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Title: I Saw Fire Author: Doug Gilbert Date: 2014 Language: en Topics: Institute for Experimental Freedom, black bloc, Little Black Cart, insurrectionary, Bay Area, Oakland, Phoenix, Santa Cruz, non-violence Source: Retrieved on February 22, 2022 from archive.org Notes: Published by The Institute for Experimental Freedom in collaboration with Little Black Cart. You can find the text in book form via Little Black Cart https://littleblackcart.com/index.php?dispatch=products.view&product_id=363.
Dedicated to Connie, Leona, Aragorn, and Marc, whose help, patience, and
dedication made this book possible.
âYou have to be logical, you know?
If I know that in this hotel room, they have food every day, and I'm
knocking on the door every day to eat, and they open the door, let me
see the party, let me see them throwing salami all over, I mean, just
throwing food around, but they're telling me there's no food.
Every day, I'm standing outside, trying to sing my way in:
We are hungry, please let us in.
We are hungry, please let us in.
After about a week that song, is gonna change to:
We hungry, we need some food.
After two, three weeks, it's like:
Give me the food or I'm breaking down the door.
After a year you're just like:
I'm picking the lock, coming through the door blasting!
It's like, you hungry, you reached your level.
We asked ten years ago.
We was asking with the Panthers.
We was asking with them, the Civil Rights Movement.
We was asking.
Those people that asked are dead and in jail.
So now what do you think we're gonna do?
Ask?"
- TUPAC AMARU SHAKUR
by Connie Anderson
To truly tell a story is to paint a picture. To make the colors so vivid
that readers and listeners canât help but feel invested in the palette
of its world. It can be an alternate universe arising from a myth meant
to explain this one, or a moment in time depicted by a single person
sharing with us the smells and sounds of living through a particular
experience. Journeying with another leads us to being changed in some
way, as the mind opens up to make room for something beyond what is in
front of oneâs eyes. And the storyâthis almost spiritual enunciation
with its unique ability to transport the mindâadds a new texture to the
realm of reality. This texture is the stuff that wistful memories are
made of; it has the magic-realism of dreams and makes even the dreary
feel beautiful. It takes an account or a fantasy or an idea and breathes
into these an otherworldly force. Its history is deeply embedded in our
own and yet we dispose of it more and more in our daily lives. No time,
no energy, nothing to say except what is necessary. But the glowing
ochre that weeps its way through the window before dusk is necessary;
the scent of earth on a tomato just off the vine and the sad birds
singing the neighborhood awake are just as important as any timeline of
events that transpire before us. The way our hearts sag or rise at the
end of the day is fundamental to the narrative of our lives. When these
elements are forgotten or left behind we are emptied of the magic in
living.
The art of storytelling drifts slowly away, disintegrating into a
horizon that no longer looks familiar. Our words exist in a society
growing evermore impatient, continuously reducing experiences to
fragments small enough to fit on the latest hand-held device. There is
little time for mythical narratives created outside of capital-producing
entertainment; this spirit has been replaced by the need for spectacular
and instant gratification. Even in the discourse we create ourselves
there is a sense of urgency, an almost compulsive attempt to connect the
dotsâto figure it all outâand there is so much that gets lost in this
rabid quest for answers. It is a reaching into imagination, into the
terrain of some protagonistâs wandering that escapes the present so
drastically. And yet, I Saw Fire, grasps this dying form of the story
and finds itself triumphant in an almost forgotten landscape.
The compilation of texts you are about to read will take you on a
journey that leads into the streets of Phoenix during multiple battles
against the National Socialist Movement, through the encampments and
riots of Occupy Oakland, and into the emotional existence of being an
anarchist. You will put on a black mask and defend its honor against
many opposing forces; you will be a worker, combatant, friend. You will
feel what the author felt as he lived these events, never being deprived
of the many layers that made each moment singular along the way. This is
no ordinary book for contemporary times; it doesnât shy away from
personal narrative nor simply create a memoir of circumstances. Every
bit of analysis has the warmth of a body behind it, the history of
struggle lifting it up with passion and purpose inviting readers into a
world of fighting with humor and sincerity.
Like a conversation late into the nightâ drunk on banter and
contemplationâI Saw Fire will keep you captivated until its last
sentence. Dougâs relentless prodding will have you laughing your ass
off, as antagonists ranging from the police, an unsettling mural, and
the Left are all deflated by our protagonistâs abhorrence. And we are
the protagonists in these pages as well. We are an undeniable part of
this world that has been painted and hurled before our eyes; it is a
sort of mirror that shows more than just our masked faces. It reveals
the terrible essence of the society we scheme against, the fuel inside
our hearts propelling us onward, and the special moments in time when
fear becomes secondary and we strike back with vehemence that knows no
apologies.
It is with joyful excitement that I send you off on this quest,
enchanted by the thought of violence in quiet little Santa Cruz and into
the University, as our protagonist looks to seize the resources such a
deplorable facility clutches selfishly. You will be transported to the
Oakland General Strike, tasting tear gas in the streets and feeling more
alive than ever before. Whether this is your first time visiting these
scenes or you are an experienced traveler here, you will find new sights
and new insights. No matter where you come from or why youâre here, now
is the time to put your sweatpants on, make a cup of tea or grab a beer,
and get ready for the ride. Cuz itâs goin down.
STANDING IN THE PARKING LOT of my union hall for bus drivers in the
California East Bay Area, located in East Oakland, Iâm stuck in the
middle of several women and men screaming at each other. Tempers are
flaring, people are cursing and pointing fingers, and Iâm at a loss for
words. The Pinkertons havenât returned, an angry mob isnât trying to
break down the doors and take over the union, and we arenât fighting the
cops, the bosses, or (whatâs really needed), the union bureaucrats. The
reason for all this commotion? Quite simply, a BART (Bay Area Rapid
Transit, the subway system that takes people across the Bay Area) worker
has arrived at the union hall to hand out flyers calling for solidarity
between BART workers and bus drivers. The union officials are angry.
âWho are you?â they ask. From around the corner of the parking lot, the
union president appears. âYou need to get the fuck off the property!â
she yells at the BART worker. Heâs flustered, but holds his ground.
Thereâs just one problem, weâre all in the same union. âIâm in the same
union you are!â the worker responds. Heâs right. BART workers and bus
drivers for the company I work for are all part of the same labor union.
But thatâs not the issue. The issue is not who he is, or what union heâs
in. The issue is that heâs passing out flyers and talking with people
about bus drivers and BART workers engaging in united action. Heâs
talking about wildcat strikes. Heâs talking about shutting down the Bay
Area. This is only several weeks after my fellow bus drivers picketed a
contract vote at our own union hall. Many were angry that we did not go
on strike with BART who struck about a month ago. Needless to say, the
union leaders are scared. âIâm calling the policeâ states our union
president, as she walks inside.
When BART workers went on strike in the summer and fall of 2013, it cost
the Bay Area bosses close to $73 million a day in lost worker
productivity. Talking amongst each other, transit workers discussed how
we had a historic opportunity. If we went on strike together, we could
grind the entire Bay Area to a halt. We could bring the bosses to their
knees and force them to meet our demands by refusing to do the jobs that
so many others depended on. Bus drivers had seen their wages frozen and
benefits ground down for many years and BART workers faced similar
attacks. But as 2013 came to a close, the transit general strike had yet
to happen. The union refused to take us out on strike, even though the
bus drivers voted for one by 97%. Flyers circulated calling for a
wildcat strike, and many bus drivers called in sick during the first
BART strike, but an official, union sanctioned action, never happened.
To many workers, the task ahead seemed clear: to unite with other people
in a similar situation and to refuse to engage in the kind of activity
that we do everydayâour jobs. To the government, the path ahead was also
clear as they saw the threat to business interests. They moved to put a
two month strike freeze on both BART and bus drivers. The media, owned
by companies that stood to lose millions from transit strikes, called
for blood, labeling blue-collar workers greedy extremists. Many within
the government began to talk about banning transit strikes altogether.
The union heads were also clear: their side was with the government.
Union officials voiced support for a cooling-off period and stated in
the media that they had no idea why their members had turned down such
âgoodâ contracts. The eliteâthe government, the media, and the union
apparatusâwere decidedly united: against us.
At the same time as this was all unfolding, another struggle was boiling
in the streets of Oakland. On a normal hot summer day, I was driving a
bus as the radio suddenly crackled to life with a dispatcher demanding
my attention. âThe protesters are on the move! They are at 14th and
Broadway, heading in large groups through the streets. Please use
caution and watch yourselves!,â the voice instructed me. This was right
after George Zimmerman had been found not guilty by a jury in Florida
for the murder of a young African-American youth, Trayvon Martin. In
Oakland, as across the United States, on the night of the verdict
protests sprang up against the decision.
For several nights, Oakland exploded. The storefronts of many businesses
were destroyed, police cars were damaged and vandalized with slogans,
roads and even freeways were blocked, and people held the streets in
angry marches. Marching through West Oakland, the militantsâmade up of
black, brown, and white demonstratorsâwere received by those on the
streets and housing projects with applause and support. While the riots
and uprisings were happening, I was working. As the weeks passed, I
drove a bus down the same streets that had been the scene of the riots.
Windows remained boarded up, as if to prepare for the next uprising. The
word âTrayvonâ was still etched onto the walls, just as they were into
the memories of so many people that came into the streets for a young
man that they had never met.
But the riots only lasted several days, and after being allowed to run
their course the police came in, made sweeps, arrested several
militants,[1] and began to clamp down. The forces that sought to clear
the streets after several nights of riots were not unlike the forces
that sought to control the workersâ ability to struggle. The police
baton and the union bureaucrat have more in common than not.[2]
Struggles, regardless of where they break out, face similar problems. We
face a system of counter-insurgency and state surveillance[3] on one
hand, and an apparatus of bureaucratic power that is the âofficialâ
organizations on the other.
The revolts in the wake of the Trayvon decision were organic and
organized at the grassroots level, largely through social networks and
social media. But while the initial rage at the verdict propelled many
into the streets, after that anger dissipated, the revolt was over. The
Stateâs forces were also keen enough to contain and allow the riots to
run their course, knowing from past experiences that attacking a small
disruption might lead to a larger one.[4] The situation at my workplace
was much different, as people looked to the official organization, the
unionâ whether they agreed with it or notâbefore making their move. Bus
drivers and BART workers have few ways of communicating with each other;
we have no way of holding mass meetings unless we organize them on our
own, and after decades of inaction and purposely being broken down, lied
to, and disorganized by the union, many have forgotten how. Many believe
it is simply a problem of leadershipâwe just have to get a better leader
in place.
Those who rioted, however, had no official organizations in place to
manage and contain them. However, for both the rioters and transit
workers, the desire to disrupt and to strike was the same desire. As the
authors Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward wrote in the book Poor
Peopleâs Movements: Why They Succeed and How They Fail, âIndeed, some of
the poor are sometimes so isolated from significant institutional
participation that the only contribution they can withhold is that of
quiescence in civil life: they can riot.â (Vintage Books, 1977, 25).
But if a revolt that can carry us not only into the streets but also
give us the ability to remake the world for ourselves is blocked by not
only formal organizations and the State, how do revolutionaries navigate
in this terrain? Throughout this book we ask these questions. Over and
over again, we run up against the same walls and into the same problems.
From riots against police brutality and murder to the Occupy movement,
questions of violence, organization, and what kind of world we really do
want remain with us and as constant tensions within social struggles. I
hope this collection will be the start of conversations that bring some
insight to these provocations and capture in time various moments of
conflict as well as the struggles within them. As Malcolm X once said,
âOf all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our
research.â[5]
Across the world in the last several years, people headed to town
squaresâand stayed there in the thousands. In Mexico, in Israel, in New
York City, in Spain, and in Egypt. Like these revolts, future uprisings
will not come from the official organizations, but from the bottom up.
The coming clash will not simply look like millions of men in overalls
streaming out of a factory onto the picket lines; social struggles and
revolt will continue to look like much like the Occupy movement did.[6]
In the battles to come, people will continue to come together en masse,
take space, and find each other. Occupy gave many of us a reason to do
this, just as other mass public occupations did across the globe. In
these moments, we find a common humanity, a common project, and create
the possibility for collective action.
It is the coming together of everyday people that the State fears most.
Each of the Occupy-era revolts show the true relationship between the
people and the State. It took only a few monthâs time for the Obama
administration and the Department of Homeland Security to evict the
Occupy camps due to the threat they represented. Just as in Egypt,
Brazil, and across the world, when faced with government repression we
often did not see the growth of a specialized group of armed militants
take up arms against the State; instead we saw the proliferation of
generalized mass defense of these struggles and occupied public spaces
through rioting. Is it no wonder then that the central boogie-man in the
current period of struggles is thus the âblack bloc[7] anarchist,â an
anonymous and self-organized element that is both collective and
combative.
We also saw how each of the Occupy-era revolts came to see each other as
part of a larger narrative. Workers in Wisconsin carried signs making
reference to Egypt as they occupied the Capitol building, just as youths
in Cairo donned masks and became black bloc to fight the police and
âdefend the revolutionâ after being influenced by anarchists in Greece
and elsewhere.[8] In this period, the general assembly and the affinity
group replaced the Party and the Union as the mode of organization, just
as the ski- mask, the soup-kitchen, and the rock replaced the AK-47 as
the means of militant struggle.
As the memory of the camps and occupied town squares now fades, we have
the opportunity to look back and think carefully on the events of 2011
and 2012. We must remember that Occupy was different simply because it
was different.[9] In the US, by and large, Occupy rejected
representational and top-down forms of organization and decision making.
Instead, it organized itself through general assemblies and horizontal
networks and groups. Occupy did not make demands, it raised questions.
It did not ask for the right to space, it took it. People got off their
computers and away from their phones and engaged in a social project
with one another. The political ceased to be a democratic spectacle and
instead became something that people had control over and an engagement
with. Now, thousands of people have had the experience of working
together and making decisions collectively, of knowing what it is like
to be part of a human community that is under attack from the State.
This will mean something in the battles that lay ahead.
While the Occupy-era explosions of 2011 were the most important social
phenomenon to come about in the last 30 years, in the US it still did
little to break through the myths of the Left that grew out of the Great
Depression and the Civil Rights Movement. It is these myths, centered
around violence, disruption, and their role in social movements that
make up much of the tensions discussed in this book. Being that this
text is aimed largely at those who have come into politics for the first
time through Occupy, I feel that it is necessary to revisit this
history.
The official organizations that seek to manage, contain, and control
social struggles, cling to the fallacies of the past. Simply stated, the
myths haunting us in a post-Occupy world revolve around the idea that
only formalized groups create change and that violenceâoften defined as
any disruptive action coming outside of formalized groupsâalienates the
public, hinders progress, and brings on repression from the State.[10]
By formal groups, I speak to organizations that have a leadership
structure that can engage with the government, have an ability to
legally function within politics (like political parties) and within the
economy (like unions and non-profit organizations). Formalized
organizations are counter-posed to self-organized forms, although most
formalized groups were borne out of struggles in the past or are created
in the wake of a revolt as a means to contain it.[11] By informal
groups, I refer to worker controlled associations[12] and strikes; those
who squat land, housing, entire neighborhoods; communities that organize
to stop police violence; an assembly in a community, workplace, or
neighborhood convened to organize direct action or address problems;
students who organize themselves to take action at their schools, and so
on.[13]
As Piven and Cloward stated, âFirst, it was not formal organizations but
mass defiance that won in the 1930s and 1960s.â (xv). In these periods,
organizations from the AFL-CIO to the NAACP, all attempted to pacify the
very rage that gave them the ability to get concessions from the elites.
As Piven and Cloward write: â...[T]he bureaucratic organizations that
were developed within these movements tended to blunt the militancy that
was the fundamental source of such influence as the movements exert ed.â
(xv). Defiance springs from material conditions but formalized groups,
however, have always sought to dull the actions of those involved and
dampen the fires of revolt.[14]
Many within the Left point to the era of the Great Depression as a time
when the official organizations within the working class forced great
concessions from the ruling elites. One morning while I was driving to
work and listening to the East Bay Left/liberal radio station KPFA, a
historian described this period as a process of labor unions using the
threat of the growing power of the Communist Party to gain the right to
strike and collectively bargain.[15] Thus, the view of history presented
to us from the Left is one based on the idea that change comes about by
official organizations pressuring traditional structures. But reality is
much different. The rise in unionization came largely out of the massive
sit-down strikes, occupations, and wildcat strikes in the early
1930s.[16] But, as unions became legal, they came slowly to be seen as a
useful part of the capitalist system in controlling workersâ anger, and
began to act more and more as a police force. Union leaders were able to
weed out radicals from leadership positions, workers were no longer
allowed control over struggles and strikes, and rebellious wage earners
were driven off of job sites. At the same time, labor began a strategy
of courting the Democratic Party with the millions of dollars collected
from workersâ dues. In return, bureaucrats hoped for concessions and
labor-friendly laws (or at least laws friendly to unions).'[17] But as
this was carried out, unionization also declined. Wages began to fall or
stagnate. Workers were again placed into craft unions and broken apart
by trade and race and were again encouraged to make deals with
management and curtail strikes. Although US workers have continued to
rise up, sometimes in massive numbers (for example, the strike wave of
the post-WW II period and again in the Vietnam era in response to the
speeds up in factories), at every turn the unions sought to control
them. The State also responded to struggle, for instance after the
Oakland general strike of 1946, the government passed laws (Taft-
Hartley) making solidarity strikes (and thus general strikes) illegal.
Now, breaking Taft-Hartley by one union to go out with another is seen
as out of the question for almost all union leaders, when it was mass
defiance and law-breaking which created them in the first place.
In the current period, many states are now attacking the rights of
unions to collectively bargain. This saw itself play out most
dramatically in the Wisconsin capitol, where in the midst of an
occupation by thousands of workers, Democratic leaders tried to control
and contain the struggle. Across the country, wages have gone down,
people are working more than ever before, and unions, where they do
exist, are by and large only concerned with continuing to collect dues.
The legalistic and electoral strategy of labor to work within capital
has been a history of almost 100 years of failure for the working class.
People work more for less pay, and are further than ever from the
abolition of capitalism. Any new worker struggles that break out now
will not only have to go up against the bosses and their police, but
also against the union leadership itself. The myth of both Party and
Union bringing the working class into a new period is a lie. It was the
working class itself, through itâs own struggles that created the very
organizations which now seek to contain it.
For other sections of the poor and working class, many of whom do not
work in unionized industries and are more likely to be trapped within
the prison-industrial complex (largely people of color in the United
States), have also seen their struggles evolve in a similar vein. In
Smash Pacifism, indigenous-anarchist writer Zig Zag commented on
non-violence as promoted by official organizations: âPacifist ideologues
promote [their] version of history because it reinforces their ideology
of nonviolence, and therefore their control over social movements, based
on the alleged moral, political, and tactical superiority of nonviolence
as a form of struggle. The State and ruling class promote this version
of history because they prefer to see pacifist movements, which can be
seen in the official celebrations of Gandhi (in India) and King (in the
US). They prefer pacifist movements because they are reformist by
nature, offer greater opportunities for collaboration and co-optation,
and are more easily controlled.â (Warrior Publications, 2012, 4).
According to Zig Zag, as with the labor movement of the early 1960s, it
was disruption and mass revolt that forced the State to enact reforms
and also at the same time, to begin working more closely with people
like Martin Luther King, Jr., who were seen as more manageable. Again,
from Smash Pacifism: âBy 1962, there was growing militancy among Blacks
in the South. Many Blacks, including even members of the main pacifist
civil rights groups, were armed. This growing militancy erupted in May
1963, with the Birmingham riots. The rioting and protests spread to
other cities and states, and the US government moved to quickly enact
greater constitutional reforms. Even as the civil rights campaign
achieved its greatest victory in 1964, with the passing of the Civil
Rights Act, the level of Black militancy and rebellion only increased
until it was repressed by a dual counter-insurgency strategy of
co-optation and deadly force.â (39).
The White House, headed by John F. Kennedy, even worked closely with
King, such as in the famous 1963 March on Washington.[18] The rally was
orchestrated and scripted so well by the authorities that Malcolm X, who
was barred from speaking, dubbed it the âFarce on Washingtonâ and
criticized the event in his famous speech âMessage to the Grassroots.â
The event was large, but the government went so far as to produce signs
for people and edit and censor the speeches made by speakers.[19] As the
1960s wore on, large scale unrest and rioting often became the linchpin
that brought government to the table, (as in the case with the riots in
Birmingham, Alabama) with the Kennedy and later Johnson administration
putting pressure on southern state leaders to comply and negotiate and
also pressure Congress to pass civil-rights legislation.
