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Title: Black Wave Author: The Black Wave Crew Date: 2020 Language: en Topics: insurrection, planning, praxis, strategy Notes: This document is for other anarchists. If you're an anarchist reading this, please try not to pass it to any liberals or authoritarians. If you're an enemy reading this, you're not like some super special agent infiltrator. You just found a somewhat public text file.
They're on their feet, we're on our asses! Get into the street!
Recently a lot has happened. Certainly any anarchist with eyes may have
noticed that not only are the nationalists back (MAGA country being
their base in America) but a lot of our fair-weather "allies" seem to
have a lot more in common with them than with us-- certainly they're
enjoying their company on twitter much more!
So here we are in 2020, anarchists in an increasingly nationalizing
world. A listless malaise over many of us. A lot of us have turned into
mere critics of the situation, commentators on the spectacle of daily
life. We know we're guilty of that too. Others work in coalitions under
Marxist or NPO bureaucracies, unable to express anything spontaneous.
Beside the non-stop liberal doom and glooming about elections of all
things, the Left is quickly accommodating itself to xenophobia and hate
and the Right is leading the charge into ever more esoteric forms of
bigotry.
Where AntiFA is not treated as a criminal gang, we've become the
marginally favored "lesser evil" for a vast neoliberal system to hide
behind. We don't want to fight for the gilded world of liberals or the
stripped concrete of nationalists, but to march into the twilight of
this society-- into the black night of the unknowable future!
It's natural for a lot of us to be gripped with anxiety: it's a scary
and very serious world we've found ourselves in. It seems like everyone
these days is our enemies, whether they'll admit it or not. Anarchists
stand on our own with no one to depend on for comradeship, which means
anarchists are going to have to reorient our struggle to acknowledge
this.
But that doesn't mean we have to go on the defensive. Quite the
opposite: it's time for bold attack!
Much of the rest of the world is in utter insurrection, so we ask-- why
shouldn't we be the instigators to start insurrection at home?
When does a fire become a disaster?
When does an angry mob become an insurrection?
Is it the moment someone has had enough, or is that just the ignition
point? Is it when it consumes the first building? The second? When it
pours out over the streets?
Could you burn down a whole system on purpose?
Let's find out!
Black Wave is first and foremost a call to arms for a decentralized wave
of anarchist offensives focusing toward building a critical mass of
opposition for May Day 2020 and raise the temperature of
anti-authoritarian struggle.
Beyond that point, Black Wave is a means by which sustainable cycles of
anarchist attack, defense, and growth can be created. What we are
advocating this year is what we advocate for every year that this system
still stands. We want to build core traditions of action that always
keep the struggle burning and undermine the cycles of capitalist
accumulation and social order.
To accomplish this we've created a series of phases as instigations for
loosely coordinated anarchist action. Each phase is a month long and
designed to naturally lead into the next phase, but also each is vague
enough that it never makes what we're doing too predictable to potential
surveillance.
We will never ask you to be in any particular place at any particular
time. When we designate days (like Actually Black Fridays) we'll never
tell you where to go. In fact, once the guidelines are laid-out our crew
will probably dissolve, since we're in no way a central committee.
We have put forward some ideas for low-stakes action that will allow for
anarchists to practice blocing up, moving together, and deblocing as
well as give them more confidence in future actions. Part of what we're
asking also means being visible as anarchists, so we ask that everyone
participating take good precautions to protect your identity. Also,
while we might ask you to mask up casually you should be aware of mask
laws in your state, county, or municipality. Always be acting in good
security culture, but that doesn't mean not taking measured risks.
- January: Spread the call to arms to other anarchists
- February: Reach out to the general public about anarchy.
- March: Help new anarchists form their own squads.
- April: Symbolic actions against institutions of control and
nationalist formations
- May: May Day and insurrectionary Spark
- June: Pride Disruptions & Hijackings / Juneteenth Black Liberation
Action
- July: Fuck America Parties / ICE Disruptions & Indigenous Liberation
Action
- August: Black Liberation Action / Blue Lives Matter Disruptions
- September: Prison and Bail Support
- October: Food and Shelter Support
- November: Redistributions / Actually Black Friday^2
- December: War on Christmas
We'll get to explaining each of those phases in a moment, but first we
want to talk about the most basic cycle in this calendar of resistance,
the weekly cycle. We're capping off each "work" week with a weekly event
we're calling "Actually Black Fridays".
