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Title: How to Start a Fire
Author: Anonymous
Date: 2017-07-10
Language: en
Topics: insurrection, communism, communisation, revolution

Anonymous

How to Start a Fire

STRAIGHT TO THE POINT:

Our civilization is in collapse.

This collapse is well-documented: philosophers, scientists, politicians,

military strategists, economists, and even NASA have begun sounding the

alarm for ecological catastrophe, the technological singularity, and the

general collapse of life as we know it. The news anchors appear no less

panicked than the environmental and survivalist fringe of the past: the

Arctic is melting, Japanese teenagers refuse to have sex, a private

company wants to build a colony on Mars, Europe is being looted by

hooded protestors, and humans may be extinct by the end of the century.

Through all of this, at the precipice of insanity, there are those who

are organizing to save mankind by dissolving all civic life into a

continuum of warfare. Urbanists work alongside military specialists.

SmartGrowthers and green capitalists hope to maintain present levels of

exploitation without the parking lots and fossil fuels. Cyberneticians

can no longer conceal their imperial fantasies: ”imagine uploading a

criminal mind onto a computer to simulate eternal imprisonment! Think of

all of the resources we could save!” Holding it all together are the

citizens who long for quiet, who will defend this civilization and its

false ideas just as so many peasants once fought for Louis XVI, Tsar

Nicholas, and a million other dying regimes.

And yet, a global struggle — a tremendous global struggle — has emerged

from this crumbling edifice. An insurrectional wave has washed over

every inhabited continent. Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, Greece, Italy, the

United States, Libya, Syria, France, Chile, Japan, Canada, Brazil,

Turkey, Bosnia, Taiwan, Ukraine, and beyond. Everywhere people have

decided to fight for another way of being — for a life actually worth

living. The same techniques appear across the globe and have been

refined for local conditions: the occupation of plazas and buildings,

flaming barricades, the reappropriation and automatic communization of

food and clothing, masked demonstrations, molotov cocktails, street

clinics, information hacking and leaks, highway blockades, and strikes.

In 2008, we watched in awe as Greece was engulfed in flames. Today,

scenes like this are astoundingly normal. We do not expect this scenario

to end soon.

In sum, there is a side organized to preserve this civilization through

every crisis that signifies its impending collapse, and there is a side

getting organized to usher in a very different future from the one in

store for us. These two sides, situated on either pole of a collapsing

order, are the forces that constitute a global civil war. This conflict

cannot be reduced to a debate over who should run the government, nor

what sort of government we ought to have. This conflict transcends

questions of the economy or social inequality. This conflict has to do

with the future of human and non-human life, of what it means to be

alive in a time where all social interaction produces computerized

information. We have entered a new geological age marked in its

emergence by a fantastic tragedy. We must grapple with the real

questions of our time: What does it mean to be human in the 21^(st)

century? How will we feed ourselves in a desert, in a nuclear wasteland,

in the ashes of a city? How do we shut down a metropolis? How do we meet

with those trapped in the rural-suburban mess? How do we pursue our

desires? With whom do we live — and how? How do we learn? How do we love

ourselves and each other? We must be willing to see our situation for

what it is and to provide practical answers to these questions. The

whole world is at stake.

We would like for each insurrectionary event, witnessed on a global

scale, to make itself permanent. We would like to live inside of these

phenomena, inside of these communes which feed themselves, clothe

themselves, debate, dance together, fight together, grieve together, and

expand. A number of obstacles rush to meet us — a number of ready-made

answers to the questions we never should have asked, barbed wire at the

edges of the path to prevent us from wandering elsewhere. So what now?

We’d like to make a break for it, right away, to really be done with it

all — but at the end of the day, the force of our “no” depends on the

collective power behind it. That power must be built.

Get property. Pirate radio. Build stoves. Learn to cook. Learn

Languages. Get arms. Open street carts and businesses. Occupy buildings.

Set up cafes. Diners. Restaurants. Pizza shops. Book stores.