But by the mid-1960s, as riots ripped through Watts and elsewhere, the
government was also keen on clearing the streets. As Zig Zag notes: âDue
to the summer riots..., the federal government and corporations began
directing millions of dollars in funding towards programs for employment
and housing (all under the âWar on Povertyâ). Some of the main
recipients were the reformist civil rights groups.â (55). Like the
non-profits of today, some civil-rights groups came to be seen as a set
of social managers that could turn large sections of the black masses
away from potential insurgency. By 1966, Stokely Carmichael would raise
the cry of âBlack Power!â and write off much of the reformist oriented
civil-rights movement. As Stokely wrote on pacifism, â...it has never
been able to involve the black proletariat...â[20] While King would
brush off the idea that riots and mass insurgency aided the passing of
civil-rights legislation,[21] â...this is clearly disingenuous, however:
the Birmingham riots and subsequent uprisings were the major catalyst
for government constitutional reform (i.e., the 1964 Civil Rights
Act)[22] along with massive government funding via the âWar on Poverty,â
direct[ed] primarily at Blacks in urban ghettosâthe base of the riots
(and from which the SCLC and other groups profited). Ironically, it was
the nonviolent protests that had achieved little more than âimproving
the food in prison,â while the people remained securely oppressed.â (Zig
Zag, 67).
Since the Civil Rights struggles, much of the basis of what the movement
sought to change has remained the same or gotten worse. As Michelle
Alexander has pointed out in the book, The New Jim Crow: Mass
Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, more African-Americans are
incarcerated, on probation, or on parole than were enslaved during
slavery. Native Americans have the highest rate of incarceration, and
blacks and Latinos still have higher rates of health issues, poverty,
drop-out rates, and foreclosure than whites. Latino workers still labor
in slave like conditions, often unable to unionize and live in fear of
deportation. Schools now are more segregated than before Brown vs.
Board. In short, as the current rebellions after the murder of Trayvon
show, America is still in the middle of its racial nightmare.
Thus, the two of the largest movements for systemic change in the US:
organized Labor and Civil-Rights, which are held up as the two shining
examples of success, are a distorted history. While some historians
include individuals and groups left out of the official text books (such
as the Industrial Workers of the World or the Black Panthers), the song
remains the same. Formal groups make changes by pressuring and
petitioning government, sometimes backed up by masses of people who are
controlled and managed by the organizations that speak for them. But at
every point in American history, the reality is that changes are made by
mass collective action that spurs the State to grant concessions as a
way of containing unrest.
Revolutionaries often have a bad habit of portraying resistance like a
sexual experience. Some see, or at least give lip-service to acts of
sabotage or collective refusal pointing towards a certain climax.
History, if it shows us anything, tells us that class-struggle is as
much a part of capitalism as are wages or property. Students occupy a
university and then the developers construct new buildings making it
harder for future students to do so. People gather in a downtown square
to demonstrate and the City Council puts in cameras and more police.
Workers barricade the streets and then the government makes smaller
roads. For the elites, the question is not if class struggle will break
out. They know that there will be unrest, riots, protests, and strikes
from time to time. They know better than anyone that these things will
happen because capitalism will always lead to crisis and the inequality
that it spawns will draw protest and anger. For them the question is
simple: they just want to keep winning the class warâto âmanage the
disaster.â[23] They know that the way the world is organized will make
people angry, they just want to know that in the end people will go back
to work.
Sometimes periods of revolt come with a change in consciousness; the
System is seen as the source of the problem and not simply an issue of
the individual or another person, (the immigrant, the unionized worker,
the unemployed, the homeless, or the person receiving state benefits).
Other times, revolt takes place in the wake of something like a police
killing and happens in a flash, but always when enough people feel like
they can go out into the streets and make something happen. Dissent can
be seen brewing in seemingly individual ways, such as mass absenteeism
at work, school truancy, even rising shoplifting rates. However, when
things reach a boiling point is when people come together and begin to
act collectively. This is the most important aspect of the Occupy-era
struggles across the world; they were based on a real desire for human
connection, community, and togetherness that punched through the
spectacle of modern life to find a common humanity on the other side.
But beyond looking back on the days of wild community and resistance of
2011 and 2012, we have to understand that the State is already gearing
up for the next clash. It is already preparing itself to make sure that
another Occupy never happens again. We have to realize the very real
threat of counter-insurgency and work to overcome it through our
relationships, projects, and the spaces that we operate out of.
Understanding the history of this country and the struggles that have
come before us is part of that process. The historic movements of Labor
and Civil Rights have to be seen in a new light. It was disruption and
self-activity often labeled as violent, disorganized, and spontaneous
that won concessions, and it was the organizations which grew out of
that disruption which in turn blunted that militancy. At the same time,
control over social movements by official organizations has lead to
worse conditions for those who official groups try to represent and
manage. With a lack of fear of a militant fight-back, the elites are
free and open to attack broad sections of the population. As I write
this, politicians are debating to slash billions in money for food
stamps, a program that in part was created to quell urban rioting.
Grasping this history allows us to look at âviolenceâ and âdisruptionâ
in a whole new light and proceed toward understanding coming clashes.
But we canât just sit and wait for the next eruption. We build networks,
our capacity, resources, and our confidence now. We push the tensions
and seemingly small fights with authority and power in the day to day,
so when moments of open conflict do hit, more people are ready for a
larger shift.
People will continue to find each other. They will be brought together
by not only material conditions but also a changing consciousness of
their place in the world. Some are starting to see the established
methods of changeâthe ballot box, the letter to the editor, and polite
protestâdoing nothing to affect the current state of affairs. What we do
with this reality is up to us. We are in for some terrible times and a
lot of hard work. We have to begin to meet, talk, and organize with
people we work with, live next to, and come into contact with daily.
This will be hard because we are not used to working together in this
way. The State will continue to assault us and our movements. People
will go to jail on frame-ups, get fired from work, and be attacked
brutally at demonstrations. We will soon hit a point again such as in
the 1960s, where the State will again start killing people in resistance
movements. As we become more powerful, the State will move against us
even harder.
As we continue into the present period, the appearance of black blocs,
or simply anonymous confrontational collective activity in social
struggles and tensions, will not ceaseâthey will continue across the
world (as the recent use of blocs in Egypt, Mexico, and Brazil[24]
show). Working class self-activity, as it comes into conflict with the
State and its police forces, will continue to look increasingly like
black bloc activity. The recent struggles in Brazil show a clear turning
point, with a major teachers union coming out in âunconditional support
of the black blocâ in their defense of protesters from police during
street clashes.[25] At the same time, more and more of those engaging in
such tactics will care more about defending territory and neighborhoods
than breaking the windows of a bank. More and more, riots and full-blown
rebellions will be a recurring response to police violence and
repression; collective acts of rebellion will become more conflictual
and seek ways to stay anonymous. For revolutionaries, we must seek to
deepen these situations to make them more subversive, and connect the
seemingly disconnected nodes of class struggle that exist.[26] We will
not be able to call for the day in which the halls of power are stormed,
but we can create the affinities and relationships which can help us
maneuver in the coming terrain.
This book is not about working within the system. It isnât about asking
those in power for anything. Itâs about what happens when people break
down the door and walk in to the wide and frightening world of open
revolt. It is about the glorious moments in the streets that we control.
You will find many recurring themes within these pages. When things do
pop off, there will always be groups and individuals ready with a wet
blanket to put out the fires before they spread. The State will always
have one hand ready to smash and the other open to dialogue. There will
always be those on the side-lines screaming âviolence!â as a way of
distraction. As we go through these events from the Student Movement,
Occupy, and anti-fascist actions, hopefully we can learn from both
ideological and practical clashes and prepare for the battles yet to
arrive. What happens in the years to come may prove to be pivotal in
human history.
In 2009, I traveled to Phoenix Arizona to write about demonstrations
between anarchists and the Neo-Nazi group the National Socialist
Movement (NSM). Finding myself in unfamiliar territory, where
libertarians and Constitutionalists on the right outnumbered
progressives and liberals, and where black bloc militants proudly openly
carried firearms at demonstrations, I decided to not only cover the
raucous protests but also take on the fascists politically.
For more information and background on the day's events, check out the
Phoenix Class War Council blog at: firesneverextinguised.blogspot.com
I WON'T LIE, as I looked out through my appropriated aviator Forever 21
sunglasses, I felt a little uneasy. âThatâs a big group,â I thought, as
a motley crew of mostly large men carrying American and swastika flags
began to goosestep my way. On closer inspection, I realized that the
large group that looked to be about 100 was in fact, mostly police.
This, of course, didnât make me feel any less afraid.
So here I was, on the front line prepared to throw down against the
âNational Socialist Movement,â a political party that wants a fascist
all-white America. The NSM has attempted to take over from where George
Lincoln Rockwellâs American Nazi Party left off in the 1960s, attempting
to be a force within the White Nationalist movement which continues to
splinter, fracture, and die. I came to Phoenix hoping that the $180
greyhound bus ticket and the 18 hour ride (all while sitting next to a
bathroom door that continued to open and smelled the entire place up
with rotten piss) would be worth it. It wasâand the success of the
confrontational and militant actions that took place demonstrates
several things that anarchists everywhere can learn from.
Several weeks ago, a flyer started circulating on the internet produced
by the Phoenix Class War Council (PCWCâpronounced Pee Cee Dub Cee) that
encouraged people to confront the NSM at their scheduled rally on
November 7th, 2009, at the Arizona State Capital in Phoenix. The flyer
included an image from the popular new movie Inglourious Basterds, in
which an elite group of American Jewish service men in WWII track down
and brutally kill Nazis in Europe. The looming showdown of anarchists
and Nazis created quite a large buzz on the internet, getting coverage
on several news sites (including major alternative Phoenix newspaper New
Times), as well as some of the major Libertarian websites. The call to
confront the NSM was followed by a well-written piece entitled, âThe NSM
Offers Nothing for the Working Class but More Exploitation and Misery.â
It argued an anarchist critique of the NSM and white supremacy, which
was presented as a cross-class alliance between working class whites and
white elites that breaks up the unity of the working class, hindering
possible united action.
The media and internet was abuzz and the fascists were stating in the
press that they would bring out 200 people for their âAmerica Firstâ
rally, highlighting their opposition to âillegal immigration.â The stage
was set for a showdown.
Phoenix is a city divided by race politics and the immigration issue.
Unlike other major cities on the west coast, Phoenix has both a Left and
a strong Libertarian and Constitutionalist scene, which holds a sizable
influence. Struggles against speed cameras for instanceâ which ticket
people for driving over the speed limitâhave been headed largely by
Libertarian type groups. This context makes organizing in Phoenix for
anarchists quite different than many places in California.
Probably the man that everyone has the biggest bone to pick with in town
is Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has served as Sheriff since 1993. People
fucking hate this guy. You see it on t-shirts, in the newspapers, and in
the streets. Sheriff Joe has gained so much scorn because of his 'tough
on immigrants' stance and his harsh management of prisoners. Under
federal law 287(g), which gives Sheriff Joe and his deputies the ability
to deport people, raids in the area have broken up families and
displaced working class people from their means of existence and their
loved ones. And while Sheriff Joe has been going after immigrants,
Phoenix in the last few years has become the playground of groups like
the Minutemen, who guard the border against migrants with guns.
One of the figures to emerge from this movement, also known to hobnob
with Sheriff Joe and State Senator Russell Pearce, is former Maricopa
County Republican precinct committeeman, J.T. Readyâwho also just
happens to be a supporter of the National Socialist Movement.
J.T. Ready first started getting heat for his after hours fascist
activity when photos of him at a National Socialist Movement rally
surfaced in 2007 and Ready started handing out anti-Semitic and racist
texts at the office. Ready's Republican bosses buckled after the
embarrassment hit the papers and he was fired, but he continued to be a
fixture in the local political landscape. In the days leading up to the
NSM demo, Ready appeared on several television stations, claiming that
while he was not a member of the NSM (which is interesting because his
license plate read âNSM USAâ), he supports the NSM because it is a
âwhite civil-rights organization.â While J.T. Ready has been pushed out
of most of the Nativist movement, the Phoenix far-Right welcomes him
with open arms and he even spoke at a Tea Party rally on July 4th. The
ability of very vocal Neo-Nazis to exist within the Arizona
anti-immigrant and far-Right movement shows the degree to which racist
ideas have a sea to swim in.
With their Nazi uniforms and flags, the NSM will appear laughable to
many people. Despite this, it is worthwhile to look at them, their
ideas, and their strategy. What becomes clear after watching videos
online and sifting through NSM texts and literature, is that the NSM has
become very media savvy after so much time in the spotlight. Getting
time in the media is perhaps one of the few things that the NSM does
wellâsince the whole website designing, video making, and general
writing thing ainât going too well for them. The media allows the NSM to
refer to themselves as âwhite nationalistsâ and ânational socialistsâ vs
the more inflammatory âNazisâ or âsupremacists.â In fact, the NSM call
themselves a âcivil-rights organization.â All this while they parade
through the streets with stickers against âspics,â screaming
âZEEK-HAIL!â and carrying Nazi flags. The media, of course, does not
call the NSM out on this and takes their claims at face value; even
though it is clear to anyone who studies the NSM that they are a
through-and-through racist organization. So, while the whole Nazi dress
up thing gets them a lot of press, at the same time in the press they
hide and dodge everything that they actually believe. Their strategy in
doing these little rallies seems to simply be an attempt to get their
name in the mediaâin hopes that people will flock to them and their
movement will grow. In coming to Phoenix, the NSM hoped to make links
with the anti-immigrant movement and to build their influence outside of
the skinhead and white power subcultureâan effort that failed horribly
on their part as evidenced by low turnout from the general far-Right,
anti-immigrant, and militia movement.
Image problems aside, a quick read through the NSM positions on their
website tells a different story than the simple âmerica lovers the NSM
would like to portray themselves as. While the NSM claims that they are
only âagainst illegal immigration,â they state clearly in their â25
Points of American National Socialismâ that they are against any
non-white migration into the United States. After gaining power, they
propose that all non-white people and Jews be deported back to their
original counties of origin, âpeacefully or by force.â Since the NSM
couldnât even get more than 40 people to show up to their rally (even
though they bussed people in from out of state), I have serious doubts
that they posses the organizational skills required to carry out such an
operation!
As for all the âpro-white working classâ rhetoric that the NSM pumps
out, they are clear enemies to all working people: black, white, brown,
and everything else. According to our would-be fuhrers, they want to do
away with all âMarxistâ trade unions (by that I suppose they mean the
ones that exist now?), and force workers to belong to National Socialist
ones, IE. unions run by the State. While the NSM promotes a beefed up
welfare state (money for schools and health careânot for Jews!), they
are not exactly enemies of capitalism. So breathe easy big wigs and fat
cats! In fact, despite all of their attacks on âCommunists,â the NSM is
a bigger fan of the ânationalizationâ of major corporations than any
Obamaites and probably most trustifarian college Trotskyist grad
students that youâll ever meet. Thatâs right, in the State capitalist
future of the NSM, youâll work for a state-run corporation, belong to a
state-run union, and live under the âunconditional authority of [a]
political central parliament over the entire nation and its
organizations.â Feel like a wage slave now? You ainât seen nothing yet!
Letâs go over this again, shall we? Under American National Socialism,
youâre still a wage slave. You will still pay rent or a mortgage. You
will pay for things that you and other workers create at work. You will
still live in a class-society of property owners and wage workersâonly
now, many of those property owners are part of the government! You donât
work for private businesses, you work for state-run corporations. You
canât participate in unions except ones that are run by the State. Be
careful what you say and write as well, or the all-powerful NSM cadre
just might pay you a visit. Despite the NSMâs standard line that they
simply want to pressure politicians in the US to âput America firstâ and
âend illegal immigration,â the NSMâs positions are very clear. They want
a more bureaucratic and totalitarian version of the modern capitalist
system. Think China but more totally racist. Furthermoreâtheir movement
offers nothing for working people. Why drive across two states to a
shitty rally with 30 other people who will probably be locked up for
selling meth next week, when multiracial groups of workers are taking
action all the time to actually better their conditions? (For instance,
the workers at the Republic Windows and Glass factory who occupied it
together and won back their wages and benefits.) Iâd rather have ferrets
dipped in Tapatio fight in my pants while I stand in line at the DMV
than live in the America that the National Socialist Movement wants, but
apparently a small number of people disagree with meâ therein lies the
conflict.
WITH!"
On November 7th, 2009 the anarchists of Arizona, made up of groups from
Phoenix, Flagstaff, and elsewhere, numbered between 150-200. Joining the
anarchists were Libertarians from various groups, as well as various
veterans, Leftists, queer folks, and Chicano activists. Another large
contingent was Native youth, especially from the Oâodham Solidarity
Across Borders Collective, which was out in force as well as young
people from various reservations across Arizona. Carrying huge banners
that read âTHIS IS ANTI-FASCISM: No States, No Bordersâ and âNo
Foreclosures, No Deportations! Round Up Nazis Not Immigrants!â along
with black flags, anarchists were clearly the largest group in vocal
opposition. Most of the crowd appeared in black bloc, with their faces
covered in masks. At this standoff, anarchists did several things right:
they stayed ahead of the Nazis and were able to physically attack them
with rocks and paint bombs and did not allow the police to arrest
anyone. Instead of being physically directly across from the Nazis, the
anarchists tried to stay ahead of them in order to try and get into the
street and confront them head on.
When the NSM group came up to where the anarchists were, police quickly
moved them onto the sidewalk, keeping the two sides apart and out of the
street. Several bottles were thrown at this point. The Nazis marched to
their rally site from their parking space a couple of blocks away.
Hardly anyone was on the street at this point other than police, Nazis,
and anarchists. Anarchists made several attempts to get in the street
and go at the Nazis, but mounted police did their damnedest to make sure
we didn't. After the Nazis had gotten to their rally point, police at
first attempted to separate non-Nazis from their rally, which was simply
held on the grass of the state capital (not on the steps like rallies in
other states). This lasted for about five minutes, before people as a
group said fuck that and rushed the space. At this point, police formed
a line between the anarchists and the Nazis, while brave souls threw
rocks and paint bombs. Anarchists were able to use their large banners
to create barriers between the prying eyes of the police and the large
stones that littered the Phoenix ground, and soon these rocks were
flying through the air. The NSM quickly responded by getting their
âshield teamâ up in front, in an effort to deflect any projectiles from
the leadership cadre. Despite the police presence of about 100, comrades
doing surveillance away from the rally also saw undercover SWAT team
vehicles, filled with highly-armed police who were equipped to stomp
anyone into the ground if a riot erupted. Even if we could have rolled
on the Nazis, we would probably have suffered more from the State in the
ensuing clash.
The greatest irony of the NSM rally was that there was no one at the
capital! They spoke to no one outside of those who heard their message
through the media. The anarchists who surrounded them were so loud that
the speakers could barely even be heard. The speakers on the mic also
spent so much of their time calling the counter-protesters âfaggotsâ and
âJewsâ that they didnât really have any time to address anything else.
The police quickly had enough, and an hour and a half before they were
supposed to leave, the police made them shut down and then walked them
back to their cars. Along the way, anarchists again tried to get in the
street and made several attempts to create barricades, but quick police
response botched those attempts and led to several near arrests as
anarchists grabbed their friends out of the hands of the cops. The
Nazisâover half of whom were from out of state (lots of Texas
plates)âgot back in their cars and headed out. As we walked back to our
cars, someone pulled up and screamed, âThe Nazis just got into a car
accident and theyâre outside of McDonalds!â We rushed to the scene to
find a speaker for the NSM with a broken leg. Stephen Lemons of the New
Times, wrote:
âThe only casualty for the NSMers came as a result of their own error,
when they caused an accident at 7th Avenue and Van Buren in one of the
rental cars they left in after the demo. An unidentified Nazi was rushed
away in an ambulance for an injury to his leg. Phoenix Police Sgt. Brian
Murray confirmed at the scene that the accident was the fault of the
Nazis, whose small white car collided with a large red truck.
None of the Nazis were taken into custody, though the truck's driver was
arrested for not having I.D. and proof of insurance. Murray said the
arrested driver would be ticketed and released as long as he had no
outstanding warrants. The driver ofthe Nazi car was ticketed as well,
but according to NSM spokesman Charles Wilson, the Nazi wheel man
refused to sign the citation. Wilson later blamed the accident on the
police, saying the cops were supposed to have kept the street clear for
the Nazis' exit.â
Probably the best scene of the whole day was when workers at the stores
next to the accident came out and laughed at the Nazis as they drove
away surrounded by police, while people in cars passed by laughing their
asses off. The Nazis did some salutes to the anarchists laughing across
the street, and people in cars were heard to be screaming, âKarmaâs a
bitch! Hahahaha!â
Anarchists carried at this event. Meaning: ANARCHISTS HAD GUNS! Out in
the open, and it was legal. Thatâs right, itâs not just Nazis and
anti-immigrant types who are packing now at protests, itâs our side too.
