, and still lifts up the Curse; but they that are resolved to work and eat together, making the Earth a Common Treasury… lift up the Creation from Bondage, and restore all things from the Curse.”
\n\n-Gerard Winstanley, in The True Levellers Standard Advanced, 1649
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Opposition to work is not new. Ever since the ruling class began forcibly separating people from the land base we all rely on for survival, people have resisted work and the institutions that impose it. When you picture the average adherent of anti-work politics, it’s easy to visualize a dropout from the 1970s, a punk rocker from the 1980s, a dissatisfied office worker from the 1990s, or perhaps a contemporary remote worker struggling to participate in a Zoom meeting while her toddler lays waste to the living room.
\n\nThese stereotypes are much too narrow. Anti-work is for everyone—it always has been.
\n\nFrom the very beginning, opposition to work emerged alongside work itself. In The Right To Be Lazy, Paul Lafargue cites Herodotus to trace opposition to work all the way back to ancient Egypt, Thrace, and Persia. Later, between the 14th and 17th centuries, the Free Spirits, the Ranters, the Diggers,3 and a wide of range of other movements resisted the enclosure of the commons and the imposition of work.
\n\n\n\n\nThe “liberation of labor-power”—that is, the expropriation of the peasantry from the common lands—was not sufficient to force the dispossessed proletarians to accept wage-labor… the expropriated peasants and artisans did not peacefully agree to work for a wage. More often they became beggars, vagabonds, or criminals. A long process would be required to produce a disciplined work force. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the hatred for wage labor was so intense that many proletarians preferred the gallows rather than submit to the new conditions of work.”
\n\n-Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch
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As fierce as they were, the Luddites who became famous for smashing industrial machinery at the beginning of the 19th century were just a late-breaking echo of even more powerful movements that rejected work itself.
\n\nAt the same time that people in Europe were resisting the transition to the modern work-based economy, fierce struggles against enslavement, displacement, and other forms of colonial violence were taking place across the so-called New World. We should understand revolts against slavery and Indigenous struggles against the imposition of settler society as struggles against work, as well—and these took place on a much greater scale than the resistance within Europe.
\n\nNor did these struggles end with the abolition of slavery and the conclusion of the initial phase of colonization:
\n\n\n\n\n“Experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other.”
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At the high point of the 19th-century labor movements, workers sought to regain control of their labor power itself and to transform the society that limited their options regarding what they could do with it. In the 20th century, these movements were channeled into negotiating the price at which laborers would sell their lives and the conditions in which they would do so. At the same time that bureaucrats were taking over the unions and reorienting them towards stabilizing the capitalist economy rather than destroying it, ordinary workers began to accept higher wages and more access to consumer goods in return for giving up self-determination in the workplace. In the United States, this was associated with Fordism, named for Henry Ford—though the same thing happened in the Soviet Union and later in the Eastern Bloc and China, with the state participating more directly in brokering the deal.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/05/10/3.jpg\")
\nWhile labor movements were slowly pacified, capitalist globalization enabled corporations to outflank them via overseas outsourcing.
\n\nThat’s how we got where we are today. Capitalists have already extracted the vast majority of the profit that can be squeezed out of the vanishing middle class. Having already colonized the future via credit and debt, profiteers have shifted to speculation—witness the craze for cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Technological advances have made laborers less and less essential to industrial production, flooding the service sector and creating a precarious population that is increasingly treated as expendable.
\n\nToday’s economy offers laborers more “autonomy,” but only in the sense that workers have to constantly do their own footwork to reestablish the terms on which they sell themselves to capitalists as the economy changes more and more rapidly. Practically nobody who takes a job today—with the sole exception of the Supreme Court justices—expects to hold that job for the rest of his or her life.
\n\nIt is becoming difficult to rake in profits from an immiserated population that already has difficulty paying its debts. The end point of this process will be war—a world in which desperate populations are held in line by repression and states compete to acquire resources via brute force rather than economic competition. In Syria and Ukraine, we can catch an ominous glimpse of the future.
\n\nIn these conditions, it’s naïve to seek to return to the times when unions would stabilize the capitalist economy by negotiating wages high enough for laborers to afford to purchase back some of the products of their labor. Stability is off the table—both for individual households and for the global order as a whole. We should understand the mass quittings of 2020-2022 as an outgrowth of the same unrest and anger that produced the George Floyd Rebellion.
\n\nJust as it was necessary to force people into the working class at the beginning of the era of modern capitalism—and many chose to be layabouts, criminals, or revolutionaries instead—we are arriving at the end of that era, when it is clear that it can only end in disaster, and once again, opposition to work itself is back on the agenda.
\n\n\n\n\nThe most visible aspect of this social struggle has been generalized labor refusal, what economists are calling The Great Resignation, which has seen over 30 million Americans quit their jobs in 2021 alone. But The Great Refusal can also be seen in a huge increase in more traditional labor action and organizing; in instances of mass looting divorced from more obvious movement and riot contexts; in the breakdown of school grading and testing regimes; in a broad expansion of mutual aid; in an even broader recognition of the psychic violence and alienation of everyday life intensified and made painfully visible by the pandemic, and a concomitant acceptance of mental health care, laziness, and pleasure seeking; in a general open hatred of work.
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![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/05/10/5.jpg\")
“In our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.” “A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
\nWe will not understand the scope and scale of contemporary anti-work struggles unless we factor in prison strikes, workplace theft, looting and other refusals of capitalist models of consumption, and a wide range of other forms of resistance taking place all over the world. As the old labor movements plateau or recede, we need to sensitize ourselves to the current strategies via which workers are asserting themselves in order to ensure that we are not looking for outmoded forms of struggle while missing the resistance taking place under our noses.
\n\nSome proponents of old-fashioned industrial union labor tactics have shifted their attention to India, Bangladesh, and China in recent years—arguing that the old union model will still serve to organize the industrial proletariat, provided we look for it on other continents. Yet in a globalized economy structured according to neoliberal principles and white supremacist logic, the working classes of the Global South will not be able to reprise the history of the European working class simply by forming unions, winning rights, and negotiating wages. The mechanisms via which unionized workers joined the middle class in Europe and the United States no longer exist; they were the consequence of an informal peace treaty capitalists struck with the white working class in the process of channeling labor struggles into reformism, all of which was financed with wealth extracted from the Global South in the first place.
\n\nThe majority of Indian workers remain informally or precariously employed. Factories have been moved to places like Bangladesh only because capitalists can treat those workers as disposable—to the extent of letting thousands die in factory collapses. In China, a self-described communist government has focused on repressing exploited laborers while creating the conditions for billionaires to amass fortunes in much the same way they do in the United States.
\n\nIt is a mistake to imagine that labor movements in more recently industrialized nations simply lag behind those in Europe and the United States in some sort of inexorable historical process. For the most part, these movements are much more powerful than the labor movement in the United States, but they face dramatically more difficult challenges. If anything, as labor becomes more precarious worldwide, workers in the United States should be learning from the struggles and strategies of their peers in the already precarious Global South. The status of workers in India is not “developing” towards the standards enjoyed by workers in the United States and Europe; the conditions of workers in the United States are slowly deteriorating towards the conditions that laborers currently face in India.
\n\nIn this context, any anti-work movement stands to gain from adopting a more global perspective. In fact, there are longstanding anti-work currents to draw from overseas. Published in India in 1997, the anti-work manifesto A Ballad Against Work offers a sophisticated analysis of resistance, drawing on reference points in a variety of industries; one can also find more contemporary examples of spirited anti-work resistance in India as well. In Russia, antijob.net has been doing what the anti-work reddit page does for fully two decades with considerable success. In China, disillusioned young people have famously embraced a movement roughly translated as “lying flat” in defiance of the pressures of the economy.
\n\nIf we really want to abolish work—not just to cash in our individual privileges to avoid working until we can hold out no longer—we have to make common cause with everyone else around the world who hates working. As war rages in Ukraine and another Cold War looms with China, our mutual hatred of exploitation offers all workers a point of departure towards global solidarity against those who would divide and rule us. It might indeed be our only hope.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/05/10/7.jpg\")
\nWhat would it take for the anti-work movement to become a threat to workforce participation, rather than a pressure valve for blowing off steam? To build an on-the-ground analysis, we solicited input from workers around the United States.
\n\n\n\n\n“About 5 million Americans have exited the labor force since the pandemic began. Goldman Sachs estimates that about 3.4 million are likely gone for good.”
\n\n-“‘Antiwork’ movement may be long-run risk to labor force participation: Goldman Sachs”
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First, we spoke with food service employees in several mid-sized cities in the Rust Belt.
\n\nThe restaurant I worked at until recently has had a hard time staffing because there are less workers available. A lot of people left the service industry during the pandemic because it made working conditions worse and more dangerous. Also, it’s often women doing that work, and a lot of women had to stop working during the pandemic to take care of their families—both because school and childcare have become unreliable and because the pandemic has isolated, debilitated, and disproportionately killed the elderly.
\n\nAt least where I live, the drug epidemic has had a tremendous impact. In certain industries, if you need a worker who is not addicted to opioids or alcohol, the pool shrinks. So you could say that another factor in the “labor shortage” is that, as a consequence of impoverishment and despair, part of the working class is becoming unemployable.
\n\nRebelliousness also plays a role here. Once a person has been unemployed for an extended period of time, it can be very difficult to tolerate the level of disrespect that employers casually show for employees. Our society doesn’t have a system to reintegrate feral adults back into the workplace. I think that rightful anger at being treated disrespectfully, combined with “help wanted” signs everywhere, accounts for a lot of the casual rage-quitting this past year.
\n\nPreviously, if you rage-quit a job, when you applied for your next job, you’d have to explain that gap. I remember once, when I was re-entering the job market after a period of militant unemployment, an employer looked at my résumé and told me, “When I see a gap like this, I assume jail or rehab.” By contrast, if you quit a job right now, you can tell your next potential employer that you’re just re-entering the job market after the lockdown. Things like that are invisible to macro-economists, but they make a big difference to workers on the ground.
\n\nA lot of my favorite restaurants and the comic shop by my house have cut back their hours for lack of staff. The Targets and Sheetz stores here are paying a few dollars more per hour than before and most stores have hiring signs in the windows. But I don’t see a labor shortage so much as a cheap labor shortage. There’s an ice cream shop in town that promised full-time hours at $15 an hour and they received hundreds of applications.
\n\nOne cause of this may be that Amazon expanded in 2020, hiring a lot of warehouse workers at $15 an hour. That’s a rock-bottom wage for warehouse labor that breaks your body, but it’s a substantial pay bump for people who were previously working customer service. Warehouse work is supposed to pay at least $25 an hour—but if you’re choosing between $8 an hour at McDonald’s and twice that at Amazon, it’s an easy choice—at first. The burnout rate at Amazon is notoriously high.
\n\nLooking at the Amazon model, we could ascribe part of the “labor shortage” of 2021-2022 to a disruption in the economy and in worker expectations as capitalists experiment with ways to intensify the extraction of profit per labor hour, rather than just paying the lowest wage possible. Henry Ford did something similar a century ago. In order to convince workers to do soul-destroying assembly line labor instead of skilled craftwork, he was forced to pay them more; as a result, he streamlined the mass production process—and generated a new market for his commodities.
\n\nIf Ford rationalized the production process—making it more efficient by escalating demands on workers and rendering previously essential personnel obsolete—then today, we are seeing the same thing in the distribution process. Capitalists have shifted to “just in time” production, and now something similar is taking place on the consumer end of the economy: Netflix rather than movie theaters, delivery drivers rather than malls. The introduction of self-driving cars and the like could accelerate this process dramatically.
\n\nIf employers like Amazon offer increased wages, but these jobs come with increased workplace turnover, the net result will not benefit the working class. Instead of the job security that the Fordist era offered our grandparents, we will end up working only when it is most profitable for prospective employers, and many of us will go jobless the rest of the time. In this context, not identifying with one’s job—and quitting whenever one gets fed up with it—will be merely redundant, already factored into the equation as a way of keeping the workplace efficient. An anti-work movement worthy of the name will have to go beyond quitting to seize back from the ruling class the resources we need to build stable, secure lives.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/05/10/1.jpg\")
\nSome 60,000 workers in the entertainment industry were set to strike on October 18, 2021. They would have been the most numerous group to participate in what some optimistically called “Striketober.” At the last minute, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) reached a tentative agreement with Hollywood producers, averting the strike. What happened instead tells us a lot about labor struggles in our era.
\n\nIn October 2021, I was working on a big-budget TV production when buzz spread about a potential nationwide strike by IATSE, the stagehands’ union. With news outlets reporting on the labor shortage, workers across the country were in a better bargaining position than they had been in years. Yet the strike never happened.
\n\nI’ve heard similar stories from other industries. Why haven’t workers been able to capitalize on this situation? Take this for what it is—an anecdote, not an in-depth investigation.
\n\nFilm is a notoriously chaotic and demanding industry. Labor conditions that documented workers rarely tolerate in the US are standard, including shifts of 14, 16, or even 20 hours; six-hour turnarounds between call times; no breaks during workdays; work weeks of 80 hours or more; and months without a single day off. People sometimes die of exhaustion on set or from bad safety practices exacerbated by insufficient rest—or are accidentally shot by A-list celebrities who have no business handling firearms.
\n\nWorkers put up with these conditions because it’s fairly well-paid union labor. It’s hard to say no to a seventh day at work when it’s paid at double time, especially if turning it down means losing your spot in the production. If you can make it into the union, film work is a rare opportunity to grind your way into six figures without a college degree.
\n\nIATSE—the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees—represents over 150,000 workers in the US and Canada. Working conditions vary widely from one production to the next. When streaming services like Netflix got off the ground in the late 2000s, the higher wages and more reasonable hours associated with traditional film production didn’t transfer to the “new media.” Producers argued that they were wagering on a new format and weren’t sure how profitable it would be, so they had to restrict budgets—starting with workers, of course. More than a decade later, the “new media” has proven extremely profitable, but the discrepancy in compensation and conditions remains.
\n\nWith production booming and more jobs available than workers, fall 2021 was the perfect time for IATSE to push for a better agreement with streaming services. This almost led to a historic strike involving 60,000 film workers. Many radicals outside IATSE were excited about the potential that this might set off a wave of strikes and other actions.
\n\nYet—as has occurred over and over—producers and union bureaucrats dodged the strike, arriving at an eleventh-hour deal. Unsurprisingly, many rank-and-file IATSE members were not pleased with this deal. It did very little to improve conditions.
\n\nMy fellow employees’ attitudes about this varied. A strike would have meant lost work and lost wages; no one wanted that. But many long-term IATSE workers were fed up with years of dealing with the same conditions. They would have been happy to stick it to the producers’ association. I didn’t see much sympathy for the union leadership among my colleagues.
\n\nWhat if a strike had happened? When production ceased, the production companies would try to bring in scab labor—easy in Los Angeles and other film hubs like Atlanta, but more difficult elsewhere. The production I was working on was outside of any major film hubs. These trades are specialized, and it’s not always easy for producers to find qualified set carpenters, decorators, makeup artists, and camera people who aren’t in the union or who would cross a picket line. They would try to piece together a motley crew and continue working.
\n\nAs it turned out, even though the strike was called off, the production began to face a labor shortage. A new wave of COVID-19 sent multiple people home to quarantine every day. Other employees got sick of working all day every day and no-showed. Still others, non-union hires being paid at union rates, didn’t have the necessary skills and were fired or left after a few days. The hourly rates weren’t high enough to bring people out from Los Angeles, or even to attract many skilled local workers. Remember, all this was taking place in a context in which there was a labor shortage all around the United States.
\n\nSo what happened was less drastic than a strike, but it was similar in that some amount of skilled union labor was replaced by less skilled, non-union labor. I’m not saying that the non-union workers were scabs—rather, my point is that the whole situation illustrates the neoliberalization of the workplace, the individualization of labor and also of contemporary workplace struggle, in ways that are not necessarily promising. A strike, authorized or not, would have been an opportunity for us to do something collectively, to develop our relationships in a struggle. Instead, people dropped out one by one because they could coast for a while or find better paying work elsewhere. While these actions in aggregate do have an effect on supply and demand in the labor market, putting employers in a tighter spot and giving workers more leverage in negotiation, they don’t do much to oppose capitalism as a whole or to foster autonomous resilience.
\n\nIn short, we continue to confront the economy more and more individually, even in a unionized workplace. I don’t mean to glorify mainstream business unions like IATSE: the union bureaucracy was the chief obstacle to a strike happening, and that’s probably true across most of the industries that are still unionized. Anything we do together will have to emerge from the grassroots in defiance of the leadership. It will require a new model.
\n\nThe new visibility of anti-work sentiment offers a point of departure, but it’s not a solution all by itself. Always dynamic, capitalism has been changing especially rapidly since the pandemic. It’s easy to imagine today’s anti-work sentiment reappearing as tomorrow’s market innovations—more remote labor, additional modes of exploitation (for example, producing online content, or monetizing people’s desperate need for connection), new ways to glamorize the thinly-veiled precarity of gig work, freelancing, and the like. We need to figure out how to reinvent the strike, too, or some other form of collective resistance.
\n\nIn December 2021, the strike by the 3000-member graduate student worker union at Columbia University was reportedly the largest strike action in the entire United States.4 This hints at the extent to which old-fashioned mass union militancy has receded since its heyday in the 20th century. We explored the full history of this strike and its implications in “Columbia’s Graduate Worker Union Struggle, 2004-2022.”
\n\nIn some ways, graduate students are emblematic of the new shape of the workforce. Graduate student worker organizing occupies what a grad student might call the liminal space between school and the workplace: graduate students are workers, but they have yet to join the workforce proper. They are not the only workers whose jobs are fundamentally temporary and transient; today, there are entire industries that will no longer exist by the time the next crop of graduate students receive their diplomas. Universities justify the low wages they pay grad students on account of their supposed future employment prospects—which in fact will only be available to a small number of graduates in an increasingly competitive market rapidly being reshaped by austerity measures. In this regard, the pyramid scheme of higher education is a microcosm of the pyramid scheme of capitalism itself.
\n\nAt the same time, seeking to defend the security of a particular demographic of student workers without concern for other workers or students is itself a doomed venture. Graduate students are not essential to the industrial economy in any strictly material sense. Any leverage they might exert will derive from the pressure that they are able to apply on the economy in concert with others who are impacted at least as badly as they are by austerity and precaritization. In a time when the global economy is structured to make workers in practically any industry replaceable, building solidarity across demographics and contexts is a strategic as well as ethical necessity.
\n\nOne of the funniest recurring chants that marks the pickets and demonstrations is “WE HAVE TEETH!” This alludes to our demand for dental insurance, and has the advantages of being funny, universal, and intimately relatable. There’s an undercurrent of irony, though, in the way it plays on its metaphorical meaning. For something to “have teeth” means it has force behind it. To say we have teeth is to convey that we are making a threat that we can follow through on, that we’re not fucking around.
\n\nOne of the ways to deal with anxiety is through laughter. The humor in this chant is twinged with anxiety—we have teeth, sure, but does our struggle? Does our strike have the force behind it to force the university to meet our demands? And even if we do win, does our collective power as students, workers, future academics, etc. have enough “teeth” in it to matter as neoliberal forces drain the universities of resources and austerity advances on multiple fronts?
\n\nMyself, I’ve never had dental insurance in my adult life. Ever waited in line at the monthly poor people dental clinic for hours, only to be told at the end that your number didn’t come up? Yeah, I have—more than once. So the idea that I could get a PhD and go to the dentist too sounds pretty appealing. But is this a prelude to a more secure dental life? Or the last gasp of a movement that is unlikely to secure us a ticket back into a dentist’s chair after graduation?
\n\nI think the answer depends on where we see our power and whether we strategize accordingly. Can we shift our focus from seeing our (precarious, replaceable) labor itself as the source of our strength, in order to concentrate on building a collective capacity to disrupt the everyday functioning of capital in the university and beyond? A single day of physically disrupting students, workers, and deliveries seems to have made more impact than five weeks of striking, judging by the university’s communications and also by the announcement, during the following day’s bargaining, of the biggest economic concessions that Columbia has ever made.
\n\nThere’s a lot that we can learn from this. In this brave new world, our labor may not be the source of our power. But the relationships we make in the course of standing up for ourselves—across the lines of position, workplace, and identity—could be the basis for a strike power that exploits the vulnerabilities of infrastructure by targeting bottlenecks in the flow of people and economies. Our enemies are more concerned with preventing us from building collective power than they are with any particular economic concessions. They know that it’s worth a short-term investment to preserve their rule in the long term. They’ve done it before, buying off whole generations just long enough to regain control.
\n\nAs the climate collapses, mass surveillance encroaches, economic disparities intensify, and fascism rears its head, time isn’t on our side. We can’t just shut down our workplaces; we have to shut down the whole economy. That’s what it’ll take to strike with teeth. And our teeth—not to mention our lives—depend on it.
\n\nAt the opening of 2022, the Student Workers of Columbia reached a tentative agreement with the administration of Columbia University, voting to end one of the longest strikes in the history of graduate worker organizing. After over nine weeks on the picket line, strikers forced the administration to concede to many of their major demands. Yet the strikers were only able to achieve this limited victory because they had already taken on and defeated the union bureaucracy that sought to stop them from confronting the administration. Their victory shows that workers who seek to assert their interests in the workplace have to start by fighting for self-determination and grassroots power within workplace organizing itself.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/05/10/2.jpg\")
\nThe waning power of unions over the past half century is not simply the result of a failure of will. There are structural reasons why union organizing has produced diminishing returns. When we set out to stand up for ourselves, it’s always tempting to try to replicate the models we are familiar with from previous generations—even though it was the failures of those models that put us where we are today. New conditions demand new strategies.
\n\nSuch strategies could take many forms. For example, using the internet, we could build networked movements extending far outside the workplace to defend workers in particular industries through pressure campaigns, boycotts, sabotage, and other tactics that anyone can participate in, employed or not.
\n\nFor people outside particular sectors of the economy to have a stake in such struggles, however, these movements will have to address the needs of the unemployed and precariously employed, as well, not just preserve the status of workers who are still fortunate enough to retain relatively stable employment. The power of the George Floyd uprising and similar movements outside the workplace offer a point of departure. Drawing on the high point of the Occupy movement in 2011, we can imagine that the most powerful labor movements of the future will be anti-work uprisings that take place outside of particular workplaces, in a common space that all can share. In this follow-up to this article, we explore what the general strike could look like in the twenty-first century and how our movements could become capable of catalyzing such strikes.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/05/10/10.jpg\")
Stickers anarchists made in solidarity with the Kellogg’s strike in late 2021.
\nIt has been a joy to debate this subject, compose this essay, and work together to publish it—precisely because it is not work. Everything that our collective has accomplished together over the past three decades—and it is a lot—has proceeded from our decision to refuse, wherever possible, to sell our time, energy, and creativity on the market. One of the chief deciding factors in what scale of social change we will see in our lifetimes will be determined by whether people like you invest your time, creativity, and resources in changing the world rather than in merely attempting to improve your personal situation on an individual basis.
\n\nLet’s find each other and see what we can do together outside the logic of the capitalist economy. This is the starting point of anti-work.