Permaculture. Mend wounds. Lathes. Giant pots. Orchards. Build

friendships. Acquire film equipment and make documentaries. Talk to old

comrades. Learn martial arts, Read. Travel. Learn from each other. Write

newspapers. Weather the hard times. Loot. Hold regional gatherings.

Write internal journals. Refine the art of sabotage. Distribute

counter-information. Offset presses. Raw materials and the means of

production. Three thousand camping bowls. Survival packs. Organic seeds.

Share thoughts, feelings, and practice. Learn history and learn from

history. Build tables. Make art. Go to the woods. Summer retreats. Dance

parties. Get cars. Steal money. Move close to each other. Start

uncontrollable riots.

Over the course of the last four years, we have deliberately and

serendipitously begun the process of constituting ourselves as a

material, insurrectional force. We have found each other in the parks

and the streets, transformed as everything was for those months during

Occupy. Although our story finds its origins in chance encounters — high

schools, punk shows, art scenes, cafes, bars — we locate the emergence

of our collective power in the wave of unrest we have had a hand in

shaping. Along the way, we have been inspired by many others who have

gotten organized in their own ways: hacker collectives, urban farmers,

DIY art spaces, crisis cults, and everyday hustlers.

In this time, we have learned well that the environment we currently

inhabit — call it capitalism, civilization, empire, the West — is

constructed to prevent the foundation of any real threat to the present

system. The political identities offered to us — anarchist,

environmentalist, Marxist, socialist — were constructed for a historical

moment which has passed. They have not, for decades, equipped themselves

with the means to actually fight. We leave behind the baggage that left

us weak and burdened but still hold onto what has given us strength. As

we have struggled together, as we have grown older, we have been

confronted by a number of forces that have threatened, and still

threaten, to pull us apart. Against the tendency to drift away, to

become lost, to return to the lonely solitude of capitalist normalcy, to

become mired with negativity, we have chosen to hold on to one another.

This is not merely a theoretical decision, but a lived practice. Having

witnessed the fact that every social movement and every struggle ends

because of a failure to create the conditions for its survival, we have

chosen to create an offensive that can sustain itself.

We must discover in every moment that which puts each of us in touch

with our power, with our potential. We must defeat that which separates

us from it.

The process of building a force has both already begun and requires

infinite new beginnings — beginnings that occur within what is

immediately present and available. With this text, we intend to incite

the formation of a revolutionary territory across the region. We are

writing to answer the question we ask and are asked daily: “But really,

what should we be doing?” We have spent too long avoiding an answer, and

have found the common responses impoverished. Too often, the people we

meet only briefly encounter the possibility of living differently, and

are either lost in the compulsion to return to normalcy or mistake an

existing political community as the only opportunity to begin. While

friendships are crucial to our struggle, we believe wholeheartedly in

the capacity of everyone to immediately begin the process of building a

revolutionary force from wherever one may stand. It should go without

saying that there are no gatekeepers: anyone, anywhere, can and should

begin from wherever they are. Immediately.

In what follows, we will present our vision of a possible near future

and offer steps toward its realization, from a weak starting position of

isolation to a situation of ever-increasing revolutionary force. The

vision is one that we have elaborated together over the course of

several years — in car rides and late night conversations, in bars and

in parks, with comrades from our own city and from across the world. The

practical suggestions contained here should be understood as real

possibilities, each connected to the next in the coherence of a

strategy. We ask that you think of your own life, your own friends, your

own inclinations — and consider fully, beyond what is expressed here,

the possibility of making a permanent break.

One thing is clear from the start: there’s no way in hell that any of us

is going to succeed alone. What is required is something that transcends

“me” as individual actor and every way that I’ve been taught to relate

to my world, my friends, my self. Hence, the first practical step in a

war against the status quo: Find each other.

In truth, the potential insurgents are everywhere. Where the workers

movement had factories to meet each other and the strike to reveal the

cowards, we have the entire metropolitan space to link up and

innumerable methods of subversion to identify who’s who: the riot,

theft, the blockade, the occupation. Cafes, restaurants, bars, gyms,

universities, community gardens, book stores, reading circles, art

galleries, parks, hacker conferences, farmers markets, salons: all of

these places are crossed by lines of antagonism, by sides and partisans,

conflicts and consequences, which are hidden just beneath the surface of

civil discourse. With certain attention, we can become sensible to these

antagonisms. For us, this means that potential comrades are lurking in

places we wouldn’t ordinarily think to look. In order to compose new

rhythms of revolt, we must become attuned to melodies of struggle and

passion which exceed or otherwise evade recognition through the

sociological and political categories we have been taught.