Why do we call it that? Well, later this year the capitalists have their
shitty consumer re-upping ritual they call "Black Friday". Which we
hate, because we as anarchists who love the color black also despise
capitalism and all it entails.
So we're having our own Black Fridays. ACTUALLY Black Fridays.
All we're asking is that every Friday anarchists just go hold impromptu
rallies in some central space. A park or a plaza or whatever your city
has.
If you don't know a lot of anarchists just set up a booth or put up
signs or hand out fliers or talk to people. Make them come to terms with
the fact that anarchists are real and we're serious through actual
contact with one of us and not through the lens of us being called
"ANTIFAs" on Fox News.
If you do know a lot of anarchists you can constitute more of a crowd
and thus demonstrate that not only are anarchists real, but there's a
lot of us.
Just plain visibility is not the only point though. The hope is that
this repeated ritual will bring new anarchists in contact with each
other and thus grow the size of the crowds each week.
Because, after all, their capitalist Black Friday happens on our
Actually Black Friday. It's already pretty chaotic out there. Maybe if
their crowd of angry shoppers meets our crowd of angry anarchists
something might happen.
(Suggested Tools: Posters, Zines, Memes, Videos, Workshops, Flyers,
Discussion groups, Tell ya friends and ya discord, Graffiti, Vandalism,
Sabotage)
We feel that the main focus should be informing anarchists of the Black
Wave so we can get as much participation as possible in the following
months.
We shift our attention from telling other anarchists about Black Wave to
reaching out to regular non-anarchist people about what anarchy actually
is and why we believe what we do.
We move into actual organizational forms and teach new and disconnected
anarchists different methods for forming their own crews, security
culture, OpSec, and spread info about existing formations.
we transition from the symbolic to the active; targeting structures
which aid in the control of society. What location is your oppressor?
Work? School? Reactionary churches? Prisons?
(Suggested Tools: Posters, Graffiti, Rallies, Marches, Riots,
Occupations, Bloc Parties)
The rallies begin, and guess what? May Day 2020 falls on an Actually
Black Friday! If you've been building up insurrectionary momentum every
Friday, this is when that'll first majorly pay off!
We keep up the insurrectionary momentum while also focusing queer
formations toward the disruption of corporate Pride Events. This month
is also a good time for Black Liberation action focusing around
Juneteenth-- which is also on a Friday.
Start your July right with some very public Fuck America Parties! July
4th is a great time to remember why we fucking hate this
settler-colonial State and all its lackeys. It's also a great time to
remember that ICE must be destroyed and also that liberation is
incomplete until the full autonomy of all indigenous people has been
won.
All August long we're battering at the cages, breaking our chains, and
fighting back against the continuing enslavement of Black people in
America. Mass incarceration, cut food benefits, cop self-victimization,
school to prison pipelines, and police/vigilante violence are all key
points of struggle here.
cynical.) (Suggested Tools: benefit shows and parties, supply drives,
rallies, student clubs and fundraisers, liberal money if you're slick
enough)
With students back in school and part of our insurrectionary force lost
as a result, we can shift toward dealing with the fallout of our
insurrectionary summer. We should make a concerted effort in this time
to reinforce our bail, court, and prison support formations.
With winter approaching, orienting ourselves toward supporting homeless
and precarious people in our formations and beyond is a matter of life
and death for many. Food Not Bombs and similar mutual aid orgs are most
important in this time.
Things start to get fun again as we remind our enemies that we're here.
There are people in need and lots of shit that isn't bolted down. But
best of all this is when Actually Black Friday coincides with Black
Friday to make Actually (Black Friday)^2. If you don't know how to do
the math, that's when we unleash chaos on the capitalist system by
mingling our very anarchist Actually Black Friday crowd with their very
large crowd of hungry Black Friday consumers.
This section is jokingly referred to as "The War on Christmas" mostly so
if Sean Hannity (or whatever other pseudo-sentient slime pile has
recently climbed out of Roger Ailes' cumsock) finds it he'll flip to
this section and find out we called him a "pseudo-sentient slime pile
[that] climbed out of Roger Ailes' cumsock".
But really, reach out to your queer friends. This is a time when people
leverage Christmas to guilt estranged family members into reconnecting
with their dysfunctional and abusive families. It's a time a lot of
people have trauma around. In general, make sure your friends are okay
and have somewhere other than their shitty former family to go to.
We come to the end of the year. We've brought new people into anarchist
formations, new formations into being, reinforced old fronts and opened
new fronts, attacked, defended, and recouped.
Now what?
Do it again. But LOUDER.