The most recent phase of the student movement came to a head on March 4, when protests took place all around the US. The Bay Area was perhaps the epicenter of this day of action, seeing thousands of people on the streets—but at this epicenter, the tensions and contradictions around anarchist participation in the student movement came to the fore. Here, we present an eyewitness report on March 4 actions in the Bay, and complement it with a set of discussion questions we hope will help anarchists and others in the student movement hone their strategies. We’re seeking responses to these questions—email answers to rollingthunder@crimethinc.com or post them in the comments section here.

Report from the Bay Area, March 4
Anarchists in the March 4 Protests: Discussion Questions

Following up on our coverage of the 2008 DNC and RNC protests, this issue of Rolling Thunder appraises anarchist action at the 2009 G20 summit, detailing the background of the mobilization, mapping conflict throughout the city, and analyzing the factors that determined the strategies of the police and protesters. The accompanying Pittsburgh scene report examines the decade of local organizing that prepared the ground for this and other confrontations, deriving lessons relevant to communities around the country.

Elsewhere within, this issue scrutinizes protest and resistance on campus—from the recent student occupation movement in the US to the campaign to shut down a fascist organization at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Overseas, we survey Smash EDO, a British anti-military campaign that tests some of the hypotheses advanced in coverage of the SHAC campaign in Rolling Thunder #6.

This issue also includes Russian history from the “time of troubles” to Kropotkin’s escape from prison, reviews of Uri Gordon’s Anarchy Alive! and the obscurantist publication Politics Is Not a Banana, and more of the reflections and witticisms that set Rolling Thunder apart as a peerless exemplar of “how beautiful anarchist journals can be.”

Starting with this issue, we’ll also be complementing each issue of Rolling Thunder with an online supplement offering additional information, links, and materials. Among other things, the supplement to this issue features maps of action during the Pittsburgh G20 protests, a PDF of the newspaper wrap anarchists used in their campaign against a fascist student group, and a FAQ flier answering objections to militant antifascist organizing commonly posed by partisans of liberal democracy.

Rolling Thunder #9 Online Supplement

Pittsburgh G20 Summit

The coverage of the G20 summit in Rolling Thunder #9 fills out and refines reports that appeared earlier on this website, including eyewitness accounts, analysis of police strategy, and a general assessment of the organizing. It also includes painstakingly assembled maps [PDF, 356 KB] charting movements and confrontations throughout the primary day of action, which should be invaluable for future anarchist strategizing:

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Student Occupations from New York to California

This issue includes accounts from the occupations of the New School in NYC December 2008 and April 2009 and University of California at Berkeley the following November–two formative incidents in the development of the student movement that came to a head March 4, 2010, the day after this issue was released. To read more about recent outbreaks of student insurgency, one might begin with:

After the Fall, a paper collecting statements from participants in the 2009 occupations in California

7-Day Weekend, a UC Santa Cruz newsletter covering the same subject in somewhat plainer language

The New School Reoccupied, focusing on occupation and resistance at the New School in NYC

Occupy CA, a frequently updated blog detailing the occupation movement throughout California and the world

Shutting Down “Youth for Western Civilization”

This issue takes an in-depth view of the struggle that played out on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill between local radicals and the fascist student group Youth for Western Civilization. Much of the corporate and campus news coverage of these events is now apparently offline, but one can still read anarchist coverage of some of the important moments of the conflict here:

Protesters Kick Racist Speaker Off Campus
Youth for Western Civilization Co-Founder Faces Sentencing on Hate Crime
Media Saboteurs Take on Youth for Western Civilization

Youtube still has some footage up of the initial disruption, when anti-immigrant politician Tom Tancredo was prevented from speaking. Some of this is from right-wing cranks who cry about the “free speech” of an ex-congressman while police are beating, peppers-spraying, and tasering student protesters.

To download the “Special Anti-Racist Issue” that anarchists used to wrap copies of the “real” campus paper on the first day of the fall 2009 semester, click here [PDF, 717 KB].

Anarchists also distributed a text entitled “War by Other Means,” elucidating the ways that the notion of the university as a “marketplace of ideas” serves to obscure the real power relationships at work in conflicts such as the struggle over YWC.

Finally, retired professor Elliot Cramer, who briefly served as the group’s advisor before protesters provoked him into getting himself forcibly removed by the administration, maintains his own online archive of material relating to the Youth for Western Civilization debacle—albeit from his own skewed perspective.

Bonus for extra credit: A moronic newscaster attempts to combine “university” and “diversity” into one word: “unidiversity.” Even liberals should find it somewhat distressing that anarchist editing standards are higher than those of the corporate outlets charged with producing informed voters.

Free Speech

To fill out the coverage of the Youth for Western Civilization fracas, this issue examines the ways that the rhetoric of free speech is used to suppress dissent and fortify the legitimacy of those in power. For the convenience of anti-fascist organizers, we’ve prepared a FAQ PDF addressing common objections to militant resistance to fascism. Print these out and distribute them next time you shut down a KKK rally or an anti-immigrant speaking event and all the liberals are crying that you “killed democracy.”

Pittsburgh Scene Report

The Pittsburgh scene report in Rolling Thunder #9 spans the past one-hundred-and-forty years of anarchist activity in the city, zooming in on the opening decade of the 21st century. Here’s an incomplete list of contemporary projects in Pittsburgh that either are explicitly anarchist, involve a lot of anarchists, or are consistent with anarchist ethics:
Pittsburgh Organizing Group – longtime anarchist organizers
Greater Pittsburgh Anarchist Collective and Anti-Racist Action
Landslide Community Farm
The BigIdea Radical Bookstore
Pittsburgh Indymedia and Rustbelt Radio
Bash Back
Food Not Bombs
Pittsburgh Association for the Abolition of Vivisection
Rusty Strings Collective – Pittsburgh folk punk
Howling Mob Society – anarchist historical society
Book ‘Em books-to-prisoners program
Free Ride – do-it-yourself bicycle repair
Critical Mass
Thomas Merton Center – for peace and justice organizing
FedUp! – prisoner defense letter-writing group
East End Mutual-Aid Association – anarchist community organizing in the neighborhoods of Bloomfield, Garfield, Friendship, and East Liberty

But how do we bring about these confrontations? How do we ensure that they strengthen us more than our enemies? What pitfalls await us on this road? And what else do we have to do to make our efforts effective?