What is political in friendship emerges when you and I are affected by a

similar leaning, when our knowledges and our powers interact and

intersect in ways that make us stronger. I am bound to the friend by

some experience of election, understanding, or decision that implies

that the growth of his power entails the growth of my own.

Symmetrically, I am bound to the enemy by election, only this time a

disagreement that, in order for my power to grow, implies that I

confront him, that I undermine his forces. Certain events make us more

than what we are, while others dissolve us, make us less alive. We must

become sensible to this reality and run head first toward the former and

flee, despite how it may hurt, from the latter.

Initial encounters can give way to ethical-political intensities, but

only if relationships are elaborated to that end. The problem isn’t that

people do not know the stakes, but rather the general state of

separation and neutrality. In our society, people are unified by petty

aesthetic commonalities and identities given to them by the economy or

the charade of politics. These false unities either constitute

limitations that suppress differences, thereby allowing the production

of homogenous, directionless forms (mass organizations, revolutionary

cadres, political scenes), or they provoke false distinctions,

deconstructing the first signs of intensity. Relationships are typically

held together by mere common interests — the currency of social clubs,

cliques, collectors, Instagram “communities,” and subcultures

everywhere. When what is common between us is left at shared interests

or aesthetic similarities, our relationships are easily knowable, and

therefore easily manageable as they harden into a digestible, safe, and

controllable identity.

We will only overcome the limits of superficial subjectivities by

elaborating — creating, generalizing, concretizing, and defending — an

ethical disposition in the world. An ethic, not a morality: a morality

consists in a million little rules about how we ought to live our lives

and a thousand hypotheticals for producing them. Morality is what is

performed in the courtroom, the classroom, the church, and and as such

provides no path to a new way of living. An ethic, not an identity

(worker, student, poor, rich, black, woman): identities are always

provided to us by a nefarious collusion between democracy and Facebook.

In contrast, the ethical question is the question of how I am in the

world. Not existentially, but tactically. An elaboration of an ethic is

precisely what is prevented by the array of mechanisms and devices that

constitute the hostile environment we currently inhabit: the cops and

the prison, of course, but also the metro turnstiles, the

commodification and privatization of technical knowledge, the management

of revolt, the interstate. If any ethic at all is permitted in this

world, it is only the epidemic of existential deficiency: the hegemony

of a one-dimensional way of life which requires that every idea be

divorced from its consequences, that every passion “ends where it

begin.” The unification of what we believe with what we do is the basis

for any true liberation. When this happens at a party, a concert, a

protest, a factory, a grocery store or elsewhere — the police always

show up.

We would be remiss to say that all things passionate are equally good —

this is the pluralist liberalism which has come to dominate consumer

markets and academic circles for the last half century. While the

environment we inhabit is coordinated to prevent the emergence of any

conflict, the fetishism of conflict alone misses the mark. As we’ve seen

in Ukraine, antagonisms against the state can take a multiplicity of

forms — and that includes fascists at the barricades. A common

disposition — which is to say, the abolition of property and its state —

will be the continuity tying together each of our actions; an anarchic

refusal of control and reification will be the basis for the

proliferation of insurrectional possibilities.

The emotional and affective intensity of our relationships must be

manifested into a material consistency. A failure to do so will

inevitably result in our being pulled part. Every life decision — where

we live and whom we live with, where we get food and how we share it,

how we get money and what we do with it — is a question that can be

answered differently. What appears initially as an individual duty or

responsibility can be understood as an opportunity to increase our

collective strength.