In Arizona, itâs legal to openly carry firearms as long as your weapon
is legal and yours. This is the first time I have seen anarchists at
demonstrations carry firearms with themâ and I have to say that the
experience was very empowering. Those in states with similar laws should
considering getting firearms and doing the same if possible. This is not
me fetishizing armed struggle or guns; the way forward is collective
action by working people in their workplaces, communities, and the
streets. But, if we are going to go up against people like the NSM, we
should be prepared to defend ourselves especially if we can avoid legal
risks while openly carrying weapons. It should be noted that members of
the NSM have been seen carrying weapons while counter-protesting
pro-immigration marches. People like J.T. Ready have also been known to
follow Mexicano people in the local area, often while armed, hoping to
deport them. As a friend told me that was packing at the protest, âI
want to show them that we are not an unarmed movement.â
Confronting the NSM gave anarchists in Phoenix and the wider area a lot
of attention and also a chance to come together and confront some
enemies. We had the chance to get in the street and see what we were
made of. We made plans, evaded and pushed back police, threw rocks,
armed ourselves, and stood our ground. We need only take this experience
and apply it to the terrain of everyday life. As Stephen Lemons wrote,
âWhatever bad rep the anarchists had before Saturdayâdeserved or
undeservedâ has now been absolved.â Any political capital that the NSM
hoped to have gained from the event on the 7th obviously slid from their
fingers. They failed to attract anyone from the surrounding area
(outside of party members) nor white people from the anti-immigration
movement. The media was very clear in all their reports that protesters
against the NSM outnumbered the NSM greatly. They failed to bring out
even 50 people, much less the 200 that they were counting on. By using
the media to get the NSM's name out into the world, their public loss to
anarchists instead gave the radicals a platform. The question is, what
are we going to do with it?
Clearly, we have to shift the discourse away from a liberal dialogue
that is focused on the issue being simply about âhate.â Sure the NSM is
hateful, but they are a political group that seeks to overthrow the US
system and replace it with one that is much more totalitarian,
bureaucratic, and violent. In the NSMâs America, the millions who
demonstrated and took over the streets on May Day 2006 against
anti-immigrant legislation would have been deported. The workers at
Republic Windows and Glass would have been labeled communists and
killed. The stu- dent-workers, who in 2009 in California occupied their
schools against budget cuts and fee hikes, would have been called
traitors to the State and shot. We must oppose the NSM not only because
they are racist, but because politically they offer only a more
monstrous version of capitalism than what we have today. Furthermore,
targeting the NSM is a tactic against Sheriff Joe and against the wider
system that attacks working class migrants. We can combat white
supremacy that seeks to divide the working class in this country, which
stops working people from coming together against their class enemies.
Furthermore, the NSM is a weak enemy and fighting them is good practice.
Let us sharpen our knives, load our guns, and train now, as we look out
for bigger and better foes.
Next time around, anarchists will have to be on the defensive much more.
The police were slow to respond and make arrests, and anarchists could
have gotten away with a lot more attacks and rock-throwing than they
engaged in. As the struggle against speed cameras, Sheriff Joe, freeway
expansion (and on the horizon a huge strike at various Arizona grocery
store chains), the possibilities of intervention for anarchists in
Arizona remain. We must also stay on our guard against the NSMâunless of
course they crash their cars on the way back to Texas. Now that would be
something to salute!
of Tomorrow
After myself and another comrade were released from jail following the
occupation of Wheeler Hall at UC (University of California) Berkeley, we
sat down with another friend to document our thoughts. We wanted to
write a piece as three people who saw importance in the student
occupation movement but were nonstudents at the time. Little did we
know, these events would pave the way for the larger Occupy Movement in
only a few years time.
After giving a speech on the UC Berkeley campus during a rally, I was
picked up by police while coming out of a bathroom at a restaurant. As
the police grabbed me I screamed, "I swear to god I washed my hands!" My
charges? Inciting a riot and carrying a weapon on campus (a pocket
knife). The charges were later dropped, but this text captures the
excitement and feeling of possibilities that existed during the early
days of the student occupation movement.
more texts and ANALYsis check out:
http://ubcom.org/ubrary/after-fall-communiques-occupied-california
âIf youâre scared today you'll be scared tomorrow as well and always and
so you've got to make a start now right away we must show that in this
school we aren't slaves we have to do it so we can do what they're doing
in all other schools to show that we're the ones to decide because the
school is ours.â
-The Unseen, Nanni Balestrini
Days later, voices in unison still ring in our ears. âWhoâs university?â
At night in bed, we mumble the reply to ourselves in our dreams. âOur
university!â And in the midst of building occupations and the festive
and fierce skirmishes with the police, concepts like belonging and
ownership take the opportunity to assume a wholly new character. Only
the village idiotâor the modern equivalent, a bureaucrat in the
university administrationâwould think we were screaming about something
as suffocating as property rights when last week we announced, âThe
School is Ours!â When the day erupted, when the escape plan from the
drudgery of college life was hatched, it was clear to everyone that the
university not only belonged to the students (who were forcefully
reasserting their claim) but also to the faculty, to every professor and
TA who wished they could enliven the mandatory curriculum in their
repetitive 101 class, to the service workers who can't wait for their
shift to end, and to every other wage-earner on campus ensuring the
daily functioning of the school.
Last week, the actualization of our communal will gave us a new clarity.
The usual divisiveness of proprietorship was forcefully challenged;
cascades of hidden meaning rushed onto rigid notions of possession and
our eyes looked past surface appearances. So now when asked, âwho does
the university belong to?â we can't fail to recognize that the college
itself was built by labor from generations past, the notebook paper is
produced by workers in South America, the campus computers are the
output of work in Chinese factories, the food in the student cafe is
touched by innumerable hands before it reaches the plates, and all the
furniture at UC Berkeley is produced by the incarcerated at San Quentin.
Thus the university, its normal operation and existence, ought to be
attributed to far more than it regularly is. To claim that the school is
ours requires our definition of ownership to not only shatter the
repressive myth that the college belongs to the State of California and
the Regents but to also extend âbelongingâ past national and state
borders and throughout time. It's clear, the entire universityâfor that
matter, every universityâbelongs to everyone, employed and unemployed,
all students and all workers, to everyone of the global class that
produces and reproduces the world as we now know it. The school is ours
because itâs everyone's; the destruction of the property relation, with
all its damaging and limiting consequences, is implicit in the
affirmation of this truth. It's our universityâŠ
...but, as of now, in its present configuration, who would want
something so disgusting as a school?
It's now larger than any conspiratorial plot by Thomas Huxley. In fact,
he could have never envisioned the extent to which contemporary
class-society would transform education into another separated activity,
detached from the totality of life and devoid of any practical worth or
good, while simultaneously being in perfect accord with the needs of
capitalist production.
Learning is now sapped of all content, education is but another part of
the assembly line in the social factory, and the university itself
serves an important function within the reproduction of disjointed life
in this divided society. While the collegiate apparatus infests
countless minds with the logic and technical knowledge of capital, there
is an illusion that somehow academic labor is divorced from the world of
work. Apologies, but a term paper is not the production of autonomous
and creative knowledge; it is work and therefore exploitation. It is
human activity animated for the sake of capital, not for humanity
itself. The conditioning and preparation of students for a life crushed
by regimented value-creation is the essential purpose of the college: to
teach the young how to give and take orders. Nothing about the
university is neutral; its role in society is clear. The lines are being
drawn.
STUDENT BODY
âYou will always be offered dialogue as if that were its own end; it
will die in bureaucracy's stale air, as if trapped in a soundless room.
In insurrectionary times, action is the speech that can be heard.â
-Slogan written on a Digital Wall
Far before last weekâs events, we've located them in the enemyâs camp.
Student activist-leaders shamed, begged, pleaded, and finally began to
shriek and scream at us when we ignored their megaphone-amplified
orders. In their last-ditch effort to see their commands followed, they
physically assisted the police in blocking us from buildings and
protected the outnumbered cops from our punches and shoves. Itâs obvious
they've chosen their side. These are the idiots who were telling people
who tried to break down the door of California Hall on November 18th
that they should not do so because âthere was no consensus.â These are
the same fools who sabotaged the attempted storming of the Regents
meeting at UCLA and the occupation of Covel Hall, ruining months of
self-directed planning, after declaring the crowd had become too
âagitated.â They are the Cynthias, who later that day went on to disrupt
the occupation of Carter- Huggins Hall. These are the same politicians
who grabbed the megaphone as students marched into the Presidentâs
office in Downtown Oakland, prepared to raise utter hell and instead
directed them into a dialogue with middle-level administrators, later
issuing an order that the crowd must leave âpeacefully.â Disgusting, yet
typical. The only consensus they want is rallied around social peace and
the preservation of existing institutions. The only alteration they want
of the power structure is their ascent to the top of it. By actively
collaborating with the administration and police, by orchestrating
arrests, by frittering away the momentum of the angry, they validate the
insults we flung at them and they revealed themselves for the âstudent
cops,â âclass traitorsâ and âsnitches,â they are.
For them itâs a knee-jerk reaction: challenge their power and they fall
back on identity politics. If they donât get their way they cry
privilege. When the actions escalate, when we begin to feel our power,
the self-appointed are waiting to remind us that there may be people
present who are undocumented (the activist super-ego). Somehow in their
tiny paternalistic brains they believe they know whatâs best for
immigrants, implying that the undocumented are too stupid to understand
the consequences of their actions and that god granted the wisdom to the
student leaders to guide these lost souls. In their foolish heads,
immigrants remain passive sheep, black people never confront the police
and just put up with the beatings they get, and the working class always
takes orders from the boss.
In pseudo-progressive tongue they speak a state-like discourse of
diversity; the groans of the student-activist zombies are the grammar of
the dead revolutions of the past. Their vision of race politics ignores
the triumphs and wallows in the failures of the 60s movements. The
stagnant ghosts of yesterdayâs deadlocked struggleâthey are the hated
consequences of the civil rights era that produced a rainbow of tyranny
with a Black president mutilating Afghanis, Asian cops brutalizing
students on campus, and Latino prison guards chaining prisoners. In this
same way, the opportunists act out their complicity with the structures
of order. When students defy preset racial categories and unify in order
to take action on their own behalf, the student cops attempt to
reinforce the present day's violent separations and reestablish
governance. They fail to recognize that divisions among proletarians can
only be approximately questioned within the struggle itself and the
festering scissions between the exploited can only be sutured with hands
steadied by combat with the exploiters. Like a scalpel used to reopen
stitched wounds, the student activistsâ brand of multiculturalism is
undoubtedly a tool of State repression.
During the scuffle with police in front of California Hall on the
inaugural day of the strike, one of the student cops asked, âWhatâs
going to happen when we get into the building?â For us, given the social
context of the strike, the answer is obvious; for them, even the
question is problematic because of the risk it poses to their position
of dominance. In the moment of rupture, their role as managers becomes
void. Self-directed action crowds out the programmatic. They forever
need to stand on the edge of the reality that something could pop off,
because it is in that possibility that they can control the situation
and ensure that things do, in fact, move the way they want towards
nowhere. When things get hot, the self-elected of the student movement
are waiting with their trusty fire extinguishers ready in hand because
they know that when people act on their own and valorize their
self-interest their authority crumbles and everyone can see how bankrupt
their strategy of social containment actually is. The student activist
stutter-steps on the path of nothingness. But we hope to turn the mob
against them. To seize their megaphones and declare: âDeath to
Bureaucracy!â Some may ask, âWhy have these hooligans come to our
campus?â The student leaders will say, âTheyâve come to ruin
everything!â
And for once, we agree.
âA movement results from combinations that even its own participants
cannot control. And that its enemies cannot calculate. It evolves in
ways that cannot be predicted, and even those who foresee it are taken
by surprise.â
-Paco Ignacio Taibo
Many will ask then, why have we thrown ourselves into this âstudent
movement?â We are not students, at least not now (and never in the UC
system). It was not feasible for us to attend UC in the first place,
either because of the cost or our resistance to living the rest of our
lives ridden with overwhelming debt.
We have not come to the university to make demands of the Board of
Regents or the university administration. Nor do we wish to participate
in some form of âdemocracyâ where the student movement decides (or are
directed by student leaders) on how to negotiate with the power
structure. For us, Sacramento and its budget referendums are as useless
as the empty words spewing from the mouths of the union leaders and
activists on campus. Nothing about the âdemocratizingâ of the school
system or forcing it to become better managed or more âtransparentâ even
mildly entices us. No, we didnât join the student movement to obtain any
of these paltry demands.
Last week, we began to attack the university not just because we are
proletarians scorned by and excluded from the UC, or because we hope by
resisting we may reduce costs and thus join the UC system and elevate
our class positions. Our choice to collaborate in the assault on
Californiaâs schools was driven solely by our own selfish class
interest: to take its shit and use it for ourselves. Occupied buildings
become spaces from which to further strike the exploiters of this world
and, at the same time, disrupt and suppress the ability of the college
to function.
Like any other institution structured by class society, the university
is one of our targets. We made our presence known in the student
movement to break down the false divisions between students angry over
fee hikes, workers striking against lay offs, and faculty at odds with
the administration over cuts and furloughs. These are not separate
struggles over different issues, but sections of a class that have a
clear and unified enemy. We have come for the same reason we intervene
in any tension: to push for the total destruction of capitalist
exploitation and for the recomposition of the proletariat towards a way
of life without a state of class system.
And so, ask yourself how could one even go about reforming something as
debilitating as a university? Demanding its democratization would only
mean a reconfiguration of horror. To ask for transparency is nothing but
a request for a front row seat to watch an atrocity exhibition. Even the
seemingly reasonable appeal of reducing the cost of tuition leaves the
noose of debt wrapped snugly around our necks. There's nothing the
university can give anyone, but last weekâs accomplishments show that
there is everything for us to take. If anything, our actions were more
important than any of the crumbs the UC system or the Regents Board
might wipe off the table for us. During these days, we felt the need for
obliterating renewal give rise to intense enthusiasm. We felt the spirit
radiate throughout campus and press everyone âto push the university
struggle [not only] to its limits,â but to its ultimate conclusion:
against the university itself.
âIt is surely not difficult to see that our time is a time of birth and
transition to a new period. The spirit has broken with what was hitherto
the world of its existence and imagination and is about to submerge all
this in the past; it is at work giving itself a new form."
-The Phenomenology of Spirit
The stench that the university emits has become unbearable and students
everywhere are reacting against this institution that has perpetually
rotted away their being through an arsenal of disciplinary techniques.
At campuses across California the corrosion of life is brought to a
quick halt when the collegeâs daily mechanism of power is given the
Luddite treatment, and suddenly, studying becomes quite meaningless.
Shamefully, the administrationâterrified they are losing control and
supervision of the pupils they spent so much time trainingâ turn riot
police on anyone ripping off their chains. At UC Santa Cruz, UCLA, UC
Berkeley, UC Davis, SF State, and CSU Fresno the occupations display the
need for free and liberated space. The recalcitrance is spreading. In
Austria, students left their occupied territory at the Fine Arts Academy
to march on the US embassy in solidarity with the police repression on
California campuses. On the same continent, the occupations in Greece
have now extended outside the universities into the high schools and
even the middle schools. Everywhere, youth are recognizing school as a
vapid dungeon stunting their growth and, at the same time, they are
refusing submission to the crushing of their bodily order. All over, a
new generation is seeking passion for the real, for what is immediately
practicable, here and now.
The assaults on police officers, the confrontations with the
administration, the refusal of lectures, and the squatted buildings
point the objective struggle in the direction of the complete and total
negation of the university. That is, brick by brick, smashing the
academic monolith into pieces and abolishing the college as a
specialized institution restricted to a specific segment of society.
This will require the recomposing of education as a generalized and
practical activity of the entire population; an undermining through
which the student shall auto-destruct.
Going halfway always spells defeat, and so the spreading of discontent
is our only assurance against this stagnation. Complete self-abolition
necessitates that the logic of revolt spill out of the universities and
flood the entire social terrain. But the weapons of normalcy are
concealed everywhere and especially within the most mundane
characteristics of daily life. The allegiance to the bourgeois family
structure and interruptions by holiday vacations and school breaks
threaten to douse the fuse before its ignition and hinder our momentum.
Let us not lose sight of the tasks before us.
We must forcefully eject the police from the campus. Find their holes
and burn them out. Block their movements near occupied spaces. Build
barricades; protect that which has been re-taken. Blockade the entrances
and gates of the campus as the students have already begun to experiment
with at UC Santa Cruz. We need only look to Chile or Greece to see the
immense advantage movements possess once they seize territory and
declare it free of police.
We must also denounce and destroy the student Left (the recuperative,
the parasitic, the ârepresentativeâ) that seeks to deescalate the
movement and integrate it back into politics. Our venom is not only
directed at those who assisted the police in blocking angry students
from entering California Hall at UC Berkeley or obstructed the crowds
during the Regents meeting at UCLA, but also at those who sought to
negotiate with the police âon behalfâ of the occupiers of Wheeler Hall.
It is telling that the police will negotiate with them; to the cops,
they are reasonable. We, however, are not so reasonable. We seek nothing
short of the immediate annihilation of both the pigs and activists.
Renew the strikes and extend their reach. Occupy the student stores and
loot them. Sell off the computers in the lab to raise funds. Set up
social spaces for students and non-students alike to come in and use
freely. Appropriate the copy machines and make news of the revolt.
Takeover the cafeterias and bars and begin preparing the communal feast.
Burn the debt records and the construction plans. Chisel away the
statues and vandalize the pictures of the old order. In short, create
not an âalternativeâ that can easily fit within the existent, but rather
a commune in which power is built to destroy capitalist society. When
faced with a university building, the choices are limited; either
convert it to ashes or begin the immediate materialization of the
international soviet.
To all waged and unwaged workersâstudents or not, unemployed,
precarious, or criminalâwe call on you to join this struggle. The
universities can become not only our playgrounds but also the foundation
from which we can build a partisan war machine fit for the battle to
retrieve our stolen lives.
And to the majority of students, from those paying their way to those
swimming in debt, who are all used as collateral by the Regents, who
bravely occupied buildings across California and fought the police
against the barricadesâwe say this clearly: we are with you! We stood by
you as you faced down the police in the storming rain and defended the
occupiers. Your actions are an inspiration to us all and we hope to meet
you again on the front lines. In you we see the spirit of insurgent
students everywhere.
As our Austrian friends recently told us, âTake out your hairspray and
your lighter!â Tear down the education factory. Attack the Left and
everything that it ârepresents.â Attack the new bosses before they
become the old ones. Life serves the risk takerâand weâre rolling the
fucking dice!
On May 1st, 2010, across the United States, black blocs were part of
demonstrations in various US cities. In Asheville and Santa Cruz, small
scale rioting lead to some arrests and much press regarding violence and
vandalism by anarchists. Watching the events in Santa Cruz unfold from
afar and also having spent a degree of time there, I found it clear that
the discussion of violence was as always, one-sided and shallow.
CHEERS GO UP ON 16TH and Mission Street as a bank window is shattered
into a thousand pieces by several people dressed in black with their
faces covered. I'm watching the events unfold in San Francisco while a
march of several hundred goes by on May Day, 2010. Soon after, the march
enters into an abandoned continuation school that has sat empty for
several years and occupies it. Gentrification in San Francisco at this
time is starting to kick back into high- gear and will soon sadly lead
to the eviction of many of my friends. Currently the city has more
vacant buildings than homeless people, yet still remains one of the most
expensive cities in the US. An hour away down the coast in Santa Cruz, a
riot breaks out along one of the busiest tourist streets in the town. On
the same night, in Asheville, North Carolina, a similar scene plays out
in the downtown as another May Day demonstration leads to minor rioting
in an upscale shopping district. Several people are arrested and over
the next several years go through drawn out court proceedings before
having their charges dropped.
While the cheers as Wells Fargo's windows fell gave a clue towards the
ripening of class anger brewing as the economic crisis deepened, the
response as expressed by the mainstream press and those in power to the
disturbances in Santa Cruz and Asheville were much different. Often
people find it hard to fathom why disruption breaks out in largely
white, college towns, and paint these acts as always the work of
outsiders. It is no surprise then that this term, âoutside agitators,â
comes from the civil-rights movement, directed at the Freedom Riders
going into the south. Furthermore, in the case of Santa Cruz, the media
and those in power also were quick to draw lines between the rioters and
those in the immigrant movement who also held protests that day. The
immigration protestors were âgoodâ for staying peaceful, while the
âoutsidersâ were âbadâ for rioting. What the elites fear most is the
coming together of wide ranges of people in uncontrollable ways.
The separation between âgoodâ and âbadâ protestors is not new and is
something that we discuss throughout this book. What I find more
interesting however, is how riots like this open up the possibility of
dialogue on the much greater violence that is required to keep
upper-scale places like Santa Cruz functioning in the first place.