\n\nThe fact that self-employed workers tend to experience a greater degree of autonomy within the confines of the economy may induce them to identify with their work, but it doesn’t make that work less alienating—it just gives them a stake in their own alienation. They still can’t use their time and resources for any purpose other than to pursue a profit without the economy rerouting resources away from them. ↩
\nTo turn a profit means to come out of an economic exchange having gained proportionately more power over the aggregate resources of society as a whole. By definition, one can only profit at others’ expense. Two parties may both benefit from an economic exchange, but if they both profit as well, someone somewhere else has become poorer in relation to them. ↩
\nIt shows the continuity of these movements and their ambitions from one century to the next that the San Francisco Diggers could take up the original Diggers’ standard over 300 years later without departing significantly from the economic principles of their namesakes. ↩
\nIn fact, considerably less than all 3000 members were participating in the strike at any one time. ↩
\nSince 2001, the collectively-run website Antijob.net has provided a “blacklist of employers,” offering a space for laborers in Russia to report on their negative experiences at work. As Russian media and labor organizing have come under increasing pressure, Antijob continues to provide a crucial resource for ordinary employees, even in an extremely repressive environment. Russian corporations and government agencies have repeatedly attempted to bribe the publishers or suppress the site, without success. The so-called “Great Resignation” and a popular Antiwork Reddit site have recently made waves in the United States; we conducted the following interview with Antijob to learn what anti-work agitation looks like in Russia.
\n\nAntijob has also played a role in supporting protests against the invasion of Ukraine, informing Russian workers of their legal rights on the job if they arrested while protesting.
\n\nAs appendixes, we’ve included the Antijob manifesto, the Antijob statement against the invasion of Ukraine, and some examples of the reports workers publish on the site.
\n\n\n\n\n“Remember and tell others: your interests are opposed to the interests of the employer. This is a struggle that has been going on for centuries. The struggle between those who are trying to make a living and those who want to buy a new yacht.”
\n\n-Antijob, “No loyalty to the employer!”
\n
\n\n\nEmployers always write about Antijob. They say this and that—they slander, they claim that they were slandered, they talk about the intrigues of their competitors. Come on, they say, remove the story about the next LLC “Lepyoshki and Matryoshki,” otherwise we will sue you. Or, on the contrary, they offer money for us to remove the material…
\n\nTo be honest, we don’t really want to make employers better. Conflict between employers and workers, whether acute or dormant, is an integral part of capitalism. It will be fully overcome only with the rejection of the wage labor system as such.
\n\n-Antijob, “The presumption of class guilt”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/2.jpg\")
“No loyalty to the employer!”
\nFirst, explain what Antijob.net is and what it does.
\n\nTechnically, we are a feedback web page where workers can leave negative feedback about their jobs. Also, we are a micro-media platform about work and labor.
\n\nPolitically, we are an anarchist project highlighting the problem of wage labor, calling for workers to organize to fight for better working conditions and, of course, against capital and the state.
\n\nWhat inspires you to maintain Antijob?
\n\nProbably the main reason for the continuation of the project and its constant regeneration (as most of the original team has changed) is the tangible result that we can feel from it. We know how many users use our server and we know that it helps put pressure on employers at a relatively low cost of effort from us. We give employees a pressure tool and they use it effectively. As far as we’re concerned, it’s a success.
\n\nTell us a bit about how the project has changed over time.
\n\nAntijob emerged in the early 2000s as a response to the emergence of job aggregators that targeted young people, who made up a large portion of Internet users at that time. These services romanticized the “careers” they promised, and then their users learned the hard way that these careers consisted of working temporary jobs for miserable wages, followed by being firing and cheated. That was the target of our criticism; the method was formed by direct statements from employees. Over time, the Internet expanded, but the problems remained the same. The audience of job search sites increased—and so did ours.
\n\nThe original version of the web page and message was more aggressive; now we are somewhat less radical. But we have not descended into orthodox Marxism, which is usually typical of groups dealing with the subject of the labor movement in Russia.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/9.jpg\")
“Blacklist of employers—Antijob.net. Add yours.”
\nWhat impact has Antijob had among workers in Russia? How has the political environment changed since you got started?
\n\nYou could say that our web page has been a pioneer in the field of job reviews in Russia. Employers realized that opinions on the Internet could be a threat to their businesses, and the field of “reputation work” emerged, which has itself become a kind of business.
\n\nFor the authorities, we do not seem to be an obvious threat. There are lawsuits against us and the authorities even block the web site, but these problems were initiated by employers.
\n\nOf course, the situation has become worse as control over the Internet has increased. The political situation has gotten worse, too. The authorities and the police have started to write to us more often, and we are sure that sooner or later we will be blocked for good, the way it is in Belarus and Kazakhstan.
\n\nHow do you moderate submissions? Do you have a fact-checking process? How do you make decisions about what you publish?
\n\nAll the materials are moderated manually. We have several levels of validation; the highest level is given to those reviews in which proof of working for the company has been attached, such as correspondence or documents. Then there are reviews that are confirmed by the person leaving their email address; these are the majority.
\n\nWe filter out any positive reviews because they are not objective in principle. It is almost impossible to check the validity of a positive review.
\n\nWe also have an automatic review checker that alerts us to suspicious activity and allows us to identify people who are trying to misuse our web page.
\n\nWe don’t do detailed fact checking. It is technically impossible with 150+ reviews coming in every week. In any case, we are not trying to claim total objectivity. For us, there is an obvious disproportion of power in the relationship between the employee and the employer—so we trust the employee more, by default.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/5.jpg\")
“Labor against work.”
\nWe understand that there have been attempts to suppress Antijob.
\n\nThey often try to hack us, and from time to time, we experience brute force DDoS attacks on our web page. These attacks are organized by employers: they are either getting revenge for the reviews posted, or they are trying to remove the reviews or find out who the author is. We do not remove reviews for money, so an angry employer chooses between spending money on legal fees or hiring hackers.
\n\nThe second type of attack is from what we can call “competitors” in the field of commerce. They create copies of our site, buy similar domains, and try to hijack traffic in order to make money from skimming reviews. Recently, they began to act in a more sophisticated way and attack the behavioral factors of the site using bots, which reduce the average time of visits to the site and the rate of denials in order to reduce the visibility of our site in search engines.
\n\nA separate topic is the courts and RosComNadzor (the Russian digital control authority). Some companies go to court to claim that reviews about them are slanderous. If their effort in court is successful, then after a while we get a request from RosComNadzor to remove the information. If we do not remove it, we are blocked. This has happened several times.
\n\nNow we remove reviews at the request of the RCN, attaching an invoice and a link to the court decision, which often contains the text of the review. If we do not remove the feedback, we get blocked, the website traffic decreases by 70%, and search engine rankings drop, which accordingly makes the attack on the reputation of employers less effective. We are constantly looking for ways to circumvent this threat. Recently, we managed to change it so that the blocked reviews are hidden only for Russian IPs, while all others (including VPN/TOR users) can easily view them.
\n\nSometimes the police and other authorities write to us demanding that we provide the data of the authors. To these requests, we answer by sending the data of disposable emails and the IP of a TOR node. It is an incredible coincidence that everyone that the police are looking for is using TOR and utilizing a high level of digital security, isn’t it =). The police are not very eager to find out what’s up.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/3.jpg\")
“No salary—eat the bosses.”
\nCan you give advice to people who might try to start something similar elsewhere?
\n\nIt must be said that starting such projects from scratch can be difficult. The weapon of our web page is its high visibility in search engines and the fame it has accumulated. Those who want to start should be prepared to work for free, but at a higher level than commercial companies. The reputation market appeared long ago and there are a lot of people who want to make a profit in it and are ready to invest resources. For example, we have to contend with commercial feedback pages, competitors intercepting users by advertising, bot attacks on the web page, etc.
\n\nWe are inconvenient for our competitors and for employers because of our adherence to the principle of not removing reviews for money. However, if you have a team or a powerful movement, you need comrades who have technical knowledge in web development, who understand the basics of SEO [Search Engine Optimization] and security in the Internet, as companies are quite willing to pay hackers if you do not agree to withdraw feedback.
\n\nYou have to be prepared to regularly spend time on moderation and on communicating with users, as well as confrontations with the state and the courts. In the Western countries, problems with the law may be even heavier than in Russia and the CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States].
\n\nAt the first stage, what is most important is not super-functionality, but publicity. In terms of distribution, stickers helped us a lot. This is a trivial method, and it often did not work well in other projects, but our stickers usually hang for a very long time. Shitty work is a very understandable problem for people of any political conviction. While the anarchist movement in Russia has been active, we have accumulated enough users from big cities thanks to stickers.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/4.jpg\")
“Antijob.net—blacklist of employers.” These stickers have been essential to promoting the Antijob site as a resource.
\nHow do you see the connection between different forms of labor resistance such as labor unions, stealing from your workplace, public pressure campaigns, etc.? Which of these tactics are viable in Russia?
\n\nFor us, all methods are interconnected, and each has its pros and cons, as well as regional characteristics. Unions are a good organizational structure, but in Russia they can exist only in industries with large companies and are often overgrown with bureaucracy. Stealing is a good tactic for individual sabotage, but is not looked at well in the society and is unlikely to change the global problem of wage labor. Public pressure is effective on a big enough scale, but mobilizing people to fight thousands of small daily violations of rights involving hundreds of companies is impossible. Solidarity networks as an example of distributed pressure are good, but they require resources from regional activist groups (it is unlikely that anyone will initiate something like this in Russia except these kind of groups), and so far, we have not seen examples of such groups becoming sustainable.
\n\nAll of these tactics require mobilization and a degree of political freedom, which are both lacking in Russia, perhaps apart from passive sabotage (such as refusing to work effectively) or active sabotage (stealing and intentional damage), and perhaps hacktivism as well. In our opinion, the future lies in tactics that do not fall under the scrutiny of repressive structures and cannot be clearly attacked by the bosses, but which are capable of inflicting tangible targeted damage. Sooner or later, the political situation will change and the road will open up for the other tactics.
\n\nHow do you see the connections between labor resistance and other forms of political activity? Over the past 40 years, we have seen labor movements, unions, and workplace struggles grow weaker in the United States, while other fields of conflict (such as anti-police rioting) have intensified. Do you have an analysis about the ways that the terrain of labor struggles is changing and how workplace struggles can remain connected to other struggles?
\n\nWe see work as a central concept that will be zealously defended on all levels, from direct attacks by the police to conceptual criticism by right-wing intellectuals. Unions have been the answer before, but the neoliberal turn has provided a broad toolkit for fighting them. Struggles against police violence, like some other mass protests, are younger and more mobile in their choice of tactics that the state does not have an effective response to yet. In addition, unfortunately, in many ways, peaceful forms of resistance do not pose a concrete threat until they develop into occupations. An organized labor movement is not just about occasional rallies, but about the state having to spend money on social programs and businesses having to shell out on decent wages and offer guarantees to workers under the constant threat of strikes. This is probably more expensive than maintaining a few riot police units.
\n\nBut the labor movement is often very conservative, trade unions have their own structural problems, and new practices (like solidarity networks) have not yet become an effective instrument of struggle.
\n\nIt seems only natural for us that the problem of work remains relevant. The people who suffer the most from police brutality, racism, environmental crises, and other problems are rarely businessmen. They work—officially or illegally—and they suffer the toxicity of the market system. The only question is to what extent we (who are essentially part of the same workforce) can make this agenda relevant.
\n\nIn the United States, there has been a lot of news coverage of the so-called “Great Resignation,” discussing all the workers who have been quitting their jobs since the beginning of the pandemic. Has anything like this happened in Russia? Is quitting a job a form of resistance?
\n\nRussia has also had great resignations—even though these weren’t really resignations, it was more like businesses firing people to cut costs. Without benefits or any guarantees. The first lockdown made the atmosphere so tense that there were no more lockdowns afterwards. People were out of work, and since most Russians had no savings but did have credit debts, everything escalated. The state limited itself to a few cash handouts. If people were not allowed to go out to work and earn their bread, an uprising driven by hunger would have been unavoidable.
\n\nIn Russia, quitting a job as resistance is relevant only for those spheres where there is a shortage of personnel and a sense of their value. Mass resignations are very unlikely because there is no broad self-organization; the resignations of a few employees do not cause any damage. People often work unofficially, so they will receive no compensation, and the benefits to the unemployed are very small. More often, a visible form of struggle will be the continuation or sabotage of work as an individual practice. We are not seeing the opportunity for mass organized action just yet.
\n\nOne of several video shorts by Antijob.
\nHave you seen the Antiwork reddit page from the United States? How is it similar to your project, and how is it different?
\n\nNot only have we seen it, but we also have covered it, including a similar movement in China. In terms of its radical message, the movement is similar to the early Antijob, and we hope that at some point this will become more relevant in our country as well. For us, we see anti-work as a fatigue with the neoliberal work ethic (in the United States) and the pseudo-communist work ethic (in China). It seems that in our country, this ethic has not yet reached the peak after which a radical rejection of work will be perceived seriously.
\n\nAnother problem with this framework is our audience. Some of them work for something like $300-400 per month, while living with children and credit debts. It would be somewhat awkward to urge them to refuse to work.
\n\nWhat can you say about the invasion of Ukraine from where you are positioned?
\n\nBefore the war started, some of us doubted that such a turn of events was really possible. However, it did happen. We issued a statement condemning Russian aggression. Russia’s imperial policy is obvious to us. As usual, it is disguised as “security interests.” We have received several insults from patriotic users trying to prove to us that the war is being fought against “Nazis who spread LGBT propaganda,” but this is different from the patriotic frenzy of 2014 [when the Russian military seized Crimea from Ukraine].
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/10.jpg\")
“No salary—eat the bosses.” The sticker is in Ukrainian.
\nHow is the invasion of Ukraine affecting Russian workers? How are the sanctions affecting workers in Russia, and how do you think they will impact the working class in Russia in the future?
\n\nThere are definitely people in Russia who approve of the war, and there are quite a few of them. Many workers live in the information bubble of the state’s “fortress under siege” narrative. From their screens, they see the message “Everyone is against us.” This mobilizes them to support the invasion, shifting the focus to the idea that this is being done for the security of Russia.
\n\nPropaganda platforms use the international sanctions and condemnation to reinforce this narrative in order to draw support even among those who hesitated at first.
\n\nThis mobilization will not continue indefinitely, of course. In a few months, everyone will feel the economic consequences, and if the war is lost, the reputation of the government will be damaged. This will not necessarily lead to an uprising, but we can hope that the social agenda will be more successful in mobilizing for the overthrow of the regime.
\n\nWe plan to be ready for such a turn of events and, as a project directly related to labor issues, to support this process.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/1.jpg\")
\nFinally, is there anything people can do to support your project?
\n\nThe easiest way is to support us financially. The development of a project like this always needs resources with which to pay for hosting, or someone else’s work on the project. In addition to this, you can help spread awareness of the project. This is especially important in the CIS countries. Also, we always need people with experience in penetration testing to help find and fix vulnerabilities, and SEO experts to advise us on promotion in different regions in order to increase pressure on employers.
\n\nAnd on the macro-level, you could create an analogue of our project in your area and contact us to create a network of services like ours in collaboration.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/6.jpg\")
Antijob participated in publishing this book, “‘Work Sets You Free’—Stories about Workers and Employers.”
\nThis manifesto, which appeared on the Antijob site a decade ago, spells out their basic analysis and goals.
\n\nA significant part of life, we have to give work. Our capacity, time, ideas, successes and failures are reduced to rubles, dollars, and euros—empty bank notes that can never fulfill our desires and needs. Usually this work is accompanied by delays in paychecks, the machinations of employers, nervousness and humiliation from ridiculous rules and idiotic bosses.
\n\nWe do not believe that the existing system of “commodity-capital” relations, which put the exploitation and destruction of people and the planet on the conveyor, can somehow be reformed “from above.” Real change can only come about if people recognize their plight and begin to seek better conditions for their lives on their own—without begging for anything from party bureaucrats or crooks from the bureaucracy.
\n\nHistory shows many examples of rebellious people sweeping away exploiters and thieves overnight, administering true justice and distributing public goods fairly among those who need them most. In this sense, we are closest to the libertarian (anarchist) philosophy and principles of direct action. You can read more about this in the “Library” section of our website.
\n\nWe have no paid employees and no hierarchy. We focus on the use of a wide range of methods of struggle in labor conflicts. We deal with problems related to working conditions and payment, as well as problems that women, young people, and national, sexual, and religious minorities face at work.
\n\nThrough our actions and propaganda, we are trying to develop class consciousness among employees and an understanding that, as a class, we have an interest in social revolution, the victory of which will offer us the opportunity to control our lives.
\n\nWe see our site not only as a place where there is a black list of employers (and where you can leave feedback about employers), but also as a place for coordinating forces in the class struggle, promoting “direct action” in resolving labor conflicts—as opposed to the bureaucratic judicial system, which actually operates in the interests of our class enemies.
\n\nThis site was created over sixteen years ago by several members of the organization Autonomous Action and has been actively developing all this time. This year, Solidarity Networks were created in various cities of Russia, which have already helped people to reclaim stolen wages (Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, St. Petersburg). Thanks to antijob.net, more than a dozen employees received a salary after publishing a review on the site, because many employers are afraid to be included in such lists—and even more so on our site.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/7.jpg\")
“Labor against work.”
\nThis war is provoked by the stifled ambitions of the Russian elites. They try to disguise this by talking about the “national interest.” But the working people do not and cannot have any interests in the oppression of the people in Ukraine and the Donbas. Our interests are peace and decent work, not war with the Ukrainians.
\n\nThis is military aggression initiated from the top of the Russian Federation. Yet we will be the ones who bear the consequences of this decision. The oligarchs and the president will not bear the brunt of military spending. Their children will not go to the front, their salaries will not be eaten up by inflation and currency depreciation. You and I have been set up.
\n\nThe Putin regime is now taking revenge on the Ukrainian people for not wanting to live under the boot of the Russian Chekist [i.e., the Cheka, the Soviet secret police agency from 1917-1922, and its descendants, the NKVD, the KGB, and today, the FSB]. Tears and coffins await our mothers, too, but bombs will fall on the heads of our brothers and sisters, workers in Ukraine. We allowed this, but now our task is to stop it as soon as possible.
\n\nToday at 7 pm, anti-war actions will take place in Russian cities. Our antijob.net team calls on you to join them and demand an end to military aggression.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/21/8.jpg\")
Antijob helped to publish a Russian translation of our book about capitalism, Work. Tragically, the artist who designed it took his own life this week in response to the dehumanizing experience of seeking asylum—first in Ukraine, then in Poland.
\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1505616538749050884\n\n\n
\n\n\nJSC RTK is the official retail chain of MTS. Why should it be blacklisted?
\n\n1) Management style: Feudalism with authoritarian and totalitarian methods of influence. That is: all retail is divided into divisions, regions, and sectors, at the head of each such division is a person who most often feels like the absolute ruler of the territory entrusted to him and thinks that he has the right to humiliate his subordinates, put strong psychological pressure on them, force his subordinates to deceive customers, without their consent, or assuring them that “It is mandatory” to add items to purchase receipts that: a) are very marginal, b) are absolutely useless for the client. All this is done under the fear of disciplinary action, fines, demotion, or dismissal.
\n\n2) Liability. Every month, inventories are carried out by the store and every three months—with the auditor. All employees must be present at these inventories, regardless of whether they have a work shift that day. Returning to work on the day of the inventory is paid only for those who have a scheduled shift. In case there is a shortage, the re-sorting most often does not overlap; in this case, the surplus is put on the balance, and the shortage is withheld from employees. The shortage is retained in full, and not at cost, as required by the labor code…
\n\n \n
\n\n\nAt work, they held a meeting at which they announced that the entire team was being transferred to minimum wage due to problems in the company… Naturally, I wrote a letter of resignation, but it turned out that none of the employees was going to quit anymore, everyone continued working as usual. While I was working for two weeks before my dismissal, I found a vacancy on hh.ru [headhunter, a popular job search site] for my own workplace, at the previous salary, and I was very surprised. Some time after my departure, the former director called me for a conversation and offered to let me return on the condition that I stop going to political pickets and covering my actions on social networks. Allegedly, there were complaints from my clients that I was against Putin. That was the reason for my removal. In fact, it turned out that no one’s salary had been reduced, everyone was quickly returned to their previous working conditions, but they decided not to inform me about this, so that I would quit of my own free will without scandal. And this whole performance was carried out in order to deceive me, one person, and force me to quit.
\n\n \n
This surprising story was confirmed with a photograph of the contract, which is available on the post on the Antijob site.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2021/12/22/report-from-the-field-where-sugar-comes-from", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2021/12/22/report-from-the-field-where-sugar-comes-from", "title": "Report From the Field: Where Sugar Comes From", "summary": "To honor the victory of striking Kellogg's workers, we share a narrative about the conditions laborers face in another industry served by their union.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/12/22/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/12/22/header.jpg", "date_published": "2021-12-22T19:06:39Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:50Z", "tags": [ "labor", "Strike", "Work", "antiwork" ], "content_html": "Roughly a quarter of workers in the United States quit their jobs in 2021. There has been a lot of talk about a supposed “labor shortage.” In theory, these conditions should be conducive to labor organizing—yet a real strike wave has not emerged. How have employment conditions changed, and what new strategies are likely to succeed in enabling people to stand up for themselves and each other against the capitalist economy? In a forthcoming series of articles, we will explore these questions.
\n\nThis week, workers at Kellogg’s concluded a strike, accepting a new contract that their union declared to be a victory. A notorious anti-work Reddit page played a role in preventing the company from replacing the strikers, pointing the way to a symbiosis between workplace organizing and anti-work subversion. Here, we present a narrative about the working conditions that laborers face in another industry served by the same union.
\n\nCongratulations to the Kellogg’s workers at the end of their 77 day strike! Their struggle is especially close to my heart, because I too was a member in good standing of the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers’ International Union (BCTGM) for nearly ten years during the 2000s, during which time I worked seasonally at a beet sugar factory in Minnesota. As a small show of solidarity, I’d like to share an account that I wrote about the job back in 2005, which was printed in the first issue of Rolling Thunder.
\n\nNeedless to say, much has changed since then—in the factory, the town, the union, and the world at large. My account is perhaps most interesting as a snapshot of industrial work at a particular time and place, and of a few of the frozen exploited maniacs who could be found laboring there at the point of production. What has not changed is that life under capitalism is nothing sweet, and that nothing is gained without struggle. Victory to the Kellogg’s workers!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/12/22/8.jpg\")
Supporters of the striking Kellogg’s workers made these silent agitators to affix to grocery store shelf labels and cereal boxes. For use with Avery brand 8160 Address Labels or the equivalent. Click on the image to download a pdf for printing.
\nSo here’s the deal. Every fall I work in this beet sugar factory in western Minnesota. A whole lot of the sugar that goes into all kinds of processed food comes from sugar beets, and a whole lot of those sugar beets come from western Minnesota. The county where the factory is located is dead flat, except for the Minnesota River valley, and it contains precisely three things: corn, soybeans, and sugar beets as far as the eye can see. It’s completely rural, but at the same time, it’s every bit as unnatural as Los Angeles or Disneyland.
\n\nEvery year in September, the beet farmers start pulling their crops. They pull them out of the ground with a combine, load them onto a semi truck, and drive them down to the plant. It takes the plant until spring to process the whole harvest, so they have to store the beets outside in seven gigantic piles, and they have to hire seasonal workers to run the machines that unload the trucks. By the end of the harvest season each one of the piles is bigger than a football field, and up to thirty feet tall. It’s one whole hell of a lot of beets.