Over the past few years, a small current has gained visibility in US anarchist circles prioritizing the themes of insurrection and social conflict. This analysis explores how effective these strategies are at achieving their professed goals, as well as the relationship between insurrectionist theory and the activities associated with it in the current US context.

Read full piece here.

Over the past decade of mobilizations, CrimethInc. agents have repeatedly pulled off narrow escapes from mass-arrest situations in which all our comrades were captured. We felt pretty pleased with ourselves until we learned, some years too late, that everyone who didn’t get away was making thousands of dollars! How embarrassing—we’re such dropouts, we can’t even get a job getting arrested! This, despite the FBI defaming our milieu as the “top domestic terror threat.” What’s a ne’er-do-well supposed to do? So we read with sympathy the account from our comrades who followed in the footsteps of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters, crawling through the sewers to escape arrest and, little did they know, a whopping $18,000.

Pass the word around—resistance doesn’t always end in defeat, even when we get beaten and arrested. We may not believe in the legitimacy of the law any more than our rulers do, but we still ought to include the battle in the courts in our strategizing alongside the battle in the streets. By bringing lawsuits against our oppressors, we can increase the costs of repressing us, and sometimes tie their hands for future demonstrations—compare the behavior of the Washington, D.C. police at the 2000 and 2002 IMF protests to their conduct during the 2007 IMF protests. Unfortunately, some sectors of the current anarchist milieu have such short memories that by the time the lawsuits are concluded, many have stopped paying attention, and the initial thoughtless appraisal of protests as “a failure” is all that sticks in people’s heads. We’re only now learning the net results of mobilizations that occurred a decade ago. To mount an effective resistance to capitalism, we need to think in terms of decades, not months.

Read full text here.

This week, representatives of governments around the world are meeting in Copenhagen for the COP15, ostensibly to make decisions on how to respond to the climate crisis. The results are bound to cater to the agenda of corporate interests hoping to legitimize carbon trading and other false solutions. Fortunately, anarchists and other opponents of self-inflicted extinction will be there to crash the party.

Comrades have published a full-length critique of the prevailing narratives around climate change, Introduction to the Apocalypse [PDF, 1 MB]. Likewise, we’ve added new material to our online reading library addressing the issues:

The Climate Is Changing & A Field Guide to False Solutions

Testament has since released a handful of recordings, some of which are freely available for downloading. His original work, such as “Get Into It” with Illogik as Test Their Logik, shows great promise, but thus far my favorite track is his interpretation of pop radio hit “Kiss Me Thru The Phone.”

Testament does with this song what we did with pay phones and the Situationists did with comic strips. Just as a minor billboard alteration can expose the sinister truths concealed in an advertisement, Testament’s cover version reveals the story latent within the original. No one can relate to the chorus more intensely than those separated from their lovers by prison walls—and with 2.3 million behind bars in the US, that may help to explain the song’s popularity.

Testament raises this plotline to the surface:

I wanna see you
but all I can do is listen
to your voice on this phone
we’re digitally kissin
through telephone wires
til they let me outta prison

This brings out all the longing and sadness in the original, formerly buried beneath a thick layer of pop glitz. It’s surprising how much feeling this trite, throwaway jingle can convey when the lyrics deal with something real. Like every other product of industrial capitalist society, radio hits are produced from the toil and tribulation of thousands never credited; superficial and disposable, they’re designed to mask the coercive social relations behind them. But the ghost of all the humanity squandered to produce them lingers somewhere within, and all it takes to summon it is to draw back the curtain.

Drawing it back, Testamant casts light on a civilization in which life at every level of society increasingly resembles imprisonment. The backstory of “Kiss Me Thru The Phone” is that most of us are separated from our loved ones to such an extent that even our fantasies and love songs include this distance. Our friends and families are scattered across the continent by the enforced transience of the job market; our lovers are gone at school or work, even when we are not; we hardly even get to raise our own children. The shelves stocked with energy drinks at every gas station attest to the unsustainable pace of modern life: scrambling to keep up forces us beyond the limits imposed by our own bodies, without ever delivering the promised pleasure and belonging. How many people have absentmindedly nodded along to the original version of this song in semi cabs, in Greyhound buses, in canneries and warehouses, in barracks in Iraq? How many use mp3 players and Ipods as surrogates when they cannot even call their loved ones, or have none to call?

In the music video produced by Interscope, romance mediated by commodities gives way to a romanticized relationship to commodities themselves: the singer’s lover is shown listening to his recordings in place of talking with him, and the love song becomes a product-placement ad for the latest in cellular technology. The more impositions we accept on our lives, the more false substitutes we settle for in place of intimacy, the further removed we become from each other and the possibility of self-determination. The function of pop music is to channel real longing into emotional release without raising the question of where that longing comes from. Yet all it takes to render this longing dangerous again is to show it in its true context, as Testament has done here.

Testament will be performing with From the Depths at a few shows on their upcoming tour through the eastern half of North America.

This review is dedicated to a few of our many comrades currently serving or threatened with time behind bars:

Political prisoner Jeffrey Luers
Environmental activist Marie Mason
Imprisoned organizer Daniel McGowan
Victim of FBI entrapment Eric McDavid
Grand Jury resister Carrie Feldman

CrimethInc. is a collective entity that invites open participation: anyone can write, organize, and publish under the name. For the past decade or so they have turned out an incredible body of books, in many ways revitalizing the world of anarchist publishing. Their books are high quality, available quite cheaply, well-designed, and speak to a different audience than a lot of other anarchist literature. While much of the “history” in Days of War, Nights of Love might be considered fiction, I was also deeply interested in their two children’s books: The Secret World of Duvbo and The Secret World of Terijan. Since this interview, they’ve also released Expect Resistance, a unique book that moves between fictional narrative and theoretical essay quite fluidly.

After a brief email correspondence, I had the pleasure of interviewing an anonymous author who, along with many others, writes under the CrimethInc. moniker. We climbed up into a dusty belfry while a radical bookfair bustled beneath our feet. And contrary to the way most interviews go, this one started with the author asking me a question:

CrimethInc.: What did you think the main differences between The Secret World of Terijian and The Secret World of Duvbo were?