Furthermore, like much of the Bay Area, Santa Cruz sits literally on top
of a graveyard of the Ohlone people who called (and still call) the area
home before colonization. Like all cycles of abuse, those in power
always portray violence enacted by those on the bottom as criminal and
insane while the violence that built and maintains this system is never
discussed.
If one were to walk along Pacific Ave in Santa Cruz, the scene of the
May Day events, one might choose to go inside the large health food
store located next to Borders. The food is overpriced, the staff becomes
angry if you pop an olive into your mouth from the salad bar, and the
beer selection doesn't include the cheap stuff. If you're bored while
waiting to spend $8.67 for a juice and a muffin, feel free to read the
latest issue of Pagan Vegan Gardening, or whatever they have in stock.
Glancing up however, one comes to see something much more sinister than
a lack of Keystone beer: a mural. Not just any mural, but one that
really angers me. It shows white people farming, and then loading the
produce onto a truck. The field ends next to the ocean and a road begins
which leads into Santa Cruz, where a sign for the health food store
beckons. If you want a picture of what Santa Cruz is, or what it wants
to be, you need only look at that mural. And, if you're too naive to not
realize how ridiculous that image is, then perhaps you need to read
on...
Santa Cruz exists like a colony. The county itself is almost 80% white,
with large sections belonging to the upper-middle-class. The importance
of tourism, technology industries, and also the university, create a
neo-colonial relationship with the nearby UCSC campus. Here, working
class Latino labor is pulled in from Watsonville (about 30 minutes away)
and exploited for just above minimum wage. Rent is out of control and it
takes years to get on section 8. Without packing swarms of people into a
small house a person with a mediocre job or non-connected parents will
not fare well here. This is a city surrounded by beauty, but it's one
that only a select few get to experience.
The politics of the local area are interesting, to say the least. Here,
the city council passes resolutions against the Iraq War and the PATRIOT
Act, Marxists and members of the ACLU sit on the city council, the
streets are filled with surveillance cameras, and the homeless are
routinely pushed out from the downtown. After an 18-year ban on
immigration police deporting people, those in power have recently again
allowed La Migra to break up families and deport working class people,
through Operation Community Shield. The coastal forest, which draws many
people to the area, is also routinely threatened by the UCSC system
itself. Recently, the university has announced a long range development
plan to clear much of the forest in order to expand the school. Welcome
to Santa Cruz, pack a gas mask in your tote bag.
In essence, everything in this place is different; but really, it is the
same. Here, people love organics, but they also love the cheap immigrant
labor that supplies it, especially when it stays in Watsonville or in
the kitchen. Here, people love being liberals, except when it comes to
issues that actually have an effect on class relations in the city. It
feels great to slap that anti-war sticker on the car, but those in power
are still a class with its own interestsâinterests that run counter to
ours. Thus, here we have repressive politicians who call for more
police, higher rents, destroyed forests, more cameras, more
developmentâall while wearing a Che shirt. An economy needs to be
managed, workers have to keep going to work, and class and race lines
have to be firmly kept in place. And if people could just enjoy their
kombucha and shut up, things would go a lot smootherâŠ
But Santa Cruz, like elsewhere, has a history of resistance. While
hippie communes in the 1960âs were once found in the woods that surround
the town, people also bombed banks along Pacific Ave. In the nearby town
of Watsonville, workers have gone on wildcat strikes in the packing
plants, and the Brown Berets chapter there has been organizing and
working within the community for decades. In 2009, students at the UC
campus occupied and held a building, helping to kick off the student
occupation movement in California that in turn laid the ground for the
larger Occupy movement. Service workers at UC Santa Cruz have also
staged a wide range strikes and actions, as they struggle for better
wages and conditions.
In a town like Santa Cruz however, torn apart by lines of race and
class, the question is: how to unite, if at all, these antagonisms and
these struggles? For me I feel, this is why riots and in the current
period, the black bloc, represents such a fear to those in power. On May
1st, International Workers' Day, people gathered along Pacific Ave and
marched. People quickly donned masks and began to attack the storefronts
of corporate businesses, and a police car was attacked with rocks and
paint. "What's next?!" cry the elites, "Will they surround city hall and
burn it to the ground? Will they link up with migrant workers and take
over the fields?!" Hopefully yes.
The actions by the black bloc in Santa Cruz are not that far removed
from countries in Europe where people fight a âsocialist governmentâ
that is just as committed to capitalism as the one before it. But, here,
unlike in Greece, there is not wide spread support for revolutionary
action, at least not loud, vocal support. In fact, in places like Santa
Cruz the most vocal support for a fundamental changing of society comes
from those that want to preserve capitalism at all costs, albeit in a
greener, much nicer form. Thus, we see signs on local health food stores
that implore us that "Non-violence is the only way."
The Left denounces the riots because they were violent. But violence,
like sabotage, has always been a tool of the proletariat. Strikers in
the United Farm Workers destroyed company property (causing Cesar Chavez
to go on hunger strike) and armed themselves. Rioters in Oakland fought
police and destroyed property when Oscar Grant was shot, leading the
State to try a police officer in California for murder for the first
time in history. In Chicago, workers occupied their workplaces, students
in Santa Cruz and beyond did the same, and in Stockton and elsewhere,
people continue to occupy their foreclosed homes, standing firm against
sheriffs with friends and neighbors. The State is already violent. It is
up to us to decide how we should respond. Will we be crushed, or do we
fight? We define the terms of our struggle against capitalism. Us. Not
liberals and Leftists who want to preserve capitalism. Display your
billboards. Write your letters to the editor. We are not in the same
struggle. They want more room at the Farmers Market. We want an end to
wage labor and hierarchical power.
Many on the Left see class as a misnomer. Something to be avoided. Don't
talk about work, and rent, and immigration. Peace, dood, comes through
buying the right products, the right lifestyle choices, and all that
jazz, man. On the other hand, some on the Left see the working class as
a means to power. They want to use us to build their Party and put
themselves in the leadership role. A ruling class in waiting. Meet the
new boss âsame as the old, but with sandals.
The breaking of windows materially doesn't get us anything (unless you
lucky bastards came up in that Rolex store!), but it sends a message
that we are not afraid to attack, and in rioting we feel something. We
have come to understand that we can't just let capitalism wash over us,
or continue allowing ourselves to simply sell our time and labor for a
wage in order to survive. To allow everything on this earth to become a
commodity; from cum to forests. In finding each other and realizing that
we don't want thisâ and realizing that the accepted avenues for change
are bankruptâwe understand that in acting together we find new ways of
being that can improve our conditions. We find possibility. That is what
is exciting. Today, a riot of 200. Tomorrow a general strike of 5.9
billion? Next week, the end of industrial capitalism?
In the end, we are not interested in breaking windows to show how bad a
corporation is or in decrying police by destroying their cars, but in
subverting and negating the totality of life in capitalism. In refusing
wage labor and the commodity. In destroying the hold and control of
capital and the police over all space. In destroying the separations
that exist between the proletariat based on race, age, geography,
gender, and sexuality. We are not out just to punish capital, but to
abolish its dictatorship over all our lives.
Across California and in much of the United States, there exist many
places like Santa Cruz that appear to go against the grain. But on
closer inspection, these towns are just like everywhere else. In fact,
when the naked inequalities are hidden behind a veil of liberalism, they
appear even more sinister. It is in moments of open revolt that their
true natures are often revealed. Just as when janitors at the UC campus
have gone on strike or carried out job actions or when the local
government has attacked homelessnessâthe lines are made clear.
So, when we go on strike. When we occupy the building. When we break
down the doors and start looting. When someone screams at the top of
your lungs "PEACEFUL PROTEST!" while cop cars are burning and we tell
them to "SHUT THE FUCK UP!" When the co-op becomes a collective meeting
space and the SEIU hall becomes a strike coordinating center. Remember,
that before all of this, someone screamed: "...Long live the proletarian
movement!"
At that point, it stopped being the start,
and started becoming the end.
Returning to Phoenix once again to cover ongoing protests against the
Neo-Nazis in the National Socialist Movement, this time in 2010, I
watched as the streets of the city exploded in fierce battles between
police, black bloc anarchists, and fascists. In the context of an
immigrant movement tightly controlled by the Left, as well as police
attacks on indigenous and anarchist militants, the riots were seen as a
turning point for revolutionaries in the city.
Again, more background information can be found on the Phoenix Class War
Council site: firesneverextinguised.blogspot.com
"[When] we permit the police, Klan, and Nazis to terrorize whatever
sector of the population they wish without repaying them back in kind;
[i]n short, by not engaging in mass organizing and delivering war to the
oppressors, we become anarchists in name only."
-Kuwasi Balagoon
CANISTERS ARE HURLED into the sky, exploding into smoke as they hit the
ground, only to be kicked back towards the police. Purple smoke billows
into the air, making its way upward, encircling the towering buildings.
The sound of shots fills the street, as police fire round after round of
pepper balls into the crowd. Your proletarian hero is at it again. Iâm
in the southwest now, Phoenix to be exact, and I'm standing on what
appears to be a completely deserted street in the heart of the desert.
Save of course for three groups: the anarchists, the Nazis, and the
police. The latter two groups though, seem more of a coalition than two
separate entities... One can almost hear the music in the background
playing, "Wow-wow-wa-wa-wow...wa-wow-wow," as if I was stepping out onto
a street from a dusty old saloon, hand cocked on a pistol. But it's
smoke grenades that are rumbling past me - not tumbleweeds, dear
readers. Still, for the two groups assembled here today, this town is by
no means big enough for the both of us.
Taking a moment out of the riot, I pause to clutch my face, as my eyes
and skin burn from a cloud of pepper spray that has made its way right
for me. Through my burning eyes, I notice that people aren't running
away. The line is being held. People fall back when the police attack,
but only for a bit, just enough to avoid the gas. Then they regroup,
aided greatly by medics and friends, cleaning eyes and helping comrades.
Together now, they unleash rocks, bottles, and hunks of concrete, which
rain down on the police and the group of about 30 Nazis behind their
lines carrying American flags and shields with swastikas. I learn later
that many within the Nazis' group had to leave early because of the
violence. Several newspaper boxes are quickly appropriated and placed in
the middle of the street as a barricade. Together, people beat the
boxes, making a primordial rhythm. A banner, one that the police have
not yet taken and destroyed, reads 'WE ARE WAR MACHINES!' The crowd
gathers again, some all in black with masks, others wearing only street
clothes. They look at the advancing police army surrounding a group of
Neo- Nazis and declare, "No pasaran! They shall not pass!" When I
stopped to catch my breath, I realized that people have been doing this
for close to an hour...
On Saturday, November 13th, 2010, several hundred people responded to a
call from the Phoenix Class War Council (PCWC, say it again with me, Pee
Cee Dub Cee), to face off against 20-40 members and supporters of the
National Socialist Movement (NSM), perhaps one of the largest white
supremacist and Neo-Nazi groups currently in the United States. The NSM,
which does about one public event a month according to the white
nationalist website Stormfront, came to town in November of 2009. Like
this year, in 2009 hundreds of protesters responded to a similar call as
the NSM rallied on the steps of the State Capital. While police forced
the NSM to shut down the rally ahead of time due to such a large and
rowdy counter-protest, the violence was nothing like what occurred on
the 13th.
The scene from the street on Jefferson was one that does not usually
play itself out for anarchists in the United States. I almost had to ask
myself if I was watching a street battle in Europe or Latin America. No,
this was Phoenix, not Athens, Greece or Santiago, Chile. We were in the
nearly deserted downtown; surrounded by glass buildings and almost
entirely empty streetsâsave for several stragglers, cars, police, and
protesters. The riot against the NSM is perhaps the largest uprising
that anarchists have participated in in the city of Phoenix for the last
10 years, and its success brings up several points of discussion as
anarchists continue to struggle and intervene in Arizona as well as
around the world.
Much has happened since the NSM made its way to Phoenix in November of
last year only to be escorted back to their cars by the police before
their permit even expired. Tensions over speed cameras have continuedâ
anarchists have pushed for a critique of them from an anti-border and
anti-white supremacist perspective. Anarchists in the PCWC have
continued to push the fractures and tensions within the
Patriot/Libertarian/ Constitutionalist movement, supporting a
pro-working class and anti-racist line of attack. In early December,
anarchists helped shut down a speaking event of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and
in January of 2010, helped organize for a revolutionary bloc within the
massive march against him.
What made the bloc at the anti-Arpaio march different from others was
who it represented. The bloc was called the DO@ (Dine', O'odham, and
anarchist) bloc, and represented a union of Dine' (Navajo), Oâodham, and
anarchists. The north area ofArizona is the indigenous home of the Dine'
people and in the area close to Phoenix and Tucson, Oâodham people live
on both sides of the US/ Mexican border. The indigenous and anarchist
organizers of the march made it clear that the purpose of the march was
not only to stand in opposition to Arpaio and the State, but also
against the recuperative and bureaucratic organizations that had called
the march. As the call for the march read:
âWe hope to use this formation on the streets at the January 16th march
against deportations in Phoenix to project a vision for a different mode
of resistance that breaks with the stilted, uncreative status quo that
dominates movement organizing in town. This document is our explanation
of the type of force we would like to put out there and why we think
itâs necessary.â
The DO@ made a clear connection between the forces that oppress,
destroy, and colonize indigenous communities, deport and hinder
organizing of Latin American migrants, and attack working class people
throughout the United States. That force is the economic system of
capitalism, and the government that exists to make sure that that system
stays in place. Again from the call:
âWe recognize what appears to be an unending historical condition of
forced removal here in the Southwestern so-called US. From the murdering
of O'odham Peoples and stealing of their lands for the development of
what is now known as the metropolitan Phoenix area, to the ongoing
forced relocation of more than 14,000 Dine who have been uprooted for
the extraction of natural resources just hours north of here, we
recognize that this is not a condition that we must accept, it is a
system that will continue to attack us unless we act. Whether we are
migrants deported for seeking to organize our own lives (first forced to
migrate to a hostile country for work) or working class families
foreclosed from our houses, we see the same forces at work. Indeed, in
many cases the agents of these injustices are one and the same.â
The DO@ bloc was historic. It represented a revolutionary coming
together of forces from both the anarchist movement and indigenous
struggles (not to mention those who do not see a distinction between the
two currents). It was anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-statist.
It was also clearly against the Leftist and mainstream protest
organizations that wanted to work with the systemâit instead pushed for
direct action. Lastly, it was strongly in favor of working class
resistance to capitalism, linking the struggles of working and poor
people with migrants and the indigenousânot separating themâwhile at the
same time attacking white supremacy as a cross-class relationship that
hinders the liberation of all peoples.
In mid-January however, at the end of the massive Arpaio marchâin which
the DO@ bloc participatedâthe police moved in, attacking, punching, and
arresting several people, clearly singling out the DO@ bloc for attack.
Five people were arrested and ticketed with trumped-up charges of
assaulting an officer and rioting.
The police made one thing very clear: they were not interested in
protecting the âfree speechâ of the DO@ bloc, which was part of a legal,
permitted march. Their very presence was enough for the police to react
with violence. The coming together of working class whites, anarchists,
migrants, Chican@s, and Native peoples represented too dangerous a force
to be allowed to publicly march. Proving to be the all too âloyalâ
opposition, Puente, a mainstream immigrant organization (the organizers
of the march), denounced the DO@ bloc, instead supporting the police lie
that the marchers brought the violence on themselves by attacking the
police first. Anyone who watches footage from the march can easily see
that the police acted first against the marchers. The Puente leadership,
which coddles up to the mayor and other city elites, has nothing in
common with those in the DO@ bloc, so itâs clear why revolutionaries
draw lines between themselves and reformists.
It is important to keep the attack on the DO@ bloc very much in mind as
we talk about the resistance to the NSM in November of 2010, because as
we will see, the police are willing to beat, arrest, and attack one
group while protecting and in some cases, working with, the other.
âAnd I can see through the walls now, we need to go to City Hall and try
to tear the walls down!â
-Willy Northpole
On November 13th, about 40-50 Nazis (a group that grew smaller) with the
National Socialist Movement were confronted in the streets of Downtown
Phoenix by about 200-300 counter-protesters. The anti-Nazis were made up
of a variety of people, but the largest group was anarchists, Native
warriors, and Leftists, pro-migrant peoples, and religious organizations
(such as the Unitarians).
The day started with people gathering in front of the federal building,
where the Nazis were planning to rally later in the day. A banner was
dropped shortly after people began gathering around noon, and at about
2pm the black bloc found the Nazis marching from their parked cars
(which was the same site as the previous year) to the Federal building.
Many of us then started to run around the corner and down the street
towards where the NSM was marching in formation (with police out in
front for their protection). A standoff then began between the
anarchist-led group and the NSM, protected by the police, from about
2:00 to 2:40pm. The street was held and, as expected, both groups
chanted and traded insults. A friend that was positioned behind the
Nazis videotaping heard more back and forth interactions between the
police and the Nazis, as the NSM became more and more angry that the
police were unwilling or unable to move their march forward and get the
group towards the Capitol. As 3 o'clock quickly approached, more and
more people within the crowd thought that as soon as the clock struck,
the police would call off the rally and lead the Nazis back to their
cars, since their permit expired at that time.
The black bloc went into action around this time, getting into a
formation which allowed reinforced banners to hide the group and allow
militants the ability to launch projectiles. After several rounds of
rocks attacked the fascists, the police sent in a snatch squad, and one
section of the black bloc moved away from the front of the line in order
to avoid arrests. However, after that section of the black bloc fell
back, the snatch squad simply withdrew into the larger crowd of the
police. It was around this time that the police decided to spray the
front of the crowd with pepper gas. I had my back turned, and was trying
to give a young hooligan my bandana, when the gas entered the air and
everyone started to run.
The crowd then quickly looked for the nearest projectiles and quickly
returned fire. Medics and those in the crowd who were not throwing rocks
(or whatever else was humanly possible), helped those with burning eyes
and skin tend to their wounds. The crowd quickly re-massed and again
held the line. Then began a running street battle between the police and
the anarchists that lasted 45 minutes, until the Nazis were finally
delivered to the Federal building which was located down the street.
Anarchists during the skirmish acted with the utmost bravery, unar-
resting people, taking blast after blast of pepper spray, and physically
combating their enemies.
When the Nazis finally made it into the Federal building courtyard, they
only stayed for about 45 minutes; their tired and boring speeches were
drowned out by the counter-protesters who came to taunt them. Even NSM
writeups of the event point out that NSM supporters were not able to
hear the speeches or participate in the rally. Afterward, the NSM
members were taken back to their cars by the police. Cops then arrested
two protest participants as they were leaving the event.
According to many organizers who I spoke with, there were several ways
that this street battle broke out of what normally occurs at anarchist
street actions. First, the anarchists were in a leading role, not simply
coming to another event and hoping for the best. They organized good and
hard for this outcome, and their organization paid off. Revolutionaries
who came to shut down the NSM had clear goals and clear ideas about how
to achieve these goals. This allowed others to plug into these actions
and see how their energies could be best placed. In a movement wracked
by apathy towards getting anything accomplished, it was refreshing to be
around others who took their ideas and actions seriously enough to put a
fair amount of time and energy into planning.
Various affinity groups came together and plugged in where they could,
which helped the larger organic uprising against the police and the NSM.
These affinities and the level of organization did not come out of thin
air, but from years of hard and ongoing organizing and various state
wide meetings between various groups, collections, and organizations.
Furthermore, people simply were not afraid of the police. Instead of
running when police brought out the pepper spray, or when they advanced,
street fighters simply stepped away and then came back, all the while
attacking with projectiles. As one friend said after being sprayed,
âYour eyes hurt for a minute, but then you realize youâre still alive,
and then youâre back in it.â This process through which we discover new
ways of life and become powerful was the spark that drove those fighting
on the 13th. Through the pepper spray and hurled stonesâyou could make
out laughter and see smiles, even beneath the masks.
âYou better have your gats in hand, 'cause man...â
-Biggie
People were packing guns, again. It was both a thrill and a heavy dose
of frightening reality to see people in the streets running with us
while carrying on the side. Also, being in Arizona, who knows how many
other people were also carrying concealed, which is legal there without
a permit. While a shootout between the two groups would have been
bloody, we should remember that both fascists and their opponents are
armed and willing to openly show it.
âThere is free speech only for the rich.â
- George Lincoln Rockwell, American Nazi Party
During the entire event, police acted and coordinated with those within
the march. They were seen using hand signs towards the rest of those
marching behind them, giving a clenched fist when they needed the group
to stop. At one point, police even moved to the right side of the
street, allowing NSM âstormtroopersâ to move to the left side of the
street. Perhaps this was done to move the anarchists out of the way, or
simply to bait us into attacking the Nazis so police had the excuse to
gas us.