\n\nIt’s good money. The farmers pull beets all day and night, unless it’s too hot, or too cold, or too wet. Seasonal workers—beet pilers—work twelve hours a day, every day, as long as the farmers are pulling. This amounts to eighty-four hours a week if the weather cooperates, and the overtime adds up quick. Anything over eight hours a day or forty a week is time and a half, and Sunday is double time. If I live extremely frugally, I can make enough money there to fund my activities for the better part of the rest of the year.
\n\nThe town is exactly like every other agricultural town of its size. There is a bar, a diner, a hardware store, two gas stations, a post office, a library, and a police station. The faces behind the counters almost never change from year to year. The tallest building is the grain silo, and the town ends abruptly where the beet fields begin at the edge of the last family’s yard. If you walk the railroad tracks two miles east you’ll get to the factory. The whole place is ordinary in every way, except that once a year it is crawling with beet pilers.
\n\nThere are three kinds of people that pile beets: the Locals, the Latin@s, and the Kids. Western Minnesota was stolen from its original inhabitants in the nineteenth century, and has been populated almost exclusively by white people of Scandinavian heritage ever since. Recently, however, a lot of Hispanic folks have moved up there looking for work. There is a sizable Latino/Latina minority in both the town and the factory.
\n\nAnd then there are the kids. It’s a strange phenomenon, but every fall the town is overrun with wild looking young people from Somewhere Else with dogs and facial tattoos who work beets because the money’s good and they don’t ask many questions. I am one of them.
\n\nThere really isn’t anywhere in town to accommodate all of us in any conventional sense, so almost every year we end up staying somewhere different. There used to be a fleabag motel down the road that would rent to beet pilers, but they got shut down for copious code violations. Last year about forty of us occupied an abandoned farm just past the outskirts of town. It was sort of like a band of vagabonds descending on a medieval village. I was a little bit worried that babies were going to start turning up missing and that the townspeople were going to come after us with pitchforks.
\n\nOne year, the weather was terrible. Nobody was working or getting paid, and nearly everyone was camped out at the bar for days on end, getting ferociously drunk and terrorizing the town. Eventually the law got involved. But the hell-raising proved to be a surprisingly effective strategy. The next year the company tried really hard to work us no matter how bad the weather got, presumably just to keep us off the streets.
\n\nAnother time, the bartender went down to the farm to hang out with us after work. She rolled up on a grim horde of beet pilers, solemnly skinning and eating a puppy around the camp fire1. She was understandably horrified by this, even after someone explained that the puppy had not been murdered. It had been killed accidentally by one of the larger dogs, and the person who was responsible for it had decided that this was the most respectful way to deal with its death. She always seemed a little wary of us after that.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/12/22/2.jpg\")
\nWorking beets can be a positive experience in many ways. There is a real camaraderie and a kind of solidarity that can develop out of living and working and eating and sleeping collectively with a group of people under trying conditions. There are people who make a kind of circuit together throughout the year, piling beets in Minnesota, raking blueberries in Maine, canning fish in Alaska, and doing a variety of other things. It’s one way to make work, and life, a little less alienating and isolating.
\n\nIt can also be terrible. The extreme drunkenness and perpetual drug abuse can get to be a bit much, and working eighty-four hours a week in the freezing cold while sleeping on a pile of straw in a barn for a month and a half without any running water or electricity will really put you in the mood to not take any shit from anyone.
\n\nThe work is really easy. A well-trained orangutan could run a beet piler. You press the same buttons and pull the same levers over and over and over. It’s mostly just really loud and monotonous and cold.
\n\nIt’s also fairly dangerous. You have to keep an eye on all the tweaked out truckers so they don’t run you over. You have to make sure not to fall into the machine. Somebody gets killed on a beet pile somewhere in Minnesota or North Dakota almost every year.
\n\nThe inside of the factory is even crazier. There are unfathomable mazes of incomprehensible machines, catwalks and conveyor belts to nowhere, and ancient engines caked in a foot of beet pulp. There is the deafening racket of a thousand endlessly grinding gears, an entire floor of the factory that is always about a hundred and thirty degrees, and a place called The Pit where no supervisor will ever go. The whole place is completely inhuman. There is no shortage of opportunities to hide—or to get maimed or killed.
\n\nI work outside on the pilers unless the weather is bad, but sometimes I work inside the factory. Here’s a story. One day, I clock in and the bossman gives me a great big squeegee. He takes me to a particular pipe deep in the bowels of the factory which has sprung an enormous leak and is spraying massive amounts of half-processed syrup everywhere. “Mop up this juice,” he says, and then leaves, never to be seen again. So for twelve hours, the pipe runneth over, and I push the lake of juice—which never gets any smaller—down a drain. The drain feeds into a sump pump, which then pumps right back into the pipe!
\n\nAfterwards, while meditating on the absurdity of that task, I watched a couple of guys with a backhoe spend half the day digging a big hole in the ground, take lunch, and spend the rest of the day filling it back in. I started to imagine that everyone there was doing the same thing on some level. The welders cut slabs of steel in half, take lunch, and weld them back together; the mechanics disassemble engines, take lunch, and put them back together; and the whole place is actually a giant meth lab or loss leader for the Mafia. There’s the method to the madness of production for you.
\n\nThe factory is supposed to be owned cooperatively by the farmers, but the evil agribusiness giant Cargill has its hands in the management of it. There was a month-long lockout last summer, when the union overwhelmingly rejected a contract that would have left workers with fewer benefits and higher health insurance costs. The lockout was wildly unpopular, and was eventually resolved, but the town and the factory are behind the times in a lot of ways. I have no doubt that the next few years will see more attempts to bust the union, and more of the downsizing, automation, and outsourcing that have already decimated most of the decent paying industrial jobs in the rest of the country. The beet plant will be an interesting arena of struggle when this does inevitably happen. There is certainly the possibility there for profound alliances to be born out of necessity amongst workers of diverse racial and cultural backgrounds.
\n\nThe beet harvest works pretty well for me, and I keep going back, but I sure am glad to get the hell gone the minute I’m done. As soon as I get there, it feels like I never left, and it only ever takes about a week or so before I start having dreams about beets again. I can’t imagine how hard it must be to stomach working there every day for years on end. I do know that the company had to start making full-time workers clock in by scanning their retinas because so many people were scamming the timecards.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/12/22/3.jpg\")
\nLast year, someone started writing “BDTF!” everywhere. Burn Down the Factory! Remember that song by Fifteen? It started turning up on the pilers, in the factory, in town, scrawled in the dust on the sides of cars in all manner of different handwriting styles. Maybe it was just the kids who were doing it, but maybe not.
\n\nMake no mistake about it: sugar is evil. It’s addictive, it rots your teeth, and it’s largely responsible for an epidemic of diabetes among poor people in this country. The process by which it is produced wastes a staggering amount of water, is horrifically destructive to the environment, and is viscerally just plain gross.
\n\nYou can’t have your cake and eat it, too. If you want that sugar, you have to accept that huge amounts of land will be used to grow the beets, that enormous quantities of pesticides and fertilizers will be used on that land, that there will be a sacrifice zone somewhere on a totally denuded moonscape where the factory will go, that some folks will spend the best years of their lives inside that factory, and that a mountain of fossil fuels will be burned to power it. You also have to accept that some doped up crust punk is probably going to poop in the beet pile. In my opinion, it’s just not worth it.
\n\nWhen I first started working at the plant, I swore I would never eat anything with beet sugar in it again. Later, I started thinking about where cane sugar must come from, or corn syrup, or any kind of processed food, period. It all comes from some factory, somewhere. It’s sobering to realize that the whole way that food is produced and distributed in our civilization is so deranged and destructive. The problem is a whole lot bigger than almost anyone cares to admit.
\n\nThere are a lot of good people—including myself—whose livelihoods are dependent on that factory, or on others like it, or on all sorts of other messed up jobs. I wholeheartedly support workers’ efforts to better their lot within the confines of industrial capitalism, but I’ll be honest—ultimately, I’d like to see the beet plant wiped off the face of the fucking earth. I want to give the land a chance to recover, and I want to be part of a society where that would be possible. I know that’s not going to happen without some truly revolutionary change.
\n\nSometimes I will be sitting up in the booth running the piler, looking through the clouds of dust at the pillars of smoke and steam rising out of the factory, and it will hit me right in the chest: two hundred years ago, this was a tallgrass prairie teeming with buffalo, and now here I am like every other white person, trying to make a buck off of this land. I don’t exactly feel guilty about it; I am trapped in this heartless economy just like so many others, and I have to make some compromises if I am going to have any resources to fight it with. If I am going to make those kinds of compromises, though, I do feel a very grave responsibility to follow through on that commitment to fight. I’m willing to bet that I’m not the only one who feels that way.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/12/22/1.jpg\")
Burn down the factory.
\nDedicated to the memories of Oakle, Justin, Mosca, Jared, Steph, and Flee—fellow beet pilers who have passed away since this article was first published. You are missed, all of you.
\n\nAuthor’s note: Please let me take this opportunity to assure the gentle reader that I played no part in the puppy skinning. Thank you very much. ↩
\nContinuing our back-to-school theme this week, we offer a memoir about how university students can engage in class mutiny, weaponizing their access to resources in order to contribute to broader struggles against capitalism. This narrative charts the trajectory of one rebel from the confrontational dropout politics of the anti-globalization era to an effort to infiltrate and undermine the institutions of power from within, ending with a rousing call for people of all professions and social positions to subvert their roles for the sake of collective liberation.
\n\nThis text appeared in 2007 in Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization, a book edited by Erika Biddle, David Graeber, and Stevphen Shukaitis. For another take on some of the same themes, composed around the same time, you could begin with “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses” by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/04/6.jpg\")
The occupation of Wheeler Hall at the University of California at Berkeley on November 22, 2009.
\nCan students and white-collar workers play roles in an uncompromising revolution for total liberation?
\n\nThe world has changed—it seems for the worse—since the high tide of revolts by unions and student radicals. Contemporary schools and universities in the United States are not exactly hotbeds of revolution. In fact, with the exception of some union organizing among graduate students and janitors, they are barely keeping the leftovers warm, in contrast to their contemporaries in France and Chile. This is a shocking state of affairs, given the once-respected position of students as igniters of global insurrection. What has become of the student mobs throwing teachers out of classrooms and lecture halls, the general assemblies in university auditoriums, the walkouts, the communiqués sent to presidents and prime ministers advising them of their coming demise?
\n\nAnd where are the masses of organized workers struggling for the destruction of capitalism? We need the second coming, the Wobblies of old, or the union organizers in West Virginia who were ready to take on the army itself at the Battle of Blair Mountain. Organized labor today seems barely able to combat the decline of wages and benefits, and is more terrified of strikes than capable of calling them. With people now feeling lucky to have a job, any job, it seems radicals have the impossible task of organizing a nation of phantoms: office workers, single mothers, the depressed and uninspired, the brokenhearted and overworked, all caught up in the system and unable get anywhere no matter what they do. What about the infamous dropouts? Has the composition of classes changed so much that revolution is now impossible beyond personal rebellion and individual revolt?
\n\nMeanwhile, the United States government and its allies seem to be hell-bent on bringing about a worldwide apocalypse, and an explosive revolutionary situation in the belly of the beast might be our only chance of survival. While students in the US have always been tamer than their comrades worldwide—research what students did in Mexico in the Vietnam War era and prepare to have your paisley-colored glasses blown away—things are quieter than ever on the Western Front. Worse, those closest to the source of the problem—the middle-class, the “creative class,” the white-collar workers, office managers, high school teachers—are living up to their reputation as mere drones.
\n\nRather than complain about all the sectors of society that don’t live up to\nour revolutionary ideals, however, we have combed the files of CrimethInc. agents who made the ultimate sacrifice, going to schools and workplaces with the explicit goal of undermining capitalism. In the course of several years in and out of high schools, universities, offices, and other psychiatric wards,1 these agents have formulated strategies and tactics for expropriating the white-collar world for revolutionary ends.
\n\nHere follow the assembled notes of one such class mutineer.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/04/2.jpg\")
The occupation of Columbia University in 1968.
\nEducation as we know it exists primarily to indoctrinate habits. It is designed to produce obedience and nurture a willingness to complete mindless\nand meaningless tasks without complaint. Since humans naturally prefer\nto have meaningful lives and do practical, useful things, this innate tendency must be repressed at all costs by authorities at the earliest possible\nage. Given enough time, the educational system can usually\nstamp out all traces of creativity and critical thinking. Indeed, now that the\nfamily, in former times the oppressive institution par excellence, is breaking\ndown, only education can fill the gap it leaves. For children in school, every\nmoment is regimented and controlled, every moment is devoted to some\ntask—any task except actually pursuing their own desires.
\n\nPreviously, keeping most workers until the end of high school was\nenough to ensure their domestication, not to mention provide them with the\nbasic reading and writing skills necessary to pay taxes. With the advent\nof global capitalism and the subsequent specialization of work on a global\nscale, new and more intensive forms of education are increasingly required.\nUniversities, formerly havens from reality for the spawn of the ruling class\nto network and mate with each other, have now been opened as holding cells\nfor the children of the serfs.
\n\nWithin the modern university, the sciences serve as convenient cover for\nstate research into control techniques and methods of mass murder and exploitation. Likewise, the empire of machines requires people with mechanical backgrounds to fix cars, program computers, and balance the books of its various corporations. Since these require technical aptitude beyond basic arithmetic, schools offer everything from business and accounting classes to engineering and computer science programs. From time to time, the system needs apologists for the terrifying destruction caused by capitalism, so people are ushered into journalism schools and departments of economics.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/04/9.jpg\")
The occupation of NYU (New York University) in 2009.
\nDepartments of political science and international relations prepare others\nto join the minor bureaucracy of the state apparatus itself, where they can\nparticipate in repression and murder by relaying commands to soldiers and\npolice themselves. Holdouts who still believe in romantic notions of education are directed to humanities curriculums or “art schools” where they\nwaste years of their lives myopically burying their heads in books or other\nself-indulgent activities until they are humiliated enough to take up service\nindustry jobs for which their high school diplomas would have qualified\nthem. How many dishwashing philosophers does the world need?
\n\nThe truly remarkable thing is that people subject themselves to these\nforms of “education” willingly. In a massive scam, capitalism convinces\npeople to pay for the privilege of being “educated,” and thus to go into\ndebt from which they can never emerge, permanently yoking them to the\nsystem!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/04/1.jpg\")
The Hetherington Research Club (HRC) occupation at Glasgow University in 2011.
\nPermit me to zoom in on my own experience here. Many of my comrades—hell, most of them—approached school solely for the sake of a career. A nice\nstable family. A job, respect in the community. Despite their punk bands and\ntheir activism, their causes and their marches, they still wanted fundamentally the same thing as their parents, or at least, they couldn’t imagine anything else. Whatever their political commitments were, they seemed to regard those essentially as a hobby that they would have to give up sooner or later for the inevitable assimilation into working life; “politics” and “work” formed a dichotomy that could never be bridged or mixed.
\n\nI found all this incredibly disturbing. After all, the jobs they sought\nconsisted for the most part of endless processions of paperwork, number-punching, and pointless meetings—and we’re not talking about working-class jobs, but privileged white-collar work! What joy could there be in that\ndrudgery? When we were children, most of our parents were so busy they didn’t even have time to play games with us or to read us books. Instead, they put us in front of the television with a fast-food meal before collapsing in front of the television themselves. What community respected jobs like that, especially when most of them involved directly or indirectly pillaging the world’s remaining free resources and peoples? The most that my parents had for “community” was a few friends from work unlucky enough to be in the same circle of hell as them, plus the people they saw at church. Did it matter if the job was selling organic food or working in a supermarket? Being part of the Social Security bureaucracy or killing people in the army? It all seemed like one big scam.
\n\nIn despair, I did what most people in that situation do. I began drinking\nheavily. I developed a taste for malt liquor, calculating that it was the cheapest way to obliterate consciousness. I started cooking bags of instant rice in malt liquor. I figured if life was just a long and drawn-out suicide, I might as well end it quickly and enjoy the trip down.
\n\nThen one day, in the supermarket getting ready to buy my next forty-ounce, I met two lanky individuals who were in the process of stealing no small amount of food, the smiling woman running a distraction while the other escaped out with a bag full of groceries. Shocked by how easy it was and their suave confidence, I approached them outside. It ended up they were homeless, jobless… but they were also artists, anarchists, lovers, writers, and creators. As I sat talking to them, I realized that their lives had meaning. Their eyes shone with an energy I saw lacking in my all peers who had to drink themselves to bed just to wake up the next morning and face work. Impressed, I decided that at the next opportune moment, I too would drop out of school, drop out of work, and never come back.
\n\nIt didn’t take long for my opportunity to come. Sitting among the ruins\nof our house with my friends, with a degree and no cash, I decided I was going to do it. I was going to drop out, to go all the way in pursuit of my dreams. I know what we’ll do: we’ll go on tour! We won’t even need a band!
\n\nAfter criss-crossing the country, running countless scams, throwing donuts at cops in the middle of street fighting, making love underneath the canopies of ancient forests, and composing and performing a full-scale musical about anarchism, I felt something I hadn’t felt in years, despite the fact there wasn’t a cent in my pocket and my prospects for survival looked grim at best. I realized I was alive.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/04/10.jpg\")
A university occupation in Bogotá, Colombia.
\nLet’s not lose sight of the obvious—no one is an island, including those\nwho have dropped out. Like everyone else, dropouts depend on a whole\nnetwork of people to keep them alive. Dropouts must learn survival skills\nsuch as dumpster diving and scamming, but it is the sympathetic cafeteria\nworker who turns a blind eye to the anarchists sneaking into the school\ncafeteria, the social worker who gives them food stamps, the employee who\nknows that there is no way these people bought this multi-hundred dollar\nelectrical tool but will let them return it for full cash—it is these people who\ncreate the holes in the system that dropouts need, in which it is possible to eke out an existence with minimal work. These workers are crucial to the survival of the unemployed, even if some of them do their anti-capitalist work almost unconsciously.
\n\nBut how long can the unemployed anarchist, the prototypical dropout,\nsurvive off the kindness of strangers? When the last scam is shut down, when even the school cafeterias require retinal scans, when every store is crawling with armed security thugs and scrutinized from closed-circuit cameras, what then? Is our dropout doomed? And if capitalism ever undergoes a major economic collapse, when the oil is gone and the food has stopped coming to the shelves of the local supermarkets, what then? Is our dropout just on a more enjoyable trip to hell with the rest of us?
\n\nLet us return to the idea of the network of sympathizers and transform\nthat into the network of revolutionaries. There is sometimes an unequal\npower distribution between dropouts and their sympathizers, with the former having no material ways forward and the sympathizers being stuck in\nsome hellish corner of capitalism. In order to overcome this, we must go\nbeyond this dichotomy of “dropouts” and “workers.” Let us inspect the more\ninteresting roles of “sympathizer” and “revolutionary.” The difference between a sympathizer and a revolutionary is mainly a matter of commitment.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/04/11.jpg\")
A university occupation in Bogotá, Colombia.
\nIn this regard, many dropouts are themselves just sympathizers. Sure, they\nmay be minimizing their impact on the ecosystem by not working, but the entirety of their activity is made up of just trying to survive. The main risk for revolutionary dropouts is that they become mere dropouts without adjectives, secretly wanting cars, jobs, careers, heating, and a regular source of food rather than taking advantage of every moment to push for liberation. (Ben Morea of Up against the Wall, Motherfucker called this “Pancho Villa syndrome,” when illegalist revolutionaries end up as petty criminals.) But if a dropout can indeed be a revolutionary, then an employed person can be more than a sympathizer too.
\n\nWhat would it entail to be a working revolutionary in this day and\nage? Would it involve organizing a union? Perhaps. Would it involve selling Marxist-Leninist papers to fellow workers who have not yet “Got Revolution?” Certainly not. One of the most obvious tasks confronting the working revolutionary is simple: seize and redistribute resources. Instead of feeling guilt about privileges, the working revolutionary does anything and everything to “abuse” those privileges, cashing them in for the material resources needed by revolutionaries who lack access. This could mean anything from sneaking out photocopies to smuggling guns. Imagine the countless resources that are at the disposal of clever employees if they approach work as a scam that they milk as thoroughly as possible without getting caught.
\n\nRevolutionaries need resources, need to eat, sleep, and have clothing. For\npeople of color, unemployed people, people with families they can barely\nsupport, especially people brought up in generations of poverty, to be a full-time revolutionary without income is impossible. Yet if some of their friends and allies can work, can find jobs, they can make this easier. If the employed\nrevolutionary is willing to live frugally, she can provide for dozens of her\ncomrades—especially if she is absolutely merciless towards her superiors,\nalways looking for a way to steal something, anything, from work to be put\ntowards the revolution. No job but the inside job!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/09/11/header.jpg\")
A barricaded school in Chile.
\nEven for the staunchest of politicized dropouts, the goal is not unemployment, but revolution. Both the unemployed and employed revolutionary—and all those in between, who take jobs when necessary and refuse to work when they can—face occupational hazards. The occupational hazard of the unemployed revolutionary is simply to become merely unemployed, indistinguishable from their grizzled peers who are just spare-changing for the next drink. The occupational hazard of employed revolutionaries is probably more dangerous—to begin to believe in their jobs and the system they play a part in, or at least to accept these as unchangeable elements of reality. To accept their positions in the economy and actually start following the rules, slowly adjusting to the idea that they are somehow different from, perhaps even superior to, all those unemployed people out there. To betray their dreams and begin living their death in life. It’s a slippery road, and every employed anarchist should watch out.
\n\nLet us here resume the story begun above, taking up the thread some\ntime after we left off. It was September 11, 2001, and my friends and I conceded that our careful preparations for the upcoming IMF/World Bank protests had been rendered moot by the terrorist attacks of the day. A couple of us raised in various suburbs in the United States had converged in a sushi joint outside of Georgetown to reflect on our experiences as dropouts and plan for the years ahead. Our conversation was a heady mix of despair and tactics. Both of us had similar “résumés”—we were anarchists from middle-class or upwardly mobile working-class families. Both of us had been primarily concerned with destroying capitalism for several years, and had college degrees but no plans for utilizing them. We had hopped trains across the country, fed our friends and whoever else showed up at Food Not Bombs, and donned black masks to take to the streets. Yet after organizing protests, skill-shares, conferences and feeling closer and closer to revolution only to watch it all go up literally in flames, we felt strangely empty. Where to go next? Somewhere else, somewhere unimaginable…
\n\nWhat would we do? We both had families at this point—families not of\nblood, but of something stronger—families of life. People beside whom we\nhad fought tooth and nail, with whom we had experienced the greatest joys\nand the bleakest hells. People we would take bullets for. It happened that by\nchance—or perhaps not—our comrades weren’t from white, middle-class,\ncollege-educated families. They were high school dropouts, folks\nwho had wised up before us or grown up in poor families. Our friends—and more recently, we as well—had been sent to jail. Been raped. Been\nhurt. Starved. Lived in tents in the cold, beneath concrete pillars under bridges. It seemed so unfair that the noblest and most creative of our generation, people who had departed from the standard career path by force or by choice, were pushed to near death. We were always struggling for the next dollar, having to hustle just to get by. How the hell were we going to take down the entire fucking government, the global capitalist system, if we were always worried about our next meal and couldn’t find a place to lay our heads?