Margaret: Well, they were both trying to get a political point across, but the Duvbo book had a lot more subtlety to it; it wasn’t as much about fighting as it was about discovering your imagination, as compared to the Terijian book, which was “kids discover the ELF.”

CrimethInc.: I don’t think that they’re too different. The Duvbo story is supposed to bring out the ways in which the dynamics within people and communities contribute to their subjugation. They’re subjugated by their own inertia, their cultural norms, and their fear of acknowledging all the secret parts of themselves. It’s an optimistic story; in the end, it is only two ruling class people against the whole town.

Whereas with Terijian, it’s actually two protagonists versus the world; their parents aren’t on board for the struggle. Well, there’s the two kids and then there are the ELFs—there are just a few of them.

Perhaps you could argue that both books bring out the limitations or shortcomings of the political programs they propose. I hadn’t thought about this until now, but the former book seems to suggest, “We’re all anarchists in waiting and if we could just be openly what we secretly are, everything will change. The ruling powers will just leave.” It’s a little optimistic, like I said. Terijian—which is a benefit for the Green Scare victims—tells a story similar to the one that the Green Scare came out of: it’s just us, and maybe a few other people, but we’ll never know who they are because they’re in masks, and we’re the ones who have to make a revolution against normal society. That’s also not a recipe for success. I mean, the parents don’t get involved in the struggle, they’re not punching the construction workers in the end, and the construction workers aren’t punching their bosses.

Terijian is a true story, in that the authors see it as a sort of allegory of the Minnehaha Freestate. Duvbo is like a creation myth for a world that hasn’t come to be yet.

Margaret: What are you attempting to accomplish when you write fiction? Do you think you have accomplished anything with your fiction writing?

CrimethInc.: There are writers whose whole project is to express themselves: “This really expresses me, these are my innermost feelings.” Personally, I’m not interested in that. I think that writing is an attempt to… if I say the word “communicate,” it sounds like there is some sort of object that is in one place that I’m attempting to convey to another place, and I would rather use a word that emphasizes that you’re trying to create a dynamic between people by introducing some new force, which is the words. So for me, writing isn’t about expressing myself, like I have some thing inside of me that I have to bring out and I’ll give it to people and they’ll be different or richer or something. It’s more like it’s a way to exert a lever on social situations. So I’m not possessive of my work per se; I try to contribute to the social milieu, or to the ongoing dialogue, in such a way that things happen.

I think non-fiction is overrated in terms of how non-fiction it is. Everything that you write is going to be a construct; when you’re writing history you’re choosing to leave out 99.9% of everything. You’re basically making up a story by choosing what to include. You could tell the story of the Spanish civil war by writing about what everyone had for breakfast every morning. The fact that we throw out the breakfasts and focus only on the military engagements or what was mentioned in the newspapers, that’s not totally true to reality. But how could you be true to reality?

So writing fiction is just a way to let yourself off the hook: “I’m telling a story.” Maybe it’s a way to be more accountable, because you’re actually telling a story and that’s the focus, the story, as opposed to, “Oh, this is the truth,” which is debatable in every case, be it a historical truth or a philosophical truth.

Margaret: CrimethInc. is both famous and notorious for blurring history and fiction anyway. In Days of War, Nights of Love, there are all the references to fictional historical events or a certain spin on historical events. What led CrimethInc. to do that?

CrimethInc.: I can’t answer for everything in Days of War. You can sort of tell that Days of War was put together by enthusiastic young people who were saying to themselves, “Fuck it! Let’s just say this! Let’s see what happens!” That can have bad results or good results. The exciting thing about Days of War is the vitality; you can tell that the people who put it together weren’t thinking about it as a book that a lot of people were going to read. And that’s the kind of fearlessness that you can only have once as a publisher; once everything you put out under that name is going to receive attention, your actions are whole lot heavier. It’s a lot harder to move that freely.

One of the aspects of free motion in that book is the devil-may-care approach to history: “Oh, we’ll just say this, maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t.” One of the points of that, presumably, is to cast into doubt all the other books that say, “This happened, and this was the truth.” Days of War seems to proclaim, “Don’t believe us, obviously we’re making things up; maybe you shouldn’t believe them either, maybe they’re making things up.” Maybe all the other books you can get are also fabrications, constructions, or at least should be treated as such.

One might say the traditional way to approach activism or radical literature is to ask, “How do we get people to believe our new idea? How do we get people to believe this new ideology?” That’s not actually particularly useful. Everybody is trying to compete to convert people to their ideology. It seems like the revolutionary thing would be to get people to look at ideologies and reality differently. That would be a part of moving to another phase of revolutionary struggle. So how do you write a book that simultaneously calls itself and all other books into question, in such a way that it has a dynamic effect on the readership rather than persuading people to your opinion? In the regard you mention, Days of War is a clumsy but audacious attempt to answer that question.

Margaret: Why do you choose to be anonymous under the CrimethInc. moniker?

CrimethInc.: As I mentioned, I’m not convinced by the myth of authorship. “These are my thoughts, I came up with them, they’re under my name.” That whole copyright thing? That’s all about private property. Folk songs—before so-called “riot” folk I mean—there are songs that nobody knows who wrote them, everybody sings them. They’re collective property. Everybody adjusts them to their specific situations. I think that that’s a much more sensible format. All sorts of CrimethInc. material has been published about the question of authorship, so maybe I’d better focus on my own choices, rather than the ideological ones?

First of all, I want to emphasize that language and all the stories inside of it are collectively produced. That is not to say that they are horizontally produced, but they are collectively produced. Capitalism is collectively produced: it’s a collective relation that we all participate in, in some ways, but a hierarchical one. We collectively produce language, we collectively produce our ideas. They come out of the conversations we’re all having. One person takes some ideas that have been gestating for hundreds of years, writes a book about them, puts his name on it, and makes a whole lot of money or a whole lot of intellectual capital, wins a whole lot of respect, for being the person who’s basically privatized this previously wild rainforest of ideas. I think that’s bullshit.

Authorship can be useful for accountability, if you’re making a claim that you need to be personally answerable for. But if you’re testing out an idea on other people, I think removing the authorship can be a pretty good thing. “Don’t worry about me and how exciting my biography is—how does this idea affect you? Does it just bounce off of you? Is it useless to you? Is it exciting?”