Police also allowed J.T. Ready to walk into the crowd to engage with
protestors. At one point when the crowd began to hurl spit, insults, and
projectiles at him, a large African-American man came up and protected
him as he walked back into the Federal building area. He stated, âYou
have every right to be here.â This is interesting yet sad, considering
Ready thinks that he has every right to deport this man âback to
Africa.â This man was later heard saying, âIf those kids had better
education in school, they would know that non-violence worksâŠâ
The thoughts and actions of this man represent the poverty of thought
behind the âFree Speechâ position. Though weâve all heard it before, the
faith in free speech is based on the concept that the government of the
United States allows us all the freedom to say what we want; to express
ourselves politically in a peaceful way as long as we do not break the
law. Thus, any attempt at limiting the free speech of others is an
assault on the free speech of all of us, so the line goes. Furthermore,
we should not attack those who wish to do us harm, because the
government exists to stop any sort of extremists who are attempting to
illegally harm citizens of this country. Meaning, even if they want to
kill us, Uncle Sam has our back and will deal with them.
The problem with this line of thinking is that the State and its police
are not neutral. The State has organized numerous times to attack social
movements aimed at transforming and liberating humanity. The government
attacking groups such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and
the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense are good examples. Furthermore,
COINTELPRO , during the 1960s -70s, was designed to stop and hinder
social movements for liberation in the United States (and even some on
the right). Through a campaign of disinformation, murder, and terrorism,
the US broke apart, assassinated, and destroyed various organizations
and people for the sake of keeping the status quo. In the current
period, we have found that under the Obama administration the State has
expanded its apparatus of surveillance, gone after whistle-blowers such
as Edward Snowden, and kept extensive documents of everyday people as a
means of monitoring potential insurgency.
In this country, if you challenge capitalism in a meaningful way, you
will face repression. This is why the State tries to steer us into legal
avenues. Want to protest? Sure, get a permit and make sure the police
are there to keep you on the sidewalk. Want to strike? Sure, make sure
you go to the union bosses with your problems, theyâll work it out with
management. Want to make the world a better place? Sure, get a job with
a non-profit, which gets State money to do the work that the State used
to do. To the State, you are only free to speak as long as youâre
reading from their script.
We do not need a government to allow us to say what we want, or to
organize in public. As the Eugene-based anarcho-punk band Axiom growled,
thatâs a ânatural power, not a right.â As we have seen, the government
will stop us, with violence when they need to, when our movements become
a threat to the established order. Lastly, we canât rely on the
government to protect us from right-wing racists who may simply talk
about deporting mass amounts of people and imprisoning many more, when
that is exactly what this government is currently doing, especially in
Arizona. The State is not here to protect us at all, and so, the State
is not concerned with âfree speech.â Governments are designed to make
sure that class angerâ between those who own and control the means of
existence, and those who do the workâdoes not tear them apart. They are
concerned with keeping the social peace, and see revolutionary groups as
serious threats.
Elites are fine with angry as long as it is expressed in allowed
formats. So, write a letter, hold a sign, even read a socialist
newspaper if you want! Just donât go on wildcat strike, firebomb the
police state, loot a grocery store, or try and stop a Nazi march! We can
say things in this society, but itâs important that's where it stays.
That is why the State was willing to attack anarchists within the
immigration march in early 2010 while defending the Nazis in November.
Police wanted to send the message that a demonstration legally
sanctioned by the State (the NSM rally) was going to be protected with
its full power. And all those who were willing to fight in the streets
(which, by the way, is exactly what Hitler claimed was the only way to
stop the rise of fascism), were going to be put down with massive force.
The same way the State wanted to send a message during the legal march
against Arpaio by attacking the anarchists. To the immigration movement
this was as clear as crystal: get with the revolutionaries, and you will
be arrested and attacked with all the power that Unkie Sam can muster.
Anyone who supports the idea and line of âfree speechâ supports the
governmentâs platform. But we anarchists are not here to play by the
Stateâs rulesâwe are here to destroy the capitalist government.
When I returned from Phoenix, I began reading a lot about fascism, the
Holocaust, and one of the âpioneersâ of Neo-Nazism in the United States,
George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party (ANP).
Rockwell was important because after his assassination in the late
1960s, former party members would go on to create organizations that led
to the formation of the National Socialist Movement. Politically, the
ANP, and thus the NSM who followed its lead, pursued an activist and
electoral mode of organizing. For the ANP and the NSM, this means
constantly being in the public eye, getting as much media as possible,
and being on the streets whenever they can. The more they fly the flag,
the NSM contends, the more people will come rally to them.
Rockwell had standard politics for a âNational Socialistâ at the time,
although he stressed he was not a âfascist,â because he supported free
enterprise. More racist lemonade stands, and less racist state-owned
factories, yay! Rockwell never led an organization of more than 200
active âstormtroopers,â (men who lived in ANP barracks and outfits),
although the ANP's influence through supporters and literature reached
out far beyond its membership base. What is interesting about the ANP is
that unlike the KKK, they placed a lot of importance on staying inside
the law. Rockwell envisioned that he could gain power by being in the
public eye, making Americans aware of his program so that during a time
of economic downturn he might become more and more popular until he
could run for President.[27]
The ANP used the civil rights movement as a âpoint of intervention,â
hoping to gain support among those opposed to desegregation, Leftists,
and supported the war in Vietnam. Strangely enough, Rockwell also saw
the fact that they were called âNazis,â publicly displayed the swastika,
and gave the Hitler salute as pluses for the organization. Without the
word âNazi,â Rockwell commented, the news would not cover the ANP. With
few members, police harassment, the threats of violence at all times,
and low funds, ANP actions never went beyond simple rallies, flyering,
and giving speeches. They certainly failed to awaken many whites to an
âAryan consciousness.â However, such organizing on the part of Rockwell
did turn many onto Neo-Nazi politics, and helped to usher in a new
generation of racists that today comprise groups like the NSM. While the
ANP failed to take power, it did succeed in at least creating the next
generation of foot soldiers.
Seeing Rockwellâs ANP as their political forebears, the NSM holds onto
their activist, electoral strategy in order to gain entry into the
higher halls of power in the United States, hoping to totally transform
it into a fascist empire. Like the ANP, the NSM is using the politics of
the day to make a name for itself. In the 1960s it was Civil Rights and
today it is border issues and the fight over immigration. The NSM is
hoping to use anti-immigrant sentiment to its advantage and pull more
mainstream Americans into its ranks. Like the ANP, it uses the Nazi
imagery of the Party to gain media publicity, although it helps to
soften its image by constantly referring to itself as a âlaw-abiding,
white civil rights organization.â
Rockwell, for all the venom he aimed at the âJewishâ US government,
worked closely with the FBI, giving them information on each and every
stormtrooper, letting police know where they would be traveling and
where they would protest, and much more. When ANP members left the
organization he alerted the FBI; that way, if the ex-ANP members
committed any acts of violence, they could not be traced back to
Rockwell. This is funny, because the ANP was ripe with infiltrators, as
we can be sure the NSM is as well. Some on Stormfront even accuse J.T.
Ready of being a fed![28] In an interesting note about the ANP,
COINTELPRO was even involved in disrupting the organization: creating
rifts with the Klan, and playing off various members of the ANP against
each other. Rockwell could wave the flag at the FBI all he liked, they
still didnât like him; but they saved their real guns for the Fred
Hamptons of the world.
Despite this, following the Stateâs rules does bring protection, and
allows you to be a Nazi out in the open while the police beat back your
detractors. This is a formula that the NSM has followed everywhere it
goes. It arrives with swastika flags, counter-protestors attempt to
attack, and the cameras go click. And thus, the NSM is at quite a
crossroads. It needs the Nazi imagery just to get attention, but it also
wants mainstream whites to join themâwhich the whole Nazi thing kind of
kills. At the same time, while riots against it give it publicity, it
also makes the NSM seem weak.
In many ways, groups like the NSM are a dead horse. Passed over by an
era of Facebook invites and grassroots organizingâthere seems to be
little room for them and their tired and boring brand of flag flying and
Nazi speeches. Even when the NSM tried to make entries into the Tea
Party they got the cold shoulder. J.T. Ready was welcomed with open arms
before he was outed as a Nazi, but when he and some of his buddies
showed up to a teabagger shindig with a Hitler portrait, they got the
boot. But the threat of these groups lies not just in their existence,
but in the idea that they will help raise the next generation of
Hitlerites. We can deal with the activist NSM, but one that is focused
on direct action would be much, much scarier.
For now, though, the NSM is weak and under attack. Like the ANP before
them, without massive police protection the NSM would be beaten down and
broken apart at most of the rallies that they organize. And like much of
the white power movement, the NSM is often derailed by infighting
between members and splits within the Party. As anarchists and other
radicals continue to physically confront the NSM, we are making it
harder for these groups to organize and meet new people. We are also
making it less attractive to join the organization due to possible
violence. While media attention is drawn to the NSM when we physically
confront them, attention also goes to us, and we appear as the only ones
willing to stand up and physically fight the Nazis.
In short, the NSM lost the media war in Phoenix, just as they do every
time they get their asses handed to them. What publicizes the NSM also
publicizes the abilities and superior number of anarchists. We are seen
in the context of popular rebellions against not only the Nazis, but
also the State and its police. In the aftermath of the riots in Phoenix,
many people felt energized and ready for the battles to comeâhoping that
the riot would provide a springboard for more radical actions. Moreover,
these actions gave credit to the idea that people can self-organize and
act outside of the activist groups that seek to manage and control
popular protest.
Anarchists should also look at the communities that the NSM and other
Neo-Nazi groups reach out to: mainly working class and poor white
communities. We need to be engaged in these neighborhoods, expressing
that our enemies are not other poor and working people (led by a
mythical Jewish order), but the ruling class. Likewise, we need to keep
in mind that these Nazis are simply reacting and feeding off of what the
State is already doing. If we are not also struggling against attacks
organized by the government on indigenous communities, the border,
deportation of migrants, etc, then we will not be fighting the
conditions that give rise to many of these âextremists.â The NSM doesnât
operate detention camps, or conduct sweeps that break apart families and
fill jailsâthe State does.
People on the west coast often ask me why Iâm excited about Arizona. For
one, Iâm excited about a place where anarchists actually support each
other and play a part in each othersâ struggles. Living in a place where
anarchists rarely travel even the short distance from one town to the
next, it is hard to believe the degree in which solidarity does exist.
Arizona is inspiring to me, because the bonds in both the world of
theory and the world of practice, all while not separating the two from
each other.
Meanwhile, indigenous militants in groups such as the OâOdham Solidarity
Across Borders Collective and fighters from Flagstaff have also created,
built, and maintained a revolutionary indigenous politic that has
informed and grown within and alongside Arizonian anarchism. Lastly, the
connections being made between all sections of the exploited and
oppressed is inspiring. People are working together against common
enemies and towards common visions; despite the divisions that capital
places between us. That in itself is inspiring.
So when they ask me why Iâm excited about Arizona, I tell âem this.
It is the place where the sons of âimmigrantsâ and the daughters of
Natives and the children of settlers don masks and fight together. Where
they chant: âRiot! Si se puede!â And indeed, it has been done. And in
that moment, we can feel the common humanity that unites us all and
reminds us, that together, we are fighting.
For freedom.
Defense of the Revolutionary Politics and Actions of Occupy Oakland
On November 2nd, 2011, a general strike was called by Occupy Oakland in
response to the police raid on the Occupy encampment and the near-murder
of Iraq veteran, Scott Olsen. In the days after he was shot, the streets
flooded with people at night who donned masks, fought the police, and
attacked their vehicles. In a week, over 50,000 people were mobilized as
downtown Oakland was ground to a halt and upwards of 100,000 shut down
the port of Oakland for several hours.
The events on November 2nd were inspiring, but after the strike, many
repeated old critiques of violence and claimed that certain tactics
(such as those of the black bloc) played into the hands of the police.
This essay was an attempt to defend the revolutionary character of the
day's events in particular and Occupy Oakland in general.
âIt is not our desire to participate in violence, but it is even less
our desire to lose. If we do not resist, actively, when they come to
take what we have won back, then we will surely lose...[A]s they sought
to abuse us, beat us, kill us, we knew that there was no other option
than to fight back. Be prepared to defend these things you have
occupied...â
- A Letter of Solidarity from Egypt
ON WEDNESDAY, November 2nd 2011, history was made in Oaklandâin the
streets, history was lived. In the tens of thousands, people from across
Oakland and Northern California converged, responding to a call by the
Occupy Oakland General Assembly the previous week for a general strike.
More than 50,000 people (some say as high as 100,000) collectively went
on strike, broke the law en masse, shut down the flow of capital at the
port, and defied police orders for hours. The crowds were a wide section
of the poor and working population: students, union and non-union
workers, the poor, and the homeless. 14th and Broadway was occupied from
early in the morning until late at night when police used flash grenades
and tear gas to remove the crowd. In the intersection of the general
strike, a huge banner was hung across the streets that read âDeath to
Capitalism!, Long Live the Oakland Commune.â
The Oakland Commune refers to the occupation of Oscar Grant Plaza
(formerly known as Frank Ogawa Plaza), the small park outside of city
hall which has been occupied since October 10th. In the early hours of
October 25th, acting on orders of former union and Communist Labor Party
organizer Mayor Jean Quan, the camp was raided with extreme force.
Police from various agencies evicted the camp, arrested many, and shot
tear gas and other weapons into the camp, which contained families and
children. A rally of over 1,000 followed that same night, and people
marched back to the plaza only to be met again with gas and flash
grenades. One protestor and former soldier, Scott Olsen, was hit in the
head with a canister and was critically injured. Driven by a desire not
only to protect the occupation, but also to defend the very real
community that had been created, people marched and tried to retake the
plaza several times until the early morning. Some courageously fought
with police, threw gas canisters back at police, and busted up law
enforcement cars. The next day, people again reconvened at 14th and
Broadway as news of Scott Olsen had settled in and the Mayor, who had
been out of town during the raid, returned to the city. Police were
nowhere to be seen, and after the security fence (placed by the police)
was dismantled, a general assembly of several thousand decided almost
unanimously in favor of a general strike. The occupation continued, and
once again became home to hundreds of people who recreated the kitchen,
library, medical space, kidsâ space, and much more. Decisions were made
without leaders or hierarchy, through working groups and general
assemblies. Furthermore, the camp decided not to work with police, the
city, or any politicians or political parties. This has been a major
step forward for the Occupy movement, and shows the extent to which
anarchist ideas have influenced Occupy Oakland.
During the strike on November 2nd, speakers addressed the crowd and
messages of solidarity were read from as far away as Pakistan. Earlier
in the week, people across the US as well as in Egypt marched in
solidarity with Oakland; in Cairo they carried signs that read in broken
English: âFuck Police!â News commentators even mentioned how the mood in
Oakland was vastly different from that of Occupy Wall Street in New
York. People here were both more willing to fight and to name their
enemies: capitalism, the governments that protect it, and the police
that enforce it. As a solution, Oakland Occupiers looked to the world
created out of the occupation; one of mutual aid, horizontal decision
making, and solidarity. The general strike was not an attempt to ask for
dialogue with anyone in power; people were consciously refusing to sell
their labor and reproduce this capitalist society. Together, en masse,
as poor and working people, we took a side in the class war and started
to hit back.
Starting at 9 in the morning, several large groups marched on
banksâforcing many to closeâas well as on several businesses that did
not allow their employees to strike. In one instance, a coffee and
pastry shop was closed down after several minutes of picketing and the
boss allowed workers to leave with a full dayâs pay. In the afternoon,
an anti-capitalist march began with over 1,000 people present. The
stated goal of the march was to force businessesâespecially corporations
and banksâto close their doors. Windows at various large banks were
broken and a fire extinguisher filled with paint was used to write
âSTRIKEâ in huge letters across Whole Foods. People chanted: âUnion
busting is disgusting!â as the windows were broken and some of the patio
furniture was taken and placed in the street. Whole Foods has a history
of stopping the forming of unions at its stores and firing its workers
for organizing. Later, as the march returned to Oscar Grant Plaza, many
of the windows at the front of a nearby Wells Fargo were broken out by a
large crowd.
Between 4:00 and 5:00 PM, tens of thousands of people marched from Oscar
Grant Plaza to the Port of Oakland. Some Longshore ILWU workers at the
port walked off the job or simply did not come into work and helped shut
down the port. By 5pm, thousands of people had reached the port, and it
was effectively shut down with workers being sent home with pay. The
occupation of the port by thousands of people cost literally millions of
dollars and disrupted one of the largest and most important flows of
capital on the West Coast. At one point, a worker drove his car into the
path of several protesters, threatening them with injury. His car was
quickly surrounded and the driver's tires were slashed and the car was
pushed out by protesters with the driver still inside. As night came,
thousands of people began leaving the port after word was given that as
of the 8 PM shift change, the port was shut down. At around 10 PM, about
100 people marched from Oscar Grant Plaza to the Travelerâs Aid Society
on 520 Broadway, a building that bad recently been foreclosed on and
which had once housed various programs for homeless people. After
several hours of people enjoying the space and listening to speeches and
music outside, word began to spread that police were on their way.
Fearing massive police violence on the same level as the raid against
the occupation at Oscar Grant Plaza, people began building barricades on
either side of the street. As the police arrived, the barricade on
Broadway was set ablaze, to stop police from entering the street and to
dull any tear gas. When police finally arrived, they fired tear gas and
threw concussion grenades to get people to disperse. At some point, many
people left the occupied building and went down Broadway or to the end
of the plaza. Windows of the nearby police recruiting station, that had
already been smashed out during a recent anti-police brutality march,
were once again broken and defaced, as many people took out their
frustrations on the buildingâas the nearest manifestations of the
police. Two businesses were also looted and graffiti artists used this
time to write various slogans. The police continued to attack into the
early morning, and many people were afraid that there would be an
attempt by the authorities to evict the plaza once again. While the
plaza eviction did not occur, police did make up to 80 arrests and
finally took back the streets surrounding Oscar Grant Plaza by around 4
AM on Thursday, November 4th.
In the wake of the police attack, some within the occupation have called
for the expulsion of anarchists. They have called for the repaying of
the banks for their broken windows, and for a formal apology to be made
by Occupy Oakland (OO). Furthermore, they are attempting to condemn
anyone who promotes âviolence,â and to ensure that OO will from now on
take a completely ânon-violentâ approach to organizing. Lastly, perhaps
the most sinister move, is the slander that anarchists are police them-
selvesâagent provocateurs sent to ruin the movement.
This essay is written in defense of the Oakland Commune, as well as the
militant actions that have been taken to make Occupy Oakland a
revolutionary project against capitalism.
âThere's no power, without control.â
- Conflict
Watching a video in support of Occupy Oakland produced by Moveon.org, a
group that supports and raises funds for the Democratic Party, leads one
to believe that those in the plaza were exercising the ârightsâ of
speech and peaceful assembly, and in turn were attacked by a police
force that does not respect those rights. This narrative has been picked
up by many within the Occupy movement including some within OO, and it
is important to counter it because, quite simply, it is a lie.
The occupation of Oscar Grant Plaza (OGP) was possible because people
took the space. They did not ask, and they did not have the ârightâ to
be there. The current laws on the books say that camping in a park
overnight is illegal. You are not supposed to have amplified sound and
be able to cook and serve food without permits. Even the decisions made
en masse by the general assembly, which forbade police from coming into
the area, are of course a direct violation of the law. But there is
nothing wrong with this; this in fact, is a good thing.
People did not hold the space at OGP because they had a right to do so
given to them by the government of the United Statesâthey made the
occupation possible by their sheer will and numbers. They took something
and held their ground. Whatâs more, they asked for people to come and
join them in breaking the lawâto make their movement biggerâand people
did. This created a base from which the camp could organize and run
itself, as well as a material force that could support other struggles.
This is why the General Assembly (GA) passed an agreement stating that
they would offer material solidarity to anyone occupying schools and
foreclosed properties.
The nature of the encampment was very radical, as one news commentator
stated, âMore Malcolm X than Martin Luther King...â A growing illegal
occupation of public space that openly denounces and refuses to work
with the police or city government is something the authorities find
problematic, to say the least. Furthermore, a growing section of the
occupation was clearly anti-capitalist and revolutionary. This is
something that the State could not have allowed to continue. And is it
any wonder that when police were cracking down on Occupy Oakland they
were also arresting people in other cities and making plans to move on
Occupy SF?
If they canât co-opt the movement, they will try to destroy it.
So, the city had to come up with a way to evict the camp. Using their
trusty friends, the corporate media, they painted a picture of a violent
and dirty camp spinning out of control without the help of a benevolent
police force and a sympathetic city government. OO was said to be
swimming with rats and filth, dirty kitchens and violent homeless
people. A series ofwarning letters and notices of eviction were sent out
to the camp, and finally, on Tuesday morning, the State had had enough.