\n\nWhile this state of affairs kept us sharp, it was slowly having an effect on\nthe less hardy of our comrades. One by one, those who could started settling\ndown, getting jobs, having children, and becoming “normal” again. If we were truly serious about a revolutionary future, we would have to find the resources to take care of children and the elderly in our communities.
\n\nWe cooked up a plan. It seemed crazy and morally wrong, but in our experience such plans were often the only ones that worked. What did we have going for us at this point? We had degrees. We could read and write. We could do the impossible. We could get jobs.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/09/11/15.jpg\")
Rebels defending a school occupation in Chile.
\nWhen one is shoplifting, a bizarre inverse logic operates, the inverse\nof the logic applied by the usual shopper. Since the punishment is always\nmore or less the same, you seek to steal the most expensive items as opposed to the cheapest ones. This inverse logic operates in a similar fashion in workplace scamming. Conventionally, people are accorded social status according to their rank in the workplace, but many revolutionaries get credit for their job in proportion to how low-paying their job is—for example, working at a organic health food store for low wages—or for how obviously their job relates to social justice—such as going door to door with petitions. Revolutionary union organizing is as laudable as ever, but the revolutionary who works for the primary purpose of seizing resources should aim for the job with the most resources that requires the least amount of commitment.
\n\nIn this regard, the educational-industrial complex is especially ripe for\nlooting. With the exception of recent events in the Sorbonne, most teachers\nand professors today seem to be in full support of the system, whether this\nmanifests itself in papers about global macro-economics or in postmodern\nliterary analysis. Even professors who oppose systems of oppression rarely\nmake their voices heard beyond the world of papers and journals, let alone\ntake action beyond that. If you look at the modern educational system not as a site for resistance but as a supply depot for looting, things brighten up quickly. While it is rapidly being destroyed by neoliberal “reforms,” the domain of the ivory tower is still notoriously slack easy to take advantage of.
\n\nAs a student, one can qualify for all sorts of loans and money. If you wish to, you can default on them and just keep the cash, as long as you are willing to commit to a future free of state-sanctioned employment. What is the world going to look like in twenty years, anyway? Also, one generally has little work to do as a student—if you can manage to read books outside of class or impress the professor with your intelligence, you don’t even necessarily have to attend classes regularly to get good grades. One can show up to a class, travel to another state to fight the minions of capital for a few weeks, come back, and often nobody even notices. Few jobs offer such flexibility.
\n\nAdditionally, schools are known to give money to students for the flimsiest of reasons. If the locals of a heavily repressed country are calling for international assistance in the preparations for their next protest, say in Russia, what better time to go abroad for an immersion course in Russian? Or if you want to support revolutionary efforts to help people become self-sufficient in the wake of a disaster such as the one in New Orleans, why not make it a school project? You can band together with like-minded students and form an organization to seize control of even more funding, with which to set up conferences for local anti-capitalists and invite revolutionaries to speak at your school—in return for a fair bit of cash, which goes right back into the struggle.
\n\nThere are all sorts of other resources in schools that are as good as gold to\nthe revolutionary. Schools may offer access to computers—and even free printing—that are hard for most people to come by. You could steal copies from the school to stock local infoshops or to distribute anarchist propaganda.
\n\nSchools also have cafeterias, which are often unguarded. One could steal food from the cafeteria and bring it to deserving fellow revolutionaries, and if one has some sort of “meal card,” one could always bring local hungry people into the cafeteria for a meal at your—or preferably the school’s—expense. Schools also feature strange locked closets, small rooms, and even entire abandoned buildings. There’s no reason to pay for rent, even if you’re working—that rent money can be spent on more exciting projects when squatting is an alternative! CrimethInc. agents have inhabited broom closets in libraries, set up shop in empty rooms in philosophy departments, and even lived in tree-sits while being “in school.” And for the clever revolutionary, not only is there a limitless supply of pencils and paper, there are countless other opportunities. One can walk in and steal just about everything from chalkboards to trashcans, and furnish a whole collective house!
\n\nIf one is privileged enough, it is also possible to become a schoolteacher, or even a professor. Becoming a professor gives you a few more\nyears of graduate school to live off of and continue the lackadaisical student\nlife. Once one is a teacher of some type, one can also, as all great teachers\nsince Socrates have done, corrupt the minds of the young. For example, one\ncould focus on books like 1984 that have snuck into the curriculum of many schools when picking readings. You could have your students make zines as an assignment or more ambitiously, take on projects like building community gardens. If you are a professor and have enough leeway, you could teach classes on revolutionary theory or subjects like “Social Movements.” A truly great teacher should be able to make even geometry a revolutionary discipline! Teachers can encourage students to organize everything from radical student unions to street demonstrations.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/09/11/7.jpg\")
Rebels defending a school occupation in Chile.
\nAnd so, once more, we’ll return to my own experience, at another point\nin my life. The university where I had spent the last three years had become\na hotbed of revolution. As a giant anti-globalization protest came to town,\nwe few local hosting anarchists were overwhelmed. As former out-of-town\nshock troops against capital ourselves, we understood how important it was\nfor the out-of-town black bloc to be able to meet safely and get a good night’s sleep to be ready to riot in the morning. After the G8 protests in Genoa in 2001, we had the unhappy suspicion that the police would raid any private landowner that rented space to us. Indeed, the local police had already done their rounds, warning everyone to avoid suspicious characters that asked to rent large amounts of camping space.
\n\nIt happened that a friend of a friend in our local Indymedia collective\nhad attended high school with a left-leaning member of the local government. After nearly endless meetings (“But you realize we can’t have peaceful protesters sleeping next to the black bloc!” If only he had known to whom he was speaking!), the town government decided it was better to get all the anarchists in one place, instead of having to deal with them squatting all over town. They hadn’t suspected that we’d prefer to have somewhere\nlegal and safe to sleep rather than getting ourselves trapped by the police in\na squat defense the day before the big action, anyway.
\n\nYet there was still no place for anarchists to meet and plan! I was morose—until one day, a thought struck me. The police would never raid the Student Union at the oldest, most privileged university in town. It was a virtual historical monument!
\n\nWith a little convincing, the head of the Democratic Student Union\nhanded over the keys to the building, ostensibly to be used for a conference\nthat happened to run the duration of the protest. As the big event approached, anarchists from all over the country showed up, and they all needed Internet access and photocopying machines. Almost overnight, my previously quiet little Department of Political and Social Studies metamorphosed into a full-scale hotbed of revolutionary activity, and one anarchist even snuck in and got his own desk as a “Visiting Professor.” I had managed to procure the keys from the night-guard, so when night came, we simply took out our sleeping bags and crashed in the office.
\n\nAs the protest neared, it became clear this was no ordinary conference.\nThere were direct action trainings, medical trainings, videos shown about previous summit protests. A horde of black-clad miscreants occupied the Student Union. Shortly before the day of action, a huge anarchist assembly took place upstairs in the Union, at which the forces of global insurrection decided to blockade the President and his cronies by whatever means necessary.
\n\nAt this meeting, we had the horrible realization that very few of the participants knew the layout of the city. So under the cover of night, we snuck even more comrades into the Department of Political and Social Studies to mass-produce maps of the locations to be blockaded and research the details about important local centers of global capital. We turned on the departmental photocopier, and, thanks to a stolen password, proceeded to make thousands of copies of blockade maps, while\nburning CDs with photos of important locations on the secretary’s computer. We rushed the mysterious box of maps right out the front door and to the cars waiting for us at the Indymedia Center.
\n\nAs I was leaving, I noticed that it was nearly nine in the morning, and to my horror I saw the head of the department, an ancient and respected professor, climbing up the stairs to the front door. He looked at me and smiled, “Up all night, eh? You won’t believe it—those unwashed protesters just spray-painted an anarchy symbol on our building!” I just smiled and walked out with the secret plans.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/04/7.jpg\")
The occupation of the New School in New York City, December 2008. The student occupation movements that began with this one were essential in building the momentum and the tactical framework that led to the Occupy movement getting off the ground in September 2011.
\nLet’s take this story to its logical conclusion. Being a parasite and scamming money from a job is not the be-all end-all of revolutionary activity. If anything, anarchists invading the university is uncreative. It would be more creative for anarchists to invade everyday jobs at all walks of life, for the express purpose of causing trouble. As the surveillance state shuts down possible avenues of escape, strategically placed anarchists in the DMV and security agencies would be worth their weight in gold. If the state and corporations send infiltrators to our meetings, we should return the favor and place anarchist infiltrators in their offices!
\n\nAnarchists often talk about getting our comrades out of jail. Why not get jobs as prison guards? Qualifying should be easy enough for those of us without arrest records. One could learn the ins and outs of a prison and plan the perfect escape route for prisoners. (Russian nihilists did exactly that in the 19th century.) Anarchist librarians, anarchist carpenters, anarchist chefs, and\nanarchist bankers—there should be no job that we cannot subvert. If there is\na job we cannot turn to the ends of anarchy, that will attest to our lack of ingenuity, not to the strength of capital.
\n\nWe anarchists need both material and human resources to fight the system successfully. Let us make no mistake about this: we’re fighting a war, and in war, you have to make use of everything you can get your hands on.
\n\nThe capitalist system seems to be doomed to collapse. Revolutionaries\nneed urban social centers, both legally paid for and—if possible—squatted.\nRevolutionaries sometimes need jobs, so we may as well start up cooperative vegan cafés and similar ventures, so long as we channel all the resources we can into the struggle. To buy land and to buy buildings requires cash some anarchists can earn, while others who have more time than money can learn to farm and cook and so on. These roles should never remain fixed, though certain roles will be more accessible for some than others. If we take the idea of dual power seriously, we will develop counter-institutions that people can fall back on as the scanty remains of old social safety nets are destroyed by looting capitalists. If all anarchists do is travel from protest to protest, we’ll never build the local strength, momentum, and roots we need for others to trust us and—more importantly—themselves when the system enters total collapse. A total collapse hopefully caused by us.
\n\nYet the true test is not whether we can push the system into collapse, but what we can do in the here and now—how we take advantage\nof any opportunity, including collapse, to spread anarchy. Let it never be\nmisunderstood that the only path to revolution is for all anarchists to drop\nout. No, the important question is how we link the efforts and desires of those within the system to those without its assurances and controls. To this end, we need more analysis of how mixed-class alliances have helped\npush forward the revolutionary struggle throughout history. Such a study\ncould begin with the impoverished masses who permitted Russian aristocrats like Kropotkin and Bakunin throw their lot in with them, and extend up to the mixed-class groups cooking and serving Food Not Bombs today.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/04/5.jpg\")
The role of education in revolution.
\nIt’s not just a question of using whatever resources we have to further\nrevolution—we must also turn any and every situation to the ends of revolution, including white-collar jobs and university lecture halls. In this sense, every revolutionary must be a situationist, an artist of situations. If we are unyielding in our demand for world revolution not tomorrow, not after exams, not after the next book is written or after hours, but now, then we must put you—dear reader—in a precarious position
\n\nAdmittedly, we barely know you. You could be an embittered revolutionary, who has already spent all your money on countless hours of organizing, and is considering getting a job at the postal service. Perhaps, reading about academics attempting to walk their talk, you feel jealous of their privilege at not having to deal with the monotonous and endless nine-to-five grind. Where is the book composed by a collective of revolutionary postal workers, the book speaking of the lives and dreams of clerks and janitors? You swear to write that book.
\n\nOr maybe you are a student who recently stayed up all night reading the\nCommunist Manifesto and, after a binge of underage drinking, proceeded to declare your dormitory a People’s Republic. Confronted with the choice of\nendless classes ranging from Linear Algebra to Biological Anthropology, it all seems so meaningless, and the university no better than a vast factory of obfuscation and bureaucracy. Instead of deciding what you want to do with your life, which seems tantamount to putting an end to your life then and\nthere, you want life itself! Reading about academics trying to create that life in actuality, perhaps you may find it easier to feel that—even within the\nivory tower—action can be taken, and you can take that action.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/04/4.jpg\")
Protests at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 2019.
\nOr perhaps you are a professor who has spent countless hours lecturing students on obscure postmodern philosophy. As a young\ngraduate student, you dreamed of changing the world, lighting it on fire with your ideas, writing famous books that would inspire the following generations to rise up and create a new world. Perhaps somewhere in the endless publish-or-perish cycle, you lost that dream, and now you write endless articles for journals no one will ever read, much less find inspiring. Now, reading this text, you wonder if you could change things, if instead of just talking about revolution, you could create it yourself. A dream has been rekindled. Who knows? These are just thought experiments. We don’t know anything about you!
\n\nYet this we do know: everything depends on you. Your actions, over the\nnext day, month, year, decade, lifetime, will determine whether or not you survive, whether the world itself survives. If you surrender to a life-in-death of obedience to the system, you will be fully complicit in its bloody end. However, within the deepest recesses of your being, you have the resources to do something beautiful, something that can change the world. You might think it is unfair for us to put all this weight on the shoulders of a stranger. After all, you’re clearly not a revolutionary. Maybe you have a job that is counterrevolutionary to the core, and what type of revolution can be incited by someone with that type of job?
\n\nThis is the crux of the argument: you can approach any job, anywhere, in a revolutionary manner. The less revolutionary potential you think a job has, the more likely that it will actually be radical to subvert it, if only you can find the courage!
\n\nOn the other hand, perhaps your background’s not right, you don’t feel like a capable and sexy young revolutionary. You’re too old, or too tired, or not confident, and so on. Consider that this might be a hidden strength, that the very diversity of our lives is and must be the basis for a true revolution. A revolution brought about by only student revolutionaries, or for that matter by any other demographic alone, would lead to disaster. Yet a revolution brought about by cunning alliances between the least likely of us will create exactly the type of situations we need, situations that can break us free from the chains of habit and separation.
\n\nNo matter how they are arranged, words alone cannot create revolution. Likewise, despite our constant calls for action, neither can action without thought. Revolutionary situations arise when people bring their words and dreams into alignment with their actions on an everyday basis. No book, no article, no matter how well written or insightful, can provide that last crucial step. That step involves closing the book, setting aside the computer, stepping back, and stepping forward into your own life.
\n\nSo—go on. Confess your love, grab that gun, plant that seed, lay your body in front of that bulldozer. Seize your life by any and all means necessary. At the moment you take action, the giant lie that has cast its shadow across human history will begin to dissolve.
\n\nWhat lies on the other side of history, no one knows. Yet we can promise you this—we’ll see you there.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/04/8.jpg\")
The occupation of the New School, December 2008.
\nAs Michel Foucault famously put it, “Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, all of which resemble prisons?” ↩
\nAnarchists have observed May Day as a holiday celebrating revolutionary labor movements since 1886. Last year, anarchists around the world honored May Day despite the combined challenges of the pandemic and state-enforced lockdowns. Ahead of tomorrow’s May Day, we are publishing an analysis of what happened to the powerful labor unions of the mid-20th century, written from within one of them. This text first appeared fifteen years ago in the second issue of Rolling Thunder, our anarchist journal of dangerous living.
\n\nSince those days, the circumstances this text describes have only become worse, as one economic crisis has followed another while labor unions have struggled to respond. The combative unemployment that some young dropout anarchists chose as a strategy at the turn of the century has become, at some points, almost a generalized condition. At the same time, the political polarization of the white working class has rendered untenable some of the optimism with which the following text concludes—showing the cost of what happens when we miss opportunities to present revolutionary solutions to the problems engendered by capitalism. The reduction of the political spectrum to different flavors of centrist neoliberalism paved the way for nationalists like Trump to falsely represent themselves as “rebels” fighting “the elites” on behalf of the common people.
\n\nToday, when the working class has been divided into the remote, the precarious, and the unemployed, rather than focusing on a rearguard struggle to preserve the rapidly eroding economic positions and infrastructure of the previous century, we have to find new, dynamic ways to interrupt and overturn the capitalism economy as a whole. The price for not doing so will be a reaction even worse than the Trump regime.
\n\nFor more on this subject, we recommend Work, our analysis of how capitalism has changed over the past century—and what it means to fight it today, especially in post-industrial areas.
\n\nRE: Report from the Shopfloor How Unions Lost Their Teeth
\nMEMO: How I spent my summer in the Midwest
\nTO: CRIMETHINC. HEADQUARTERS
\nFROM: AGENT 356592
The summer of the big AFL split, I infiltrated the federation by interning as an organizer for a certain dissident janitors union. The legends of past labor struggles were my introduction to anarchism as a youth, and I wanted to bring back some labor organizing skills to my southeastern town, which had been forgotten by virtually all unions. Today’s business unions generally follow a strategy of density: they focus on organizing areas where there is already a sizable Union presence, leaving historically un-unionized communities like my own to fend for themselves.
\n\nThanks to this strategy, my internship took me to a Midwestern railroad town with a vibrant history of class struggle—though it seemed that much of that militant energy had been tamed by the time I arrived. The local I worked for had been established thirty years earlier, when some uppity janitors realized they didn’t have to be treated like dirt. Although the activity of the union had declined, the stories and pictures of picket lines, office occupations, and sabotage by janitors touched a soft spot in my heart, and I had high hopes.
\n\nAlong with several other interns, I was part of one of two “surveying teams,” responsible for initiating contact with janitors and creating a database with information on possible union targets. The work itself was pretty simple, though in the course of gathering intelligence I quickly accrued enough counts of trespassing and breaking and entering to make even a seasoned CrimethInc. agent jealous. All this, and officially sanctioned dumpster diving! Imagine my delight at being knee deep in employee lists, invoices, and office memos instead of rotten produce and dumpster juice. A kid could get used to this.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/04/30/1.jpg\")
\nThe wealthy side of the city had seen the appearance of a lot of office buildings and corporate parks, most of which had not been documented by the union. These were not unionized buildings, yet obviously people were cleaning them. Who were they? It was up to us to solve this mystery.
\n\nI haven’t spent much time in office buildings, and seeing them from the outside I used to assume they were basically impenetrable catacombs of cubicles staffed by security guards and video cameras. Most of the ones I entered were not, as it turned out, and the ones that were were that much more fun. A couple of us would roll up to the security desk and start talking, making up some excuse or just chatting, trying to get information from the guard. While he was distracted, someone else would sneak into the building and try to find the janitors’ closets.
\n\nIt’s one thing to distract a retail employee while your buddy slides something into her purse. It’s another to try to sneak by a fully-armed guard who hasn’t seen an exciting day on the job since that bag of popcorn caught fire in the microwave and set off all the sprinklers on the fourth floor. They take their jobs very seriously.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/04/30/2.jpg\")
\nYet it turns out it’s possible. I button my shirt, hold my breath, and go. Look straight ahead and just get on the elevator.
\n\nI only had a problem once, when the security guard saw me and told me to wait in the lobby. I disappeared up the stairs when he was distracted and had a heyday in the office, but when I came back down he was looking around for me and I had to hide behind a column. When I heard him talking to another guard, I bolted and didn’t look back.
\n\nAt a fortress-like building, I pretended to smoke until an employee walked out the locked back door. She politely held it open for me and I got to work rummaging through the basement closets and pocketing some nice pens.
\n\nExcept for my lack of a tie, I fit in fairly well at the offices. I got into character and became an up-and-coming intern for some insurance or telecommunications company. No one really minded when I asked questions or poked my head into the wrong door. No one could have recognized anyone outside of their immediate office anyway—capitalist alienation was on my side for once. To them, I was just another faceless drone aiming for the American Dream.
\n\nJanitors’ closets tend to be next to bathrooms or in other out-of-the-way places. In each building, I was looking for the name of the janitorial corporation that held sway there; I usually found these written on a trash can or on a container of cleaning chemical. There were about eight national or international cleaning companies operating in the area.
\n\nThis worked for about half of the sites, but at the others we had to wait until nightfall to try to meet with the janitors themselves. The buildings were usually locked after 6 pm, but at corporate parks janitors might be found walking between buildings or taking out trash. In our expeditions, we discovered a trend that should not have been surprising: all the non-unionized janitors were Spanish-speaking Latinos. The local union staff didn’t have a single Spanish speaker—can you believe that?—so I attempted to speak using the very few Spanish words I knew (trabajo, durruti, syndicato, nada).
\n\nWe had two Spanish-knowledgeable comrades on the intern staff, and they organized a meeting for Latino janitors in the area. Only a dozen or so came, and they reported being threatened by bosses if they attempted to work with the union. The communication barrier was embarrassing on the part of the union, as several of the work problems they raised could have been easily solved by a Spanish-speaking staffer. The local is working on the problem, and I hope they get things rolling soon.
\n\nThe movement as a whole has been slow in responding to immigrants’ needs, especially as it has become entangled with nationalism and legalism and the drudgery that comes with being a mediating part of the status quo.
\n\nBut it wasn’t always like this.
\n\nThe labor movement was born and bred on sabotage as an illegal underground conspiracy of workers fighting to raise wages and improve working conditions by any means necessary. In the nineteenth century, disgruntled employees met by night and destroyed the wool and cotton mills threatening their livelihoods—to such an extent that “machine breaking” was made a capital offense in England. Early US labor agitators had to fear for their lives, as they were often chased out of town or lynched. Strikes crippled railroads and factories, cops and soldiers attacked picketing workers and families. It seemed the whole world might erupt in a global class war between the haves and have-nots.
\n\nFearing industrial chaos, governments forced employers to yield to some of the workers’ demands. Workers’ movements were integral to the implementation of the eight hour day, safety and health regulations, and the National Labor Relations Act. The day had been won for the workers, and many on both sides of the class divide felt unions were on their way to redistributing wealth and power once and for all.
\n\nBut in the course of all this, a funny thing happened. Unions themselves became legitimate players on the political playing field—with clout, bargaining power, and, most of all, healthy bank accounts. The struggles continued, but they began to have less heart. More money, but less heart. Business agents, grievance procedures, lobbyists, closed shops, dues check-off and “labor-friendly” politicians helped integrate—or entangle—unions into the smooth functioning of governments and economies, and it wasn’t much longer before they had become pale shadows of their former selves. Were unions still a tool for class war, or just glorified human resources departments?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/04/30/3.jpg\")
\nTo return to my summer—the stranglehold of legalization had choked the town’s labor movement years before, though many in the movement still showed a radical spirit. The president of my local, a jovial and warm-hearted long-time labor leader, reminisced over the occupation of a prominent downtown office tower and confided that one could seriously disrupt plumbing by flushing tied tampons down a toilet. This indicated not only willingness to be arrested, but also willingness to act without being arrested—an even more desirable trait—and his eyes lit up when I whispered to him some of my own adventures.
\n\nHowever, any direct action was relegated to war stories or video “action footage,” thanks to those bank accounts and laws making unions accountable for member action. The bosses can actually sue unions for illegal job actions. The unions are tamed; there is little discussion as to whether promoting a little sabotage is worth de-certification and bankruptcy.
\n\nThe local had for a time cancelled union meetings because it seemed there simply was nothing to talk about—but with contract negotiations looming on the horizon, it was time to get into gear. At one of the first meetings I attended, a woman spoke up, saying that she had read the contract and that the union wasn’t for the worker, it was a tool for the bosses. The officers quickly countered that no, the union is for the workers and she needed to re-read the contract. The union is the workers, they said. The union is the workers, and the staff is just employed by the workers.