I’m interested in seeing language play out as a dynamic between people. Not as an expression of one person’s personal reality, but as a collective construction. And personally, in addition to finding that critique compelling, I’m just not interested in being some John Zerzan or Ernest Hemingway or something, who has to contend with more people knowing my shadow self than my real self. I enjoy working collectively on writing projects with other people; I think that I’m more intelligent contributing to a collective process of writing, just as people are generally more articulate in conversation than they are when they have to compose a monologue extemporaneously. I don’t think anybody deserves, in the good sense or the bad sense, the positives that Hemingway gets. Nobody deserves the misery of being a famous public figure, upon whom everybody else can project their personal psychodramas and resentments.

Margaret: I feel like that happens to a certain degree with the moniker CrimethInc.

CrimethInc.: Well, CrimethInc.’s not important. Everybody can hate CrimethInc. and that’s not a problem. It’s like a false front to absorb all the projections, all the good and bad associations, so that the people involved in it can still be the real individuals they are in their communities, doing the things they care about, without being crippled by people walking up to them on the street and being like, “Oh my god, it’s really you, sign my blah blah blah.”

Since a lot of the attitudes around authors tend toward mythologizing, better to present something that is explicitly a myth for people to mythologize and leave the people who are involved with the project free to go about their real lives.

Margaret: Why did CrimethInc. choose to self-publish?

CrimethInc.: Self-management. CrimethInc. is just a name that a small group of people initially started sticking on self-published projects, with the critique that it is best to have control of what you’re doing. This is a long-running question that goes back much further than The Clash signing with a major label. Let’s say you’re trying to get to know people in your town. Do you go to their parties or throw your own parties? If you only throw your own parties, maybe you’ll only meet the people you can persuade to come to them, but you can create an environment that brings what you want out of those interactions—what’s good for you, and hopefully will be good for the people who choose to come. If you only go to other people’s parties, you’ll always have a limited agency in framing the interactions you have with others.

I remember when they killed Brad Will in Oaxaca, a year ago now, it was right before Halloween. We went to someone’s Halloween party to try to turn people out to come occupy the Mexican consulate with us. We were trying to explain to people that our friend had just been killed, at some fucking party where everybody was just there to drink. It’s sort of a stretch, as metaphors go, but that is why we have our own dinner parties, right, so we can have a space in which the dialogue is about the things that are important to us. I was at some else’s fancy vegan bourgeois Halloween party where everyone’s in costumes and they don’t give a fuck about my friend who got killed, you know what I’m saying? They care about me, but it’s not a space in which we can discuss that, let alone discuss what to do.

So first of all, we’re creating a space that is self-organized and controlled by everyone who participates in it. CrimethInc. isn’t necessarily the most radical experiment in this direction, but it’s significant that the name itself, if not all of the structures that exist under it, is open and freely accessible to all. The Terijian book was published by a totally different group of people than the people who are involved in crimethinc.com. That particular website is still an exclusive and difficult-to-participate-in structure, but the CrimethInc. myth itself is open and accessible to the public.

Why do things ourselves? I mean, fuck capitalism, you know? The initial projects that I was aware of were ones in which people were committing small-scale crime, taking the money, and making free things out of it, saying, “Here’s some free things funded by anti-capitalist crime—can we have some more of this please?” When you first got a copy of Evasion in zine form, and you’re reading the zine, you’re some 16-year-old kid, it dawns on you that obviously, that zine was stolen and is a sign of an entire underground community of people who believe in anti-corporate theft as a ethical way of life. The zine is the message, however repetitive and dumb the text in it may be.

I think the content of self-organization is worth 1000 times whatever you can say. I’m sure Verso [largest English language radical book publisher] or someone might publish an amazing anarchist text that lots of people would then read, but the question isn’t how to get everyone to read anarchist texts, the question is how we can interact in anarchic ways. You can assign Bakunin at Columbia University and the world won’t be any more anarchist.

Margaret: [Here, dear reader, I rambled incoherently for a moment before reaching my point:] I know that CrimethInc. in particular is a scapegoat for people’s accusations of lifestylism.

CrimethInc.: You’re talking about The Wooden Shoe [a Philadelphia anarchist bookstore] not carrying Evasion? I support The Wooden Shoe’s choice to not carry Evasion. [Note: Evasion is a zine that CrimethInc. published in book form, a memoir of a traveling shoplifter that offended some people through its flippant view on homelessness and lack of class critique.] Evasion wasn’t made to be sold at The Wooden Shoe in its book form. The people who are going to The Wooden Shoe need other things that are available at The Wooden Shoe much more than they need Evasion. Evasion was made, specifically in book form at least, to subvert the materialism of a certain class of youth, by valorizing another mode of life, not as an end in itself, but with the understanding that if those alternate values were presented as a possibility, as an exciting possibility, that they could only lead, at least for some people, to readers eventually developing a deeper anti-capitalist analysis. I feel that that book has served that purpose in some circles. That’s the great thing about us organizing horizontally—freedom of association is one of the other anarchist catchphrases: if people don’t want to organize with us it’s fine. It’s not like the CrimethInc. distribution hub is some giant monolith that if you don’t take all of the books suddenly you can’t get any of the other books you want either. That what’s good about things being structured on a more horizontal basis: everybody can take care of their own stuff rather than depending on one big distributor.

Back to what I said about The Clash signing to that big record label, as one of the first punk bands to sell out or whatever: if all of the energy that had been put into that compromise had been put into building autonomous structures instead, it would be so much easier for us to circulate our ideas today without reinforcing hierarchies. I think that it’s absolutely worth whatever you won’t be able to do, whatever the drawbacks of doing things yourself are, to reinforce the culture of self-directed activity.

We did finally have to work with Baker & Taylor, the giant distributor, to get books into the libraries. I grew up reading books in the library. I think that that is important, that’s one of the few currently existing communal forms of wealth, our libraries. The way I understand the way the distribution is set up, first the books go into all the DIY channels of circulation that are available, then they also go to Baker & Taylor and the bigger distributors, so that people who can’t find them in the DIY environment maybe encounter them elsewhere, because it’s also not good to keep our projects a secret. Baker & Taylor and all of those motherfuckers… you know, to get one ISBN number you have to buy 10 of them, so you can’t just be one person with a book. I think we need more cooperatives, more groups of people who would need ten ISBN numbers, so the individuals don’t get screwed. I’m not saying that that is a solution to capitalism, but it is a way to collectively organize in the meantime.