With the Mayor signing the order and then heading out of town, the
police were left to do the one thing that they do well.
At this point, many people can agree that the reason the State gave for
the raid had nothing to do with the Stateâs real desire to destroy the
occupation. Clearly the government does not want this movement to grow
and organize. As one comrade said in the early days of the camp, âThis
is America; youâre not supposed to be able to do this.â And so, when the
flash grenades exploded and the tear gas filled our lungs, it wasn't
because someone forgot to read their constitution; itâs because our
material force, our occupation, stood in direct opposition to everything
that the power structure is. The way of life that is capital cannot
allow ours to exist.
Many people quickly grasped this concept, and no blame was given to
anyone who, facing down rubber bullets and gas, picked up a canister
that could have been aimed at anyoneâs head (such as Scott Olsen's), and
threw it right back at the police. No one seemed to cry when the cars of
officers who attacked and hurt us had their windows smashed into
oh-so-many lovely pieces. No; people understood in an instant that this
is war, and we will fight. Just as the Egyptians did, just as the Greeks
did, and just as the students in the UK did. After the first raid on the
camp, many people came to a very simple, yet important, conclusion: the
government lies and the media helps them. Their eviction had nothing to
do with keeping the park clean and protecting that treeâit had
everything to do with maintaining state power.
After the raid, the media continued its blatant whitewash. âThe police
had to fire on us because protesters were throwing rocks,â they cried!
âWe donât know who shot the tear gas, it must have been the protesters,â
parroted the media for the police. We read the headlines and shook our
heads.
The occupation of Oscar Grant Plaza was not an exercise in our ârightsâ
as Americans, it was an expression of our power as human beings. In
flexing that power, we met the violence of the State, but held our
ground. On the night of November 2nd, we escalated again. Knowing that
the cold weather was only going to get colder, knowing that just as we
took the plaza we can take other things, and knowing that capital will
never meet our needs and will only exploit us, a foreclosed building was
occupied. It once offered services to the homeless and the idea was to
create more services for the community as well as for the movement. In
keeping with the decision passed by the General Assembly, hundreds came
out to join the occupation and also to defend it. Soon the police
arrived, and began to clear people from the occupied community center
just as they did at Oscar Grant Plaza only a week before. Nothing was
different, everything was exactly the same.
That night, and into the next day, the media attacked us with the same
ferocity that the police did. Just as the media was used to spread lies
about Oscar Grant Plaza, and thus endorse and build popular support for
the raid against it, this time the media gave justification for the
police attack and helped demonize anarchists who attempted to open a
community center. Thus such gems as âthe police came to the area only
after people started a bonfire,â perpetuating the lie that the police
just wanted to keep residents safe. They said that anarchists wanted to
burn the building down, which hides the truth that we opened the
building for all and for the community surrounding it. That the police
arrived after people began writing graffiti and breaking windows, when
in reality this happened largely after the police violence began. This
last narrative attempts to split the occupiers between âviolentâ and
ânon-violent.â It also hides the targets that actually were attacked,
and the degree to which graffiti artists of all types took to the walls
to write revolutionary messages. And, out of that tension, the corporate
media gives us the group of heroesâthe fighters of anarchists and the
defenders of the âPeaceful Protestâ: the peace police.
A violent contingent stalks Occupy Oakland. They have been known to
assault protesters during marches, call people âfaggotsâ if they
disagree with them or donât like the look of them and generally use
violence to stop the actions of anyone who they do not agree with. No,
itâs not the black bloc. Itâs the peace police (PP).
For those fortunate enough to exist outside of the world of protest
politics, the PP are demonstrators that try to get other people to stop
doing things that they consider to be âviolent.â Case in point: when
people spontaneously began to dismantle the fence around the camp on
October 26th before the general assembly, PP screamed, âStop! Stay
non-violent.â Thus, for many of the PP, âviolentâ actions are anything
that can be seen as confrontational, spontaneous, militant, or
forcefulâfor example the occupation itself. That is to say, as far as
the PP are concerned, violence equates to effectiveness.
And the corporate mediaâthe lapdogs of the ruling classâLOVE THESE
PEOPLE. In one video shot on the news shows PP âbravelyâ placing
themselves in between âanarchistsâ and the windows of a bank in order to
stop people banging on it (in order to force the bank to close). In
other situations, PP have become extremely violent towards individuals
just for expressing their opinions. During other situations, PP have
used violence or fought those attempting to break or paint over the
property of large banks or the walls of corporations.
As someone wrote in the online essay, We Laugh at the Waves as they
Crash on Us!
âWhat we found comical about this whole event was that the liberal
pacifists themselves destroyed the myth of ideological pacifism,
although from their position they are not able to see this. In the
process of smashing bank windows, there were a couple protesters who
took more hardline stances on pacifism, with a couple individuals going
as far as grabbing, hitting, and tackling the people smashing windows.
There was also talk from some of the âpeaceful protestersâ of forcefully
removing people's masks. Of course the sweet sweet irony in all of this
is that while property was being destroyedâ and it should be made clear
here that it was only banks and union-busting businesses that got
destroyedâthe only violence directed toward actual human beings was on
the part of the âpeaceful protesters.â We notice here that the projected
goal of pacifism, a peaceful world, is not possible through pacifism. We
also notice a definite difference between non-violence and pacifism: the
former being a specific tactic individuals might choose to employ; the
latter being an ideology forced onto other people. It is here that we
see the very same logic of the State and the police embodied in actual
bodies. That peace has to be forced upon other people, regardless of how
this happens. It should bring you joy then to hear that the peace police
were beaten Greece-style with wooden dowels and poles.â
Why has the media demonized the anarchists and heralded the peace police
as heroes? It is simple. Because the anarchists are revolutionaries and
the PP are not. The anarchists promote a world that is based on the same
anti-hierarchical organization that the camp is run on. They actively
defend the occupation of OGP and of foreclosed properties from the cops.
They are willing to use direct action to occupy space and to also attack
the property of the 1%. The PP are not; they do not want things to be
confrontational, to escalate, or a revolution.
It is telling that to this day, only the policeâwhether the Oakland
Police or the PPâhave been the only ones to use violence against people
to make them do what they want or in a non-defensive way.
Perhaps this goes without saying, but fuck the police.
The strike on November 2nd cost the city of Oakland and various banks,
city governments, and multi-national corporations millions of dollars.
This was paid in the way of overtime for police, the money lost by banks
and businesses shutting down, the millions of dollars lost from the port
closure and workers wildcat striking, and in the destruction of property
of banks and large corporations.
It is the latter actions that have caused so much disagreement.
According to reformists, it is 'violent' to break the windows of banks
and corporations. Since property is not alive and cannot feel pain, many
people contend that by destroying property people are being forceful and
destructive, and thus violent. But if one claims that the breaking of a
non-living window or the spray-painting of a wall is somehow violent,
how is the shutting down of the port or the occupation of a public space
not violent in the same manner? Based on numbers alone, the occupation
of the port cost banks and corporations millions of dollars more than
the windows that were broken just hours before. And, the shutting down
of the port was forceful: people refused to leave and physically blocked
the movement of goods and workers. It violated the ability of the port
to function as such, and destroyed the ability of capital to reproduce
itself. The same goes with the occupation. Furthermore, the stated goal
of the port shutdown was in part to act in solidarity with Longshore
workers in a contract fight against scab labor. In a twisted logic, many
heralded the direct actions of workers in the ILWU who fought with
police and destroyed company property in the Pacific Northwest, yet were
antagonistic towards the black bloc.
There is also something to be said about the very targets of attack:
Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo, and corporations like Whole Foods.
The hatred for banks should be very clear and easy for anyone to grasp.
Theyâre helping to evict millions of people, holding people hostage with
debt, investing in environmentally destructive industries, and in
private prisons and immigrant detention facilities. Whole Foods has a
long history of gentrification, firing workers for organizing, and
paying pathetically low wages. Furthermore, it is a corporation like any
other and failed to close for the general strike. Thus, smashy smashy.
But while some may not believe that the breaking of a window isnât a
problem in itself, they believe this idea that the destruction of
property causes police to react more aggressively against protesters.
The only problem with this line of thinking is that the police were
nowhere to be seen during the anti-capitalist march where the black bloc
attacked banks, nor were there any arrests. In fact, the only physical
violence that happened was between peace police and those resisting
their attacks. Furthermore, when compared with the costs of everything
else that day, namely the shutting down of the port of Oakland, the cost
of the windows was miniscule. The reason that the police arrived later
that night on Broadway was very clear: they were there to stop people
from occupying a building and to put down the general strike. And once
the police began to evict the occupied building, people responded by
fighting back and attempting to hold the streets.
One of these false narratives that continues to be perpetuated by the
media is this idea that the âbad protestersâ ruin âgoodâ movements. The
government will attack any and all movements that are effective and that
seek to disrupt the status quo. Over the last hundred years, two of the
most influential and radical organizations to come out of the US, the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Black Panther Party for
Self-Defense, suffered at the hands of the State and corporate powers.
Their members were beaten, killed, imprisoned, and slandered in the
media. They too were blamed for âruiningâ social movements and bringing
the very police violence that was dished out to them. The IWW promoted
sabotage as a legitimate tactic in the workplace and encouraged workers
to strike across racial lines, building for a general strike which could
expropriate the means of production the working class. In May of 1990,
Judi Bari (an IWW and Earth First! organizer who was working to bring
radical environmentalists together with union loggers) was almost killed
when a bomb exploded under her car. The attack was carried out in part
by the FBI who wanted to stop Judiâs organizing efforts. The Panthers,
who armed themselves and patrolled the police, engaged in a variety of
other tactics and did not distinguish between self-defense against
police and government agencies and the building of a revolutionary force
through community organizing and âsurvival programsâ (breakfast for
school children, etc.). For this, J. Edgar Hoover named them the most
dangerous group in the country and created a massive police and
government campaign against them, resuiting in assassinations,
frame-ups, counter-intelligence operations, and the imprisonment of its
members, many of which are still incarcerated.
Repression of social movements is not caused by âbad protesters,â it is
caused by the authorities consciously waging social war against anyone
and anything that threatens their power. It is also nothing new, either
in Oakland or across the world. The State will continue to repress
social movements in order to stop threats to the status quo.
As the anarchist journal A Murder of Crows wrote:
âWhen repression strikes and comrades are arrested... the reaction of
many is to disassociate themselves from those who are being attacked by
the State. Liberals, progressives, and most activists draw up official
statements denouncing violence, sabotage, and illegality, all in hopes
of proving to the government that they are just good citizens who like
to follow the rules and who are interested in âpositiveâ social change.
This spineless response is standard for the left, and serves to flank
the State's actions. Disassociation is not only a cowardly act, but is
also based on faulty logic.
The underlying premise of disassociation is that the State has reacted
to a specific occurrence and that those being persecuted are responsible
for bringing repression upon themselves and everyone else. Certainly
there are specific acts that the State responds to...but this is not
where repression stems from. In actuality, repression is a long-term
strategy employed by the State regardless of specific illegal acts and
is an attempt to maintain the status-quo by any means necessary.
Repression, then, is always present in many forms. It is the police, the
courts, the prison system, the proliferation of security cameras, the
immigrant detention centers and the like.â
As anarchist Margaret Killjoy wrote about the day's events:
âImmediately after the property destruction began, the debate raged: was
this okay? Did this represent 'us'? The only violence I personally
witnessed was perpetrated by people screaming 'non-violence' who
attempted to hurt people who had just defaced property, but it was clear
that the march was of two minds. Still, when a group tried to split the
march ('non-violent go this way, violent go that way') they were met by
apathy and abandoned their plans. What was fascinating to me, though,
was I encountered at least as many non-masked participants who were
enamoredâor even participatingâin the destruction as those who felt
alienated or betrayed. One man I saw, shouting into the broken windows
of (I believe it was) Bank of America at the bankers on the inside: 'Do
you hear us now? We tried everything: we wrote letters, we signed
petitions, we protested, and you didnât listen. Did you hear that
though? Do you hear us now?'â
In the first hours of 2009, Oscar Grant was shot and killed by BART
Police. His murder led to a round of riots in Oakland, many of which
took place on 14th and Broadway. The largest occurred in July of 2010
after Grantâs killer, Johannes Mehserle, was found guilty of involuntary
manslaughter, not murder. Much has been written about Oscar Grantâs
murder and the movement against police brutality that it helped breathe
life into, but we want to go back and review the push from the media,
mainstream non-profit organizations, and the police, who were united in
creating a narrative to divide the protesters along lines of violence,
geography, and race.
First came the police and city officials saying that white anarchists
were outside agitators, coming into Oakland to disrupt the legitimate
protests of black residents, who mostly wanted to remain peaceful.
Non-profit groups picked up this narrative, calling on protesters to
remain ânon-violentâ and not âtrash Oakland.â This was an attempt by the
power structure to take the teeth out of a very black and militant
movement, that many anarchists were also involved in.
As one anarchist in the Bay Area wrote in the text, They Canât Shoot Us
All:
âMany non-profits...oppose the collective uprisings and spontaneous
activity because they feel the need to control the movement. These
organizations view themselves as the saviors of the downtrodden; when
dominated people rise up on their own terms, it threatens the position
of leadership these organizations occupy in their imaginary worlds.
We have also come under attack from non-profits that operate entirely
under the influence of the city government. One of these city-funded
non-profits has taken up a full-fledged assault against us, using some
of the $2 million in city money they have received to wage a propaganda
campaign against the unity we have found with each other through this
struggle. They have even used city money to pay young people to come to
their indoctrination workshops where they speak of the evils of people
coming together and standing up to their enemies.
They have also helped to spread the absurd logic of the Mayorâs Office
that only people born and raised in Oakland have the right to take to
the streets. This is an attempt to foster collaboration between
disenfranchised people and their exploiters in a united front against
the enigmatic 'outsiders.'
In the past, our enemies have attempted to divide movements by
distinguishing the 'good' element from the 'destructive' elements. This
time, it seems that the primary division they created was not between
the 'peaceful' and the 'violent,' but a racial division wedged between
groups in the uncontrollable element in an attempt to neutralize our
collective strength.â
It would be wise to keep these words in mind, as once again we face the
possibility of our movement becoming divided and broken. Once again, the
lesson of the struggle for Oscar Grant shows how much the police, media,
and much of the Left were united in holding a line to break any sort of
militant resistance: fostering perceived divisions between protesters
based on racial or tactical lines.
Anarchism is the idea that the State exists in order to keep the
inequalities and divisions within society in place through coercion and
violence. This is the nature of all states: to preserve the existence of
a society divided by class, race, and gender and protect an economic
system that indentures, enslaves, displaces, and imprisons the vast
majority of the population while generating wealth and power for a small
minority. Thus, the State is not a neutral force, it cannot be reformed
or taken over to serve the people; it is an instrument that preserves
the inequalities that exist between us for the benefit of a few.
Anarchists believe in non-representational forms of decision making;
against power being structured in a hierarchy, meaning âfrom the head.â
Instead, anarchists believe in horizontal organizations of power,
anarchy, âfrom the base.â Anarchism stands for resources being held in
common by autonomous communities and free groups of individuals, not as
private property. Human labor should be put towards human needs; we
should not be wage slaves divorced from the necessities of life. Lastly,
we desire a relationship with the land that does not take and destroy;
one that is in balance with the natural world. These ideals can be seen
best in the General Assemblies that have taken place at Occupy Oakland
and across the country and the world, at different occupations. Here,
groups of people organize themselves and make decisions without
hierarchical organization or representatives. In the camp, work was
performed by autonomous groups along the lines of mutual aid and human
solidarity. People make food and feed each other, some donating labor,
others donating medical supplies. People organize to protect themselves
against the police and also to settle disputes and arguments. People
hold workshops and classes, create newspapers and spread information,
make music, hold meetings and make decisions; all without a central
hierarchy or bosses of any kind.
Many of the values and organizational models of the Occupy movement are
anarchist, even if many do not use this term. Given the presence of
anarchists from the earliest days of Occupy Oakland, it is no surprise
that the General Assembly has supported many anarchist positions that
other occupations would not. It does not cooperate or work with the
police, and in fact expels them from the camp. It does not work or
cooperate with politicians or political parties. It does not make
demands to the power structure it is fighting; it organizes itself to
fight that power structure. It does not ask for the things it needs, it
takes them, occupies them, and uses them for its own benefit.
But how do we get there? How do we organize ourselves into a
revolutionary force that can make Occupy Oakland into Occupy Everything?
Anarchists do not believe in working within the system. We do not
participate in elections or encourage people to vote, instead we
encourage people to self-organize where they work, where they live, and
where they go to school. People need to take direct action and occupy
space to organize from and meet their needs directly. The State will not
âwither awayâ under the groundswell of an âalternative society,â or even
from the occupations themselves. The State will use violence to crush
threats to its power and to destroy revolutionary or potentially
revolutionary movements. This is why we saw the State respond to Occupy
Oakland on the 25th in just the way that it did. Thus a revolutionary
movement must defend itself from the violence of the State or it will
simply be crushed.
Such a struggle must use a variety of tactics to not only spread our
occupations, strikes, and direct actions, but also to defend the spaces
that we have already taken. Those that scream ânon-violenceâ to people
fighting back against policeâwho have just raided a camp of sleeping
peopleâhave no solution in this regard. We must defend ourselves from
the State and their police, if our movement is to survive and grow.
As things heat up, more people start to take action. Workers go on
strike, students walk out and occupy their schools, people fight the
police, those in their homes, apartments, and trailers take back their
living space: the property of the capitalist class will be attacked. It
is going to happen. People will riot when the police kill someone just
as they did when Oscar Grant was shot. They will loot stores after
pushing the police out, and retake the things that other poor and
working people have made. They will spray paint the walls with slogans
and messages. Homeless people, those foreclosed on, and our own
movements will take over buildings, plazas, and property. We will break
the locks and move in. Workers on strike will attack scabs, fight
police, and destroy company property. People on a march against
capitalism will pass by banks and understand them to be
institutionsâpart of a system that they want to destroyâand windows will
be broken. As the economic and ecological crisis deepens, as the
struggle escalates, and as more people are drawn into taking action,
social struggles will continue to deepen. People will defend themselves
and they will engage with their enemies. They will organize and they
will act en masse. This is not a new struggleâit is one that has existed
since capitalism began.
We can still feel ourselves flinching as the flash grenades explode in
our memories. Our noses and skin still burn and tingle from the tear
gas. Our bruises have not healed and we wonder if anyone we know is
still in jail. But we also remember the sea of people who responded to a
call for a general strike. We remember the workers who went on wildcat
and called out sick, the tens of thousands who shut down the port, those
who bravely stood up to the police, and those who took action against
the banks. We remember the students who walked out of class and the kids
who came with their parents. We feel amazing warmth for everyone who
braved rubber bullets and tear gas canisters to defend the occupation.
We remember it all, for on that day we walked along streets where the
police were not allowed. We walked into liberated spaces and occupied
buildings, as music and laughter filled what was once nothing. We saw
graffiti on the walls and it brought smiles to our faces because it was
exactly what we were thinking.
Indeed our comrades are here with us. They are all welcome here. We are
in Chiapas, on the very first day of 1994. We are on Ohlone land,
occupying Glen Cove in Vallejo only a few months ago. We are back in
Oakland, during the general strike of 1946. We are in Exarchia in
Greece, right after Alexis was murdered and we are spilling into the
streets with so many thousands of others. We are ourselves only a year
ago, rioting on 14th and Broadway as Foot Locker is looted and someone
is writing âRiot for Oscarâ on a wall. We are in Egypt. We are in
London. We are Orwell in Barcelona and we see the red and black flags
waving and we know now what he meant when he wrote what it was like to
be in a city, âwhere the working class was in the driverâs seat.â
We are coming. We are already here.
Non-violence
As discussions and debate around the "use of violence" in the Occupy
movement continued, I felt that the debate overall was lacking. This
essay was an attempt to wade through the bullshit of the "99%" rhetoric
and get to the real heart of what was at stake in the Occupy Movement.
Wanting to get beyond the talk about "violence," I hoped to raise
political questions about the poverty of certain positions.