\n\nBut over the course of the summer there was a subtle shift from the intern orientation, at which it was hammered into us that “the Union is the Workers,” to the confession on-site that the union is a business. Unions need money to run, and to get it, they are in the business of representing workers and handling grievances, and occasionally getting better wages and improving job conditions. The unions’ “strategic planning” can also be read as a business strategy: unions have to find areas where there is already a market for their product (the union); job sites with few employees won’t be able to repay in dues the cost of establishing the union, so those sites are ignored. On the other hand, organizing a factory of 200+ can get an agitator a position as a sort of business agent—then you’re “set for life,” I was told.
\n\nThe local I worked for was well-established and had “union shop” contracts, according to which workers hired by certain employers were forced to join the union after a certain number of days of employment. In fact, the union didn’t even have to meet with the workers for them to sign up; their bosses gave them the union card and made them fill it out. This contributed to the union’s disconnection from its membership. Often, members didn’t even know they were in a union, or didn’t know what it did; and for that matter, the union didn’t keep track of its membership. The member lists we were supposed to use to call folks out for rallies were horribly out of date. But what did it matter? The dues were decided at the international level, not the local. The employers deducted dues from paychecks and sent a monthly lump sum.
\n\nCollaborating with the boss is good for business, and unions have gotten into the business of collaboration. I had a chance to look at the contract the woman was complaining about. The most disappointing aspect, as always, is the “No Strike/No Lockout” paragraph, which explains that the union cannot strike as long as the terms of the contract are followed. Even better, when there is a legal strike, the union pledges that it will send a “minimal staff” into the striking offices in order to keep them functioning—yes, the union will scab itself!
\n\nThe union encountered some difficulties reining in its membership in preparation for the upcoming contract negotiations. The union wanted its members to want full-time status, but most of the part-time workers weren’t especially interested in changing. This was an example of a complaint I’ve heard often in my small southern town: the unions, people say, disregard their individual situations and force them to accept what the union says is “better for the whole.”
\n\nThough this critique tends to come from conservatives and is disregarded by leftists who think they can figure out what’s best for everyone, it has a certain radical undercurrent to it. Most unions have become large and bureaucratic, and their political and economic legitimacy is based on their ability to keep their members in line. The union knows what’s best; in order for negotiations to go well, your desires have to fit into a certain box so that the negotiators can squeeze them into an even smaller contract. The union has to be able to give the bosses a promise of stability, a guarantee of the security of the status quo and the smooth running of production. Otherwise, it’s out a customer.
\n\nAs these unions are inextricably entrenched in the functioning of the economy, of course they’re more interested in the right to employment than the right to enjoyment. Business unions are about making sure that everyone wants the same thing, rather than the workers uniting and standing up together for their individual desires.
\n\nThere were pockets of dissatisfaction within the local, and at moments there seemed to be hope for change within the membership. But the members themselves had been beaten, both by the employers and by the union. One young man explained that the bosses had threatened to deal harshly with disrupters, and he was unwilling to stick his neck out on the job without the support of his co-workers—which was non-existent. Defeat, yet again.
\n\nBeyond the institutionalized constraints, the biggest roadblock to a vibrant union was the basic lack of a culture of solidarity. Folks didn’t stick up for one another against the boss. “Union” was just another deduction from wages, not something that existed in the relationships between workers on the job. What good was a union card if it sat idle in your back pocket? Credit cards, discount cards, membership cards. Unionism became just one more thing to consume in order to get a better job, participation optional.
\n\nThis isn’t to say that legalized unions bring no benefits to the workers themselves. US unions pride themselves on raising the standard of living and creating a large middle class. Many unions have helped to bring at least some fragment of the American Dream™ to US families. But this has altogether neutralized these workers’ opposition to capitalism, and removed them from participation in social struggle. Middle class workers, thanks to and along with their unions, have been effectively domesticated.
\n\nWhy struggle against capitalism, one might ask, if one has a working garbage disposal of one’s very own? It’s a question of values. The workers movement has always struggled for two things:
\n\n1) Autonomy, freedom, and power over the workplace and daily life; and
\n\n2) Wealth.
\n\nThe bosses and politicians have ceded a fraction of their wealth but have not given up any power. Workers who might want to fight for more autonomy or power are held hostage by the middle-class lifestyle they already have; to strive for freedom would mean to risk their little hard-won comfort. Indignity at work is the price you have to pay to live the dream of two cars and a pile of debts.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/04/30/4.jpg\")
\nHere, amid all this co-option and concession, I see opportunities for anarchist intervention and participation in the labor struggles of today. My home town, for example, as a place most unions have ignored, is a prime site for a renaissance of labor organizing without money, limitations, or institutions.
\n\nAnd outside our punk and activist ghettos, we dropout anarchists have a lot to offer. We’re used to living on next to nothing, so bosses can’t threaten us; if we can link up with others fed up with their power, we can threaten them. Our lust for freedom and autonomy, and our willingness to go without the consolation prizes of convenience, could help us develop new methods of cooperation and workplace action that no union today can even consider. We’ve acted outside formal structures for so many years that we take all the benefits of being able to do so for granted; in league with our fellow work-haters, we could open new avenues for genuine revolt. We’ve dumpstered meals for hundreds for our own conferences; let’s make sure there’s never a hungry belly at a picket line. Our infoshops and Food Not Bombs groups have given us good practice building community organs; let’s offer working parents daycare and free breakfast for their kids. And fun—fun is almost an ideology for most of us; let’s share our games and schemes and optimism with workers and co-workers, so that no one ever has to go home and waste away in front of the TV again. The togetherness that comes from those is exactly the foundation that makes collective resistance possible.
\n\nUs dropouts have a lot going for us that today’s union organizers don’t. Unlike most of them, we have no overhead. We can steal or scam what we need to fight with, squat or dumpster what we need to get by, and travel by rail or by thumb just as the I.W.W. union faithfuls used to. The money we raise for labor organizing can be put to better use than staff salaries or rental cars. As an intern with the established union, I still had to compute everything according to the scarcity logic of capitalism—from the pizza we ate to turning on the lights in the office, we were always reminded that we were spending or wasting our members’ hard-earned money. Organizers who don’t depend on dues for their livelihoods, on the other hand, can look at workers as real people and not just potential sources of income. Such union representatives could be collaborators against the bosses, not agents for them.
\n\nThis isn’t to say we revolutionaries should spend all our time doing grunt work for the “real” labor movement. If we’re serious about this, we can make our own connections with grassroots labor militants and act on our own terms outside the bureaucratic institutions that have been holding the movement back. The formal labor movement still has plenty of organizers and members with radical visions and vibrant spirits, but perhaps we can do some things they want to but can’t: wheatpasting, visiting houses, smashing offices…
\n\nAnd this participation can go both ways: if we get involved in labor struggles, other labor activists will be more likely to join in ours. In the middle of the summer, I invited my fellow interns and the local staff to join in an anti-G8 solidarity rally organized by the regional Anarchist Action group. The union staff was excited to meet other potential allies, and the anarchist group was very interested in labor involvement, though the two hadn’t worked together before. After work, wearing our bright red union shirts and bearing dumpstered buckets for festive drumming, we joined in a parade that ended at the local Board of Trade. In the course of this unpermitted march, we were corralled, pepper sprayed, and beaten, but I was surprised and impressed by the willingness of the interns to stick through the action and not back down. Though short-lived, it was an exciting and inspiring few blocks in the streets, chanting class war slogans alongside the folks with whom I had taken my first meaningful steps into the class war.
\n\nIronically enough, as I finish this report a strike has struck, of all places, right outside my home town. The company wants to cut pensions and jack up healthcare costs. The cement plants employ most of the people in the area, and only one of them is unionized. The other plants are watching—the bosses nervously, the workers excitedly. If the strikers get their demands, there’s a good chance there will be inspiration for the union to move into the other sites. And so, after all my ranting and raving against unions and their contracts and compromises, a few of us went down to hang out with the workers and bring lots and lots of dumpstered food. The picket is strong—every worker in this 100+ employee plant is off the job in this right-to-work1 state. Scabs are having trouble keeping up output: after a week, four customers have already stopped ordering. I got a chance to talk to the folks down there with their drawls, John Deere caps, Harley t-shirts, and, of course, sweet tea. They are sticking together and they all support the union. It’s inspiring to find another bastion of resistance in this once-hopeless humid town. I got some numbers, and we are going to keep in touch. They enjoyed the d.i.y. mashed potatoes and I promised to bring more. I didn’t talk anarchism on the picket line—I didn’t need to. They know what’s up. Every southern working class redneck knows she’s been abandoned by the politicians and that their bosses don’t care about them. The question is what we can do about this, together.
\n\n“Right to Work” is a euphemism for scab-friendly. ↩
\nFor ten years now, we have observed April 15 as Steal Something from Work Day. Coinciding with tax day—when the government robs workers of a portion of their earnings to fund the police, the military, and various welfare programs for the ultra-rich—Steal Something from Work Day celebrates the creativity of workers who take a swipe at the economy that exploits them.
\n\nYet today, the consequences of the global rip-off called capitalism have gone so far that nearly a quarter of us have no employment or source of income whatsoever. Many of those who still have jobs are being forced to risk death on a daily basis just to bring home a paycheck, while more privileged workers have seen their jobs invade their very homes. Tax day is pushed back to July—it’s difficult to rob those who have no income, though our oppressors aim to squeeze it out of us sooner or later.
\n\nThe crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic should put things in proportion. While executives and loss prevention experts wring their hands about workplace theft, sticky-fingered employees are not the ones responsible for systematically draining resources from hospitals or accelerating catastrophic climate change. It’s not stealing from work that is outrageous—the outrageous thing is how much capitalism has stolen from us.
\n\nAs history accelerates, the humble little gesture of workplace theft, via which so many workers have asserted their autonomy and made ends meet, has almost become outmoded. In a global disaster that is just a taste of things to come, we have to become more ambitious about what we aim to seize.
\n\nThe workforce has been divided into “essential” workers, “remote” workers, and the unemployed. In many cases, “essential” simply means “disposable”—along with doctors and nurses, it describes a range of low-paid jobs that involve a high risk of exposure to COVID-19. Of course, if you are working one of these jobs, you still have access to material goods; you can still steal from a grocery store or warehouse.
\n\nWhen so many people have no access to resources whatsoever—while employers and the politicians above them are conspiring to force us to risk a million deaths to re-start the economy—stealing to support those who cannot buy products becomes a solemn duty to humanity.
\n\nWhat can “essential workers” do besides sneaking food, medical supplies, and cleaning products out of workplaces? Can we set our sights on something more systematic?
\n\nLast month, facing layoffs, General Electric employees demanded to be kept on to build ventilators for the treatment of COVID-19. This points to the possibilities for workers to steal back their entire workplaces. Yet making demands of corporations like General Electric will produce few results unless we are able to find ways to exert leverage on them.
\n\nIn Greece, unpaid workers in Thessaloniki went further, seizing the factory they had worked in and using it to manufacture their own line of ecological cleaning supplies. This is an example of workplace theft writ large, one we can aspire to emulate in the United States over the coming years.
\n\nCould we steal the existing infrastructure and use it to produce a different society? Should we aspire to take over the global supply chain and run it more efficiently than its current overlords do?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/04/15/4.jpg\")
\nThe quintessential 21st century work environment is the Amazon warehouse. Surveillance devices and software force humans to behave like robots. In some Amazon warehouses, gigantic screens display footage of employees who were caught stealing to terrorize workers into obedience. Cashing in on the pandemic, Amazon has added over 100,000 new positions, but all the profits are still concentrating at the top. Signs in Amazon warehouses instruct workers to remain three feet apart at all times as an anti-viral measure, when their work stations are actually two feet apart. Is there a place for such places in our dreams of the future?
\n\nBefore we decide what aspects of the global supply chain to keep, let’s look closer at the meaning of the word “essential.” Police in some parts of the US have explicitly stated that “protesting is not listed as an essential function”; they aim to take advantage of the pandemic to suppress any dissent, though dissent is the only means by which we can assert our needs and defend our safety. Freedom is inessential, along with the lives of frontline workers. Meanwhile, the governor of Florida has deemed professional wrestling an essential function along with all other “professional sports and media production[s] with a national audience.” As in ancient Rome, what is essential is bread and circuses.
\n\nSo we should not accept the concept of “essential workers” at face value. Capitalism has monopolized activities like food production that used to take place on a more decentralized basis. We are among the first human beings to be born into a society in which the only way to obtain food is to go to a grocery store staffed by employees. Most of us have no other option today; this monopoly is what makes grocery store workers “essential.” In almost any other model, these workers wouldn’t be the only line between us and starvation.
\n\nOn a fundamental level, Amazon warehouses and corporate grocery store chains are like police: they are essential to the maintenance of this social order, but they are not necessarily essential to life itself. We depend upon them because—through centuries of successive enclosures of the commons—we have been robbed of everything that sustained our species through the first million years of our existence.
\n\nWhen we are thinking about how to steal our lives back from work, this suggests another point of departure, alongside individual workplace theft and collective workplace occupations. We can begin to re-establish means of subsistence outside the economy—for example, via occupied urban and suburban gardens. Especially for those who are now unemployed, this is a way to steal the possibility of subsistence from a world optimized for employment alone. Perhaps, one day, where there are currently Amazon fulfillment centers, there can be community gardens complete with collective dining areas and childcare bungalows.
\n\nIn the age of surveillance technology, some of the differences are eroding between warehouse workers who are monitored by drones and white-collar workers who are monitored by technologies that take screenshots at random throughout the workday. All of us are being “optimized” according to capitalist control mechanisms and criteria. In remote or “smart” working, our employers invade our bedrooms, ruthlessly fixing our most intimate activities to the demands of the market. Middle-class workers have to worry about whether the décor of our bedrooms and the behavior of our children will be acceptable to our employers. Nothing is sacred.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/04/15/2.jpg\")
Camera-bearing drones maintain surveillance inside warehouses, just as the camera on the device you are using to read this article can be used to surveil you.
\nAt the same time, as more and more of our lives become dependent on digital technologies, some of the differences between the employed and the unemployed are also eroding. Among those of us who are unemployed, many of us also spend our days in Zoom meetings and clicking around on phones and computers. Our behaviors—paid or not—can be almost identical. Our online activity continues to provide income to corporations employing a profit model based on the attention economy, harvesting data, and the like.
\n\nPresciently, for Steal Something from Work Day 2013, one of our authors analyzed the ways that time theft alone can fail to take us beyond the regimes of capitalism:
\n\n\n\n\nWorkers who engage in tactics of la perruque [i.e., time theft], but use the reclaimed hours to participate in a digital capitalism that commodifies user attention, merely sneak from one job to do another. In 2013, we call it “social media”—in thirty years, it will have no name. […] We add stars and comments to Amazon products improving their sales; we self-surveil with Facebook; and we help search engines anticipate human desires by performing as a human test audience for them.
\n
So while time theft is the one ostensible remaining means of stealing something from work for an entire social class now under de facto house arrest, we should not assume that it will suffice to get us beyond the logic we are trying to escape. That goes for the unemployed as well as for those working remotely.
\n\nWhat is the solution? To return to the wisdom of our forebears, we should never use any tool produced by the capitalist system for its intended purpose. To quote “Deserting the Digital Utopia,”1
\n\n\n\n\n“There is an invisible world connected at the handle to every tool—use the tool as it is intended, and it fits you to the mold of all who do the same; disconnect the tool from that world, and you can set out to chart others.”
\n
For those confined to working or playing online from home, this offers a way to think about our little individual revolts. When you are engaging in time theft, don’t just click around on the internet, delivering additional information to the corporations and governments that are spying on all of us. We have to use this time creatively and effectively to prepare for the next phase of global collapse. Teach yourself a skill that you can use away from the computer, something that can help you heal or nourish people, whether biologically or psychologically. Create new connections and networks that can assume an untraceable offline form in the near future. Print out letters and deliver them to all the tenants around you inviting them to participate in the unfolding rent strike and offering them support. Remember, you must always have a secret plan.
\n\nNow more than ever, stealing something from work has to mean assaulting the system that forces work on us in the first place.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/04/15/5.jpg\")
\nWe conclude with one employee’s narrative of a lifetime of workplace theft, a memoir of a simpler time when it was easier for many people to channel resources from the capitalist economy into joyous anti-capitalist creative activity. If the pandemic, automation, and surveillance technologies continue to transform our lives in the ways they have been, such stories may soon belong only to a comparatively idyllic past—but that only makes it more important to pass them on, so those who come after us can see everything that they have lost and whet their appetites to fight harder.
\n\nI’m writing this on company time under stay-at-home orders.
\n\nI want to share an incomplete list of all of the things I’ve stolen from work over the course of my two and half decades as part of the work force. I want to start by acknowledging that my situation is likely different than yours. When and where we grew up, where we are living now. The kind of work we do. The relative privilege that each of us benefits from.
\n\nThis is not a prescription or playbook. You might have access to opportunities I have not. The time and place and situation may be different, but the bosses are still the bosses and the fight is still the fight. Look for the cracks and squeeze through them.
\n\nWhen I was in junior high school, I had a paper route. I delivered the paper every day after school. Once a week, there was a coupon day. An extra stack of little papers arrived at my house with the bundle of newspapers. I was supposed to stuff these coupons into all the newspapers before delivering them. I was a good kid. At the beginning, I did what I was supposed to. It made the load of papers in my satchel weigh twice as much.
\n\nStill, I couldn’t help suspecting that most people didn’t care about the coupons. So I performed an experiment. I stopped stuffing the paper with coupons and waited to hear who complained. I made a mental list of the few houses at which people really wanted the coupons. I’d include the coupons in the papers I delivered to those houses. All the rest of them went straight into the recycle bin.
\n\nThis saved me a literal weight off of my shoulders. It also freed up an extra hour of precious post-school daylight hours to play with neighborhood friends. The paper route was supposed to teach me the value of a job well done—and it did.
\n\nIn high school, I was in a computer class. We students had free rein to use whatever we wanted, as long as we did tech support for teachers who were having issues. Jammed printer. Dead network. Missing mouse. We would come fix it.
\n\nMost of the time, though, I was in the corner using the high-speed audiocassette dubbing machine. It could transfer one tape to three others at the same time, at four times normal speed. I started a little do-it-yourself record label using that machine. This changed my life, connecting me to other young people around the world in the days when the internet was just getting off the ground.
\n\nI also designed, printed, and mass-produced countless zines on those high school computers, printers, and copiers.
\n\nAround the same time, I worked in a concession stand at a fancy pool serving upscale neighborhoods. I made minimum wage. I never paid for nachos or slushees, and neither did my coworkers, friends, or casual acquaintances.
\n\nIn subsequent years, I also worked at the admissions desk. I operated the cash register. People who came to swim paid me and went on their way. Dollar fifty for kids. Two dollars for adults. Fifty cents extra for the water slide. All day. Over and over.
\n\nOn hot summer days, the pool brought in several hundreds of dollars per day. Some days, a group would come in from a day care or camp. Those were big days.
\n\nIt’s hard to skim off the top of a $1.50 charge. If you’re keeping the change, your pockets get heavy and jingly. There’s also a paper trail of receipts.
\n\nBut not if the cash register is broken. Weirdly, every summer I worked there, the cash register would stop working the first or second week. In effect, this reduced the cash register to a money drawer, abolishing the paper trail of receipts. I would do the math in my head, pop the drawer open, make change, and keep a running count in my head. How many customers have come through the door today? How much can I skim without anyone noticing?
\n\nThe answer: I bought a new computer, printer, monitor, and scanner to take with me to college. And a lot of records!
\n\nLearning to do math in your head can be an important skill if you weren’t born with a silver spoon under your tongue.
\n\nEvery shift during my lunch break, I’d wander over to the juice aisle, pick out a bottle, then go to the hot foods bar and heap up a pile of French fries. If my friend was working the hot foods register, we talk for a bit, putting on a little performance for any potential spectators. If not, I’d just go sit down and start eating.
\n\nAs a cashier, I had a lot of discretion and prerogative. If something didn’t ring up properly, or lacked a barcode, or neither I nor the customer knew the produce code… they got it for free. Or, if I didn’t get the feeling that they were down, I’d ring it up for twenty-five cents. That way, they still saw me ring up something and weren’t forced to make a decision about the ethics of workplace theft.
\n\nAny time friends came through my checkout line, I pantomimed ringing up their groceries, turning each so the barcode was facing up, away from the scanner. I’d say “boop” out loud with my voice. We’d share a nod, a wink. Then I’d ask them to buy me a pack of gum. Total bill: twenty-five cents.
\n\nOnce, I made the mistake of trying to pass along those savings to my best friend’s dad. He was pretty cool on most accounts. For example, during Sunday church, rather than making them listen to sermons, he taught his kids algebra and other math that was advanced for their respective ages.
\n\nBut on this day, I grossly misread his sense of ethics. When he noticed that I was scanning items upside down, he started making a stink, raising his voice about his principles. Luckily, I was able to recover the situation before anyone figured out what was going on.
\n\nI was the slyest employee thief when taking food off the shelf; I always left with something tucked down my pants. A meal or two to tide me over from one shift to the next.
\n\nI also stole pantloads of film, processing, and prints. I would drop off a few rolls of photos from punk rock shows at the film developing desk, checking the boxes for all the upgrades: oversized prints, duplicates, fancy finish. When I picked them up, I’d say I had some other shopping to do before checking out. They just let me walk away with them. I never once paid for film, processing, or prints there. The good ol’ days.
\n\nIn college, I worked in the computer lab. The university had a really fancy computer sitting unused in storage. I took all its internal parts home with me one by one. Later, I bought a case and reassembled them into a new computer to serve the general public in a shared computer lab at a DIY collective space.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/04/15/3.jpg\")
Like many other things, stealing from work was easier in the 1990s.
\nIt turned out I was good at web design. I’d crank out the work really quickly, then spend the rest of the time designing zines and working on other creative projects.
\n\nI have always stolen time from office jobs. It was especially useful to be good at keyboard shortcuts in order to hide or destroy whatever I was up to when the bosses came around.
\n\nI also took all the normal office things: cables, paper, printouts, photocopies, staplers, staples, tape, keyboards, mice, laptop stands, chairs. I’ve stolen a few computers from jobs. Once, I traded a couple such computers for a car that I then drove around the country on a Great American Road Trip.
\n\nWhen it’s provided, I always load up on food. Snacks for myself now, snacks for myself later when I’m not in the office. If friends come visit me at work, they eat for free, too, but they should also load up their bags and pockets. I try to make a point of using office-provided food to channel meals, snacks, and drinks to the houseless.
\n\nThis trip down memoir lane is all fine and good, even if some of the particulars aren’t necessarily useful anymore. But what does it mean to steal something from work when many people are working from home or out of work entirely?
\n\nIf you still have a job at a physical place and still have access to physical stuff, you can continue to steal. Food, supplies… toilet paper! Take some for yourself, for your friends and family, for your mutual aid network. Don’t just hoard it—everything you pass on to those in need will be returned to you fourfold.
\n\nYou can also steal for others so that they don’t have to. Do it without them knowing, if you think knowing might make them anxious. Cashiers still have the prerogative to selectively miss ringing up items for customers buying supplies during the pandemic. People loading bags of food for delivery can slip in an extra of this or that.
\n\nIf your workplace is now your living room couch, dining room table, or bedroom, there are still ways you can steal something from work.
\n\nIf you’re lucky enough to have “unlimited” paid time off (PTO), then for goodness’ sake, take paid time off! Use it to focus on your physical and mental health. Use it to care for your friends and neighbors. Use it to volunteer in mutual aid projects.