Indeed, several people have been charged with “hindering apprehension,” which is a new one to us here. It sounds more like an existential condition than a crime—picture Woody Allen in some sex farce, awkwardly explaining to his mother that he’s been suffering from hindering apprehension!

This report focuses on the events of Friday evening, when police and National Guardsmen gratuitously attacked students at the University of Pittsburgh.

We’ve retreated to a back street; a cacophony of sirens, gunshots, and explosions echoes off the walls ahead of us. With our experience, this isn’t exactly frightening—it all seems to be happening in slow motion; but the irrationality of the authorities’ behavior is unsettling. A tremendous cloud of white smoke is filling the air above the roof of the dormitory, and a familiar acrid scent is beginning to mingle with the sweet stench of tear gas: is something on fire? Two more tear gas canisters soar high into the night sky, trails of poison billowing behind them, and land on the same roof. It’s like the Fourth of July, only with crying, bleeding college students fleeing beneath the fireworks.

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According to reports, the authorities assembled a force of nearly 5000 for the G20, including 2500 National Guard troops, 1200 state troopers, 875 Pittsburgh city police, and small groups from other agencies. It’s a potentially significant precedent that the National Guard comprised more than half of the total force; it may point to greater military involvement in domestic policing in the future. It’s also important to note that the original plan had been to utilize more police and fewer National Guard, but it appears that only the National Guard was available—one more sign of overextension among our foes.

According to Cindy Sheehan and others, the National Guard troops in Pittsburgh had recently returned from duty in Iraq. This may explain their behavior the night of Friday, September 25, when they pointlessly brutalized a gathering of students at the University of Pittsburgh in downtown Oakland.

Earlier that day, a flier had circulated reading “Go Pitt; Fuck the Police; 10 p.m., Schenley Plaza,” the location of the previous night’s standoff between police and students. By ten o’clock, hundreds of people had gathered in and around the plaza. A small minority were avowed anarchists; perhaps a greater proportion had participated somehow in the previous day’s events, but the vast majority appeared simply to be curious students.

The university had sternly instructed students to stay away from Schenley Plaza that night, but this backfired, making the Plaza irresistible. Police and National Guard were already present in the area in tremendous force, parading in full riot gear. Helicopters combing the ground with searchlights intensified the atmosphere of military occupation.

No protest ensued: no march, no banners, no chants, no confrontations or property destruction. All the same, the police soon forcibly cleared the square. Not content with this, they then began to shoot tear gas canisters at spectators on the sidewalk across the street. Eventually, they advanced further, shooting tear gas and projectiles at hapless, fleeing onlookers and beating and arresting anyone they could catch. This continued for hours; in the end, 110 people were arrested, mostly passers-by and medics who stayed behind to treat the injured. The National Guard pacified Oakland the same way they pacified neighborhoods in Iraq.

Despite years of police brutality and “Bring the War Home” rhetoric, witnessing this was downright dumbfounding. Anarchists always decry police repression, arguing that every use of coercive authority is illegitimate. But it is difficult to imagine how even a statist conservative could justify this particular exercise of repressive force; there was no resistance to repress. The events of Friday night show that the authorities can produce a “riot” simply by ordering people not to do something that they don’t even realize they are doing; this is the heavy-handed stupidity that helped generate the Iraqi resistance.

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No outrage was capable of igniting resistance among the students, however. The flier had cast them as the protagonists in a struggle against the police; some radicals came hoping to support them in this conflict, their hopes buoyed by the clashes that had taken place on the same terrain the previous evening. But the students refused to see themselves as protagonists; despite 36 hours of other young people in hooded sweatshirts confronting the police, they still saw themselves as inert and helpless. This underscores the foolishness of pinning one’s hopes on another demographic as the revolutionary subject. Instead of waiting for others to take the initiative, those who wish to struggle against this society must cast themselves as protagonists in that struggle and find common cause with all who join in.

Some anarchists took the dim view that the students were carrying their apathy to a sadomasochistic extreme, paradoxically asserting their right to be spectators of their own repression: “Why are you tear-gassing us? We have the right to be here watching you tear-gas us!” Conversely, one might argue that, by being present in defiance of the decrees and threats of the university, the students were already challenging their social roles—perhaps more so than the anarchists who were just there to do what anarchists always do. In that light, simply in coming out, the students were protesters: not politicized protesters like those who elaborated their critiques of the policies of the G20 into indymedia cameras, but protesters all the same against the authority of the school administration and the tedium of college life.

For their part, though they set out to break up a presumed protest, the police had no method by which to identify protesters. They began by threatening everyone; those who did not immediately flee they assumed to be protesters. They tear-gassed everyone; those who covered their faces were obviously protesters. As they claimed territory block by block, they shot projectiles at anyone in view; those they struck were marked as protesters by their own blood. They charged anyone who remained on the street; those who ran away were protesters, and were chased, tackled, and beaten accordingly.

At one point, word went out that the police were about to raid the dormitory towers in search of protesters. Had this occurred, it would have been a bloodbath. All this illustrates how those serving authoritarian power can only see—and thus produce—enemies everywhere they look. Coercive force can never resolve conflict, only intensify it.

Following Thursday’s clashes, it turned out that a mere flier sufficed to provoke a full-scale police state. Once again, the apparatus of repression causes a great deal more disruption than the protests to which it responds: the tiny sting of the anarchist mosquito provokes an intense allergic reaction that can be disproportionately costly for the state. In some ways, the events of Friday night were strategically fortuitous for anarchists: the police discredited themselves, and this is bound to help the cases of those who were arrested on Thursday.

At the same time, it’s possible to be overly optimistic about this. Manifestations of the violence inherent in state power don’t necessarily persuade people of the possibility or value of the anarchist alternative. The police didn’t win any new friends Friday night, but nothing empowering occurred either. It will take months of serious follow-up work from Pittsburgh locals if the events of September 25 are to attract new people to anti-authoritarian struggle.