Recently, at a forum on ânon-violenceâ vs. âdiversity of tactics,â an
event that was attended by over 400 people for the purpose of discussing
the role of violence within Occupy Oakland. The MC of the event, Rahula
Janowski, put many things in context. âThe Occupy movement, the movement
of the 99%, has already had a pretty enormous impact. Iâve been seeing
the language of the 99% and the 1% coming up in places like San
Francisco Board of Supervisors...Iâve seen it in movie reviews, thereâs
a new Occupy-related meme on the internet practically every day. Itâs
not surprising given that growth that there are divisions.â
For the Left, (the Democratic Party, unions, non-profits, various
Marxist sects, liberals, activists, etc.) the Occupy Movement then, is
simply a democraticâalbeit directly democraticâpush towards reforming
the State and how it manages capital. We hear talk of abolishing the
federal reserve, giving more power to the unions, and more taxes on
corporations. These are not even reforms that seek to gain concessions
that might make life better for the working class; they only attempt to
make capitalism âwork better,â or give more power to the institutions
that manage the proletariat. As far as the Left is concerned, the
movement is showing signs of changing society when elected leaders and
various social managers (media, academics, etc.) begin to use the
language that movement leaders (including Marxists, unionists, Leftists,
and some anarchists) have been using. The question of violence is not
then an attempt at dialogue on revolutionary strategy, or even a âmoralâ
question, but instead a discussion on how the movement should tactically
proceed to reform and work within the State structure. Thus, for many on
the Left, violence is problematic because it scares the State structure
with the possibility of open revoltânot because people are opposed to
violence, per se. On the contrary, they support the monopoly of violence
that is the State itself. Perhaps some Leftists will even be made to
believe that âviolenceâ (often ill-defined) will be good for the
movement as long as it is used to maneuver within the State structure.
For us though, the dividing line is more fundamental.
For revolutionaries, the question of violence is secondary to the
question of how the movement organizes itself and how we see our
activity directed. Is it against the State or not? We are not here to
pressure the State into adopting our positions or âour language.â We do
not measure our power in such a way, instead these are examples of
recuperation; the process in which antagonistic ideas and actions that
could possibly negate class society are instead used to make it
stronger. Revolutionaries, who have pushed so hard in the
Decolonize/Occupy Oakland movement, must once again draw clear lines in
the sand. This means coming into complete conflict with much of what
makes the Occupy Movement what it is.
Since the start of the Occupy Wall Street protests, the concept of the
99% has spread throughout the world and become a new identity; one that
many in the Occupy movement claim to be a part of. Some radicals
heralded this new classification, proclaiming a return to âclass
consciousnessâ in the United States. Others, while critiquing the exact
semantics, still agreed that at least it was âbetter than nothing,â and
was something that a better critique could be built on. Leftists and
liberals were overjoyed that many anarchists and anti-authoritarians had
handed them such an easy-made package, one that in fact swept away a
class analysis of society and replaced it with something much more
sinister.
The idea that the Occupy movement has returned a sense of class
consciousness implies that peopleâs understanding of power relations and
their position within them comes from outside of their own experiences
and that, moreover, it takes a vanguard of specialized activists to
bring such an understanding back into their lives. As the anarchist
journal Murder of Crows wrote in an interview with Modesto Anarcho:
â[W]e donât need to be reliant on the Left for developing class
consciousness. Class consciousness is not as scarce as some assume it to
be. The widespread destruction of businesses and the attacking of the
police in many riots make this very clear. What is not present is class
solidarity and widespread class conflict. We believe that the
experiences of the exploited, through direct action and social conflict,
are the main force for transforming peopleâs perspectives and relations.
[T]here are many on the Left who are much more ideologically committed.
These people propose more symbolic activity intended to appeal to those
in power, or activities that seek to show large numbers of people while
de-emphasizing direct action. On occasion they propose direct action as
a last resort and as simply a tacticâa meansâtowards political power.
[In every revolutionary moment and struggle] the Left recuperated and
liquidated uncontrollable radical and anarchist elements. People should
really study and learn from the history of failed social struggles.
Weâve got to think about these things and be sharp in our criticism and
opposition to the Left, not through obsessive anti-Left ideologies that
become ends in themselves, but in order to understand how we deal and
interact with them.â
Often, Leftists believe that consciousness is something that comes from
the Left (the management of the proletariat), and is something that must
be raised and mass produced, until the number of adherents has reached a
point of intensity where enough converts can then change society. On the
contrary, consciousness instead comes from the experiences of people in
their everyday lives and is not something that has ceased to exist since
the passing of the workerâs movement or the liberation struggles of the
1960s and 70s. Furthermore, many of the delusions that act as real
barriers during class conflict and help to hinder solidarity between
people, are the ideologies imposed from above as well as from much of
the Left. For instance, it was unions in the post-McCarthy period that
started to use the term âmiddle classâ to describe American workers in
order to shift away from sounding âCommunist.â Thus, one of the tasks of
revolutionaries is to attack these false concepts, be they nationalism,
stat- ism, pacifism, or the concept of the 99%. As someone from
prole.info wrote in an interview:
âI'm skeptical of the approach that people need to recognize something
or see something clearly and then they will start trying to change
things. People's consciousness is a very contradictory thing...even
people who have very well-thought out political views on things. In most
workplaces I've ever worked, everyone steals from work. At the same
time, the people stealing from work, if asked, would probably say that
of course they're for private property and are likely to be in favor of
harsher sentences for people caught stealing. The point is that I DON'T
think that âconsciousness raisingâ does much of anything.
Being working class means struggling, even if it's just struggling to
survive. Just standing up for our own interests brings us into conflict
with capital. Your average wage worker has any number of problems that
are the same as everyone in their workplace and similar to those that
workers have all over the world. By fighting together, against the boss,
we can begin to see each other as allies. The stronger the struggle, the
more we will see as possible. Of course, we need to put forward our
ideas in the clearest and most coherent way we can, and argue for them
strongly; but much more important than that is to make concrete
contributions to the struggles happening in our workplaces,
neighborhoods, cities, and elsewhere. The only real threat to the system
is a class movementâworking people coming together, fighting for our
interests, refusing to work, blocking the flows of commodities, fighting
the powers that hold this society together and finding other ways to
produce and live collectively.â
Far from generating a critique of daily life, the Occupy movement has
instead tended to sweep away the class analysis that exists in many of
us. Police, prison guards, border patrol, developers, politicians,
property owners big and small, members of the extremely rich but not the
â1%,â are now considered part of the 99%, and according to the current
analysis, have interests in common with the rest of us. But we do not
have anything in common with police; we are the ones that are policed.
We have nothing in common with the banks that hold us hostage through
rent and mortgage payments in exchange for shelter. We have nothing in
common with property owners, be it Goldman Sachs or owner of the new
condo development down the street, because we do not own propertyâwe are
slaves to the regime of work. The concept of the 99% sweeps away the
very real dynamics of power we all feel everyday to create some vague
form of populism.
We can clearly see the recuperation of the Occupy Movementâs language
(which itself is an attempt to recuperate organic class consciousness)
from state institutions such as the Oakland Police Department, which
proclaims itself to be âpart of the 99%.â It has also been a way for
activists and Leftists to cool down class conflict: trying to manage
those who engage with property or their protectors (the cops), by
stating that they are attacking other sectors of the poor and working
population. For instance, during the end of the General Strike, some
people wrote graffiti and looted businesses in the absence of law
enforcement. Many within the movement condemned the vandalism even
though such actions were very logical for many of those there (and were
also a feature at past conflicts in Oakland, namely the riots around
Oscar Grant). It is the police themselves who ensure a relationship to
property and keep people from expropriating commodities. Thus, when the
innate âconsciousnessâ of people (who by and large were not activists or
âanarchists,â) came out, it was condemned by those who screamed the
loudest about the â99%.â
Furthermore, the â99%â is presented as a collection of people who come
from âdifferent communitiesâ yet share common interests in that they are
not the â1%.â This helps to further fractionalize the proletariat from
itself while maintaining the various divisions that are created from
class societyâs existence. âPeople of colorâ are thus one community that
has something in common with âpolice,â who are âworkers,â and they in
turn have something in common with âsmall business ownersâ and
âtrans-people.â This âanalysisâ (or lack of) does nothing to examine the
realities of patriarchy, heterosexism, and white supremacy within class
society and instead glosses over very real class antagonisms. As
prole.info wrote in their classic booklet, Work, Community, Politics,
War:
âThe whole point of talking about class and the proles is to insist on
the very basic way in which people from different communities have
essentially similar experiences, and to show that people from the same
communities should in fact hate each other. This is the starting point
to fighting the existing communities. When we begin to fight for our own
interests we see that others are doing the same thing. Prejudices fall
away, and our anger is directed where it belongs. We are not weak
because we are divided. We are divided because we are weak.â
Revolutionaries have done something that the current Left in the US
never couldâthey have created a situation and context for the forming of
real human relationships and experiences, one in which actual change on
a mass scale feels possible. In doing so, they have brought together
much of the Left in the processâthe very same people that we know will
sell us out. People who previously had politics totally antagonistic
towards horizontal decision-making and direct action now sell papers
outside of general assemblies and on the sidelines of riots. While these
groups have remained on the sidelines, we must ask ourselves why we are
allowing space to our political enemies and what we could be doing to
drive them out of the movementâor at least to render them impotent.
The issue of unions is even more problematic. Many were excited by
various union locals, scrambling to be two steps ahead of their workers
by endorsing the General Strike in 2011. Local union leaders, in an
effort to stop wildcat strikes from spreading and workers walking out,
instead offered various ways that workers could âlegallyâ strike or at
least offered to not discipline them if they did participate. This was
an attempt to remain legitimate but also to keep workers from taking
action on their own. If workers were joining in the General Strike at
least they were doing so under the direction of their own local leaders
and as union members.
It seems that many have forgotten the famous words of the situationist
Guy Debord when he stated that, âthe representation of the working class
has become an enemy of the working class.â Those who seek to manage the
proletariat do so in order to stop workers from taking the kind of
actions necessary to create a revolutionary situation. This is not to
say that we should stop encouraging union members to participate in
actions or to join us in struggle (although we should remember that most
US workers are not union members). Instead, we need to encourage people
to take action outside of and against the union bureaucracy who have
pushed through austerity measures and backed Democratic politicians that
in turn attack them. Even a defensive struggle against attacks on the
working class means an offensive attack on union leadership: the labor
brokers and policing agents of the proletariat.
What social movements have happened in the US since the
anti-globalization period that have been neither strange collections of
Leftists nor completely recuperated by Leftists in the end? None.
When radicals intervene in such movements, it is always to break them
out of the control of the Left and to push the subversive and
insurrectionary tendencies to their fullest extreme. We seek to push the
breaking of windows into full-scale looting. To push street battles with
the cops into full-blown revolts of entire neighborhoods against the
security forces. In doing so, we come up against the activists who put
their bodies in front of the property of capital (hey, two for one
right?) and the 'movement leaders,' from Leftists like Naomi Klein to
'anarchists' like Starhawk. Other social movements that are often
outside of the established Left, such as those against HR-4437 or
SB-1070 (anti-immigrant legislation in California and Arizona), included
genuine class conflict. People walked out of school and work en masse,
sometimes getting into battles with police as they held the streets. Of
course, these movements were quickly recuperated, and with the defeat of
much of the legislation for fear of an immigrant uprising, the momentum
that developed soon dissipated. Other social struggles and eruptions of
class conflict, such as riots against police, follow a similar
trajectory. We have to become better in these situations and not allow
them to be lost to bureaucrats and managers.
There are many pitfalls to avoid and no single way seems all that clear.
On one hand, we see that the 'social movements' we are often drawn to
are nothing but fronts for non-profits, upper-class social managers, and
career activists. These movements often mirror the alienation and class
relations of wider society. And, in the wake of Occupy, they often even
use our slogans, imagery and tactics as a means of staying relevant. For
instance, the group One Billion Rising, who uses flash mobs of dancing
protesters to decry violence and rape against women (a noble cause
indeed), is a collection of politicians, non-profits, and celebrities
that use the phrase, âStrike, Dance, Rise!â as their slogan, mimicking
Occupy. On the other hand, we simply cannot wait for the next
insurrection to break out, or hope to roll the dice the next time people
go out into the streets that more than a dumpster is set on fire. If
anything, one of our main tasks now is to try and struggle in the
downtime, make connections, make friends, and get ready.
Many radicals busy themselves with âfighting the crisis,â or attempting
to create social programs which will respond to attacks on the working
class. It seems that many have forgotten the slogan: âWe Are the
Crisis!,â and the threat that the proletariatâthe force of generalized
human negation of class societyâwill be the gravedigger of the old
world. Capital creates crisis, and an economy based on speculationâboom
and bust cyclesâwill continue to create crisis after crisis, war after
war, and disaster after disaster. This is not to say that we should not
take care of each other in our times of need, but simply that our
revolutionary program must not be one of charity and social service. We
are not here to help people get through the hard times because we are
activists and we feel bad. On the contrary, we are here to push the
realities of the crisis to its most subversive and explosive endâthe
complete destruction of our current way of life and the end of the
separations between us.
The fires lit in Oakland will not die out; the processes, experiments,
and beginnings of creating communal power will not soon be smothered. We
must understand the tensions that exist in the revolutionary movement
and proceed from there. We must attack what keeps us from being free and
continue to divorce ourselves from the regime of work; diving into the
joy of the commune.
Our movement is a conscious negative force that attacks the existing
order as a means of demolishing the dictatorship of capital. Yet, at the
same time it is also a positive material force that, while destroying
the separations between us, communizes the means of existence in the
same breath. There is no way to separate these things; they must be one
or not at all.
Gentrification in the Bay Area
As this book was being finished, a series of blockades against shuttle
buses carrying tech workers to companies like Google took place in the
Bay Area of California before spreading to Seattle. On January 1st,
2014, anarchists also marched through the Mission District in San
Francisco against continued police brutality, a campaign by business
owners to push out homeless, and new condo developments. This essay
connects the dots between struggles of the past and battles of today
while also placing the corporate media's usual crying over windows in
context.
âIf you leave San Francisco, theyâre like, âBye, thanks for coming to
San Francisco. Come back in April, weâre having a sale on Birkenstocks.â
As soon as you get to the other side, âWelcome to Oakland, bitch.â
- Dave Chappelle
SABOTAGE AND MILITANCY within the fight against gentrification - like
all struggles in the Bay Area of California - is nothing new. However,
in the wake of recent protests against tech companies in which buses
carrying workers were blocked and in Oakland a bus window was broken
out, many mainstream media sources have glossed over this history. San
Francisco is seen as âpeacefulâ and âorganizedâ while Oakland in
âviolentâ and âchaotic.â While most commentators probably did not have
Dave Chappelle in mind when they made such comparisons, the racial and
class undertones that can be gleamed from such an analysis is
illuminating. The State, with the media in tow, will always attempt to
divide those on the front lines by making one group look more
law-abiding than the other. This is a tactic that is designed to
destabilize insurgency and crack a movement in half against itself.
In many ways, the Google bus protests served to bring the issues of
gentrification and evictions to a mass audience by exposing a deep
tension within a class-divided city, just as the Earth Liberation Front
(ELF) arsons did to the topics of gas guzzling SUV's and urban sprawl in
the late 90s. But, gaining an audience also means that whoever is poised
to speak loudest often reaps the rewards after the disruption has faded
and people are looking for answers. If those that seek a world outside
of class society are not ready to push for militant, collective, and
combative action beyond simply symbolic blockades, than more often than
not, politicians will simply out-maneuver us in our wake with promises
of changes in legislation once swept into office.
Some writers such as Kevin Montgomery on the blog, Uptown Almanac,
instead point to how protesters are in fact âwinning.â The victories
stemming from this triumph include tech companies donating laptops to
schools and other acts of philanthropy, to Mayor Ed Lee of San Francisco
coming out in favor of a higher minimum wage, and the SF Board of
Supervisors passing various measures aimed at half-heartily protecting
tenants (while the Ellis Act stays in place). As Susie Cagel wrote in
Wired: â...[W] hen tech does give back, it does so in its own (and
arguably self-serving) image: Google gives Wi-Fi to the cityâs public
parks, Facebook gives laptops to public schools.â For liberals, these
actions are a success because they have garnished simply the attention
of politicians who can then (in theory) enact laws which will address
the demands of the population. In reality, politicians have always
acquiesced to protest movements and working class disruption as a means
of clearing the streets for fear of a wider revolt.[29] As we saw after
several rounds of Google bus protests, the San Francisco Transit
Authority moved to charge (a considerably small amount of money) tech
companies that use MUNI stops with their buses and get permits (thus
making legal what was illegal before). Government appears responsive,
tech companies keep doing what they are doing, and elites everywhere
hope that this small reform will return business to normal.[30] In the
end, the real cause of the anger in the bay over gentrification:
evictions and the high cost of living, goes unanswered. And, while
recent legislation against condo conversions might help some residents
stay in their homes, ultimately even the cost of living itself, lack of
access to jobs, education, and transit will also continue to push many
residents out. New laws themselves are also never a safe guard against
evictions, with many landlords often turning to harassment, threats, or
even arson to evict tenants.
Landlords and speculators also have another powerful tool on their side:
the police. Starting in the summer of 2013 in the Mission District of
San Francisco between 16th and 17th streets, formerly thought to be an
un-gentrifiable area recently saw a campaign created by local business
owners to âClean Up the Plaza.â This push by local business owners saw a
build up of police presence at the 16th street BART plaza (entrance to a
subway terminal). At the same time, it was announced that a new condo
project would be placed where a Wal-Greens now stands across the street.
This of course, is not coincidence. In January of 2014, anarchists
organized a march from the 24th BART station to the 16th Plaza, bringing
attention to the connection between the rise in police brutality in the
Mission District and the recent campaign by business owners to remove
street people for the on-coming ânew residents.â For the renters and
businesses that may be possibly evicted in the wake of the development,
the current ballot initiatives will do little. Local politicians and the
mayor have pushed for the building of more âaffordable housingâ within
current developments, while thousands of seniors, AIDS patients, and
poor and working people that have already, or currently are, being
thrown out. Only direct action can get the goods. The pressure and the
disruption must be kept on. When confronted with the force of the market
we must answer with a force of our own. Now is the time to literally
demand the impossible, and act on those desires. Mass rent strikes.
Large open assemblies of people in their neighborhoods. Occupations of
vacant buildings for all. Preventing each and every eviction with
organized force.
Many, like Susie Cagel, have pointed out that while Google and tech
companies are only a piece of the puzzle, the real perpetrators are
developers, speculators, serial evictors, and those within the
government giving tax- breaks to corporations. These people are of
course right. However, historically working and poor people are not able
to affect change through democratic means upon political and economic
elites. The courts, the media, the policeâthey all work against us.
Regular people have power when they come together and act as a group and
deny a basic service or function. This can be by denying their labor or
simply their civility; they can engage in disruption. Simply put, it is
easy to block a bus. Like Occupy, the blockades of Google buses are a
social action that people can do en masse. This is why they caught the
imaginations of so many and this is why they have spread. This is also
why these actions are powerfulânot because they have gotten the ear of
elites, but because they have scared them.
Having a sense of the historical struggle against displacement can also
help shine a light on the path ahead of us. For those that are
interested in looking into the record of resistance to evictions and
displacement in the Bay Area would do well to read a document floating
around online prepared for by the now defunct, Mission Anti-Displacement
Coalition, (MAC). The text, written by Fernando Marti states, âThe first
recorded eviction in what is now called the Mission District occurred in
1776. The Spanish arrival forced the Ohlone, who had lived in the region
for at least 5,000 years, to flee across the Bay.â (2). Soon after,
Ohlone people were forced into slave labor at the Mission Dolores, which
now sits next to the famous Dolores Park. While Native people launched
uprisings against the Mission system, by the 1800s the Ohlone population
was decimated.
In the post-Gold Rush period, the Mission became a working class haven
as the rich opted to live in homes over-looking the bay and the ocean.
As American capitalism became more industrialized, the Mission also grew
as a center for working class militancy with the Red Stone building
being a major node of operation during the 1934 San Francisco General
Strike. Through the 1970s-90s, as production was moved overseas, the
Mission became home to many niche based industries, with âthe citywide
proportion of [those working in] manufacturing remained constant at 9%
of total jobs.â (4). While production shifted, the spirit of proletarian
action was not lost, as strikes and organizing continued in a variety of
sectors.
âThe first wave of Latinos began arriving in the Mission during World
War II,â (5-6) some coming into the US through the bracero program or by
fleeing US funded civil-wars in their countries like Nicaragua, El
Salvador, and Guatemala. In the 1960s and 70s, the Mission grew as a
hotbed of militant organizing inspired by the farmworker struggle in the
Central Valley and the battles against imperialism in Latin America.
This took the form of the militant occupation at SF State in part to win
ethnic studies, the indigenous takeover of Alcatraz Island, and the
creation of groups such as El Comite para Liberar a los Siete de la
Raza, modeled after the Black Panthers in Oakland, which organized free
programs in the community. When seven young people living in the Mission
were accused of killing a police officer a community struggle was formed
around them, Los Siete de la Raza, becoming a milestone in the
neighborhood. Going into the 80s, the Mission was a stronghold of
solidarity with revolutionary struggles in Central America, with
residents even training to go off and join insurgent forces. It was
within that context that a battle against gentrification began.