\n\nIf you have flexibility to take some time away from the computer while on the clock, do it! Even if you don’t actually go anywhere, just step away from the computer for a while.
\n\nYou can steal time.
\n\nYou can take time during your workday, between Zoom meetings and Slack channel discussions, to do whatever you want. You can put some time on your calendar as “quiet working hours” to protect your calendar from meeting invitations. You can watch movies, educate yourself, or even write an article for an anarchist website about stealing from work! If you need it, take a nap or stare out the window.
\n\nIt’s OK not to be productive™ in this situation. This time is not simply working remotely. We are working remotely during a global pandemic that has already killed over 100,000 people, an ongoing fascist takeover, and large-scale economic failure. You have permission to forgive yourself for not writing the next King Lear, discovering the next calculus, learning another language, or mastering a musical instrument.
\n\nIf you want to do these things, you should. If not, that’s OK too. Just take care of yourself out there. Remember, your time is the most valuable non-renewable resource that you’ll ever have.
\n\n\n\n\nIf your heart is free, the time you spend is liberated territory. Defend it!
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/04/15/1.jpg\")
\nThe text continues, “The ideal capitalist product would derive its value from the ceaseless unpaid labor of the entire human race. We would be dispensable; it would be indispensable. It would integrate all human activity into a single unified terrain, accessible only via additional corporate products, in which sweatshop and marketplace merged.” Now we are seeing sweatshop, office, and even bedroom merged. ↩
\nReminiscences of Xelîl, a friend we lost last year.
\n\nIn October 2012, we organized a lecture tour through Germany on the occasion of the publication of the book Message in a Bottle, a collection of CrimethInc. texts in German. The planning escalated quickly; it became a total of 45 events throughout Northern Europe within less than 2 months.
\n\nI was on the road for two weeks of the tour. We did 13 events on 13 days—mostly in Germany, but also in Holland and Belgium. Before the tour, I only knew the other two presenters via mail.
\n\nIt was an intense tour, full of adventures and meaningful discussions that produced new friendships and connections between communities. Everywhere we went, the venues were full and the conversations went on until late at night. Between events, we visited historic sites, took city tours, climbed onto rooftops, danced at wild parties, and finally hurried to the next event just in time.
\n\nOn one of those evenings, when we were discussing the basic questions—”What do we mean when we say that we are anarchists? What is our overarching strategy against capitalism?”—I got to know Xelîl, who was going by another name in those days. It was one of the many meaningful encounters on that tour, one of the moments that remained in our memories.
\n\nAfter the discussion, we ended up in an activist collective in which private property was limited to small boxes and which was otherwise based on shared self-organization. We felt at home there immediately.
\n\nWe sat half the night at the kitchen table. I was drinking wine; I don’t remember if Xelîl drank too. I was impressed by his knowledge of texts from Adorno to Foucault to current CrimethInc. texts and how eagerly and tirelessly he tried to combine the approaches, to find similarities. Reading his obituary in Lower Class Magazine, in which Peter Schaber writes, “He belonged to those people who are constantly driven by the very big questions,” I immediately recalled that encounter.
\n\nXelîl offered to work directly on future translations - and so he became part of the crew that also translated Work. We owe the first 30 pages of the German translation to him.
\n\nThe introduction describes much of what we discussed that night in 2012:
\n\n\n\n\n“At any time, we could all stop paying rent, mortgages, taxes, utilities; they would be powerless against us if we all quit at once. At any time, we could all stop going to work or school—or go to them and refuse to obey orders or leave the premises, instead turning them into community centers. At any time, we could tear up our IDs, take the license plates off our cars, cut down security cameras, burn money, throw away our wallets, and assemble cooperative associations to produce and distribute everything we need.
\n\n“Whenever my shift drags, I find myself thinking about this stuff. Am I really the only person who’s ever had this idea? I can imagine all the usual objections, but you can bet if it took off in some part of the world everybody else would get in on it quick. Think of the unspeakable ways we’re all wasting our lives instead. What would it take to get that chain reaction started? Where do I go to meet people who don’t just hate their jobs, but are ready to be done with work once and for all?”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/09/07/5.jpg\")
Xelîl on the trail of the revolution in Latin America.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/09/07/6.jpg\")
Xelîl’s first band, Unknown Artists.
\nWe stayed in loose contact after working on Work together. Xelîl was one of the first to explain the “new paradigm” of the Kurdish movement to me, inviting me to reconsider my previous concerns about the Kurdish movement and to engage with Abdullah Öcalan’s idea. I remained skeptical, but if I had not been talking with Xelîl and other friends we would not have been able to send Öcalan’s writings and material expressing solidarity with the Kurdish movement to our local bookstore so early. “In a few years, he managed to connect many people and movements with the liberation movement and to build bridges,” proclaims the eulogy published by Internationalist Commune. I can only agree with that.
\n\nIn 2015, we met again at an information event about the struggle in Kurdistan at which Xelîl reported on his trip to Bakur. After the event, we sat together once again in the living room, talking until early in the morning. There were many things we didn’t agree on, but we were united by the determination to combine struggles and theories, to create something new, to break the mold and depart from the old paths that had led to dead ends. It was an enriching conversation, an example of the sort of respective and productive debating culture that many people wish was more common. When Xelîl polemicized against Western individualism, citing Öcalan, I confronted him with the ideas of Max Stirner; we got into a debate about autonomy, the individual, and the importance of revolutionary politics. Shortly afterwards, we lost contact, but even today, the memory of that night remains clear in my mind.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/09/07/3.jpg\")
Xelîl traveling in Mexico.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/09/07/4.jpg\")
Xelîl visiting Oaxaca, Mexico.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/09/07/1.jpg\")
Xelîl in Kurdistan.
\nToday, I read his text about “revolutionary leadership.” It contains so much that I would like to argue about with him and also some things I would have liked to ask about. “The seeds that Heval Bager has sown on his many travels have begun to germinate and sprout everywhere,” reads the aforementioned eulogy. Hopefully, the seeds he sowed will not only open up in his theory, but also in creating the conditions for discussion and productive struggle.
\n\nCrimethInc. published the interview “From Germany to Bakur” in 2015. Xelîl took part in composing the answers. In response to a question about the Kurdish form of struggle, he wrote:
\n\n\n\n\n“Let me share a story that a friend once told me. He took part in the Qandil war in 2011. At that time, there was a pragmatic alliance between Turkey and Iran: both had a problem with the Kurdish movement, and were afraid of the military opportunities the guerrillas had. Qandil forms the southern end of the Mediya Defense Territories, the guerrilla-controlled mountains in the border regions of Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. He told me about a situation when one and a half thousand pasdaran, the Iran infantry regiments, tried to storm the hill where the guerrillas were hiding. There were only about thirty comrades defending their mountain. He explained that what the Iranian army tried to use against them were just their bullets, and their fear of punishment from their leaders. They ran blindly upwards, and were defeated. They had no conviction, no energy, no friendship between them. On the other hand, when his comrades defended their position, they didn’t just use their weapons, he told me. They were fighting for their looted villages, for their split families, with their fallen friends in mind, with the consciousness that the attacking army would burn the mountains and forests behind them and destroy the nature in their lands. They fought for those who were too weak to stand alone, for all the parts of society who stood behind them and had their back. Maybe it’s hard to understand if you didn’t feel it yourself. But their energy was backed by a long line of friends, historically experienced oppression, mutual protection—a love for life and a belief in themselves.
\n\n“All these things come first, he said, when you’re sitting next to your friends in your guard position and raising your arms in defense: your trust in your comrades, your gratitude for those who believe in a free society living in the valleys, for the ones who cultivate the gardens feeding you, your sadness about the horrors the state did to your friends and families. And in the end, there’s the bullet you shoot at the ones stumbling in your direction. How could they possibly win, he asked, smiling.”
\n
In these lines, we see his admiration and appreciation for the guerrillas in the Mediya defense areas where Xelîl was murdered by the Turkish Air Force in December 2018. He was serving in the ranks of the HPG (Hêzên Parastina Gel, People’s Defense Forces).
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/09/07/sehit-bager.jpg\")
\nIn the Kurdish movement, it is said, Şehîd namirin—the dead are immortal. It’s true, martyrs are immortal—but this is true not only of those who died in battle, but also of all who act in search of their full potential, who are seekers on the trail of life, looking for escape routes for all of us out of the global catastrophe that is unfolding today. Xelîl has left behind traces that have made him and his thoughts unforgettable.
\n\nThe Struggle Is Not for Martyrdom, but for Life
\n\nWe’ve reprinted two of our classic books, Work (2011) and Expect Resistance (2007). These books still have a lot to offer today and we’re excited to keep them in circulation. If you haven’t read them yet, here is your chance.
\n\nWork presents a schematic analysis of how a profit-driven society distributes power and agency, exploring the ways that the economy has shifted since the age of industrialism and the Fordist compromise and proposing how we might update our strategies for anti-capitalist resistance. This book is one of the few popularly accessible efforts to update anti-capitalist analysis from the dusty Marxist models of the 19th century. If you want to understand why unions have not been able to stabilize wages for two generations, why neoliberal globalization prevents governments from enacting reforms without immediate negative consequences via the financial market, how labor movements that originally fought for the liberation from work were coopted into preserving and stabilizing the capitalist system, and what it would take to abolish capitalism once and for all—this is the book for you.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/06/11/8.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/06/11/10.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/06/11/2.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/06/11/1.jpg\")
\nExpect Resistance is one of the most ambitious and beautiful projects we’ve ever undertaken. It combines a novel that allegorically recounts our experiences from the rise of the so-called “anti-globalization movement” to the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq with a wide range of anarchist theory, analysis, and art.
\n\nThe red text tells a story; the black text presents a critique of all the different forms of alienation, confinement, and coercion in our everyday lives and points the way to a resilient struggle for collective liberation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/06/11/9.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/06/11/5.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/06/11/4.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/06/11/3.jpg\")
\nTo learn more about Expect Resistance, consult this whimsical reviewer’s guide from 2008.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/06/11/7.jpg\")
The books in production.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/06/11/6.jpg\")
The reprints in transit.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/06/11/n8_3b.jpg\")
A copy of Expect Resistance at a research station in Antarctica in 2008.
\nThis year, to observe Steal Something from Work Day, we present three stories of ordinary workplace resistance. In the first, an employer seeking to cheat minimum-wage employees is outsmarted by an employee who secretly evens the score for the workers. In the second, a proponent of healthy eating smuggles a crucial implement out of a high-security situation. In the last one, a Steal Something from Work Day epic, two low-wage workers—one dressed as “McGruff the Crime Dog“—sneak into a hockey game in a surrealistic example of what our exploiters call “time theft.” We take great joy in celebrating the everyday heroism and good humor with which workers stand up for themselves and assert their dignity in the face of a dehumanizing system.
\n\nEmployers see workplace theft as a major threat to their profits, if not to the stability of the order that enables them to profit. Traditional doctrinaire socialists ignore it or regard it as a pressure valve that ensures the continued functioning of capitalism, alleging that rather than organizing for the revolutionary seizure of the means of production, employee thieves try to solve their problems on an individual basis.
\n\nBut we should approach workplace theft as a point of departure for a better world. This widespread phenomenon illustrates how many people don’t actually buy into the social constructs that sustain the current order. Even if theft does play a role in the continued functioning of capitalism—for example, by sustaining workers who could not subsist on their meager salaries alone—it can only serve that function if it takes place in secret, individualistically. When we celebrate it, when we create public forums in which to compare notes and reinforce the shared conviction that we all deserve better than this, we transform isolated acts of rebellion and survival into a basis for the kind of collective revolt that can never be reintegrated into the preservation of the status quo.
\n\nWe honor the courage of those who refuse to be exploited, of those who seek to even the score. Let’s find each other and take action together.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/if-you-dont-steal-from-your-boss/if-you-dont-steal-from-your-boss_front_black_and_white.jpg\")
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\nI live on the border of two states with extremely different minimum wage laws. I worked for a company that moved over the border from the state with the higher (though still not sufficient) minimum wage to the other state. We were able to keep our jobs but we had to take a pay cut. Meanwhile, the boss bought a new house in California and kept her house here as well.
\n\nDuring the process of the move, I happened to find a Post-It note with the admin credentials to the payroll system. Every week for the few months I stayed on after the move, I gave myself and my coworkers a few extra hours of pay to make up for the money they were trying to save.
\n\nNothing happened to me. And it felt like a good deed.
\n\nI just wanted to share my story for Steal Something from Work Day.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/04/15/3.jpg\")
\nThe morning smoothie is an important tradition at our house. Some grocery stores in our town donate food they would otherwise throw away to the church up the street, and if you get there at the end of distribution process you can lay claim to whatever is left over before it becomes hog food. This gives us access to vast amounts of fruit, which is all well on its way out by the time we get our hands on it. To preserve what’s left, we dehydrate and freeze all we can salvage. The morning smoothie is a joyous celebration of this bounty.
\n\nOf course, this plan relies on one piece of essential equipment: the blender. And there came a time when our blender’s future was in question. It had served us dutifully and well; many a frozen banana had met a cruel fate in its gnashing maw. But its time had come to pass on to Valhalla, where it would chew strawberries thrice the size of those in our mortal realm all day and be lovingly soaped and rinsed by Valkyries all night. We all saw its end coming—we could hear the gears grinding. But miserly bunch that we were, we were leaving our next blender—and therefore the future of our house culture—to luck, the invisible hand of the Really Really Free market, or our own future cunning.
\n\nAt the time, I worked on a ship and was finishing a two-month stint away from home. The day I was leaving was chaotic: we were receiving a truckload of new supplies and preparing for the next voyage. Typically, when we load supplies, we form a human chain and pass boxes deep into the bowels of the ship. On this day, I was located in the part of the chain where I was passing thirty-pound boxes of engine parts past the door to the galley (that’s ship talk for kitchen).
\n\nIn plain view, on the counter, mere feet away, was the blender.
\n\nTo protect the identity of this machine, lets call it the NutriStir. I had watched this sleek example of engineering prowess do things our warrior back home could only dream of. At home, we’d present our blender with a daunting task and often it would need assistance to accomplish the feats we asked of it. We’d have to stop it, stir the contents around, fish them out, chop them finer, and generally give the old battle-scarred veteran a leg up. The NutriStir, by contrast, made quick work of everything thrown into it. I had never see it even twitch at a job, no matter how formidable. If we had a blender like that, I thought to myself, our lives would be revolutionized.
\n\nNow, it’s common knowledge in shoplifters’ lore that it isn’t a good idea to steal from a place you can’t escape from. Trains, airports, ferries, and the like don’t offer you a way out; you’re in a closed population of suspects if suspicions arise. I admit it: despite knowing that it’s a bad idea, I love stealing from these places. These closed environments enable our exploiters to charge us exorbitantly more than they could if we had alternatives. I’m offended by these case studies in capitalist logic.
\n\nThat said, it’s especially dangerous to steal on a boat. And a blender is not a small item: I couldn’t just pocket it and walk away. To get it to my room, for instance, I’d have to pass through many different spaces full of my coworkers, some of whom I knew I couldn’t trust, and into a room I shared with two other people. In only a few hours, I would leave the boat to catch my bus out. I thought about it all day, but no solution occurred to me. In my experience, a good theft demands either meticulous planning or a lightning flash of opportunity.
\n\nBut then I was tasked with taking care of a stack of dirty towels.
\n\nIn order to get to the laundry room, I had to pass by the galley. Looking through the doorway, I saw that it was empty. I ducked in and threw the towels over the coveted blender. Then I washed my hands in the sink so I would have an excuse if someone had seen me walk into the galley and happened to follow me in. In what felt like a slick move but probably looked extremely awkward, I picked up the towels and unplugged the blender underneath them. I carried my bounty to the laundry room and set down the heap in the corner, hoping to return before anyone else went to put them in the washer.
\n\nThen it was time to leave the boat. I packed my bags and said my goodbyes. My hidden treasure lay in the last room I would pass through on my way out. I was hoping to walk in, deftly put the blender in my backpack, and be on my way with no one the wiser.
\n\nAn empty room would have been ideal. But one of my coworkers, a notable slacker, was hiding in the laundry room watching videos on his phone to avoid working. I hadn’t really come with an excuse prepared, nor could I imagine one that would make sense. “Oh, just left a sock in this pile of dirty towels.” “I can’t find my charger, so I’m checking everywhere.” I could gamble on trusting my coworker, but it was a gamble I didn’t want to take.
\n\n“Hi,” I said. He had headphones in and didn’t lift his eyes from his phone.
\n\nOften on boats, there is very little privacy. To cope with those conditions, we create our own little bubbles and focus on whatever tiny spaces of mental freedom we can arrange. In the crew lounge, it’s not uncommon to see one person watching a loud movie while another is intently reading and yet another is having a phone conversation a few feet away. I walked in, sorted through the towels, stuffed the blender in my backpack, and walked out. I feel confident my coworker didn’t even register that I had entered the room.
\n\nI arrived home victorious and proud. We had the nicest blender on our block. It effortlessly minced concoctions that would have destroyed our previous blender. It’s been well over a year since I brought home this new addition to our family, and I get a tinge of joy every time I hear it grinding away.
\n\nSometimes I wonder what they thought when they discovered that the NutriStir was missing. There weren’t many places it could have gone. There really was no logical explanation other than what happened. Despite the fact that gossip on ships spreads fast and inflates fairly benign dramas to extraordinary levels, I never heard a word about it. I think the most likely answer is that they saw that it wasn’t there, pulled out a spare, and went on with the workday.
\n\nOur blender likely has a few years left in it. But if it starts to falter, the ship I work on now has an even nicer blender, waiting to be liberated.
\n\nWhen life gives you lemons… get revenge.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/04/15/2.jpg\")
\nThe National Museum of Crime and Punishment. I was an anarchist working at the National Museum of Crime and fucking Punishment.
\n\nDon’t let the name fool you. Though located in Washington, DC, it wasn’t a “national” museum in the same sense as the Smithsonian—it was a private collection of chintzy memorabilia and copaganda. The museum exhibited a life-size prison cell, a self-directed polygraph test, and a chronology of the evolution of crowd control weapons—cheap exhibits that could only fascinate a class of people entirely unacquainted with police and carceral violence… and as luck would have it, that’s precisely the class of people who could afford the $25 admission! The crime section of the museum actually had some cool stuff—daring prison breaks, bank robberies, piracy old and new, and no less than a dozen anarchists scattered throughout. But that’s not what the bootlicker clientele came for. The big hits were the police training simulators, “The Cop Shop” (the gift shop—apart from the lobby, the only part of the museum free to the public), and last but, by definition, not least, the America’s Most Wanted television studio.
\n\nSo what the fuck was an anarchist like myself doing there? It wasn’t because it paid well, that’s for sure.
\n\n\n\n\n“Actors! Looking to build your resume? Need a job with a flexible schedule? A new, one-of-a-kind museum is coming to Washington, DC and we are looking for ACTORS to help promote it. Commission bonuses available!”
\n
The Craigslist ad was for actors. I had recently aged out of a youth-empowerment/anti-oppression theater group1 that had changed my life and I was looking to fill the void its absence left in me.
\n\nI even did a half hour of diction exercises before the interview, not knowing if there would be a proper audition as well. As it turned out, the “acting” they needed was dressing up either in an orange prison jumpsuit or as McGruff the Crime Dog in order to draw tourists over to a coupon-monger. The coupons were for a discount of one dollar. One miserable dollar from the twenty-five dollar admission. In other words, touristy bullshit—definitely not acting. But hey, I needed the money, y’know, “until something better comes along.” Jobs are such shit. An endless impotent vow to myself to never again suffer that kind of humiliation just gives way to a readjustment (read: lowering) of expectations and self-worth. What else can one do? No, that’s not a rhetorical question. What else? That is the most important question our generation has to answer.2
\n\nBut hey, at least I wasn’t the only sucker. A friend of mine—who I’ll call Zoe—from the youth-empowerment theater group also showed up, thinking, like we all did, that it was a more dignified résumé-builder than dressing up as a prisoner or McGruff the fucking Crime Dog.
\n\nThe museum opened right before summer, which is the big tourist season in DC, but it was already sweltering. DC residents like to say the city was built on top of a swamp—hence the “drain the swamp” chant. That’s a myth, but it’s believable, given how insanely humid it gets.
\n\nOn one particularly moist and muggy afternoon, I was handing out coupons while Zoe, dressed as McGruff, worked the passing pedestrians on the street. There were legions of them because, just a block away, the hometown hockey team was playing in the Stanley Cup semifinals. White suburbanites, sweating in their Capitals jerseys, rushed past us to get to the game, without time or attention to spare for my half-hearted sales pitch. The few that did engage with us were mostly drunk and exclusively stopped to challenge McGruff to a fight.
\n\nWhy, you ask? During this time, there was a viral news story about an uptown MetroBus driver who, seeing a cop dressed as McGruff, stopped his bus, stepped out, and socked the crime-fighting mascot. The bizarre part of the story is that there wasn’t much more to it than that. No past grudges, not even much of an explanation—just plain old prole-on-police violence. What’s not to love?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/04/15/1.jpg\")
\nAs a result, when my coworker worked as McGruff (I unequivocally refused to ever do so), jokers would often approach and say something to the effect that “he oughta watch out.” Normally, it was easy enough to laugh this off and move on, but it was a different story when a crowd of drunken hockey goons began to form around my friend. Breaking character, Zoe took the head off: “I am so over this.”
\n\n“Yeah, I’m sorry about these bozos.”
\n\n“Nah, I don’t care about them. It’s this damn costume. I’m sweating like a bama up in here and I can’t even get the fan to work. I feel like I’m gonna faint.”
\n\nMcGruff’s head was wired with a fan that worked exactly 0% of the time that I was employed at the National Museum of Crime and Punishment.
\n\n“Damn. Yeah, just leave the head off. And if you want I could try getting you some ice from Chipot—”
\n\nStop. The air dropped out of my voice and my eyes went wild. The gears of scheming began to turn in my head. You could say I froze…like… ice.
\n\nIce. Cool. Cold. Ice. Rink. Hockey. Hockey! ICE. HOCKEY. Arena. Sitting. Cold cool sitting. Arena. Mascots. MASCOTS! MCGRUFF!!!
\n\n“No, wait, fuck that, I bet we could get into that hockey game with the McGruff costume.”
\n\nHad it been any other coworker, I don’t think I would have just come out with it. But Zoe and I had been through the theater group together. We came from really different backgrounds and parts of the city, but we had talked about deep shit together—race, oppression, growing up. Still, up to that point, we had never been bad together. My intuition told me that our shared capacity to communicate, both with and without words (for all good actors know that language is not just what we say, but how we say it), would make us good at being bad.
\n\n“Oh my god, you really think so?” She didn’t miss a beat. That’s how I knew she was down.
\n\n“Definitely. I mean, not legitimately, but…”
\n\n“Let’s do it.”
\n\n“The only thing is Matt and Laura…”
\n\nMatt and Laura. Matt and fucking Laura: our managers. About once per shift, one of them would find us on the street and “check up on us,” pretending like they were seeing if we “needed anything,” but both parties knew they were making sure we weren’t stealing back time while on the clock. If they rolled through and couldn’t find us, we’d have to sit through some patronizing interrogation. Fuck Matt and Laura.
\n\n“Fuck Matt and Laura. Oh wait, shit.”
\n\n“What?”
