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Title: Black Wave Subtitle: An Anarchist Offensive Date: 2020 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. Authors: The Black Wave Crew, Black Wave Crew Topics: insurrection, praxis, planning, strategy
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.
(Assuming we don't immediately win, because we're 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.