âThroughout the 70s, battles raged against the gentrifiers, with gangs
chasing Anglos out of local taquerfas, and activists stopping a bar that
they thought would have attracted an upper income crowd from opening on
24h Street. But for many, it was the parades of low-riders that scared
the whites from moving any further east and made Mission Street the line
that stopped gentrification in the 70s. Eventually, Anglo homeowners,
the Mission Merchants Association, and police harassment forced the
low-riders to leave. (6).
Bank policies of âredlining,â marking out neighborhoods they would not
lend to, kept Latinos and other people of color from building up wealth
or being able to keep their homes in good conditions. Capitalâs flight
to the suburbs throughout the 50s and 60s created areas of poverty that
would eventually become ripe for new investment and new cycles of
growth. In the Mission this was felt as a loss of access to jobs and
education, and the resulting jobless youth in the streets, termed by the
police âgangs.â Starting in the 70s, Mission residents, especially youth
and families, were affected by the increase in gang violence, drug use,
and waves of police brutality that targeted youth, immigrants, and other
people of color. Redevelopment was the most visible tool of Capitalâs
assault on the working class. In this process, cities would declare
certain areas âblighted,â and would target them for destruction, buying
up properties by eminent domain, and âredevelopingâ them into new
neighborhoods. In San Francisco, this meant targeting working class
strongholds: the South of Market bastion of unionized longshoremen (the
veterans of the â34 Strike) as well as elderly Filipinos, the Black
neighborhood of the Fillmore, and the Latino neighborhood of the
Mission.â (7).
With the coming of BART to the Mission, many groups, from the Brown
Berets to homeowners banded together to stop the displacement of working
class families and ended up stopping much of the new construction.
Throughout the 1970s, organizing against displacement continued,
especially in the face of a rash of Hotel fires, such as the fire at the
Garland Hotel, which lead to the creation of the âGartland Pit,â an open
air arts space that was also a center for organizing. By the 1990s,
cycles of divestment and reinvestment lead to a wave of evictions of
unprecedented proportions as the bay-area experienced the âdot-com
boom.â At the same time, California was in the midst of an
anti-immigrant xenophobic backlash, as politicians attempted to pass
Proposition 187, which would deny benefits to immigrants and their
families. The Mission remained a hotbed of organizing and action both
against gentrification and anti-immigrant backlash.
This was expressed in a variety of ways, from posters calling on attacks
on yuppie businesses and cars, to public marches, mass assemblies,
disruption of government meetings and the occupation of buildings, and
even the attempted arson of condos. The current period of struggle,
marked by the linking in public consciousness between evictions and the
tech industry, has also used a variety of means. From graffiti, public
marches and rallies, block parties that attacked Google bus pinatas,
public occupations and blockades against homes threatened with eviction,
picketing of businesses responsible, to militant marches down Valencia
Street that destroyed and vandalized a variety of businesses. Such
battles cannot also be removed from the ongoing struggles against police
brutality and fights over land and green space that have also been
raging in the city. Over the past several years, the Mission has
exploded in anger as police have killed and shot young people and a
homeless man both in Hunterâs Point, at a BART station, and in the
Mission. Young men of color such as D'Paris Williams and Kevin Clark
have also been savagely beaten around the 24th BART station by SFPD,
leading to large protests. Young people, many of them coming out of
Occupy SF have also fought to save urban gardens and farms from eviction
to be turned into condos. The several-week long occupation of Gezi
Gardens, formerly the Hayes Valley Farm, featured the largest urban
tree-sit in the US and was carried out in solidarity with the ongoing
anti-gentrification battle raging in Turkey.
Participants in each cycle of struggle often forget or are unaware of
those that came before them. Militants in the 1960s perhaps were unaware
of the anarchists, socialists, communists, and unionists that did battle
in the same neighborhood several decades before them, just as many
people who call themselves revolutionaries now are unaware of those that
preceded them. What is clear is that the struggle against displacement
is a class-struggle, or one in which one class does battle with another
over basic interests, conditions, and control over their lives. On one
side stands developers, politicians, and city-planners who have a stake
in making millions, and on the other, working, homeless, and poor people
that want to live without being displaced. The popular struggles against
BART construction show that even in the face of what the rich call
âprogress,â everyday people can still come together and win.
This fight has always used a variety of tactics, most of them aimed at
being disruptive and stopping business as usual. Often, these tactics
are confrontational and sometimes violent. Sometimes they are done
individually such as graffiti, posters, or even arson, and sometimes
these are collective acts such as occupations, blockades, riots,
strikes, marches, and pickets. The rock that crashed through the Google
bus windows during the end of 2013 is nothing new; it is simply another
example of the antagonisms that have existed for as long as capitalism
and the State that protects it. New and better targets will be found,
but the important thing is that we have begun to act with each other and
have called on others to join us.
For over 100 years anarchists have been hunted and imprisoned, arrested
and tortured, rounded up to be deported, slandered and betrayed, placed
as youths into detention facilities and ârehabilitation centers,â
snitched on and sold-out by activists and union bosses, assassinated by
snipers and murdered by police. Militants within our movement have
suffered at the hands of capitalists, fascists, and Communists and we
have filled prisons, immigrant detention centers, concentration camps,
and gulags.
But anarchists have never, never been victims. We too have been
assassins. We have been the murderers of kings, captains of industry,
and Presidents. We have picked the locks of wealthy business owners to
fund our publications and have scammed millions of dollars in
photocopies. We have armed ourselves with pistols to protect strikes. We
have formed militias and armed columns of women and men to defend
ourselves and our liberated territory from the Ukraine to Mexico, just
as we have formed crews of queers to attack homophobes. We exist in
agrarian communes in Chiapas, Mexico where we carry on the ideals of the
insurrectionary Ricardo Flores Magon as well as the urban squats of
Europe and we defend both with guns and Molotov cocktails. We have taken
over campus buildings in California and defended gardens in New York
City. We were the first to unionize Starbucks as well as the first to
decry the mainstream unions for what they are, a police force for the
working class. We support our prisoners, be it with benefit concerts or
jailbreaks.
By the time I was 18, I learned what it meant to don the ski mask and
stand with my friends and comrades in the streets to face down the
police. I discovered the power that comes in placing oneself in danger
and knowing that the only way to avoid a criminal record, a beating or
worse from the authorities, and possible jail time lays in my physical
abilities and especially the solidarity and support of those around me.
I learned what it meant to stay loyal to a group of people I had
affinity with.
This book has been for everyone who shares the intimacy of the sound of
hammers against the property of the rich. Those that have lived through
riots. Who have stood in stores being looted. Who have walked in
universities they could never afford to attend while they were being
occupied. Who have camped on land reclaimed by indigenous people who
spoke of their ancestors and welcomed us as comrades. Who have seen
fire.
It is with these words that I leave you, unsure of where the tides of
history will take us. My biggest fear with this book is that the reader
will take away from it that revolutionary action only happens in
specific, spectacular moments. You canât plan for it and you canât
expect it, it just happens. As my good friend anarchist historian Barry
Pateman once told me, âOne thing we know for sure, is that shit will
always hit the fan.â Capitalism will create crisis as long as it exists.
It will create the material conditions that will cause some people to
resist it. But will people see their resistance as part of a push
towards a new way of life or as simply a way to blow off steam? Perhaps
they see their actions as simply an effort to make the system more fair?
For revolutionaries, one of our first tasks is to come to these
struggles and make people realize that the symptoms within capitalism
will always exist as long as capitalism does. Anarchism is based on the
idea that regular people should put faith in nothing other than their
own abilities to come together to solve problems and create solutions.
We have to popularize this and bring it to struggles as they unfold.
Reading through these essays, we find over and over again similar
concepts, problems, and ideas. The Left will always try to contain
revolt; official organizations will try to manage self-organized and
grassroots groups to co-opt them back into the political system. The
State will always have a two-pronged assault of brutal repression and
destabilization of resistance. This will happen through State promotion
of dialogue within accepted channels; misinformation and fear through
the media; and funneling money into non-profits to compete with the
insurgency for the hearts and minds of the population. While some of
these things are not new, we are certainly in a new era of policing and
statecraft, which views the entire population as potential insurgents
and thus uses counter-insurgency to combat even potential rebellion.
If resistance movements are to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the
public, our work cannot be confined to the moment of the riot or the
occupation of a building. In between these moments of open conflict we
have to begin to build connections, networks, and associations with
people in our workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods. We have to be able
to organize and struggle around daily issues and build up our confidence
to work together, fight, and win. We must have the space to talk with
people and expand our ideas on the nature of this system, in order to
create new forms of life and new ways of relating to each other and the
land itself. The work we do between moments of high conflict may be just
as, if not more, important as those moments in the thick of it.
We must continue to promote the idea of a different world after
capitalism and the State; we cannot solely focus on the negative
outcomes of revolt. Society is not simply a heap of dry wood that we are
just waiting to spark. There have always been riots and revolt since the
start of class society, but without a desire for a different world most
people simply enact their anger, then go home and back to work.
As I write this, the Oakland City Council has decided to begin
construction of the Domain Awareness Center. Such a facility will
process and store surveillance information from a variety of cameras,
use facial recognition technology, log license plates and filter social
media. Police are already pushing for access to drones in the Bay Area
for use in fighting crime and monitoring protests. All of these things
have vast political and social ramifications. Reading the headlines of
even the mainstream news, we hear again and again how the NSA is spying
on everyday Americans. Accessing information through Angry Birds and
reading emails. This government is not legitimate nor is it neutralâit
is our enemy.
At the same time, the Bay Area is in the middle of a renaissance of
non-profits organizations. Fresh-faced young people from around the
country, many white and from upper-middle-class backgrounds, flock here
every year to get involved in a non-profit that will help âsave the
world.â Thereâs nothing wrong with much of the work these groups do;
many of their projects came out of social struggles and grassroots
campaigns. But these things are not divorced from the framework of
counter-insurgency. People in communities hardest hit by capitalism are
now seeing white grad students financed by the Ford Foundation and the
State do the work previously done by the Black Panthers and anarchists
from their own neighborhoods, who have now been evicted, killed, or
jailed. The State is then free to move in and create relationships with
people who would most benefit from its overthrow. We face a brutality
that wishes to see us dead from a ruling-class that is smart enough to
prop up a fake resistance to the problems it has created.
Some people in France wrote in a call to arms, âThe desert cannot grow
anymore: it is everywhere. But it can still deepen. Faced with the
evidence of the catastrophe, there are those who get indignant and those
who take note, those who denounce and those who get organized. We are
among those who get organized.â History will show just how serious we
are.
[1] For more information about how to support two militants arrested,
see: http://bayareaintifada.wordpress.com
[2] Another bus driver I know was called by union officials and asked if
he was responsible for producing the flyer calling for a wildcat strike.
In the instance of the BART worker mentioned at the start of the
chapter, union officials took pictures, just like undercover police.
While the State was on the streets of Oakland to surveil and contain the
riots, the union was in place at my workplace to make sure that none
broke out in the first place.
[3] Before and after the Trayvon uprisings, the city of Oakland moved to
install surveillance technologies throughout the city. Soon after the
riots, police and government security agencies had their annual âUrban
Shieldâ expo in downtown Oakland, where various counter-insurgency
technologies are sold and police trained against âdomestic terrorists.â
A young mask-wearing man protesting that day was followed by police who
sent pictures of him and his vehicle at a demonstration to his work. He
was fired soon after.
[4] Kristian Williams, on the CrimethInc. radio program described how
police crowd control strategy have evolved over time. In the 1960's,
police used an escalated force model, however this largely drew more
resistance from large groups that the police sought to contain or drive
off the streets, (the riots around People's Park being one example).
After this strategy failed, police then sought to instead work with
protest leaders to ensure a system of âprotest management.â This
strategy failed in the anti-globalization period largely because of
black bloc anarchists who rejected this model and pushed for
non-cooperation with the State. In the current period, police use a
system of ânegotiated management;â by working to isolate and repress the
âuncontrollableâ elements and portray them as âoutsidersâ and
âterrorists.â Podcast can be found at: http://
www.crimethinc.com/podcast/5/
[5] Malcolm X, âMessage to the Grassrootsâ speech.
[6] This does not mean that revolt will not happen at the job siteâfar
from it, it must spread there if any uprising is to be successful and
have any revolutionary potential. Revolutions become possible when
people see the old ways of living no longer acceptable and the ruling
institutions lose legitimacy. However, as riots the world over show,
rage in the streets often only lasts for some time. Barricades may go
up, but if people can't get food, water, and basic needs met, then they
will head back into the very system that they set fire to the night
before.
[7] Black bloc refers to a tactic that evolved from the autonomous and
squatter struggles in Europe in the 1980's. It involves wearing all
black clothing and masks in order to remain anonymous and acting as a
combative group or a defensive force on the streets, often at protests
and demonstrations.
[8] For more on this, see ROAR Collective's piece, âIn Egypt, Anarchists
Carry Revolution Forward.â http://roarmag.org/2013/01/egypt-tahrir-
black-bloc-anarchism/
[9] While a small number of people involved in Occupy were inspired and
involved with the anti-globalization and anti-war movements in the US,
Occupy traces its genealogy from largely international influences, with
many participants taking part in social struggle for the first time. The
Arab Spring, which involved various revolutions across Egypt, Tunisia,
and elsewhere, involved the occupation of public squares, which in turn
were protected by mass rioting. This model was in part the inspiration
to the Indignados Movement in Spain in 2011. But in the US, things were
brewing as well. In late 2008, the occupation of the Chicago Republic
Windows and Glass factory showed the success of workplace occupations.
In 2009, students at the New School of Social Research in New York City
occupied their university. Inspired by students in New York as well as
the ongoing insurrection in Greece, a wave of student occupations in
California began around the slogan: âStrike, Occupy, Takeover!â
As the student movement in California receded by 2010, many asked
themselves how these ideas could leave the university and be generalized
within the wider social terrain. Many began to question when, where, and
how popular struggle would develop against austerity and the naked class
war of the economic crisis. With the occupation of the Wisconsin capitol
building in the spring of 2011, against legal threats to collective
bargaining and inspired by the Arab Spring, we saw a glimpse of what was
to come, although the militancy and the occupation itself was quickly
controlled and corralled by the unions and the Democratic Party.
[10] As we will discuss, however, mass disruption has often been the
only force capable of not only creating change, but also creating the
conditions for wider social rebellion and possible revolution. Also, it
is often the best way to gain wider participation from those outside of
a set social group. Lastly, although resistance always carries the risk
of repression, the State is already designed to repress the population
to stop disruption and self-organization from happening in the first
place, a system of control I refer to as counter-insurgency.
[11] As Jeremy Brecher wrote in Strike!, âFar from fomenting strikes and
rebellions, unions and labor leaders have frequently tried to prevent or
contain them...In part this is because unionsâno less than churches,
governments, and other organizationsâoften become bureaucracies with
professionalized leaders whose experiences and material interests
diverge from those they represent.â (South End Press, 1997, 3).
[12] An example of such an informal grouping would be the Port of
Oakland Truckers Association, which was formed by truck drivers to
organize and carry out shut-downs of the Port of Oakland in the Bay Area
of California. Unable to legally form a union, truckers had to meet,
organize, and plan on their own in mass meetings, carrying out job
actions that stopped the flow of massive amounts of cargo.
[13] Jeremy Brecher in Strike! details the nature of these groups, â...
[They] show a great diversity of activities, including strikes, general
strikes, occupations, mass demonstrations, and sometimes even armed
confrontations. But they are all marked by three characteristics: an
expanding challenge to established authority.; a tendency of[people] to
take control of their own activity; and a widening solidarity and mutual
support among different groups.â (2).
[14] From Poor Peopleâs Movements, âThe mass membership bureaucracy was,
after all, not invented by the left, but is rather a form through which
the left emulated the modes of organization that exists in the
capitalist society the left seeks to transform.â (xvii).
[15] The disruptive strike wave ofthe early and mid-1930s forced the
State to create a framework in which workers could collectively bargain
with employers, thus taking the class war off the streets and into union
halls and boardrooms. Once this right was won however, unions turned on
the disruptive nature of self-organized action which gave them power in
the first place. As Piven and Cloward write, â...[The unions] did not
create the strike movement of industrial workers; it was the strike
movement that created [the unions].â (96). This was coupled with the
growth of support from union officials for the Democratic Party. Such a
trajectory has been a complete and total failure, as the lack of
disruptive capabilities has been diluted by the unions and thus workers
have lost the leverage power that grew out of their ability to strike
and disrupt the economy.
[16] As Piven and Cloward point out, âIn the minds of most people,
worker struggles are usually linked with unionism...But that does not
mean that established unions played a central role in these uprisings.
In fact, some of the fiercest struggles in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries occurred when the unions were weakest and sometimes
despite the resistance of established union leadership. In the struggles
of the 1930s, a.pattern emerged. Many of the workers' battles were
mounted to win union recognition. But neither the battles nor the
victories were the result of existing union organization or union
leadership. In fact the rising number of strikes after 1934 paralleled
the decline in union membership as the AFL scuttled its own federal
unions.â (147)
[17] The electoral strategy has been a losing strategy since the 1930s
and further helped curb the disruptive nature that gave birth to the
AFL-CIO in the first place. It has not been able to confront and defeat
the Taft-Hartley laws (the passing of which made union membership levels
plummet further), or the variety of other anti-labor assaults that have
come from the elite-class. In the recent period, we have Democrats who
have been elected in part on union dollars (such as Governor Jerry
Brown) stopping strikes of unions that poured millions into his
campaign. The Leftist refrain from âgetting involved in politicsâ has
been a total failure even by the standards of the Left itself.
[18] As Zig-Zag writes, âAlong with announcing submission of the Civil
Rights Act, the Kennedy administration then moved to align itself with
the reformist civil rights movement and co-opt both the march and the
movement itself.â
[19] Zig Zag, Smash Pacifism, 49.
[20] Ibid. (56).
[21] As King stated in the I Have A Dream Speech, âOccasionally Negroes
contend that the 1965 Watts riot and the other riots in various cities
represented effective civil rights action. But those who express this
view always end up with stumbling words when asked what concrete gains
have been won as a result. At best, the riots have produced a little
additional antipoverty money allotted by frightened government
officials...â
[22] As Peter Gelderloos would write in How Non-Violence Protects the
State: â...A month and a day [after the Birmingham riots], President
Kennedy was calling for Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act, ending
several years of strategy to stall the civil rights movement. Perhaps
the largest of the limited, if not hollow, victories of the civil rights
movement came when black people demonstrated they would not remain
peaceful forever. Faced with the two alternatives, the white power
structure chose to negotiate with the pacifists...â
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/
peter-gelderloos-how-nonviolence-protects-the-state.
[23] Invisible Committee, The Call, page 6.
[24] In the late 2013 and early 2014 in Mexico and Brazil, black blocs
were both used in defensive and offensive capacities. In Brazil, mass
rioting broke out over a struggle against the raising of bus fares, and
in Mexico clashes set off amid a labor dispute with teachers. Black
blocs help push the revolt while also acting as protectors of other
protesters from police violence.
[25] 'Brazil's Teachers Union Officially Declares Unconditional Support
for Black Bloc,' http://news.infoshop.org/article.phpfsto-
ry=20131009222354949.
[26] Our enemies are also aware of this desire. For instance, in the
BART strike in the Bay Area of California in 2013, union leaders, the
police, and the media were quick to drive a wedge between the Occupy
Movement and strikers.
[27] It should be noted that during the Civil Rights era, Rockwell was
able to successfully intervene in white struggles against desegregation
to win sizable influence. In the suburb of Cicero near Chicago in 1966,
the American Nazi Party led rallies against Martin Luther King, Jrâs
attempts to desegregate a largely white community. White mobs carried
âWhite Power!â signs with swastikas and rallied around Rockwell. For
more information on this large victory for the ANP, see Hate: George
Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party by William H. Schmaltz,
(Brasseys, Inc., 2001).
[28] In 2012, J.T. Ready shot and killed himself, his half-Mexican
girlfriend, her daughter, and her daughterâs fiance. His FBI file has
yet to be released and many allege that he was an informant for the
government. For a very in-depth look at J.T. Ready and more information
on his role in white power and militia circles in Phoenix, check out the
PCWC text: J.T.
Ready is Dead: Fascism and the Anarchist Response, 2005â2012.
http://firesneverextinguished.blogspot.com/2012/06/jt-ready-is-dead-fascism-and-anarchist.html
[29] For instance, in the wake of the student occupation movement, then
Governor Schwarzenegger moved money from prisons (actually prisoner
health-care) into education as a means of trying to break the movement.
[30] All the while, ordinary people pay out the nose for increased
transit fares with less service in working class areas and the city
moves to ticket more and more people that ride public transit for
freeâsometimes leading to upright murder, such as in the police killing
of Kenneth Harding, Jr. People caught by police without citizenship also
face deportation.