\n\nMatt’s voice startled me and I whipped around a little too fast. Did I betray our coworkerly conspiring? Is there a fucking YouTube channel or something where managers watch tutorials about how to creep up on you out of nowhere? They’re all so fucking good at it.
\n\n“Hey you two! Just wanted to check up and see if you needed anything!”
\n\nMy eyes blurred, tearing up with all the effort it took to keep them from rolling. Luckily, it was a bright day, and my look came off more like a sun-squint than a glower.
\n\n“Oh, yeah, we’re all good.”
\n\nLaura piped in: “Looks like you’re doing a great job out here. Zoe, one thing, the McGruff costume just doesn’t work without the head, I know it’s hot, but maybe you could just stand in the shade?”
\n\nWe were saving all the shade for you, Laura.
\n\nWhen my eyes came back into focus, I realized Matt and Laura were both wearing Capitals’ jerseys.
\n\n“So glad we bumped into you two. We won’t be back for a couple hours, so if you need anything just talk to Brock, ok? Keep up the great work!”
\n\nBrock, the security guard. Brock the Pet Rock, as we called him behind his back. The name had as much to do with his stone-cold demeanor as with the fact that the man barely ever moved. Neither before nor since have I met someone so apparently content to stare, for hours, straight across a gift shop lobby. We didn’t have to worry about Brock. And we no longer needed to worry about Matt or Laura—they’d be occupied… inside the very fucking place we were about to sneak into, oh shit!
\n\nZoe apparently just didn’t give a fuck. Reasonable, given that the stadium was full of thousands of other people to blend in with—and the job sucked. I was a little nervous now, though.
\n\n“Risky.”
\n\n“What?” Zoe asked.
\n\n“This feels risky, yo. Matt and Laura are going to be in there.”
\n\n“Yeah, but so are twenty thousand other people.”
\n\n“Still feels risky. Let’s take a break and think it over.”
\n\nWith a silent nod to Pet Brock, we were back in the museum soaking in the AC. It was slow inside. Barely any customers. Zoe hit the break room, but I took advantage of the empty museum to admire the crime exhibits on my own. Bandits, outlaws, escapees: I was surrounded by some of life’s greatest risk takers. Compared to their escapades, sneaking into a sports game was small potatoes. But what was the payoff? The criminals whose stories and memorabilia surrounded me (the ones I took inspiration from, at least) were after a life of riches and adventure, or else fighting for their freedom. Me, I was just trying to kill time.
\n\n“Maybe we shouldn’t…” I thought, “Zoe will be disappointed, but to be honest, I kind of need this job.” The pay was shit, but a couple of weeks without it, while searching for a new gig, would have really set me back.
\n\nFrom an enlarged mugshot, Emma Goldman abruptly butted in: “Puritanism is based on the Calvinistic idea that life is a curse, man must do constant penance, must repudiate every natural and healthy impulse, and turn his back on joy and beauty. Our life is stunted by Puritanism, and the latter is killing what is natural and healthy in our impulses.”
\n\n“So, uh, what you’re saying is I should skip work and try sneaking into this game… because it could be joyous and beautiful?”
\n\nSilence. I walked on, glancing back at Emma’s motionless face. She was still icily staring down her captors. Calvinistic Puritanism?
\n\nAs I passed the “Great Trials in American History” section, Albert Parsons addressed me from the Haymarket panel:
\n\n“Break this two-fold yoke in twain!
\nBreak thy want’s enslaving chain!
\nBreak thy slavery’s want and dread;
\nBread is freedom, freedom bread!”
“Okaay… thanks Albert, but I’m all good on bread. Always plenty in the dumpster. But, uh, that was a very inspiring verse. Thanks. Though to be completely honest I’m not really deciding between freedom and slavery, I’m just trying to figure out whether to sneak into this hockey game.”
\n\nOn the gallows, next to Parsons, George Engel interjected, “As water and air are free to all, so should the inventions of scientific men be applied for the benefit of all!”
\n\n“Right… but, like, you mean hockey arenas?”
\n\nNo reply.
\n\nI ambled on through the museum, lost in contemplation. Was this decision so important that the legends of anarchist history felt the need to speak up from beyond the grave and compel me to disobedience and crime? As I mulled it over, I didn’t even realize I was wandering into the “punishment” part of the museum, until I bumped into the glass perimeter. It was the studio of America’s Most Wanted.
\n\nDisplayed behind the glass were the program’s biggest “busts.” The first one to catch my eye was Sarah Jane Olson. I recognized her immediately because we had celebrated the good news of her recent release at our infoshop’s last political prisoner letter-writing night. Olson did time for charges stemming from Symbionese Liberation Army actions in the 1970s, but she had lived underground for decades afterwards—even volunteering at the Arise! bookstore and infoshop in Minneapolis.
\n\n“There you are!”
\n\nZoe. Right. Shit.
\n\n“I’ve been looking all over for you, I even asked Brock. Come on, he’s gonna snitch us out if we stay on break much longer.”
\n\n“Right. So, back to work or…?”
\n\n“What? What about the game? Or are you starting to feel sketchy about it?”
\n\n“Well, I was just thinking…”
\n\nThe glass began to shake. Sarah Jane Olson’s voice broke through, shattering my inhibitions. “I’m with you, and we are with you!” The voices of all our freedom-loving, law-defying, boss-hating forebears rang out, filling the hall with an eerie, deafening hum. As the hum got louder, it filled me with determination. It wasn’t courage—for I was still scared of getting caught—but now I was determined not to live a life of fear, subjugated to the clock and the Sisyphean scam of earning commission. Then the janitor switched off the vacuum.
\n\n“Excuse me. I need to get that spot you’re standing in.”
\n\n“Oh, right, sorry. We were just leaving.”
\n\nOut of the television studio, back through the prison cell replica, past Parsons and the gang, past Emma Goldman, whose eyes, I swear, changed from icy refusal to pedagogical approval as we passed before them. Past Pet Brock, out of the air-conditioned lobby, into the sun. Too much sun and a flower will wilt, but the spell of a warm kiss after a long freeze will bring blossoms.
\n\nI come to life.
\n\n“Okay! Put your head on, don’t say a word, and just follow my lead,” I tell Zoe.
\n\n“Got it!”
\n\nWe walk up to the first open door with a ticket taker. We try just walking in naturally, but the ticket taker stops us: “Excuse me.”
\n\n“Yeah, uh, McGruff here, uh, for a promotional, yeah, you know?” It’s not even a full sentence. And what explanation do I have for accompanying McGruff? Like, this woman is an adult and understands that there is a person inside the costume—why would they need me to walk the mascot around?
\n\nBut the totality of the spectacle is powerful. She ignores McGruff and just speaks to me.
\n\n“The media check-in is at the loading dock.”
\n\n“Oh, right! Yeah, uh, where is that again? My boss forgot to tel—”
\n\n“Fifth Street.”
\n\n“Right, right, okay, cool! Thank you!”
\n\nZoe complains, “Man I gotta walk to Fifth Street in this?” Fifth Street is on the opposite side of the arena. “At least you got time to work on a better line than ‘promotional, yeah, you know?’”
\n\nAt the loading dock sits a bored security guard with a radio on his desk and a men’s fitness magazine in hand.
\n\nTo Zoe, quietly: “Okay remember, let me do the talking.”
\n\nTo the guard, after taking a second to breathe deep and muster all the improv skills I had honed through my years of theater: “Yeah, uh, here’s McGruff, uh, you know, for a um uh promotional, yeah…”
\n\nMy supernatural abilities are expanding today. Not only can I communicate with portraits, but I can sense, without even being able to see through McGruff’s big plush head, that Zoe is staring daggers at me with the sidest eyes ever.
\n\nWithout looking up from his magazine, “Sign here and see the media desk back there to find your registration.”
\n\nFind my registration? Fuck. Well, that definitely won’t be happening. I might have turned back at this point if I were by myself, but there isn’t really a way to discuss the situation with Zoe in front of this security guard. Best to just move forward, like everything is going as expected. I sign for both of us. I sign “McGruff McDogg” for Zoe. Dude doesn’t care, doesn’t even look.
\n\nThe media desk sits about 50 yards down into the bowels of the arena, in front of an elevator. As we walk closer to it, I whisper to Zoe, “Wait, is anybody even back there?”
\n\n“Man, I can’t see that far in this thing.”
\n\n“I don’t think there’s anyone there. Here, walk quickly with me.” But not too quick, lest the first security guard turn around and suspect something’s up.
\n\nWe get to the desk, and I scan the area—there doesn’t seem to be anyone around. There’s definitely some cameras pointed this way. But there are always cameras in places like this, right? Is this a part of the building they would prioritize during an event? It’s definitely a controlled access area, but…
\n\nThe chime of the elevator brings me back. Zoe didn’t hesitate when we got to the desk. She just sidestepped it and called the elevator. Go Zoe! The doors open to reveal a tall man with an ID badge, looking very grumpy, and I immediately offer a jumble of excuses: “Oh sorry we were just making sure our names were here in the book I don’t know what happened to them you see McGruff is doing a promotional, uh, you know, thing, and they told us to sign back here they had our names back there at the entrance so I don’t know where the breakdown in communication was but we’re definitely supposed to—”
\n\n“What floor?”
\n\nSweet relief—he’s the elevator operator! We rush past him into the elevator, before anyone actually shows up at the media desk.
\n\n“I said what floor?”
\n\n“Um…” I scan the numbers “Three?”
\n\nThe doors close. We are lifted into the belly of the beast. Doors open. We’re in.
\n\n“YO!”
\n\n“I know Zoe, I know. We fucking did it. But come on now we need to find a bathroom and get you out of this costume.”
\n\n“What?! No way, man, this shit’s funny. I always wanted to be on the Jumbotron!”
\n\n“Not today, you don’t. Remember, Matt and Laura are here!”
\n\n“Man, fuck them.”
\n\n“Come on, I don’t want to lose my job.”
\n\n“Aight fine.”
\n\nLooking back, I shouldn’t have protested against the costume. I don’t remember how I eventually quit that job, but I would have never forgotten if it had been by giving the bird to my bosses over the Jumbotron.
\n\nIn the bathroom, I think over what to do if we see Matt and Laura. Will I even recognize them? All white people in sports jerseys look the same to me. Maybe I can pass it off like we snuck in here to do some high-volume couponing. The halls are empty, though. It’s the middle of the second period, and the game is tied.
\n\nZoe changing didn’t actually make us less conspicuous. We still had to carry around a giant plush mascot head stuffed with a trench coat, and, worse, we are literally the only two people not wearing hockey jerseys. Everyone is wearing a jersey.
\n\nWe play it safe and go up to the nosebleed seats. But empty seats aren’t as easy to find as I expected. It’s fucking packed, even up here. And for good reason: the game is TENSE. It’s tied 1-1 when we finally take our seats, but almost immediately—SCOOOOOORE! The stadium erupts. Before I know it, Zoe and I are on our feet cheering, though we don’t know whom for.
\n\n“WOOOOOO!!!! What just happened?! I’ve never seen a hockey game.”
\n\n“What! Are you serious, Zoe? Then why did you want to come here?”
\n\n“Are you kidding me? This is way better than work!”
\n\n“Well, uh, I think it was the Capitals, because everyone in here is losing it.”
\n\n“We’re winning!” Some stranger screams in my ear as she hugs me. Yes, we are.
\n\nThe rival team—the Pittsburgh Penguins—start off the third period strong. Two goals right off the bat take away the Capitals’ lead, but it brings suspense back into the game. A fight breaks out on the ice.
\n\n“Yo! They’re just letting those dudes brawl!”
\n\n“Yeah, that’s hockey.”
\n\n“Hell yeah.” Zoe is loving it.
\n\nWith five minutes to go, I start wondering if we should call it and beat everybody to the exit—especially Matt and Laura. But while I’m discussing it with Zoe—SCORE!!!! The Capitals tie it up again. Four minutes left.
\n\n“Aw, fuck it. This is too good.” We stay.
\n\nThe stadium is roaring. The atmosphere is electric. Time slows down for the next four minutes. Not a soul questions whether their tickets were worth what they paid for them. For once during my employment at the National Museum of Crime and Punishment, the calculator in my head stops evaluating whether $8.50/hour is worth what I’m doing with my time. I am more than fine with sneaking in to watch this game and hang with my friend for $8.50/hour. Fuck, this shit is FUN.
\n\nOvertime buzzes in and the crowd is LIT.
\n\nI explain to Zoe, “Overtime in hockey is sudden death.”
\n\n“What’s that?”
\n\n“First goal wins. So as soon as somebody scores we out, okay?”
\n\n“Kay.”
\n\nThe whole crowd is screaming their goddamn heads off. Is that Emma’s voice I hear cheering in the stands? Albert’s too!? And George’s? I can’t tell—I can’t take my eyes off the ice. The ice. This is so much nicer than standing around outside in the heat.
\n\nBam! Pittsburgh scores. All the energy is sucked out of the room. My gaze is hypnotically fixed on the ice, along with forty thousand other eyeballs, disbelieving what we just saw. What the fuck is wrong with me? How did I all of a sudden care about this game? Damn, what a rush…
\n\n“Hey, we gotta go, right?”
\n\nZoe breaks me out of my daze.
\n\n“What? Oh. Yeah.”
\n\nWe bolt, trying to beat the crowd. But, as we were sitting in the highest section, all the floors below us are full of people clogging the exits.
\n\n“Damn, we are definitely stuck. Hopefully we don’t see Matt or Laura.”
\n\n“Hey, why don’t we just hand out coupons right here?” Zoe proposes.
\n\n“What? We’ll get kicked out or something.”
\n\n“So? We’re trying to leave anyway. I’m just saying it’s a bunch of disappointed people who might want something to do now, and we get commission from the coupons, y’know?”
\n\nI agree that she has a point.
\n\n“Alright, yeah, go get changed.”
\n\nThe coupons are flying out of my hands. Everyone’s eager to take their minds off the game. Damn, I should’ve brought more.
\n\nTwo floors down and we’re almost to the exit, when none fucking other than motherfucking Matt breaks away from a conversation and gets in our face, “What are you guys doing in here?!”
\n\n“Uh, when the game ended we rushed in, you know—big crowd, lots of coupons.”
\n\n“No. No, no. Jesus, you can’t just go into a private establishment and solicit. You’re going to get us in trouble. We need a contract to hand stuff out in here! Get out of here, NOW!”
\n\nWe turn around and start for the exits.
\n\n“Hey! And don’t get caught.”
\n\n“You got it, boss.”
\n\nIn practice, this theater group was one of the most functionally anarchist projects I’ve participated in. At the beginning of the season, we established agreements—rather than rules—that only passed if every single cast member agreed to them. For the first half of the season, we took part in long, challenging exercises addressing racism, sexism, heterosexism, and ageism—not only discussing them as abstract concepts but also sharing stories about the impact of oppression on our own lives, whether we faced the brunt of it or wielded privilege. In the second half of the season, we broke into small groups, each of which developed a one-act play based on our stories. These plays were then woven into a collectively written, full-length play. For me, the most transformative part was that whenever a problem came up in the cast—some beef, drama, or cliquing—if it couldn’t be addressed interpersonally, we addressed the conflict openly. The experience of working out problems between people from really different backgrounds, people who probably would never have met if not for this theater project, cemented my conviction that human beings have the capacity to live in societies without authority figures.
\n\nNo one besides myself would have identified as an anarchist or understood anarchism as anything other than Hobbesian chaos. However, through this project, everyone came out armed with the lived experience of collective organizing, consensus process, conflict resolution, and an understanding of power and oppression. While I treasure certain anarchist critical examinations of consensus process, identity politics, and conflict resolution, I lament the lack of attention given to the anarchistic aspects of the ways people often live, albeit by some other name or without a label at all. Everyday practices that reproduce anarchistic values are as important as our wildest revolutionary aspirations, for the latter require fertile ground to grow in—and the former can provide it. ↩
\nYears later, a small scandal emerged over the museum paying black youth to stand outside in orange prison jumpsuits, essentially to entertain tourists. For me, this just illustrates how for targeted populations in a white supremacist society, dependence on a wage and imprisonment in a cage are just different expressions of the same thing—different points on the same continuum of oppression. ↩
\nWhat if nobody worked? Sweatshops would empty out and assembly lines would grind to a halt, at least the ones producing things no one would make voluntarily. Telemarketing would cease. Despicable individuals who only hold sway over others because of wealth and title would have to learn better social skills. Traffic jams would come to an end; so would oil spills. Paper money and job applications would be used as fire starter as people reverted to barter and sharing. Grass and flowers would grow from the cracks in the sidewalk, eventually making way for fruit trees.
\n\nAnd we would all starve to death. But we’re not exactly subsisting on paperwork and performance evaluations, are we? Most of the things we make and do for money are patently irrelevant to our survival—and to what gives life meaning, besides.
\n\nThis text is a selection from Work, our 376-page analysis of contemporary capitalism. It is also available as a pamphlet.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/03/1.jpg\")
\nThat depends on what you mean by “work.” Think about how many people enjoy gardening, fishing, carpentry, cooking, and even computer programming just for their own sake. What if that kind of activity could provide for all our needs?
\n\nFor hundreds of years, people have claimed that technological progress would soon liberate humanity from the need to work. Today we have capabilities our ancestors couldn’t have imagined, but those predictions still haven’t come true. In the US we actually work longer hours than we did a couple generations ago—the poor in order to survive, the rich in order to compete. Others desperately seek employment, hardly enjoying the comfortable leisure all this progress should provide. Despite the talk of recession and the need for austerity measures, corporations are reporting record earnings, the wealthiest are wealthier than ever, and tremendous quantities of goods are produced just to be thrown away. There’s plenty of wealth, but it’s not being used to liberate humanity.
\n\nWhat kind of system simultaneously produces abundance and prevents us from making the most of it? The defenders of the free market argue that there’s no other option—and so long as our society is organized this way, there isn’t.
\n\nYet once upon a time, before time cards and power lunches, everything got done without work. The natural world that provided for our needs hadn’t yet been carved up and privatized. Knowledge and skills weren’t the exclusive domains of licensed experts, held hostage by expensive institutions; time wasn’t divided into productive work and consumptive leisure. We know this because work was invented only a few thousand years ago, but human beings have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. We’re told that life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” back then—but that narrative comes to us from the ones who stamped out that way of life, not the ones who practiced it.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/03/2.jpg\")
\nThis isn’t to say we should go back to the way things used to be, or that we could—only that things don’t have to be the way they are right now. If our distant ancestors could see us today, they’d probably be excited about some of our inventions and horrified by others, but they’d surely be shocked by how we apply them. We built this world with our labor, and without certain obstacles we could surely build a better one. That wouldn’t mean abandoning everything we’ve learned. It would just mean abandoning everything we’ve learned doesn’t work.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/03/3.jpg\")
\nOne can hardly deny that work is productive. Just a couple thousand years of it have dramatically transformed the surface of the earth.
\n\nBut what exactly does it produce? Disposable chopsticks by the billion; laptops and cell phones that are obsolete within a couple years. Miles of waste dumps and tons upon tons of chlorofluorocarbons. Factories that will rust as soon as labor is cheaper elsewhere. Dumpsters full of overstock, while a billion suffer malnutrition; medical treatments only the wealthy can afford; novels and philosophies and art movements most of us just don’t have time for in a society that subordinates desires to profit motives and needs to property rights.
\n\nAnd where do the resources for all this production come from? What happens to the ecosystems and communities that are pillaged and exploited? If work is productive, it’s even more destructive.
\n\nWork doesn’t produce goods out of thin air; it’s not a conjuring act. Rather, it takes raw materials from the biosphere—a common treasury shared by all living things—and transforms them into products animated by the logic of market. For those who see the world in terms of balance sheets, this is an improvement, but the rest of us shouldn’t take their word for it.
\n\nCapitalists and socialists have always taken it for granted that work produces value. Workers have to consider a different possibility—that working uses up value. That’s why the forests and polar ice caps are being consumed alongside the hours of our lives: the aches in our bodies when we come home from work parallel the damage taking place on a global scale.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/03/5.jpg\")
\nWhat should we be producing, if not all this stuff? Well, how about happiness itself? Can we imagine a society in which the primary goal of our activity was to make the most of life, to explore its mysteries, rather than to amass wealth or outflank competition? We would still make material goods in such a society, of course, but not in order to compete for profit. Festivals, feasts, philosophy, romance, creative pursuits, child-rearing, friendship, adventure—can we picture these as the center of life, rather than packed into our spare time?
\n\nToday things are the other way around—our conception of happiness is constructed as a means to stimulate production. Small wonder products are crowding us out of the world.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/03/4.jpg\")
\nWork doesn’t simply create wealth where there was only poverty before. On the contrary, so long as it enriches some at others’ expense, work creates poverty, too, in direct proportion to profit.
\n\nPoverty is not an objective condition, but a relationship produced by unequal distribution of resources. There’s no such thing as poverty in societies in which people share everything. There may be scarcity, but no one is subjected to the indignity of having to go without while others have more than they know what to do with. As profit is accumulated and the minimum threshold of wealth necessary to exert influence in society rises higher and higher, poverty becomes more and more debilitating. It is a form of exile—the cruelest form of exile, for you stay within society while being excluded from it. You can neither participate nor go anywhere else.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/03/6.jpg\")
\nWork doesn’t just create poverty alongside wealth—it concentrates wealth in the hands of a few while spreading poverty far and wide. For every Bill Gates, a million people must live below the poverty line; for every Shell Oil, there has to be a Nigeria. The more we work, the more profit is accumulated from our labor, and the poorer we are compared to our exploiters.
\n\nSo in addition to creating wealth, work makes people poor. This is clear even before we factor in all the other ways work makes us poor: poor in self-determination, poor in free time, poor in health, poor in sense of self beyond our careers and bank accounts, poor in spirit.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/03/7.jpg\")
\n“Cost of living” estimates are misleading—there’s little living going on at all! “Cost of working” is more like it, and it’s not cheap.
\n\nEveryone knows what housecleaners and dishwashers pay for being the backbone of our economy. All the scourges of poverty—addiction, broken families, poor health—are par for the course; the ones who survive these and somehow go on showing up on time are working miracles. Think what they could accomplish if they were free to apply that power to something other than earning profits for their employers!
\n\nWhat about their employers, fortunate to be higher on the pyramid? You would think earning a higher salary would mean having more money and thus more freedom, but it’s not that simple. Every job entails hidden costs: just as a dishwasher has to pay bus fare to and from work every day, a corporate lawyer has to be able to fly anywhere at a moment’s notice, to maintain a country club membership for informal business meetings, to own a small mansion in which to entertain dinner guests that double as clients. This is why it’s so difficult for middle-class workers to save up enough money to quit while they’re ahead and get out of the rat race: trying to get ahead in the economy basically means running in place. At best, you might advance to a fancier treadmill, but you’ll have to run faster to stay on it.
\n\nAnd these merely financial costs of working are the least expensive. In one survey, people of all walks of life were asked how much money they would need to live the life they wanted; from pauper to patrician, they all answered approximately double whatever their current income was. So not only is money costly to obtain, but, like any addictive drug, it’s less and less fulfilling! And the further up you get in the hierarchy, the more you have to fight to hold your place. The wealthy executive must abandon his unruly passions and his conscience, must convince himself that he deserves more than the unfortunates whose labor provides for his comfort, must smother his every impulse to question, to share, to imagine himself in others’ shoes; if he doesn’t, sooner or later some more ruthless contender replaces him. Both blue-collar and white-collar workers have to kill themselves to keep the jobs that keep them alive; it’s just a question of physical or spiritual destruction.