At first, what is shared is small and presents itself in fleeting

moments: a gourmet meal of stolen food; a few graffiti kids racking

paint, sharing the loot, and hitting the town together for a single

night; a conspiracy of baristas stealing coffee from the back to share

with their friends at home. Over time, get organized to be able to put

more in common. Live together. Share meals. Share money. Get everyone on

food stamps, build farms, share techniques for theft and resource

misallocation. Learn how to cook for two, then four, then twenty, then a

thousand. Building a force means that we always search for ways to

increase our power together and get organized to actually do it. Skills

and specialized knowledges must be looted from the intellectual

marketplaces they’re meant for. Herbal remedies, auto-repair, home

construction, business accounting, permaculture, programming, and legal

work can all be put to use. An established practice of sharing

everything with the abandonment of all forms of balanced reciprocity can

create a feeling of ease between us that could be dangerous on its own.

Ordinarily, these sorts of mutual care and mutual support are never

allowed to spread past the formation of a monogamous couple or a nuclear

family. As we build our life in common, the need for money and

accounting between us should become less practical, less necessary, and

generally more absurd. We can share so much more than our Netflix

queues.

For this, we need places. Places to meet in, whose addressed can be

publicized because they’re not connected to any name, places that can

hold the crowd of fifty that won’t fit into a house, places that can

hold a thousand who won’t fit inside. Places to get productive in, that

have enough room for the supplies necessary to repair the sound cart.

Places to print the newspapers, equipped with industrial printers and

drawing tables. Places of encounter: a cafe, a restaurant, a pizza shop,

a book store, a gym, a bar. Rent space. Better yet, buy buildings, get

property. Don’t let rising prices push us further and further from the

parts of town we should be in.

To be clear, we do not propose the mere possession of land or crafts to

“withdraw” into. We want to build a struggle, an insurrection, which

occurs at the level of everyday life and not as a vacation from it, a

revolt which could be a pulsing, angular rhythm of small events and

breaks, of constant subversion. A communal house in the middle of a

small town can be a node of partisan reality or a burden to everyone

involved. It will never be enough to simply acquire property, buildings,

land. We must become territory by increasing the circulation and density

of partisan relations in an area and between places. There’s little

sense in obsessing over the morality or “internal dynamics” of such

ventures. Avoid exploiting each other and always hold together what this

society separates: practice with thought, action with contemplation,

thinking with feeling. What becomes a burden can be abandoned. We want

more strength and energy with time, not less — so do what moves you.

Together, we must learn how the devices which control us function and

develop sciences for uncovering their vulnerabilities. We must share

tools for tactical thinking, for strategic vision, for poetic

connections. We must understand how our surroundings constrict and

divide us, how ideologies keep us docile, as very concrete operations.

But we must also learn and share methods of resource accumulation, of

scamming, and of insurrectional conspiracy. When strategic employment

opportunities arise, they should be ours in a heartbeat. When opportune

shipments come in, we should have ways of collecting them — “it fell off

the back of a truck.” When a riot breaks out, we must know how to spread

it and how to crash police communications. When immigration enforcement

is about to raid our neighborhoods, we should know how to tip people off

and how to help them escape. When a comrade is washed in depression,

they should have no doubts that they are loved. The technical nature of

these problems must be reckoned with.

In the century before last, the South was zigzagged by a vast

conspiracy. A strategic consistency linked teamsters, sharp-shooters,

translators, look-outs, saloons, hostels, churches, farms, rumors, and

slaves across literally thousands of miles. Partisans of this conspiracy

were followed, surveilled, hunted, and repressed. Their ability to

transform their lives into a collective practice made hem resilient to

these operations. They smuggled a hundred thousand runaways out of

slavery. Whether or not not this was an attack on the commercial

institutions of the time or the mere construction of alternatives does

not concern us here and we doubt it concerned them then. We believe that

our current scenario could benefit from adopting this legacy as a

historic vantage point to be contextualized and refined.

We will be confronted on all sides by those who wish to fracture our

struggle by insisting we seek only to build a new society inside of this

one or that we are extremists who are concerned only with destruction.

We can do nothing but shrug at the morons who call us nihilists one day

and lifestylists the next. We recognize these divisions as a fundamental

binary in imperial logic: normal and abnormal, citizen and criminal.