In this regard, the invisibility—dare we say the mythological character—of actual anarchists Friday night was a loss of ground. Anarchists were at once everywhere and nowhere. Everywhere—or else why were the police attacking everyone?—yet nowhere, in that there was no explicitly anarchist presence. This indeterminacy implies a tremendous potential—Are those people over there anarchists? Might I be one, myself?—but usually ends up serving the interests of the state. As the underdogs, anarchists generally have to stay in the shadows for security reasons; we can hardly speak honestly about our intentions in our own spokescouncils, let alone to the public at large. We remain utopian ghosts, shadows pursuing something otherworldly, while the police prove again and again that they are the only reality, writing this on the skin of civilians in a Morse code of rubber bullets when need be.

This is why moments of visibility and togetherness like those we experienced Thursday afternoon are so important. When enough of us join in action, we are no longer isolated lunatics pursuing will-o’-the-wisps; brought into reality, our dissident desires are legitimized in a such a way that we can finally believe in them, so that others will be able to as well. Suddenly, fighting capitalism is more realistic than knuckling under to it. Nothing makes more sense than pulling masks over our faces, linking arms, and charging our oppressors. Dumpsters cease to be organs of denial about the wastefulness of our civilization and become mobile barricades; corporate windows cease to display merchandise and sing instead the uproar of social transformation. The world itself becomes something different.

Now that the G20 protests are over, let us not retreat into obscurity, but lay the groundwork for other battles in which we can give our dreams flesh together.

[First Photo by Foo]

In short, the basic narrative of the day runs as follows. The protesters attempted to reach the summit site but were brutally forced back by police. They eventually turned around and marched through Pittsburgh neighborhoods and shopping districts, where the police pursued and attacked them. Property destruction intensified in response to these attacks, and the conflict culminated in a standoff between police and students during which a black bloc destroyed a business district.

One might interpret all this as legitimate acts of revenge for the police murder in London at last spring’s G20 summit; but it also signifies the survival of militant street resistance in the Obama era.

Read full piece here.

Balancing out the previous issue’s focus on breaking news, this issue steps back to reflect on the priorities and relationships that can make resistance effective and infectious. The centerpiece of this issue is a critical examination of the strengths and shortcomings of contemporary insurrectionist theory and practice, spanning 24 pages and a wide range of lines of inquiry. Elsewhere herein, one can find a guide to crafting constructive accountability processes, a survey of the past four decades of anarchist activity in Chile, and a report from San Francisco exploring the broader context of anarchist organizing leading up to and following the Oakland riots covered in Rolling Thunder #7. We’ve also turned up a retrospective by a member of the legendary clandestine prison abolitionist group Os Cangaceiros, distilling the lessons of years of underground struggle. All this is rounded out by inspiring accounts, entertaining anecdotes, magical realist fiction, and a whole lot more. Also, just a reminder that subscriptions are now available, and starting your subscription now, beginning with #8, is an option.

We’ve also composed a new poster to celebrate its arrival and convey one of the themes of the issue.

Anarchism is not a rejection of power itself. There are so many kinds of power we affirm: the power to provide for ourselves and one another, to defend ourselves and sort out conflicts, to perform acupuncture and steer a sailboat and swing on a trapeze. We prize the freedom to develop our capacities and capabilities, especially in ways that increase others’ freedom as well. Every time one of us acts to achieve her full potential it is a gift to all.

Authority over others, on the other hand, always comes at the price of power over one’s own life. It is always derived from outside oneself:

The authority of the Constitution, the president, the general, the soldier—
Of the law, the judge, the attorney, the police officer—
The economy, the executive, the manager, the customer—
The scripture, the pope, the cardinal, the bishop, the priest—
The text, the critic, the professor—
The bluest eye, the deepest voice, the thinnest waistline.

Just in time for Rolling Thunder #8, we’ve produced a new sticker on this subject. Screen-printed on vinyl and 4” in diameter, they are going out free in every single order.

For a nuanced discussion of various forms of power and authority, one could try Uri Gordon’s Anarchy Alive; an expanded version of the relevant chapter is available in pdf form here. Uri is currently touring North America.

Learning, Growing, Failing: One Organizer’s Perspective

The first night of the CrimethInc. Convergence, around ten o’clock, I descended into a furious assembly of everyone who had arrived prepared to give a workshop or decided five minutes prior that they had something to share. Fifty to seventy people had gathered and were buzzing with conversation; the room almost seemed to have an electric charge. I had written emails for months encouraging friends and contacts to present creative, relevant and challenging workshops, and now the moment had arrived to make the schedule concrete. It was more hectic than I can describe; I was completely overwhelmed at the task of figuring out where and when everything would happen. People began shouting out how things should proceed, and the word “chaotic” can only begin to describe that moment. But somehow we feverishly wrote down the titles of the workshops, assigned them to times and spaces during the week, and managed to leave space open for folks to add more as the week progressed and their courage increased. Over fifty workshops were scheduled on topics as diverse as one could imagine: intercepting secure communication, eating disorders in the radical community, social war, radical religion, G20 resistance, cultural appropriation, terrain analysis for demonstrations, the biopolitics of BDSM, acting, herbalism, critiques of insurrectionism, survival skills, gardening and plant identification are just the tip of the iceberg.

We created a skeleton for the next few days—needing some familiar structure to know how to come together and feel productive. As someone who has learned much about the world and our conflict with domination through workshops at gatherings like this, it was fulfilling to see this come together. As someone who has also felt the limitations of the workshop model, I saw how this framework fell into many of the same trappings. Many people expressed over the next few days that there were too many “101″ or introductory workshops; at a convergence lasting a week we should have stressed that skillshares and trainings could build over the week in order to be more in depth and ambitious. I gave three workshops without ever having presented one at an anarchist gathering before. It was a tremendous learning experience and allowed me to connect in invaluable ways to people who came to the Convergence.

Many things flowed beyond this structure, even though it may seem to be at the center of what went on. Late night parlor games and post-midnight games of Go, evening soccer games, and an inventive combination of basketball and dodgeball. Three free and glorious meals every day—it must be stressed that the cooks this year really raised the bar and deserve mountains of praise for their hard work. Handfuls of people learned to fix the plumbing as the toilets broke or started leaking. Letters were written to prisoners, masses of free literature given out. There were bicycle rides to the magical and abandoned secret spots of Pittsburgh. On quiet walks through the cemetery and the streets of Bloomfield, I felt my connections to friends and comrades strengthen as we discussed our shared frustrations, joys, histories and desires. All this helped to make me feel surrounded by others who are also trying so very hard to live anarchist lives despite the resistance we all face.