\n\nThose are the costs we pay individually, but there’s also a global price to pay for all this working. Alongside the environmental costs, there are work-related illnesses, injuries, and deaths: every year we kill people by the thousand to sell hamburgers and health club memberships to the survivors. The US Department of Labor reported that twice as many people suffered fatal work injuries in 2001 as died in the September 11 attacks, and that doesn’t begin to take into account work-related illnesses. Above all, more exorbitant than any other price, there is the cost of never learning how to direct our own lives, never getting the chance to answer or even ask the question of what we would do with our time on this planet if it was up to us. We can never know how much we are giving up by settling for a world in which people are too busy, too poor, or too beaten down to do so.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/03/8.jpg\")
\nWhy work, if it’s so expensive? Everyone knows the answer—there’s no other way to acquire the resources we need to survive, or for that matter to participate in society at all. All the earlier social forms that made other ways of life possible have been eradicated—they were stamped out by conquistadors, slave traders, and corporations that left neither tribe nor tradition nor ecosystem intact. Contrary to capitalist propaganda, free human beings don’t crowd into factories for a pittance if they have other options, not even in return for name brand shoes and software. In working and shopping and paying bills, each of us helps perpetuate the conditions that necessitate these activities. Capitalism exists because we invest everything in it: all our energy and ingenuity in the marketplace, all our resources at the supermarket and in the stock market, all our attention in the media. To be more precise, capitalism exists because our daily activities are it. But would we continue to reproduce it if we felt we had another choice?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/03/9.jpg\")
\nOn the contrary, instead of enabling people to achieve happiness, work fosters the worst kind of self-denial.
\n\nObeying teachers, bosses, the demands of the market—not to mention laws, parents’ expectations, religious scriptures, social norms—we’re conditioned from infancy to put our desires on hold. Following orders becomes an unconscious reflex, whether or not they are in our best interest; deferring to experts becomes second nature.
\n\nSelling our time rather than doing things for their own sake, we come to evaluate our lives on the basis of how much we can get in exchange for them, not what we get out of them. As freelance slaves hawking our lives hour by hour, we think of ourselves as each having a price; the amount of the price becomes our measure of value. In that sense, we become commodities, just like toothpaste and toilet paper. What once was a human being is now an employee, in the same way that what once was a pig is now a pork chop. Our lives disappear, spent like the money for which we trade them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/03/19.jpg\")
\nMost of us have become so used to giving up things that are precious to us that sacrifice has become our only way of expressing that we care about something. We martyr ourselves for ideas, causes, love of one another, even when these are supposed to help us find happiness.
\n\nThere are families, for example, in which people show affection by competing to be the one who gives up the most for the others. Gratification isn’t just delayed, it’s passed on from one generation to the next. The responsibility of finally enjoying all the happiness presumably saved up over years of thankless toil is deferred to the children; yet when they come of age, if they are to be seen as responsible adults, they too must begin working their fingers to the bone.
\n\nBut the buck has to stop somewhere.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/03/10.jpg\")
\nPeople work hard nowadays, that’s for sure. Tying access to resources to market performance has caused unprecedented production and technological progress. Indeed, the market has monopolized access to our own creative capacities to such an extent that many people work not only to survive but also to have something to do. But what kind of initiative does this instill?
\n\nLet’s go back to global warming, one of the most serious crises facing the planet. After decades of denial, politicians and businessmen have finally swung into action to do something about it. And what are they doing? Casting about for ways to cash in! Carbon credits, “clean” coal, “green” investment firms—who believes that these are the most effective way to curb the production of greenhouse gases? It’s ironic that a catastrophe caused by capitalist consumerism can be used to spur more consumption, but it reveals a lot about the kind of initiative work instills. What kind of person, confronted with the task of preventing the end of life on earth, responds, “Sure, but what’s in it for me?”
\n\nIf everything in our society has to be driven by a profit motive to succeed, that might not be initiative after all, but something else. Really taking initiative, initiating new values and new modes of behavior—this is as unthinkable to the enterprising businessman as it is to his most listless employee. What if working—that is, leasing your creative powers to others, whether managers or customers—actually erodes initiative?
\n\nThe evidence for this extends beyond the workplace. How many people who never miss a day of work can’t show up on time for band practice? We can’t keep up with the reading for our book clubs even when we can finish papers for school on time; the things we really want to do with our lives end up at the bottom of the to-do list. The ability to follow through on commitments becomes something outside ourselves, associated with external rewards or punishments.
\n\nImagine a world in which everything people do, they do because they want to, because they are personally invested in bringing it about. For any boss who has struggled to motivate indifferent employees, the idea of working with people who are equally invested in the same projects sounds utopian. But this isn’t proof that nothing would get done without bosses and salaries—it just shows how work saps us of initiative.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/03/11.jpg\")
\nLet’s say your job never injures, poisons, or sickens you. Let’s also take it for granted that the economy doesn’t crash and take your job and savings with it, and that no one who got a worse deal than you manages to hurt or rob you. You still can’t be sure you won’t be downsized. Nowadays nobody works for the same employer his whole life; you work somewhere a few years until they let you go for someone younger and cheaper or outsource your job overseas. You can break your back to prove you’re the best in your field and still end up hung out to dry.
\n\nYou have to count on your employers to make shrewd decisions so they can write your paycheck—they can’t just fritter money away or they won’t have it to pay you. But you never know when that shrewdness will turn against you: the ones you depend on for your livelihood didn’t get where they are by being sentimental. If you’re self-employed, you probably know how fickle the market can be, too.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/03/12.jpg\")
\nWhat could provide real security? Perhaps being part of a long-term community in which people looked out for each other, a community based on mutual assistance rather than financial incentives. And what is one of the chief obstacles to building that kind of community today? Work.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/03/13.jpg\")
\nWho carried out most of the injustices in history? Employees. This is not necessarily to say they are responsible for them—as they would be the first to tell you!
\n\nDoes receiving a wage absolve you of responsibility for your actions? Working seems to foster the impression that it does. The Nuremburg defense—“I was just following orders”—has been the anthem and alibi of millions of employees. This willingness to check one’s conscience at the workplace door—to be, in fact, a mercenary—lies at the root of many of the troubles plaguing our species.
\n\nPeople have done horrible things without orders, too—but not nearly so many horrible things. You can reason with a person who is acting for herself; she acknowledges that she is accountable for her decisions. Employees, on the other hand, can do unimaginably dumb and destructive things while refusing to think about the consequences.
\n\nThe real problem, of course, isn’t employees refusing to take responsibility for their actions—it’s the economic system that makes taking responsibility so prohibitively expensive.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/03/14.jpg\")
\nEmployees dump toxic waste into rivers and oceans.
\n\nEmployees slaughter cows and perform experiments on monkeys.
\n\nEmployees throw away truckloads of food.
\n\nEmployees are destroying the ozone layer.
\n\nThey watch your every move through security cameras.
\n\nThey evict you when you don’t pay your rent.
\n\nThey imprison you when you don’t pay your taxes.
\n\nThey humiliate you when you don’t do your homework or show up to work on time.
\n\nThey enter information about your private life into credit reports and FBI files.
\n\nThey give you speeding tickets and tow your car.
\n\nThey administer standardized exams, juvenile detention centers, and lethal injections.
\n\nThe soldiers who herded people into gas chambers were employees,
\n\nJust like the soldiers occupying Iraq and Afghanistan,
\n\nJust like the suicide bombers who target them—they are employees of God, hoping to be paid in paradise.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/03/15.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/03/16.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/03/17.jpg\")
\nLet’s be clear about this—critiquing work doesn’t mean rejecting labor, effort, ambition, or commitment. It doesn’t mean demanding that everything be fun or easy. Fighting against the forces that compel us to work is hard work. Laziness is not the alternative to work, though it might be a byproduct of it.
\n\nThe bottom line is simple: all of us deserve to make the most of our potential as we see fit, to be the masters of our own destinies. Being forced to sell these things away to survive is tragic and humiliating. We don’t have to live like this.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2018/04/15/steal-something-from-work-day-2018-three-stories-of-employees-reclaiming-what-is-theirs", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2018/04/15/steal-something-from-work-day-2018-three-stories-of-employees-reclaiming-what-is-theirs", "title": "Steal Something from Work Day 2018 : Three Stories of Employees Reclaiming What Is Theirs", "summary": "April 15 is annual Steal Something from Work Day! We celebrate with a video of workers promoting the holiday in Sweden and two dramatic narratives of workers settling the score.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/15/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/15/header.jpg", "date_published": "2018-04-15T09:50:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:36Z", "tags": [ "Work", "banner drop", "Steal Something from Work Day" ], "content_html": "April 15 is annual Steal Something from Work Day. Today, whether we like it or not, millions of employees around the world are stealing from their employers in a desperate bid to slow the process that is steadily expanding the gap between those who labor and those who profit. (Yes, even on a Sunday.) That makes it a good day to reflect on workplace theft. If you are confused about why people steal from their employers, review the Steal Something from Work Day FAQ or our colleagues’ text, How to Justify Workplace Theft. On the other hand, if you simply want to savor a few pulpy stories about workers who set out to get even, we’ve got just the thing for you.
\n\nMind you, we don’t endorse any of the following behavior. We’re not trying to persuade you to drop a banner or engage in some kind of illegal activity! What we’d like to see happen is for those who violently impose the prevailing system of property and profit on the rest of us to think better of what they’re doing and help us create a world in which stealing from work will be impossible because there are no such things as property, work, or theft. Change their hearts and minds! Failing that, we hope you’ll enjoy the following (surely fictitious!) tales of risk and reclamation.
\n\nFor more resources and other such stories, consult past Steal Something from Work Day commemorations:
\n\nSno-Från-Jobbet-Dagen: The banner reads “Your job is eating you up—Steal a little back!” The line of the advertisement still visible below it urges “Don’t let pollen stop you this year.”
\nWe received this anonymous video from somewhere in Sweden, where enterprising rebels celebrated Steal Something from Work Day 2018 a couple days early by promoting it to their fellow workers.
\n\nYou can also read about Steal Something from Work Day in German and a variety of other languages.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/15/1.jpg\")
\nIn the repertoire of punk jobs there used to be a job known as poster tour. Many people who have spent a little time on college campuses can conjure a memory of this traveling spectacle. Picture it: a company orders absurd quantities of posters from overseas and sends forth its minions to market them to the gaping voids of personality that are the college students of America. The premise is that these first-year students, lost in the sea of their future, will desperately cling to any kind of material affirmation money can buy—to be specific, by adorning their dismally blank walls with beautiful portraits of the complex identities they’ve laboriously constructed throughout their lives.
\n\nBy and large, the students’ poster selections involve a constellation of beer pong, action movies, bikini babes, the ever-present visage of Bob Marley, and some poem about Jesus.
\n\nThe life skills needed for this job are similar to those required for other facets of the punk lifestyle, especially for anyone who has been on any other kind of tour. You wake up and eat a sorry excuse for a hotel breakfast, then get in a van and navigate to an unfamiliar destination; the host of the sale might meet you to introduce you to your venue (the requirements for the role of host do not include being available, being present, having any idea what’s going on, or being sober); you set up your poster sale, painstakingly facilitate access to it, and watch the clock until the event is over. Then you break down the sale, head to the cheapest motel the company could possibly find for you, fill out a bunch of paperwork, and cry yourself to sleep. Repeat this the next day, and the next, and the next—for six weeks.
\n\nThe job attracted outliers from several sections of society. The largest faction, due to the connections of our subculture and the viral nature of our relationship to employment, was the punks. Besides us, there was a smattering of hippies, weirdos, a few wild cards (including some non-subcultural, seemingly successful people), and a healthy portion of Europeans. People from the last category were in a unique circumstance. Through shady outreach efforts and middlemen, they were promised gainful employment in the USA—at a price, of course. The company made sure that the workers’ profits were drained from what they owed to the company for securing their employment, as many companies do.
\n\nTo top it off, we were tasked with selling the drivel of American culture. In rural Kansas, I watched as a dumbfounded Czech person was asked about the TV show Friends. Then the confused college student asked his companion, “Why are there Russians on campus?”
\n\nIt goes without saying: the system was rigged. The company set projections of how much they expected you should sell; you wouldn’t get paid above a meager daily base rate unless you sold more than their projections. It was an easy way to motivate workers while making sure they could never get ahead. The workers were instilled with the desire to work harder in order to reach their projections and make more money via commission, while the company set the numbers high enough that the workers could rarely make a profit—yet in the company’s logic, the workers could only blame themselves for this failure.
\n\nIt was obvious from the get-go that playing by their rules wouldn’t get us anywhere. We needed to create a new landscape if we wanted to take advantage of this opportunity that was taking advantage of us.
\n\nThe first step is always to get organized. At orientation, we exchanged contacts, made friendships, and vetted each other for trust. Mixing fun and subversion, someone uploaded a bingo board to a blog and shared the login passcode with others. (This whole story precedes smart phones.) The idea was that this would help us to keep in touch and allow us to report our winnings.
\n\nThe squares on the board included a fun mix of communal misery (crying yourself to sleep, an\neasy square to win), impossibilities (going a day without selling a Bob Marley poster, which was never achieved by any team), hijinx (selling cute monkey posters to really tough sports bros), and bad behavior (going skinny dipping, drunk dialing the boss, meeting with other poster teams on tour). The blog served as a break room for us to gripe about our working conditions, share tricks, and foster a work environment that would be increasingly hostile to our employers.
\n\nWe showcased our commitment to slacking and time theft front and center. This was such a pillar of\nour work culture that there was no place for people who weren’t slacking and boasting about it. With the help of the blog, every day became a competition to see who could commit the most outlandish offense to the job. At the same time, the blog also helped us share information which enabled us to work out how much profit we were making for the company: with over 50 teams at work, we were making the company about a million dollars a week.
\n\nWe tried to organize a strike. Unfortunately, in the end, the strike did not really come together and the team who was leading it decided just to quit. Quitting seemed like the best option—until we learned what happened when you quit: the company had all kinds of sly rules to ensure that you lost your earnings if you quit prematurely. Worse still, you might end up owing the company money afterwards! The team that quit ended up having to hitchhike out of the company office, as a final insult to the work they had done already.
\n\nThis incident transformed our small-time scheming into war. We had already been telling each other how to pull the small scams we all depended on to stay afloat while working. The company gave us a small stipend for food, so we used our food stamps and pocketed the money. The company paid for hotels, so we would camp or stay with friends and pocket the money. The company allowed for a percentage of shrinkage, so we made sure that a percentage of posters “disappeared” and pocketed the money. Teams got creative: one bought a bunch of their own merchandise and sold it alongside the merchandise provided by the company. They weren’t found out until a college contacted the company to say that it was not OK for them to be selling “all this marijuana merchandise.”
\n\nThe company noticed our sales weren’t meeting their projections, so they authorized us to have a 20% off sale. We charged full price and kept the extra 20%. When you’re in this mindset, the ball just keeps rolling.
\n\nIn a Super 8 motel, I began to toy with a new idea. We dealt with lots of cash. How do you make more cash out of cash?
\n\nThe answer hit me the next day as we drove by a riverboat casino: gambling.
\n\nObviously, this was a bad idea. Countless movies, crime novels, and real-life disasters start this way. Still, we passionately hated the company, we shared an affirming and subversive worker culture, and we had already gotten away with a lot. The fact that it was a bad idea was what made it so appealing: workers at terrible jobs are always looking for something self-destructive to do that might just take the whole enterprise down with them.
\n\nThere was one problem—I knew nothing about gambling. I sat in the motel for hours scribbling out math and probability problems, the way so many people have done in motels near casinos. The prudent gambler would have consulted proper sources via the internet or the library, as many people have written extensively on gambling tactics. But I was motivated and in my zone, and after a few days of neglecting the duties of the job, I had worked out my plan.
\n\nI won’t get into the mechanics of the plan; I wouldn’t want to bore the reader or showcase its obvious flaws. Let’s just say I came up with a strategy that felt safe as long as I would be working with a large amount of cash.
\n\nTo play it safe, I did a test run with some of the money I had earned already. I was really nervous—taking risks with money is completely contrary to my character. I also hadn’t been to casinos, so it was terrifying to watch people lose hundreds and thousands of dollars in seconds. I watched a\ncouple who had just gotten married earlier that day, still in their wedding attire, lose more money than I was slated to make all year in less than an hour. I wasn’t cut out for this.
\n\nStill, I persevered, comforting myself with the thought that if I lost my own money, I’d just take it from the company and figure out some way to get away with it. Sure enough, a nerve-wracking hour or so later, I had more than doubled my initial bet. Like many gambling strategies, it worked in the short term.
\n\nThe next day just happened to be an anniversary dear to jingoistic patriots. It always feels appropriate to do something irreverent to capitalism and America on such a day. We went into the casino, a battlefield of flashing lights and singing machines desperately fighting to keep you feeling like a winner while draining all of the life and money out of you. I’d heard that when you’re gambling, it’s important to have a stopping point—a goal you set beforehand to keep yourself in check in case the desperation of losing or the elation of winning takes over. I won’t disclose the numbers, but with the pretty penny squeezed out of all those Bob Marley posters in my hand, I set out to make ten times the amount I walked in with.
\n\nIn casinos, they don’t want you to stop gambling. They offer free drinks to gamblers, free food, members-only areas, concerts, shirts, stickers, and all sorts of other useless crap to assure you that you’re a winner in hopes that you’ll go on gambling until you’ve lost it all. I couldn’t fall victim to this nonsense; I had a scheme supported by math problems I did on napkins. It was mechanical, cold, exacting, and required the coolheaded rejection of any kind of victory-induced excitement that could tempt me to stray from my path.
\n\nDealer after dealer watched me make the same tactical choices, unfazed by the results. While most gamblers would think about their next bets and take time to place them, I had already done my thinking and was simply executing a strategy. I didn’t take any of the free alcohol; I gave it to my tour buddy, who intelligently decided not to participate in my harebrained scheme. Like a rising flood, my winnings slowly grew while I watched other gamblers win and lose thousands of dollars around\nme. After a full day of what must be called work, I achieved my goal. I had taken company money and made tenfold what I put in.
\n\nI experienced none of the feelings I project to be associated with gambling—I felt no elation, no highs and lows, no sense that my good fortune would enable me to steal the wealth of the casino. I did a math problem and it worked long enough for me to quit while I was ahead. Having reached my self-prescribed goal, I was free to revel in all the benefits that the riverboat casino had to offer. We enjoyed all the free bowling we could handle, ate free hot dog after free hot dog, and danced with middle-aged day-drunk casino goers to a band of older men doing a cover of “What I Got” by Sublime (with several additional gratuitous saxophone solos).
\n\nThe money I made came and went, as money does. But the feeling of getting yet another one over on the company that had engineered nothing but failure for its workers is something that I’ll carry with me forever. It reminds me that if I divert the energy and time that my bosses want me to invest in the job towards the more strategic goal of subverting my workplace, my fellow employees and I will come out ahead.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/15/2.jpg\")
\nOn March 30, 2018, longtime anarchist and author Paul Z. Simons passed away. Paul was a determined rebel and illegalist; his writing is both lively and erudite. He published an article entitled “Take Things from Work” in Black Eye, a journal he helped edit some three decades ago. More recently, in “Illegalist Praxis: Notes on a Decade of Crime,” he outlined his own experiences stealing from work as a young person.
\n\nBear in mind that Paul was writing about a different era, when surveillance cameras were less of a concern. But you’re not the sort of person who would consider doing what he’s describing, anyway, are you?
\n\n\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2018/04/13/resources-for-steal-something-from-work-day-2018-posters-stickers-and-more", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2018/04/13/resources-for-steal-something-from-work-day-2018-posters-stickers-and-more", "title": "Resources for Steal Something from Work Day 2018 : Posters, Stickers, and More", "summary": "Steal Something from Work Day is right around the corner! We offer posters, stickers, and other resources with which to promote it. So long as there are capitalists, make every profit cost them!", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/13/header1.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/13/header1.jpg", "date_published": "2018-04-13T16:55:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:36Z", "tags": [ "Work", "Steal Something from Work Day" ], "content_html": "Before I begin, a disclaimer or two. First, I never knowingly physically harmed anyone. Second, most of my criminal activities were driven by survival, in some cases by desperation.
\n\nA quick philosophical footnote: money taken in crime is far sweeter than money earned. The fact that one relies on oneself, or a group, to outthink, outsmart, and outbrave some stupid boss and his security precautions turns ill-gotten gains into reward beyond compare. Plus, the hours, while short and nerve-wracking, are never boring.
\n\nOddly, one of the best ways to begin a burglary is by getting a job in the store you plan to hit. In general, places that have loads of cash, that deal with deposits in a lazy fashion, and that trust you just enough to let you know that the burglary alarms are “just for show.” After a week or two of drudgery, you’re ready. The neighborhood is dead quiet at night, there are rear entrances that haven’t been used in years, and hopefully those entrances have windows. Timing is key and I recommend between 3 and 4 in the morning on a Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. The cops are all changing out shifts, the security guards (if any) are drinking coffee somewhere trying to stay awake, and the neighbors are all tucked in their beds. Windows can be easily removed by breaking through the glass with a cloth wrapped hammer and steel bars can be separated using a tire jack. If the back is lit by floodlights, unscrew them. For windows placed high, use a car as a boost to reach them. A quick dash into the establishment—to exactly the place where you know the day’s cash receipts are hidden—and out. A peek in the rear view mirror to make sure you’re clean—and gone. Like it never happened. The rewards from burglaries can be surprising: in one short twenty minute stint I walked off with almost $5000. They can also be disheartening; one burglary took almost an hour and netted less than $300—but that was the exception.
\n
It’s that time of year again! For years, employees around the world have celebrated April 15 as Steal Something from Work Day, a day to even the scales with those who profit on our labor. This year, April 15 falls on a Sunday, which means employers should have nothing to fear—since for thousands of years, Sunday has been designated as a day of rest on which no one should have to work. Didn’t we win the struggle for the 40-hour work week? However, just in case the ever-increasing precarity of the labor market has forced some poor soul to work on Sunday, we’ve prepared a great deal of outreach material celebrating Steal Something from Work Day.
\n\nThe capitalists are enriching themselves on your labor! Settle the score!
\n\nTo employ these, just print them out on a sheet of sticker paper, cut them up, and deploy!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/stickers/steal-from-work/steal-from-work_front_black_and_white.jpg\")
Click the image above for a downloadable PDF of a sheet of our classic Steal Something from Work Day stickers.
\nComrades have translated our classic sticker into Swedish!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/13/3.jpg\")
Click the image above for a downloadable PDF of a sheet of these stickers.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/stickers/steal-something-from-work-day/steal-something-from-work-day_front_black_and_white.jpg\")
Click the image above for a downloadable PDF of a sheet with a variety of Steal Something from Work Day stickers.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/04/13/1.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/if-your-coworker-needs-something/if-your-coworker-needs-something_front_black_and_white.jpg\")
Click the image above for a downloadable PDF.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/hang-in-there/hang-in-there_front_black_and_white.jpg\")
Click the image above for a downloadable PDF.
\nPrint out this trifold to spread the word. Slip it into lockers, leave it in a tip jar paper-clipped to your tip, give them out at the metro.
\n\nUntil we can abolish capitalism—make every profit cost them!
\n\n" } ] }