Struggles and antagonisms are normalized when they are forced to

articulate themselves as a negotiation with the state, business, or

other institutions. This is the purview of activism and social justice

movements. The temptation to be sucked into community organizations, on

the left or right, is persistent and understandable. What these groups —

churches, nonprofits, unions, political parties — offer people is

continuity, stability, sometimes money, and always the false pretenses

of pragmatism. But the activist approach has always mirrored the

structures is supposedly challenges, responding to the forces that

divide our lives into separate spheres of work, race, medical aid,

marriage rights and so on with piecemeal demands. By conforming to

governing discourses, activists have always missed what is really at

stake, confusing life for a collection of distinct issues.

On the other hand, and often in reaction to the forces of recuperation,

others retreat into the “abnormal” category, allowing themselves to

become insulated from society, from its pathetic slogans, from its awful

methods of pacification. They allow themselves to become militants. But

just as workday traffic is a primary consideration in the planning of

interstates — traffic jams are avoided by, say, an addition of new

lanes, a carefully regulated speed limit, and tactically placed exists

and bridges — political dissidents are accounted for. Government needs a

militant subject. No police operation is complete until an organizing

cell, a hang, a mafia, a terrorist, or some other criminal subjectivity

has been identified and eliminated. By adopting a position inside the

debates of government, as the antithesis to their thesis, the violence

to their nonviolence, the militants are doomed before they begin. Their

fate is already determined — isolation and death. Still, the most

pressing threat the militant poses to an insurrection is the

specialization of revolt: that millions of people will become assured of

their spectator position in the private conflicts between the police and

the “rebel forces.”

The normal and the abnormal, the citizen and the the criminal, and every

variation of these dichotomies co-substantiate one another — which is to

say that neither position offers us a way out. Our strength lies in our

ability to affirm neither, and occupy both. We must learn to be visible

to the movement and invisible to the State. This is what every drug

front does, what every encrypted email does, and what we must learn how

to do. A mass of kids willing to riot doesn’t mean shit if they’re not

smart enough and fast enough to not get caught and if there’s no money

to bail out friends afterward. Similarly, a network of gardens might as

well be the aesthetic indicator that the yuppies have moved in if we do

not remember what kind of struggle real autonomy entails. What matters

isn’t a particular action (medicine, intellectual labor, cooking) or a

particular object (printers, spray paint, Mason jars, metal), but how

it’s connected to every other object, every other practice — and how we

circulate between them. Anything we do and everything we touch can take

on a new character when linked up to other practices, spaces, and

comrades. Do not allow yourself to be fooled by detractors: just as

skills and crafts can serve as distractions, many have lost themselves

in alienated cycles of petty vandalism and militant activism. The point

is to get on a common path with others and to use whatever means must be

used for the purposes of overcoming obstacles — which are everywhere.

The crisis, the disaster, the emergency have become a foundational

element of contemporary government. The crisis as reorganization of

space, of attention, of people. The crisis as emergency government, as

the force of law itself. As many have been forced to learn, crises are

named when things are about to be restructured. The state of emergency —

the governmental state of anarchy — is the name given to the

polarization of the world under the present arrangement of forces: the

state versus society. We have seen this in the days following the Boston

Marathon bombing when tanks rolled through the streets of an American

city looking for a single teenager. Natural disasters, pandemic flus,

droughts, power outages, insurrection, and invasion: for the

contemporary governmental regime, all of these events are simply times

of disorganization to be capitalized on. If this is opportune for our

enemies, who seek to return these temporary disturbances into a new,

more brutal, more empty normal, then could be doubly opportune for those

of us who hope to dissolve this society for good. When crisis comes to

the surface, we should push it to its absolute conclusions: every

strike, a general strike; every black out, a looting spree; every

protest, a riot; every riot, an insurrection; every picket, a permanent

blockade. We must make trenches of every crack in society.

What begins on a local scale should be pressed across the boundaries of

neighborhoods, towns, cities, and states. Open up lines of

communication. Be smart: if comrades in a town an hour away have a

printing press, it might make more sense to start a permaculture farm in

your city. Instead of duplicating the things a larger “we” can already

do, set up networks of resources through which all of us can circulate.