As a local organizer at the center of it all, I won’t deny we made mistakes. Many mistakes. We have a lot of difficult questions now to face, a lot of consideration and reflective work to struggle with. There is some uncertainty about our collective ability to continue to participate in anarchist activities. But I for one would still rather have failed, and continue to fail, at something monumental than succeed at mediocre endeavors. The routines and roles of our milieu are easy to fall into and become content with. My lasting impression of the CrimethInc. Convergence, however, does not make me want to retreat from new projects into a place of security and safety. Instead I believe we must try harder still to reinvent and experiment with what it means to be an anarchist and the ways in which we can act to confront hierarchy and domination in our lives and in the world at large.

Free Clinic and First Aid

With the help of many others, I organized a temporary free drop-in clinic in Garfield that ran concurrently with the CrimethInc. Convergence, but was located down the street at the Greater Pittsburgh Anarchist Collective’s community space. The aim of the free clinic was to offer accessible “alternative” healthcare to the broader Pittsburgh/Garfield
community. People who were attending the convergence were also invited to drop in. The clinic offered consultations and treatments with a qualified acupuncturist and herbalist. People came to the free clinic with a variety of questions and needs. Acupuncture was done on site using a “community clinic” setup, which allows one practitioner to treat multiple people at the same time. Herbal remedies were suggested, and sometimes formulated on site free of charge. The clinic ran for four consecutive days, and was well-received by locals and convergence attendees alike.

This year I also helped to coordinate the first-aid space at the convergence. This was located in a small nook in an upstairs room, and was used by a variety of people for many different things—counseling, acupuncture, herbal consultations, treatments for acute symptoms, massage, and as a sleeping spot when necessary. The first-aid space was well stocked with herbal medicines, and personal formulas were put together by herbalists as needed. I felt there was a good balance between treating both chronic and acute symptoms using a variety of “alternative” medicine and standard first aid. I thoroughly enjoyed helping with the first-aid space, and I hope to see more multi-disciplinary health
care spaces at future convergences/gatherings as well as longer-term projects in our communities.

I Am, but It Was Not, a Bummer: 2009 and the CrimethInc. is Easy

At its best, the CrimethInc. Convergence is a last-chance saloon for weirdoes who can’t find a place at any other gathering: those too sober for Rainbow, too useless for activist conferences, too shy for book fairs, too confused for academic seminars. Anarchist schlemiels. In a world without movement or community, it is one place where we can find each other to hook up and talk for a few days. I go to see a dozen friends from far-flung places and meet a few more, to present a new idea and stir things up. I have realized those desires every year.

At its worst, the convergence is a boiling pot of frustration and poor communication. This year we saw the worst very clearly on Friday night when accumulated anarchist (and—it needs to be said—nationalist) insanity exploded into a mess of shouting, lost bags, and tears. That night casts a shadow on our memory, but there were other moments too.

I was tied to a St. Andrew’s Cross and beaten with a book while shouting straightedge lyrics. I discussed Pynchon and literature with a wonderful stranger (Luca, whenever we meet again, I plan to make up for not having coffee with you that Friday night). I played many games of Go. I heard my poetry read aloud before a crowd and even read a bit myself. I solved a math riddle. I met a few new friends. I embraced old friends and found solace in their intelligence. I wrote hidden messages in the daily workshop schedules. I urged my compatriots to write fiction, or at least annotated editions of their favorite texts, rather than just recycling the same writings again and again. We were young, and the city was not ours, nor the building. The streets of Pittsburgh made as little sense as the content of the workshops. Tasks were organized by the usual organizers; workshops given by the same presenters. Though we lived those few days amongst the falling petals of disappointment and purple prose, I must say it was a fine summer week, despite everything.

A few ideas for next year: more collective activities, a game learned by all at the very beginning or a convergence-wide reading group of an original text never before seen; more problems, mysteries, and tasks that must be taken on in groups; more weakness, less hardening; a confusing series of five rendezvous points arbitrarily directing people to either of two convergence spaces that are near each other but unconnected; expanding the exclusion policy to include those who neglect their imagination; anything that will shift our definition of success away from reproducing earlier results; a dirtier sex party.

Romance and Strength

It is true that when it comes to the convergence, a big chunk of my heart is dedicated to thinking about identity politics. I don’t want this account to be perceived as undermining the happenings around oppression during the convergence. But I want this account to be dedicated to other things I experienced during the convergence, and I think there should be a space for that as well.

Two other themes kept revisiting me during the convergence. The first was sweet romance. I live in a town where the activist community is very small. So when it comes to smooching, I have two choices, either to kiss someone who is not a radical—and deal with having a relationship with someone who have not thought about issues like sexism, homophobia and polyamory—or smooch a radical with whom I share a very small community. The trip up north meant growing excitement about going out of my usual radical dating pool.

Sex has always been something that felt very serious to me. As a female-bodied sexual assault survivor, sex often feels dangerous and unsafe. Being sexual with others often feels like opening the door to subjecting myself to objectification or worse. So before deciding to share my body with someone, there is always a long process of thinking about the pros and cons, and negotiating the terms of that decision with my potential partner. I went to the convergence with a recognition that sex should be a little lighter. I decided that during my trip I will follow my lust without fearing the consequences, and so I did. During the convergence I felt I had space to develop crushes and even fall in love. The convergence gave me a really good space in which to discover that sex doesn’t have to be very serious, it can also be something goofy and fun. I feel like even now, after weeks back home, I have managed to let go of my fears and see the beauty in people around me.

The relationships I created during my trip also helped me remember that sometimes love can be easier than we think. Sitting on the grass with my grrrlz, having a crush debrief, I was reminded again how romantic relationships should look. We are all connected to one another until we decide to put boundaries between us. And so I share with my ex’s lover my difficulties with that new established friendship, and they sit there and listen, giving me support. Another person in our circle declares how important it is for them to have the back of their lovers’ lovers. Yes, polyamory is possible, in the best way there is. I am reminded that relationships are not something that happens between two people, but something that happens between all of us.

The second theme that reoccurred during my trip was rediscovering things that have been hiding under my nose all along. During the convergence I felt so much pride, pride of who I am and where I am from. I felt joy every time I got to introduce myself and say “NC pride!” Before going to the convergence I was scared of what it would be like. I imagined a scenario in which I would be alone, and have difficulty making friends. Instead I found myself feeling like a part of a crew, and feeling like I have a group of friends that have my back. It felt so good to see my friends perform in the Cabaret and I was able to say “those are my friends” with a proud grin on my face. It felt so amazing to be held in my friends’ arms when I was having a hard time. I definitely feel I am where I want to be, surrounded by people I truly love. It’s funny to travel that far just to rediscover how amazing my home is, but one of the main lessons I am taking from the convergence is that as far as I am concerned is that NC is the place to be.

Understanding the importance of my community is strongly linked to rediscovering what kind of person I am. The one cannot have happened without the other. I moved to the U.S. not so long ago, and have had a hard time ever since. I cannot explain the hardship of having to express yourself in a language that isn’t your own, or trying to figure out what it means to be an experienced activist thrown into a totally new political context. It is walking around feeling like you don’t belong, always feeling the pain of the culture you have left behind, but not being able to share that life with anyone. It feeling like there is never enough space for you, that you are crushed. I feel like since that change in my life, I was changed as a person and become someone else. I feel like I was erased.

Being in the convergence was the first time I felt like myself in a long time. I was loud, friendly, and talkative. I was aware of how strong and awesome I am with every step I took down the halls of the convergence space. I was able to show my love for others and to be open with them. I took space, but not for the sake of taking space, but for the sake of existing as I am. I was able to be completely myself, completely honest. And now, there is no way back. The convergence reminded me how it felt to not compromise on being and doing what I want, and I am not willing to give that up. Ever. I am going to live to the extreme, to be as strong, as great, as loving and connected, as honest and as myself as I can. I am so grateful that I had a space to remember who I am, to remember how it feels to walk proud.

Defeat

Skirting the perimeter of the D.H. Lawrence Convention Center, moving quickly from car to car in an effort not to be seen by the opposing team, I knew my time was precious. I had scoured the enemy territory for the flag and found nothing, and began to make my way to their jail to free my captured teammates.

Every object on a street looks different when you play Capture the Flag; a dumpster becomes a place to hide, an alley becomes an escape route, a doorway becomes a place to wait momentarily as an opponent runs past you. I inch forward, moving up the street from the convention center and crisscrossing between doorways that could conceal me. Around a corner and ducking behind the bushes in front of a hotel, I peer out to make sure the coast was clear. Carefully beginning to get up, I notice someone coming around the corner behind me. I break into a mad dash and the player wearing an orange arm-band is close at my feet. I jump over hedges and run between parked cars, the jail a mere block away. Panting and sweating I fly around the corner to see almost all of my team stuck in jail, and they look at me with wide eyes and begin to jump and shout. I’m so close, so tired, but I find some hidden cache of energy and run even faster, now followed closely by three or four others. “Run! Run!” they shout, “We know where the flag is!” I’m almost there, and it is my moment of glory: if I make it our victory is assured.

Mere seconds before I reach the jail, a mass of the other team emerges from an alley way, running in unison. I’m crushed to see that one of them holds our flag in her hand—the game is done, our team has lost. Exhausted I sit down and stare for a second at the dark streets of Pittsburgh and think about returning to this very spot in two months or so, after it has been transformed into a more serious battleground. I know these streets a little bit better now, and when I return in September that knowledge will likely prove invaluable. After the game’s conclusion we walk over to a huge downtown fountain and go swimming as it thunders down rain. Against all logic and reasonable odds, the authorities don’t even show up, and we splash and play with a fragile sense of invincibility.

From the Depths has released their “Germinate” recording as a 13-track split CD with Colombian hardcore band Nagaf. Including members of long-running Bogota d.i.y. bands such as Res Gestae and Reacción Propria, Nagaf brings nuanced anti-authoritarian politics to a take on the hardcore punk tradition somewhere between Point of No Return and His Hero Is Gone. Their tracks on this release are alternately suspenseful and thunderous, benefiting from crisp, powerful production.

The split CD is produced by the following labels:

Straight from the Inside (Bulgaria)
Masapunk (Chile)
Persistencia, Direccion Positiva, La Sospecha Criminal, Sin Fronteras Discos (Colombia)
Acclaim Collective (Japan)
Disonancia Distro (Mexico)
Cria Cuervos (Venezuala)

This fall, From the Depths will tour the eastern half of North America; this will probably be their last tour on this continent for some time, as they have plans to go to Europe in 2010. They’re still looking for help booking the dates marked with “*”s. Contact them via booking@fromthedepths.info.

October

17 Greenville, NC
19 Gainesville, FL
20 Lake Worth, FL
21 Miami, FL
22 Fort Myers, FL
23 Orlando, FL
24 Columbia, SC

November

13 Greensboro, NC @Legitimate Business w/Resister
14 Asheville, NC @Static Age Records w/Dark Castle
15 Cincinnatti, OH 10:00pm @ the Bunk Spot, 1818 John St, Cincinnati, OH
16 Chicago, IL with Testament, 6:00pm @ the Metrodome, 5356 S. Archer
17 Kalamazoo, MI
19 Findlay, OH
20 Wheeling, WV
21 Eerie, PA
22 Oswego, NY
24 Montpelier, VT
26 Portland, ME @cruston manor/the bike barn 547 blackstrap road, Falmouth
27 Boston, MA @45 mt auburn st in cambridge
28 Providence, RI 9:00pm @ AS220, 115 Empire Street
29 Hartford, CT @217 South Whitney Street
30 Albany, NY w/Testament
1 New York City, NY w/Testament
3 Fredrick, MD
4 Washington, DC 8pm @St. Aloysius, 19 Eye Street, N.W. (the 900 block of N Capitol Street NW) w/Deathrats and…
5 Richmond, VA

This full report offers a summary of the events and a discussion of the issues, prepared with input from several convergence organizers after countless conversations. If you’re already familiar with the basic story, skip right to the analysis.

For a basic discussion of some of the issues around privilege, power dynamics, and identity, try “Undermining Oppression” in our online reading library.