At every turn, the hostile environment we inhabit and the mechanisms

that constitute it are ready to prevent us from getting in touch with

and building our own power. The counter-insurrectional process occurs at

both the profound, nearly invisible level of the production of everyday

life and the highly visible level of outright domination. Get organized

to overcome everyone one of these obstacles, one by one.

In the attempt to build a revolutionary force, we are struck by the

impotence of our own imagination. Upon reflection, our immediate desires

can feel as foreign to us as the environment that produces them. We meet

our own stagnation and our own frenzy, the two automatic responses to

uncertainty. Some withdraw into depression or spectatorship, waiting for

others to take the initiative. Others rush to do something, anything, to

stave off anxiety or boredom. By beginning with a plan to take on the

task of building greater access to our potential, next steps should

become more obvious. When they are not so obvious, there is

conversation. If that fails, there is always the gamble.

In the attempt to build a life in common, we are confronted immediately

by limits imposed by the capitalist economy, of jobs, rent, and

unfavorable housing. That comrades and friends are compelled to work is

a sign of profound weakness. This is a collective problem that should be

treated seriously. Work must be rendered voluntary: a tactical or

strategic consideration, a pleasure, not a necessity for survival. Of

course, the most pressing expense is nearly always rent. It keeps up

working and needlessly vulnerable to the whims of landlords,

emergencies, and city planners. Comrades should organize to purchase

housing as soon as possible. It’s cheaper than renting and provide us

with greater permanence and, therefore, strategic insights to the

conflicts around us.

In the attempt to hold on to one another, we come up against our own

ignorance — our utter inexperience in building friendships and

maintaining them, our utter confusion as to what it means to love one

another, our utter weakness when it comes to supporting one another

emotionally, spiritually, materially. None of these conditions should

cripple us, but if we allow them to define who we are or what we’re

doing, they very well may. Each is simply an obstacle which, like all

obstacles, exists in order to be overcome.

Inevitably, at moments, we will experience our own weakness. A

neighborhood is demolished for a new mixed use complex; a meeting spot

gets raided; a movement dies out. The depression that comes as each

cycle of struggle closes can only be encountered with the conviction

that time itself is on our side. The urgency imposed by the impending

collapse of civilization gives us no reason for haste. The fall of Rome

took centuries. We must find comfort knowing that we can be a part of an

anti-imperial movement that spans generations. History is not the linear

progression that it is usually made out to be. Thoughts, ideas, and

actions circulate and reappear throughout time, and things you thought

would endlessly grow suddenly drop off. Like a garden that dies every

winter, the movements and riots will come, provide us with excitement

and energy, and then fade off. If we understand ourselves as a force

that persists through time, we will survive the depression of a loss not

with exhaustion, but with strength. Next time, we will be even more

prepared.

Different groups of people cycle through the farms in neighborhoods

outside downtown, ready to provide food for thousands of people

occupying Woodruff Park. A warehouse on the west side has trucks and

teams to drive to abandoned hotels and industrial waste facilities,

gathering “raw” material — metal, lumber, kitchen equipment — that can

be used to build brick ovens and fix up the new building. A partisan

cafe downtown functions as an entry point for visitors and newcomers, as

well as a drop-in point for insurgents from around the state, the

region, the country, and even the world. The dance club lets people in

to blend with the crowd after a rowdy demo while giving them a way to

blow off some steam. Pirate radio transmitters broadcast from secret

locations outside of the city to spread sedition and heresy into the

heart of a great metropolis. University copy machines are hacked for

free prints for this weekend’s assembly — the print shop is already

running overtime. A friend walks out of the store with a backpack full

of goods and a knowing wink. Doctors and herbalists are at hand,

equipped to deal with any injuries that might ensue from tonight’s riot,

well trained from treating common ailments and injuries. The family lake

house is repurposed to sleep a hundred for a summer strategy meeting.

Slowly, something is growing.

We need neither words nor promises, but the steady accumulation of small

realities.